(03-09-2025, 09:29 AM)F2d5thCav Wrote: I've read of "bilocation" as a thing.  Never experienced it, although once or twice I had people at work mention they had seen me somewhere ... for which I had no recollection.  Could have been mistaken, though.

(03-09-2025, 09:06 AM)Ninurta Wrote: I've never seen a Doppelganger that I know of. Never experienced it at all.

But I've apparently been one, at least twice now.

Many, many moons ago, in the late 70's - 1979, I think it was - a girl I'd known for years saw me walking the streets of a nearby town. She yelled and waved and did everything she could to get my attention, but apparently I ignored her entirely and just kept walking on.

Problem was, I was a long, long way away from that town at the time. Not there at all, and up to my eyeballs in rough livin' and bad business. When she actually did see me, and confronted me about my indiscretion, I of course denied being there at all, and told her where I HAD been at the time... but she wasn't buying it. She was so convinced it had been me that she didn't speak to me for a few years afterwards over my slight of her. She was just that certain that I was lying to her, and that I damned well HAD been there.

Flash forward 45 years or so, to last Thursday evening - 6 March, 2025 - around 6:30 Pm my time. There I was, minding my own business taking an evening nap, sound asleep, when Grace comes running into the bedroom, starts shaking my leg and shouting "Are you DEAD? Are you DEAD?".

One can imagine my confusion at being abruptly awakened in such a manner.

Once I got her calmed down, she told me that walking through the living room, she'd seen me sitting there (here) in my usual place as she passed. Then, thinking of something she wanted to ask me, she immediately turned around to ask it, but POOF! I was gone. Not there at all. So, she went looking for me through the house, wondering where I had gone to, but I was not in the kitchen, nor the bathroom, nor anywhere else. She finally found me laying in bed,in the bedroom, where I'd been for the last hour and a half or so.

That's when the shaking and yelling started.

Everything got better when I answered her, because dead guys, as a rule, don't answer. I think she thought she'd seen my ghost... even though she claims not to believe in ghosts.

it's a weird phenomena that I know nothing about, this doppelganger business. I've no idea what causes it, or what it means, or if it even means anything at all. It's just not something I've ever studied up on.

Does anyone else have any ideas as to why this sort of thing happens? I'm stumped.

.

Quote:Astral Bodies, or Doppelgangers

M. C.  Great confusion exists in the minds of people about the various kinds of apparitions, wraiths, ghosts, or spirits. Ought we not to explain once for all the meaning of these terms? You say there are various kinds of "doubles" what are they?

H. P. B.  Our occult philosophy teaches us that there are three kinds of "doubles," to use the word in its widest sense. First, man has his "double" or shadow, properly so called, around which the physical body of the fetus — the future man — is built. The imagination of the mother, or an accident which affects the child, will affect also the astral body. The astral and the physical both exist before the mind is developed into action, and before the Atma awakes. This occurs when the child is seven years old, and with it comes the responsibility attaching to a conscious sentient being. This "double" is born with man, dies with him, and can never separate itself far from the body during life, and though surviving him, it disintegrates, pari passu, with the corpse. It is this which is sometimes seen over the graves like a luminous figure of the man that was, during certain atmospheric conditions. From its physical aspect it is, during life, man's vital double, and after death, only the gases given off from the decaying body. But, as regards its origin and essence, it is something more. This double is what we have agreed to call Linga-sarira, but which I would propose to call, for greater convenience, "Protean" or "Plastic Body."

M. C.  Why Protean or Plastic?

H. P. B.  Protean, because it can assume all forms; e.g., the "shepherd magicians" whom popular rumor accuses, perhaps not without some reason, of being "were-wolves," and "mediums in cabinets," whose own "Plastic Bodies" play the part of materialized grandmothers and "John Kings." Otherwise, why the invariable custom of the "dear departed angels" to come out but little further than arm's length from the medium, whether entranced or not? Mind, I do not at all deny foreign influences in this kind of phenomena. But I do affirm that foreign interference is rare, and that the materialized form is always that of the medium's Astral, or Protean body.

M. C.  How is this astral body created?

H. P. B.  It is not created; it grows, as I told you, with the man and exists in the rudimentary condition even before the child is born.

M. C.  And what about the second?

H. P. B.  The second is the "Thought" body, or Dream body, rather; known among Occultists as the Mayavi-rupa, or "Illusion-body." During life this image is the vehicle both of thought and of the animal passions and desires, drawing at one and the same time from the lowest terrestrial manas (mind) and Kama, the element of desire. It is dual in its potentiality, and after death forms what is called in the East Bhut, or Kama-rupa, but which is better known to Theosophists as the "Spook."

M. C.  And the third?

H. P. B.  The third is the true Ego, called in the East by a name meaning "causal-body," but which in the trans-Himalayan schools is always called the "Karmic body," which is the same. For Karma, or action, is the cause which produces incessant rebirths or "reincarnations." It is not the Monad, nor is it Manas proper; but is, in a way, indissolubly connected with and a compound of the Monad and Manas in Devachan.

M. C.  Then there are three doubles?

H. P. B.  If you call the Christian and other Trinities "three Gods," then there are three doubles. But in truth there is only one under three aspects or phases: the most material portion disappearing with the body; the middle one surviving both as an independent but temporary entity in the land of shadows; the third, immortal throughout the Manvantara, unless Nirvana puts an end to it before.