Can any person perceive anything beyond personal perspective? I think not. We touch upon the absolute with our subjectively-gloved palms, processing it into our own reality through nerve-channels and neuron arrays.
This is the paradox of subjective co-existence. On the one hand, we and all things are interconnected... tied to each other by physical and spiritual bonds. It is futile to try to disengage, and the harder one focuses on trying - the stronger the link becomes. Yet on the other hand, we are doomed to separation; to an experience of indirectness... We can never be what we are not. We can never experience what we do not experience. Our reality is ours and ours alone - uniquely so thanks to the uniqueness of our subjectivity. It is what makes us "us", distinguishing an identity of self from among the endless uniform mass that would-be "objective reality".
How does this affect our interactions?
We are mirrors.
We are machines of input and output. Connected yet separate, we reflect one another. We recast the light we receive - after passing it through our own lenses and filters. We reflect our background, our heritage, our place and our potential. We reflect our unique position in relation to everything around us. More pointedly - we reflect anything with which we interact, whether knowingly or unknowingly, purposely or offhanded, rationally or instinctively.
This is but one way to approach Mirror-life. Moreover, the notion that we reflect what we receive is quite common and trivial. But something interesting happens if we dare try and look at it from the other way around - searching for the mirrors not within ourselves, but for the mirrors found everywhere around us, reflecting our own image back to us.
All is mirrors.
Look around you. What do you see? What we see is no less a product of our apparatus than the footprints we make in the sand. It has already been ingested, digested and passed on, to a certain extent. So look around you - and know: Every little thing we touch with our hands or with our minds has a story to tell us. About who we are, about what we want. It’s not egoic, and it isn’t a narrow way of looking. It doesn’t mean that these things don’t tell us endlessly about themselves, or of things far beyond our current reach. It means that since we interact with them one way or another, since we perceive them uniquely, that they bear the effect of us upon them, which they reflect back like a moon in the night.
What do they tell you?
Your family members and close friends? The stranger sitting across you on the bus? The birds in your back yard? The fish in the ocean? The chair you sit on? The earth you step on? Did you know that a great tracker can tell not only the actions but also the moods and dreams of an animal, just by looking at a single track?
_______
A simple drill to go with this lecture:
Take three things, from three different areas in your daily life. It can be a person, or an object or anything. Even a concept. Take three things which are apparently the most mundane... And if you want the exercise to be even more dramatic - pick three things which you don't really want to choose... which you'd rather not handle, because surely there is something better...
Consider these things anew and write down - what do they tell you about yourself and about the world around you? Write down something new each day.
Let's start with that.
