Heroes Not Zombies

When you listen to a favourite piece of music, do you have the same experience every time you listen? Have you ever had a wonderful meal in a restaurant, returned at a later date and had, maybe another wonderful meal……but were the two meals the same? Was the experience the same? If you look at a great painting, do you see exactly the same painting every time? I don’t mean is it the same object. I mean do you have the same perceptive, affective experience…….do you actually notice, regard, attend to the painting in an identical way, and does that produce an identical pattern of thoughts and feelings in you?

William James considers it this way in his Stream of Consciousness essay…

…and yet a close attention to the matter shows that there is no proof that an incoming current ever gives us just the same bodily sensation twice. What is got twice is the same OBJECT. We feel things differently accordingly as we are sleepy or awake, hungry or full, fresh or tired; differently at night and in the morning, differently in summer and winter; and above all, differently in childhood, manhood, and old age. For an identical sensation to recur it would have to occur the second time in an unmodified brain. But as this, strictly speaking, is a physiological impossibility, so is an unmodified feeling an impossibility….

The reality is, we never have the exact same experience twice. So maybe you should slow down a little, become more aware, more mindful of this present moment. You’ll never have another chance to have this particular experience again.