Was I Here Before?

“Was I Here Before?”
Written by: Frank Cormier

Stardust,” what does that term mean? I believe it to mean that it is the lowest common denominator which interconnects everything. And I mean EVERYTHING. From the actual stars in the night sky to the smallest known particle, the Higgs Boson, and all that exists in between.

The universe is immense. There is no question about that, all though I am sure that there are non-believers that would argue the opposite; however, it is up to them to write their own thoughts out for examination as I have mine on this subject. As far as our best telescopes can “see,” the universe is over 13.8 billion years old, which equates to roughly 47 billion light years away to the “observable” edge from our point of view here on Earth. That qualifies as immense! A light year for point of clarification is a “distance” unit, not one of time. One light year is the distance it takes a photon of light to travel from one point to another at a given speed in a given time frame, specifically, a year. Light travels at 186,282 miles per second (or 299,792 km/sec for my metric friends), so one can quickly surmise that in one year’s time, given there are 31,536,000 seconds in a year; light has traveled an immense distance in a short amount of time, (approximately 6 trillion miles in one year). It is mind boggling.

Now that the nerd stuff is out of the way… my main point is we are stardust. In fact science tells us that anything in existence comes from the same origin: stardust. This is where the common basic building blocks of existence originated. When the universe popped into existence through a process known as the Big Bang, stardust was scattered throughout the universe. Some of it clumped together to form stars. The stars clumped together to form galaxies. The galaxies spread out to form the universe. The best estimate regarding the quantity of galaxies in our visible universe is in the billions. Within each galaxy there are billions of stars and billions upon billions of planets and moons. Some of these planets or moons may or may not support life as we know it, or some exotic form of it not yet know known to us, but there is life elsewhere. It is statistically improbable for life to not exist elsewhere in the universe.

I shall progress to my thesis question asked above in the given title, “Was I here before?” My answer is simple: it is both yes and no. I am not vacillating. I am merely pointing out that I have existed before in some other form (with or without being in human form as we know it), and I have not existed at all before this time. Pretty straightforward; right? Well hopefully I can clear up some of the confusion with an explanation. I will begin my answer by restating that everything is comprised of stardust. Me, you, the ink used to print my words and the paper itself, and the computer I typed on, the snow I see outside my window, the birds, the trees, the clouds, the atmosphere, in a word: everything.

How can this be? Life is believed to be “special” and it is; however, other things exist that may not be “living” in the sense we know it. For example; rocks, grains of sand, snowflakes, iron, and other metals are all made from the same exact elements that we are made from, but they are not alive and breathing as we define life. If I share the same elements as these other objects I listed, then I have existed before now. Let’s examine the cycle for a moment. A seed is planted in the soil and the womb. The soil consists of non-living particles as we define life, and the womb contains a life form as we know one to be. The soil provides nutrients that enable a life form to grow and transfers some of its stardust to its guest, say a carrot. The womb also provides nutrients to grow a life form that we can call human or some other mammal name that also uses a womb to incubate life. And yes eggs of reptiles and chickens and whatever else creates life in a shell also counts. So when the carrot is consumed by another “life” form it transfers some of its stardust to its new host. In the process, the one doing the eating also transfers a small amount of its stardust back to the object being consumed. If for example the leftover carrot is returned to the soil, say through a compost pile, then so is the part of our stardust that got transferred during consumption. Give a little, take a little. In the end all gets recycled somehow or someway. It is the recycling aspect that I would like to touch on next.

Whenever I have heard of someone claiming to have “lived a past life,” I am almost always amazed at how often one claims that they were “someone famous” or important in a previous life. How come you hardly ever hear someone claim to have been a tree or a coffee table made from the wood of the tree? It is just as possible, and probably more likely the case. When we die part of us is returned (or recycled) to the Earth. And since the Earth is part of the universe, then part of us is returned to the universe. I just don’t know how much is returned to either the Earth or the universe. And it is most likely not in equal amounts, but I am certain that nothing goes to waste. The universe does not operate that way. In fact, the universe tries its best to ensure that everything in it will consume every last bit of itself. Scientists call this entropy. The universe has to constantly feed itself in an effort to survive and do its job of consuming itself. A paradox has formed. It is the same paradox that exists whenever someone claims to have lived a previous existence. There is just not enough of the one person left over to be consolidated into one place to ensure that it all gets deposited (or transferred if you will) into a different person.

Our bodies are comprised of billions upon billions of cells. When the body dies and breaks down, it does so at different rates. So there really is no way for it to fully reassemble (if you will) into another person or object. Even when the body has been cremated, part of it goes up in smoke and the rest becomes ash. I believe that “past life experiences” in the form of another person is the mind playing a trick on the host body. Though, if one believes in a soul and it being separate from the body, then perhaps it could transfer from one host body to the next? However, it still hasn’t been proven that a soul does exist. That doesn’t mean it can’t, it just means that the soul is an illusion created by a belief system imagined by man for now until proven otherwise. And it begs the question; do animals have souls, or trees, or fish, or bacteria, or any other “living” organism? When a tree is cut down and repurposed into a bureau for example, does the soul of the tree (if it has one) try to occupy another tree? Does it remain in the furniture it has now become? If it were to occupy another tree, what happens to the existing soul of that tree? Is there a hierarchy of souls where the lesser one gets booted out for a more privileged one? Wouldn’t the same conundrum exist for souls occupying humans?

Another factor that weighs into my thoughts is that time is irrelevant. According to science, there is no need for time. It is an illusion. In other words, there is no past, no present, or a future. Everything happens at once. Our brains are hardwired to “perceive” the flow of time, which several scientists attribute to the arrow of entropy. Once an egg is cracked open and the contents scrambled, it is impossible (at present) to fully unscramble the yolk from the white and reassemble the contents back to its original form. The old adage: “history will repeat itself if the past is forgotten,” doesn’t apply to the broken egg. It does however serve a useful purpose as long as humans follow their own time worn advice. Except that human history shows that man keeps repeating the same mistakes! Which makes me wonder if there is no such thing as “time,” as these manmade catastrophic events keep repeating because they appear to be an illusion created in our mind that wants to separate past from present? Are we deceiving ourselves? Will there ever be a future different from our past? Or does science have it right and everything is happening at once? After all… we are interconnected with everything!

Perhaps David Bowie best described the part of the human condition that I have written about in his song “Ziggy Stardust,” when he sang the lyrics, “Making love with his ego, Ziggy sucked up into his mind.” We are all stardust, and we all have an ego, and we create the world we live in, in our own mind; however, we may not all play the guitar…

“Ziggy played guitar”

Copyright (C) 2017 by Frank Cormier.  All rights reserved.

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Frank

I graduated from Northeastern University in Boston, MA with a bachelor's in Business Management. I still live in the New England area.

3 thoughts on “Was I Here Before?”

  1. Remember the conversation at a cookout with my father in 1990? He believed everything changes form and when he dies he could come back as a cucumber. And you said “yeah, and you could end up in a Caesar salad” to which he agreed.

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