Doppelganger Friday

It's Friday. From the time I rise on Friday mornings my weekend brain is in complete control. One could even argue that the transfer of power starts sometime on Thursday evening. On Friday my mind wanders like a stray dog.

In between classes I googled the term 'doppelganger.' Doppelganger, German for "double walker," commonly referred to as a shadow-self. According to about.com's paranormal pages, there is some crazy sheenus out there regarding these doubles. Shelly claims he saw himself when he was in Italy, silently pointing towards the Meditarranean Sea. He died in a sailing accident in 1822 on the Med. Maupassant, French novelist, said that one day his double came in a sat down across from him as he was writing and actually starting dictating his story to him. Now that would be cool. "Hello me. Sit down and tell me a story." What struck me as odd was that many of the stories about doppelgangers are coming from writers. Maybe it's because they tend to write things down, whereas many stories are lost. But still...weird.

My favorite story, though, is about Goethe, that crazy German. He encountered his double, riding towards him on a road to Drusenheim. The doppelganger was wearing a gray suit trimmed with gold. Eight years later Goethe found himself riding the exact same road, same direction, wearing a gray suit trimmed with gold. I like this story because it dovetails nicely with my ideas about the phenomenon of deja vu. They go something like this:

With God, we are told, time is different. It is "one eternal round." All is present with him. Whereas we are trapped in linear, chronological time, he can behold all things at once. How are the prophets given visions of the future? How did Moses behold every living soul that ever lived or would live on the whole earth? God can show them these things because he knows them. He's not making movies about what might happen. This brings up the old dilemma about destiny, which I'm not going to go into deeply here. But I will say I agree with James Talmage when he says that just because God knows the end from the beginning doesn't mean he is controlling outcomes or taking away agency. Surely his influence is felt through his work, but for us the opportunity to decide our own course is never in jeopardy. Maybe God can see down different space-time continuums, maybe there are an endless amount of outcomes. But whatever the case, there seems to be a place, another dimension maybe (for as typically sci-fi as that sounds), where time slips.

Maybe when we dream we can slip into that place where time is jumbled up. Maybe we encounter pieces of the future, or futures. Every once in awhile we find ourselves actually living one of those futures, and the experience is powerful deja vu. I know its wacky, and utterly undebatable on a scientific level. But I like to imagine that could be the case.

We've all heard about how we only use 10 percent of our brains. Hugh Nibley talks about how we mortal can really only concentrate on one thing at a time. Our minds are slow and move from one task to the next chronologically. But for God, he says, his mind is capable of multi-tasking on a supreme level, he can devote his complete attention to many people at the same time. Maybe our brains sometimes slip past their mortal bounds. Maybe the result is strange phenomenon like visions or supernatural experiences, or doppelgangers. Maybe I'm full of crap. But I like to think that we are wired for more than we can imagine, that we aren't ready for everything yet, but that are made in the image of a being who can comprehend all things...and that is our ultimate purpose.

And that's all I've got.