We are such stuff as dreams are made on.
William Shakespeare
415 hertz, that’s the frequency they say every newborn cries at. Some refer to it as instinct, while others call it a response. Maybe somewhere amidst this dilemma, we can say the children are recalling how they died in the last world, or maybe how the last world itself died.
Across all of history and myth, humanity spits out the same words and the same fears, but in different tongues, of course. The Hindus speak of Kalpas, all those golden ages destroyed but reborn in fire. The Stoics spoke of ekpyrosis, a universe which is consumed by scorching flames, only to begin again. The Mayans counted baktuns, knowing that each cycle would end with a great collapse.
We mortals talk of them as if they are metaphors, trying to map them to something mythical, psychological, or philosophical. But maybe they are passed-down memories. Possibly, every end of the world leaves its trace not on the sky, but inside us humans.
The very first scream is not a reflex of fear or shock or anything like that, but maybe recognition. The baby does not come out as a new record of the brain, but as a hesitant co-spectator. Maybe life is not beginning, but maybe life is recalling, all of it, one memory at a time.
DNA is like a computer program, but far more advanced than any software ever created.
Bill Gates
Even science, which comes across as cold and precise, agrees that it might indeed be genetic memory.
The body doesn’t just inherit a certain form or particular characteristics; it inherits fear as well. Mice born from frightened parents become scared of smells that are new to them. Human infants, likewise, become frightened of certain phenomena like shadows, thunder, and the dark; as if they are remembering a danger that existed before their understanding of the world and its attributes, before the development of language, and maybe even before the development of their sense of right and wrong.
We humans are no different. Our blood is a history book of all those times when we came close to being wiped out. All those cruel ages of famine, cold, and flood, when our ancestors died but also prayed for salvation, are still with us, pulsing in the beating of our hearts. That shake in your stomach when the sky turns orange is not anxiety; it’s memory. Evolution wasn’t advancement; it was suffering after suffering, deeply inscribed into every molecule of our being, one after another.
Somewhere in our genetic code, the world’s lament for the dead still remains; a song handed down from the time the first living being came out of the water and saw the stars dying for the second time.
I believe every new life that takes its place on this planet is, at its core, a rebellion against something beyond our comprehension. Still, even before language and words as we know them, we already knew how to express. A baby stares at the ceiling and giggles out of the blue; we might casually ignore that, but maybe it is laughing consciously, maybe at the absurdity of being back in this. Perhaps awareness itself is the scar from our former death.
Growing up, then, is the slow disappearance of the world that ended to make this one look new.
Time is nothing, but a flat circle.
Friedrich Nietzsche
If time and history repeat themselves in cycles, then I firmly believe the end is not a matter of “coming”, it’s rather going back, in circles. The universe doesn’t change; it comes back, with a slight variation, as if a record that keeps skipping on the same note.
A few noble physicists from the past name it as the Big Crunch, some call it eternal recurrence. However, it might not be physics at all. Maybe it is psychology, but on a cosmic scale this time. Maybe the universe itself is stuck in a loop deliberately by those beings of higher power. It keeps dreaming the same dream, creating the same species, going through the same collapse, because it, too, remembers.
And we, humans, are just the neurons of that memory. Every kid is a spark of déjà vu, a glimpse of very old consciousness covered with soft skin. They cry not because they are scared, but because they recognise the scorch in the sky and the trembling in the earth.
We spend lives thinking the apocalypse is something that is going to happen in the future. But what if I tell you, it already took place long back and we are nothing but merely the children born with the memory of how it all ended.
Discover more stories on Her Campus at MUJ. More articles by me coming soon at Vaibhav Chaudhary at HCMUJ; he who watches the world and its miracles closely, noticing what slips between moments, between the infinite realities.