Famous Doppelgangers

Picasso’s “Girl in the Mirror”

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A doppelganger could be that image of the girl in the mirror. It’s usually defined as a ghostly double of a living person. The idea is found in mythology, folklore,  throughout various cultures, and has been used in popular culture in movies, novels,  and TV shows. Many notable individuals have seen them – the 16^th century poet John Donne,  the 18^th century Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, and Percy Bysshe Shelley, another 18th century poet, Abraham Lincoln, the 16^th president of the United States, Queen Elizabeth I, and the French novelist and short story writer, Guy de Maupassant.

 It’s interesting that Donne, Goethe, and Shelley were all poets. It suggests that their imaginations were well-developed and that perhaps they were deeply attuned to other realms and dimensions. Donne was in Paris when he had his doppelganger experience – but it was of his wife, who appeared holding a baby. At about this same time, she was giving birth to a stillborn daughter. Shelley’s encounter happened in Italy, where his phantom self pointed at the Mediterranean Sea. Not long afterward, Shelley drowned in a sailing accident in the Mediterranean. He was just 29.

The encounters  both Donne and Shelley experienced were certainly precognitive – the foretelling of a future event. For both of these men, that future event spelled tragedy. For Goethe, the experience was simply deeply puzzling. It happened while he was riding on the  road to Drusenheim, a city in northeast France.  Riding toward him was his exact double, who wore a gray suit trimmed in gold. Eight years later, Goethe was traveling on the same road, but in the opposite direction. He realized he was wearing the same gray suit trimmed in gold that he had seen on his double eight years earlier. So even Goethe’s encounter  was precognitive. Can a doppelganger, then, be some sort of holographic projection from the future self? Perhaps.

Neurophysiologist Karl Pribram, along with physicist David Bohm, was one of the early pioneers of the theory that we live in a holographic universe. Or, as Michael Talbott so aptly expressed it in his brilliant book The Holographic Universe, “…there is evidence to suggest that our world and everything in it – from snowflakes to maple trees to falling stars and spinning electrons – are also only ghostly images, projections from a level of reality so beyond our own it is literally beyond both space and time.”

 And if that’s the case, if we’re living in a holographic universe, then synchronicity may be one of our most direct experiences with this deeper reality. We can reach this place “beyond time and space” in dreams, during meditation, intense physical activity/competition,  heightened creative periods, during NDEs, and through other kinds of altered states. But synchronicity may be the most easily accessible conscious experience we have of this deeper reality. If so, it behooves us to pay attention.

 In an interview in 1979 in Psychology Today, Pribram  noted that it isn’t that the world of appearances is wrong. “…it isn’t that there aren’t objects  out there, at one level of reality. It’s that if you penetrate through and look at the universe with a holographic system, you arrive at a different view, a different reality. And that other reality can explain things that have hitherto remained inexplicable scientifically: paranormal phenomena, synchronicities, the apparently meaningful coincidence of events.”

Doppelgangers – and synchronicities – may also be projections from probable realities. In the early 1960s, author and mystic Jane Roberts (The Seth Material) and her husband, Robert Butts, began experimenting with a Ouija board as part of Jane’s research into ESP. It quickly became apparent to them that the material/information that came from the Ouija entity – Seth- was profound. Not long afterward, they stopped using the Ouija board and Jane began channeling Seth and Rob started transcribing these sessions. At some point between then and when they began writing the first book- The Seth Material – Jane and Rob took a break one night to go dancing.

During that evening, Jane suddenly spotted a dancing couple who looked so similar to herself and Rob that she drew her husband’s attention to the couple.  They were heavier than either Jane or Rob, didn’t look happy, had a kind of grimness about them that disturbed her. She later realized the man and woman were probable versions of herself  and Rob, the version they might have become if they  hadn’t pursued the unknown path that led them to Seth.

What else lies in this deeper reality? I suspect there are gems we haven’t discovered, truths we haven’t uncovered,  and places we haven’t even imagined. Yet.