THE MIRROR
Stone: Gold Topaz (Citrine)
The Mantra: Om Buddhi Vyaakhyaa
The Key:
The world and all in it is essentially
a mirror
to begin finding out who you really are see how each relationship,
conflict, achievement or failure is a reflection
of various aspects of your being.
What have you learned from it so far?
That’s all?
a) The issue is introduced by noting how
Because of our greater or smaller dissatisfaction with our life and its rewards,
most of us are as if sighing in front of a mirror: its surface
becomes clouded and we cannot see clearly in it.
In one of His verses, Rumi called the body
dust on the mirror spirit
Most of us keep forgetting that
what a mirror reflects is not ourselves but merely our body and the false masks of tour various personalities, of our ever-changing, superficial qualities.
Who we really are may be called a ray of the Divine,
but has no perceivable form.
Wu Hsin asks:
What is the world other than numberless mirrors
reflecting the light from a single source?
The Tantric Tripura agrees:
What is popularly called the external is indeed only a reflection
on Chaitanya (the Divine) as on a mirror.
As Nisargadatta Maharaj said,
You can see both the image and the mirror,
therefore you are neither.
Dee Remy adds that
Mirrors are perpetually deceitful. They lie and steal your true self.
They reveal only what your mind believes it sees.
Does your mind believes all it sees?
Don’t be deceived.
Rumi goes very deep into the issue:
We are both the mirror
and the face it reflects.
This very instant we taste eternity.
Both pain and what cures it are we,
the fresh cold water
and the jar pouring it out.
b) The whole world is reflected in the mirror of our own heart,
and in the Witness state it becomes transparent, revealing the Divine
behind Maya’s veil of illusions.
Jackson Peterson asked:
Does the clear glass of the mirror ever become altered
or burdened by its reflections?Does it need
to ‘ignore’ its reflections?
His answer is:
Of course not. You are that changeless mirror,
all the rest are the stories within the reflections, that have
never impacted the transparent Clarity
that you always are.
As Allama Prabhu said:
For all their searching the mirror’s image they cannot see it:
in the circles it blazes between the eyebrows.
Who knows this attains the Divine.
Do you know this?
If not, how will you learn it?
The way that Dongshan put it is:
As form and image face each other in a bright mirror
you are not really it – but it is YOU!
Do you FEEL, not just believe, that it is YOU?
To which extent?
WHICH of your many “you”?
Ha ha ha ha!
c) Consider the ancient symbol of Narcissus,
who liked so much his own image that drowned in a pool where it was reflected in the attempt to merge with it, represents the human tendency
to identify oneself with one’s self-image and this is what actually happens to most of us:
lost our countless identifications time passes much more quickly
towards death and we miss out on the true life
we could have had.
To which extent this applies to you as well?
Not at all?
Are you SURE?
Machado offers a very deep observation about our human condition:
He is unable to see his own face in the mirror because
he has BECOME the mirror.
To which extent have you become the mirror?
Krishnamurti adds that:
Relationships are the mirror in which
the self is revealed.
Leibniz agrees:
Every soul is a living mirror of the universe.
According to Wu Hsin,The Final Understanding is
an intuitive apperception that
in every moment of every day,
all that is happening is thatyou are looking into a mirror.
How often are you aware of this?
d) With a silent mind the Mirror becomes clear
and then we can begin to perceive Reality at last,
who we truly are.
Interested?
Farid ud-Din Attar spoke of it very poignantly of what happens until we perceive Reality at last:
So in front of mirrors you sigh
clouding their surface
Are you still sighing in front of mirrors?
It’s a complete waste of time.
What tends to happen when you cloud their surface?
It is the main reason that there is so much confusion
and uncertainty in the world.
e) Let us emphasize it once more: each relationship,
encounter, sharing, even each conflict
is like a mirror reflecting the nature of our being and our state
of that moment, a great help to better understand
what we appear to be.
In the Gospel of Mary Magdalene the Christ says that he -or His Father, (the Divine) is
“a secret treasure that wished to be known”,
Therefore I created a mirror: its shining face is your heart
and its darkened back is the world.
And then added this observation:
The back would please you – if you have never
seen the Face.
What does “the back” represents?
Only all worldly things?
Or what?
Does it interest you more than His face?
Don’t be deceived.
The Kabuli:
It is recorded that the Kabuli’s family was very poor and He had never seen a mirror until the first time his father brought Him to a barbershop.
When He saw himself in the barber’s mirror he seemed bewildered and mumbled to himself:
Who is that small boy standing there in the mirror
like a mastool (idiot) with his mouth open?
The barber thought that he was joking and laughed at his wit, but his father, a true Faithful, understood what his son meant and gave thanks to the Merciful for having granted him such a worthy spiritual progeny.
The Veil:
It is the Veil that makes us see only a deformed mask in the Mirror
instead of the infinite beauty of our own true face.
The Dreamgame:
The Mirror can be a great ASSET in the Dreamgame,
but only if we are very sincere, accepting to see things as they really are, not imagining them differently because it is easier and more comfortable.
The shortest and safest way to the Divine consists in keeping the mirror
of our heart open to Him and no longer concerned
with so many inane things.
With how many inane things are you still concerned?
To which extent?
Why?
The Amritanubhav (The Nectar of Mystical Experience) asked:
Indeed, the word, well known as a reminder, is a useful thing.
Is it not a mirror that reflects the formless ?
It is no wonder that the visible is seen in a mirror; but, that which is invisible is seen in this mirror of the word.
Is it possible even for the Creator to stand in front of himself
without a mirror ?
The Devil’s Advocate:
All you know about yourself in the image that you see in the mirror of your choice,
but they all have one thing in common: they reflect only your own inane dreams and self-deceptions.
What is your reality then?
Of course, there isn’t one, but you don’t want to realize this, which is quite understandable, considering how dismal it is.
This suits us just fine, thanks a lot!
The Khdir:
The Mind is the ultimate Mirror, but it doesn’t reflect the world,
only its own confused interpretations of it.
The one thing that no mirror can ever reflect is your own Self.
Let your heart abide in your true center within,
never in the world’s mirror.
To which extent does your heart abide in your true center within?
It will come.
Words of Power:
May our Mirror reflect always
only the Divine!
Whoever is happy abides in a happy world, a negative person
dwells in an unpleasant, even terrible world.
everything is our mirror.
“Know the world from end to end is a mirror; in each atom
a hundred suns are concealed.”
Shabistari
In which world do you live?
Why?
What do you usually see in it?
Can you see everyone you meet as a mirror?
“But a mirror the world is, reflecting
Love’s perfect image.” Rumi
As you live deeper in the heart, the mirror
gets clearer and clearer.” Rumi
How deeply are you living in your heart?
That’s all?
Living it:
In Oscar Wilde’s novel ‘The Portrait of Dorian Gray”, notwithstanding his life of debauch full of excesses the protagonist remains always physically young and beautiful while his portrait progressively gets more and more old and horrible.
Although when Vijay read it was not yet on the Path he told himself:
somehow underneath the false image of myself in the mirror
of my life there must be my real Self
reflecting itself in me…
Well, the Khdir helped him to see that.
From Vijay’s old journals: 1995 – On the highway between San Remo and Rome.
This morning Prema told me that in all her life she had never seen even once two persons physically fighting, and I asked myself: why did I have to confront so much violence in my life?
Then I suddenly understood that the reason is that I had seen the world and most others as potentially very dangerous, while she had seen the world positively and everyone in it as an angel in disguise.
The mirror of the world reflected perfectly
BOTH our expectations
What almost nobody is aware of is that
we can make the mirror of the world reflect just about anything
we consciously or unconsciously expect to see into it.
From Vijay’s old journals: 2008, place not recorded
These four verses of Han Shan hit me like a thunderbolt.
I know only too well what he meant and would like to share it with those close to me, but how on earth will I ever find the words to express it better than he did?
“I’ve watched smoke spiral into the void of space.
In that bright mirror, I’ve seen a myriad things.
But last night a dragon gulped the shining moon
and in the blackness, I saw what I had missed. “
From the poem Right Living Hints:
If you are the equivalent of a Mirror
realize that so far
you have been reflecting
but illusions, false appearances all.
What are you really
meant to reflect?
Question/ko’han 1 and 2:
The soul has been called the image of the Divine
because by polishing our inner mirror
we can become one with Him.
Where is your inner mirror?
How will you best polish it?
Question/ko’han 3:
The Mirror becomes clear when we look in it
with the eyes of a small child.
Can you?
Question/ko’han 4 and 5:
Malcolm de Chazal said that
Monkeys are superior to men in this:when a monkey
looks into a mirror, he sees a monkey.
What do you usually see in your own Mirror?
Considering that it depends only on you,
what would you like to see there?
Question/ko’han 6:
Rumi said:
Body of earth, don’t talk of earth;
tell the story of pure mirrors.
Which is the story of pure mirrors?
If you don’t know it, IMAGINE it right now.
Question/ko’han 6:
as already mentioned, Rumi called the body
dust on the mirror spirit.
What does this tell you?
Question/ko’han 7:
Hakim Sanai asked:
When the Divine wants to reveal His true nature to us,
through which mirror shall He enter?
Through which mirror in you shall He enter?
There is only one which is real.
Hadewijch has the last word with the best advice:
You who want knowledge, the Oneness within you seek:
there the clear mirror you will find, always
waiting for you
Practice:
1) Consider these words of Lahjiri:
Man is the eye that looks in the mirror, and just as the mirror reflects the face of the person looking into it, the reflection itself has an eye:
at the same time that the eye looks in the mirror its reflection
looks back at God, who is the eye of man;
He looks at Himself through man.
2) Meditate on his passage of Shabistari:
Know that the whole world a mirror is:
a hundred suns in each atom are concealed. If of a single water droplet
the hear you pierce, a hundred clear oceans from it will flow; if at each speck of dust intently you gaze, a thousand beings in it will you see…
a drop of water in name the Nile resembles; in a barleycorn heart’s a hundred harvests abide.
A whole world in millet-seed lays; in an insect’s wing an ocean of life; in the pupil of your eye a heaven is hidden;
small is the core at heart’s center, yet the Lord
of both worlds enters there.
– Then tell yourself:
In the Mirror in the world are reflected all my “natural” impulses, regrets and guilt, inspirations and enjoyments, everything which my mind classifies as “good” or “bad”,
what shall I do with all this?
3) Meditate also on these words of Vivekananda:
The Self, the Knower, the Lord of all, the Real Being, is the cause of all the vision that is in the universe, but it is impossible for Him to see Himself or know Himself except through reflection.
You cannot see your own face except in a mirror,and so the Self cannot see
Its own nature until it is reflected, and this whole universe
therefore is the Self trying to realize Itself.
Contemplate:
1) These verses of Rumi:
To a mirror-like finish metal can be polished,
but what polishing
might the hearts’ mirror need?
Between the mirror and the heart
but one difference is there: unlike the heart
no secrets the mirror conceals at all.
Do you know why the mirror of your soul
does not reflect anything?
Because from its surface
the rust was not removed.
If you find the mirror of the heart dull, the rust
has not been cleared from its face.
How will you remove it?
To which extent?
Every second into a mirror he is bowing.
If for just a second one molecule could he see
of what is there without fantasizing about it
he would explode.
Both his imagination and himself
with all his knowledge would vanish
into a rebirth obliterated, a perfectly clear view
and a voice saying “I Am God”
2) This passage of Zenkei Shibayma
The mirror is thoroughly egoless
and mindless.
If a flower comes it reflects a flower, if a bird comes it reflects a bird. It shows a beautiful object as beautiful, an ugly object as ugly. Everything is revealed as it is.
There is no discriminating mind or self-consciousness
on the part of the mirror.
If something comes, the mirror reflects; if it disappears the mirror just lets it disappear… no traces of anything are left behind.
Such non-attachment, the state of no-mind, or the truly free working
of a mirror is compared here to the pure
and lucid wisdom of Buddha.
3) These verses of Tozan Ryikai:
At midnight truly it’s most bright
by daylight it cannot still be seen.
It is the principle that regulates all,
relieving every suffering.
Though it doesn’t act it is not without words.
In the most precious mirror
form meets reflection:
you are not It, but it is all you.
What does this imply?
Haiku:
The clearest mirror ever made the world is
reflecting all that is and ever was,
but then why in so many reflections
are we still lost?
