Jekyll and Hyde
A respectable man drinks a potion and becomes a monster. Then the monster starts showing up on his own, uninvited.
Hyde was never a separate person. He was Jekyll, convinced he was someone else.
"Fine, but that's fiction. A cautionary tale about a chemistry experiment gone wrong."
Is it?
Consider how we move through an ordinary day. Angry at what's going on in the world. The quiet verdict passed on others, sometimes not so quiet. The grievances we harbor, a few of them worn as badges of honor.
This is us, most definitely not at our kindest. Mr. Hyde, running the show.
We call that self me. We answer to it. We defend it. We take it to be who we are.
A Course in Miracles doesn't borrow Stevenson's story, but it does describe an identical strangeness. "Into eternity, where all is one, there crept a tiny, mad idea, at which the Son of God remembered not to laugh." One small thought. A different self, tried on for a moment. Then forgotten as a costume and mistaken for a face.
The tragedy is not that Hyde exists. It's that Jekyll loses the way back. And unlike the kindly doctor, we drink the potion in every instant. Fusing the mask of me a little tighter each time.
But there is a way out. Jekyll was always there. Just forgotten. And what is forgotten can be remembered. What was made can be unmade.
Jekyll is our true Self. Hyde is only an apparition we took ourselves to be.