Imagine me a baby–just like you were, just like I was–snuffling and sniveling, wiggling and wailing, mercilessly ejected from the placental nectar and the amniotic anodyne, umbilical rip-cord capriciously severed. That’s when I met my etheric double, a version of me in a stifling straitjacket, an exoskeletal prison, separating the me-that-is-we from the undifferentiated and illuminated whole like a cookie-cutter cleaves a singular gingerbread man from an expansive and amorphous sheet of dough.
Much later in life, but still before my etheric double had killed itself, I perfunctorily paged through the theosophy discussing etheric doubles. I didn’t even know that’s what they were called, early on. There’s evil twins and doppelgangers and the dark, uncanny specters in the other-sides of mirrors that betray their otherness with the occasional malevolent wink at one’s own unblinking eyes, and all that. But that’s not how any of this works. It’s both more banal and pervasive than any of that.
The theosophists thought that an etheric double was like this light-body thing, an incandescent aura festooned around one’s physical body like lurid holiday lights temporarily wrapped in cascading rows around an otherwise drab and darkened building. But they got it exactly wrong–it’s backward; it’s the opposite.
My etheric double immediately went to work on murder with several angles. It, like its cousin sardonic mirror-selves, probably wasn’t conscious, but exhibited a patterned intelligence like a lizard, an algorithm. An infallible and incremental erosive process with occasional paroxysms of brutal catastrophe. Its unyielding aim was to dim the shine, to turn the incandescence off, to tarnish and obfuscate the light till all that remained was the structure–lightless, empty, skeletal, desiccated, mummified.
Imagine me a baby–just like you were, just like I was–all light and little definition. All potential. The neonatal organism even has unspecialized cells that can become anything! Rubbery bones. A soft skull. Fully plastic brain matter. One could conceive of a baby becoming an angel, feathery and downy wings carrying it into the sky, and maybe even Heaven, where that’s a metaphor for anything at all. Though Heaven necessarily at least means something more beautiful than this encompassing and inescapable sable shroud congealing the collective light.
The etheric double sets to work right then and there, though–it plants code into the little light-babies, all of them, you and me and we, so that the rubbery becomes ossified; the plastic becomes immutable; the potential squelched with a wry and sadistic squishing sound. The light-babies are birthed into the filthy and reprehensible deterministic bathos, where they will remain trapped as child prisoners, aging in an ineradicable, mechanistic, and metronomic manner, with twin-mirrored life and death sentences, issued by an unthinking patterned intelligence–lizardlike and algorithmic.
The code restricts the little-light babies from growing wings, which means they’ll never get to Heaven, but rather, stay entombed in the fetid and squelching dirt. And that’s both literal and metaphorical too, because if there is a Heaven that can mean anything, there’s also an Earth that can mean anything. Though Earth necessarily at least means oxidization, involuntary localization–itself broadly a definition of prison–and involuntary temporalization, which is broadly a definition of murder.
The thing the theosophists had wrong was that the etheric double isn’t the light around the body; it’s the body around the light. That’s the prison.
My etheric double started commanding substance abuse before I was even an adult. Imagine me a baby, a little tabula rasa, whose etheric double started graffitiing all over the tabula in rancid sepia, the color, consistency, and redolence of Earthly feces the moment the clean slate was presented.
That’s the space between the me-that-is-we and the me that is separated, exquisitely suffers, and wallows in the mediocrity forming the substrate of the foul pig-pen into which we are all corralled for future processing and disassembly. The space between the me-that-is-we and the me that was an addict, behaved cynically self-servingly in my myopic stupidity, and became nothing, just like you, is the humid, noxious, and stale air between the processed meat and the taut cellophane affixing it to a sarcophagus of styrofoam, a suffocating skin acting as a burial shroud until the meat within rots.
By my early adulthood, my etheric double started commanding the commission of suicide. Once, it dragged the length of an oxidized razorblade across the pulpy part of its own inner wrists, which were part of the cellophane over the me-that-is-we. In a risible fit of algorithmic hypocrisy and ambivalence, the etheric double both started slicing itself off me, one razor-drag at time, but also failed to slice itself off me. The etheric double lived on after this little exhibition and subsequently started wearing long-sleeve shirts to hide its failure from the eyes of the other etheric doubles, from you and them.
Later, it tried raising its strange meaty appendage with five phalanges–an arbitrary amount, but part of the code comprising the prison–to its own mouth first with an unprescribed overdose of muscle relaxers and second, in short-sequence, with an entire bottle of spiced rum. The etheric double used the tools at its disposal to try to stop its own heart, at which it failed again.
After this second failure, it then proceeded in an autonomous procession to walk me like a marionette whose strings were my body, the double, through nearly two decades of insipid, banal, stultifying, and historically-unimportant behaviors at the behest of other etheric doubles. Answering phones, drafting correspondences, accounting for numbers concerning how wealthy some doubles were and some weren’t, who owed whom. All while the marionette strings of the doubles, congealing over the combined light of everyone, dictated that some were greedy and accumulative while others were stupid and consumptive, the symbiotic relationship being a simple and deterministic mathematical function while the light within them all sonorously squelched. Consciousness wasn’t a necessary witness to the irrefutable outcome of them all, but was instead a gratuitous flourish by the lizard-algorithm to the aggregate suffering. The lights within the doubles could observe themselves, an entire city skyline of brightly bioluminescent potentialities, terminated as though the electrical grid calamitously and instantly collapsed.
It was the third attempt of my etheric double to destroy itself that finally took. Now in its middle age, the etheric double’s body wasn’t as resilient as it once was, which was also part of its code. Remember, etheric doubles execute their felonious roles doubly, both explosively and erosively. The third stochastic explosion of my etheric double fatally finished it. Relentlessly resuming its decades-old algorithm, my etheric double’s phalanges first raised an unprescribed overdose of opiates to its own open maw, leading to a series of lightless, undulating intestinal tunnels, and second, in short-sequence, nearly an entire bottle of bitter brown spirits.
You, the you still trapped by your etheric double, a calcified exoskeletal prison sleepwalking you by the marionette strings through the wanton straitjacket-consciousness that you struggle to tolerate even with the aid of any available analgesic or frivolous distraction, the you pantomiming algorithmic behaviors, now self-destructive, now self-serving and small, now pathetic and unremarkable, can take it as rote that my etheric double died. Which it did.
But let this light-that-is-we remind you: just because my etheric double had a flair for the dramatic, the tear-jerking-scandal kind of stuff, everyone gather-round-his-grave he-died-too-soon, doesn’t mean yours is any less insidious. Sometimes they do it explosively, like mine and the pills and the booze and the lifeless and putrefying exuvia, in all its revolting spectacle. But they always hedge their bets, just as mine did, just as yours did. When the flair for the explosive doesn’t take, the inextricably erosive routine inevitably does.
Your double, just as all doubles, surreptitiously slipped an algorithm into your code that causes your own cells to progressively falter and fail. This routine is irreversibly running, even during this light-bringing disquisition, which your double is causing you to read. There you are: inexorably metamorphosing into a desiccated husk, both literally and metaphorically, affixed to your marionette strings, being walked on a leash to the end of the algorithm, when you can shed your double, too.
You can return to the light that is we.