FOLLOWING THE FOOTPRINTS OF ANOTHER YOU

 

“The awful thing is that beauty is mysterious as well as terrible. God and the devil are fighting there and the battlefield is the heart of man.”
― Fyodor Dostoevsky

 

I have never had a sympathy for myths but rather for that amazing feeling to beat them up. Somehow,  I feel  almost like an obligation to fight the primitive stories and beliefs within our society because they aren’t compatible with the modern expectations and space exploration.  You can’t believe in ghosts and Aliens at the same time, unless you are Fox Mulder. Thats why I am having my own issue against the trend of dragging people into the supernatural, stopping them to be realistic and open minded, not an easy prey for social or political manipulation. If you have a mass of people who believe in strange things instead of searching for the reasonable explanations, you are able to make them opinionated and use them for your own purpose. That applies especially on hard core power chess games.

What this introduction has to do with the story about doppelgänger? Everything and nothing. This is just one more example how some people think and how they could be mentally jailed into their own fears and nightmares, far away from reality.  My friend John called me some days ago and cried on the phone. He told me he is reaching the edge of his patience and he can’t anymore deal with the demons around him. I tried to find out more about the reasons of his traumatic words but he ended the conversation with the statement that he had found his doppelgänger and that the end is close. Honestly, I am concerned about John because I know him for more than 15 years and he never played a clown or lunatic. How this could happen and what is doppelgänger?  The only way to help John to be back on the road of common sense is to research all about his own devil and to demystify the object of angst, turning it all into the logical field.

According to writings of specialists in demonology, the doppelgänger or double goer is a ghostly counterpart of a living person.  It means that nobody on this world, except the twins, share the unique characteristics of your look and when you see someone who is exactly like you, it could be your dangerous one version, the ghost who is brining the bad luck. Now, this is a folkloric background with no touch of science. The scientists believe that there are many double goers who seem to share the similar genetic attributes and their appearances could be identified as one and original genetic form. The Twin Strangers Project helps people to find their lookalikes from around the world and, in spite of all supernatural urban legends of doppelgängers, nobody has complained of having any kind of problem after finding own semi-twin.

The people who support omen versions of double walkers are those who claim that seeing your own means your death and seeing the double goer of your family member or friend means bad news are on the way.  They even warn to test the  doppelgänger through the absence of their shadow and the reflection in the mirrors. That is all a ground for opening the chapter of supernatural events that has nothing to do with anything with reasonable roots. My friend John told me that his doppelgänger has been in his kitchen, starring at him with sinister smile. Taking look on his life recently, with lots of failures in private and professional life, it is obvious that he is experiencing the big pressure and emotional struggles that block his senses for logical outcomes. He lost his job, wife and daughter and he has doubt in his own shadow. John is afraid of the new try in life and he projects his soul demons into the reality, shaping them into the familiar faces that are against him. Even his own double walker is against him, like everything else in his life. Actually, he is trying to ask for a help but he is confused so he is hiding behind the doppelgänger, pretending that it is a force he can’t fight anymore. In other words, he can’t deal with his own insecurities and panic attacks so the double walker is just a wrong emergency way-out.

The doctors have studied this phenomena as well:“Such hallucinations are classified as autoscopic phenomena (from ´autoscopy´; in Greek, autos means ´self´ and skopeo means ´looking at´). The simplest form of an autoscopic phenomenon involves feeling the presence of someone next to you without actually seeing a´double´– a sensed presence. The doppelganger effect takes this phenomenon a step further, so that a person may hallucinate that they are actually seeing and interacting with  another ´me´ – a visual double.  But probably the most widely experienced and best-known form of autoscopic phenomena is the out-of-body experience (OBE). During a classic full-blown OBE, people report leaving their physical body and seeing it from an outside perspective, say from the ceiling looking down at the body lying in bed.”

The theory about double walker is just an interesting tissue for creating popular tales and movies. We are all very unique and our facial expressions and genetical infrastructure is one of a kind, if we don’t talk about existence of twins. The doppelgänger could be some out there but, at the end of the day, he or she wouldn’t be just like you but rather similar to you, at some point and perspective. There is no other you, not in your mental world and not in your real world.  I talked to John about this and pointed on all facts just like I leaded my article this time. We can find many reasons to be logical and we always pick up one to be illusional because it is easier to choose imagination than scientific facts. Sometimes, myths are helping us to be free in our fears, to use those fears as an excuse for being weak inside and outside. John admitted  he was feeling good accepting his weakness and embracing supernatural as causer of all his problems. Instead of searching for realistic ground for struggles, he was drawn into the ocean of doubts, angsts, illusions and apathy. The real John is one and he has no doppelgänger like we all don’t have but we all have our own agitations, hesitancy, inhibitions and self-doubts and that is ok as long as we work on them and not pretending that another version of us  is responsible for it.

The life is not always black or white but the rainbow is all we need, and that comes only when the sun and rain dance together.