The Mirror

“Mirror, mirror on the wall, who in the land is fairest of all?”
Of which you would love to hear “You, only you, are fairest of all.”
But if the respond is, “you are full fair, ’tis true, but there is one fairer than you.”, you would be devastated.

In the morning when we wake up, the first thing we do is to walk into the bathroom. The next  thing we know is to look at our image in the mirror. We check whether we look the way we used to look. We touch the hair into the place it is supposed to belong. Then we start to wash face, brush teeth, take a shower. In front of the mirror again, we dress up to look the way we think we should look. We get used to with the image we have in the mirror. Anything deviating from that firm image we hold on will not be satisfied.  When something special comes into our life, of which doesn’t matter whether we think it is positive or negative, we might start wanting to change our look – coloring hair, changing color of the outfits, changing lipstick colors etc. just to look different to welcome new things in life.

We walk out of the house. We smile to people who smile at us. We don’t feel good when people we expect to smile to us don’t smile. We walk to the office with the same pace, greet colleagues with the same word and we expect them to reflect the same thing. When things don’t reflect the way we think it should be, we start wondering why and start to be uncomfortable.  The real mirror reflects our outer look while how we perceive people and the surrounding environment reflects our value that we believe the ultimate beautiful value in us. If the image starts to twist from the way we believe, we start to be uncomfortable.  We start to blame the environment, the people around us. We start to question what is wrong with them. We start questioning the world.  Have we ever thought of questioning our selves, that what disturbing us can be our image that reflects to the mirror? The environment may not change but we change. We react to things that coming towards us so that the mirror image is stable the way we expect it to be.

Our emotional image starts to reflect when it touches our value system whether we agree or disagree, whether we accept, or not accept, whether we like, or dislike, whether we appreciate or not appreciate.  It will reflect in our emotion towards the image that we see.  Mind is a great machine in linking things to what we want to see and perceive.  When we go shopping, if we want to buy apparel all we see are a lot of apparel.  Sometimes we would be surprised that we never noticed those before. We link the past emotion with the current situation and we many times try to generalize to fit with our frame of references of which might have no linkage at all. Just like the Chinese says, “being bitten by a snake once, being afraid of wet rope for another 10 years.”   The more we use the linkage in the same pattern the more we pave the path for it to act effectively to our behavior.  Our mind is selective. It will set a perfect frame to our value and belief.  And we will select what fits into the frame and act on it.  All emotions anger and frustration will filter what we hear to be what we want to hear and conclude those pictures to fit into the frame and act upon it. Information is like the rain pouring down from the sky; our mind is a glass to receive that water. We will be able to hold water only at the size of the glass mouth. If we pretend ourselves to be the ground; the earth that can receive everything, it will help absorb all water that pours. It will take a great mind with great generosity to be able to receive all the information with no prejudgment. Let it absorb with no reaction and with no linkage with the set value.  Our glass is like our mind, it change its shape according to emotions – sometimes twisted with jealousy, sometimes  torn with anger, sometimes round with pleasure or rounded with relaxation. So the same rain pouring can be held differently by the same person or by different persons.  The water the glass holds will shape itself in the same way as the holder itself.

When you sit in your office, and your assistant coming in aggressively shouting yelling about  what he is not happy about the situation in the office, what  would you react:
I am your boss, why not just better behave?
Why are you always complaining? Just get the damn job done?
Smile, and said let’s talk, so I can understand more or your issues?

If I do the first thing, he is the twisted mirror for me.  He becomes a threat. My image is being a “boss”. I want the see the mirror as the person who will look at me with respect and at the same time come with a more polite manner. I am linking the word “boss” with “polite and obedient”. I would dislike “aggression.”

If I do the second thing, he is the ugly glass for me. He is ugly because he always act like that with no reason.  I am linking the current behavior with the previous collective thinking that I used to hold. Is there any link in that?

If I smile and pay attention to her behavior, I might understand more of the issues. I don’t presume that I have the image; I don’t presume that I have the value, I am selfless. Whatever I see from the mirror is the real image of him, not the image I want to see.

We link something and hold them so strongly that we would feel uncomfortable to lose the link.  Losing link is losing “me”.  What that means is that I do not exist anymore.  Isn’t that difficult to lose yourself?  When it rains, the ocean is the place that can hold any drop of the rain. Does the ocean lose itself of being less “ocean”? It is always difficult to let go of everything, to let go of self. Mind is just like domino; when one falls, the rest will have the same effect. If we take the every other piece in the row away away, each one that falls will not lead others to fall either. Can we remove those dominoes? The rows and rows of dominoes are our values, believes. They are just like our back bones that make us stand up straight to be a proud person with so-called “integrity and pride.  When we remove all the bones, will we be able to stand up? Otherwise, can we remove the idea that we have the backbones? Can we see our self stand up with no egos?  It could be interesting to explore how to remove the dominoes as well as standing with no backbones.

Mirror is magical. It can reveal our past. It can reveal our future but it doesn’t often reveal what it is, “now”. We look at the magic mirror and want to see the image that we are used to, holding to the past perfect image. Again, we keep looking at it and trying to project our future in the mirror as well. The mind is so great in twisting the images – we see our suffering towards the current uncomfortable situation, we see ourselves as progressively happy when we dream of being something different. But we never see our current situation as it is. When we wake and look at ourselves in the mirror, we think it is so unattractive. We already project ourselves how to look better.  When we get a bit older we look at ourselves and mourn for our youth that would never come back and then start imagining the nice image of having plastic surgery while being scared of how people would say about it, how painful the process we have to go through etc. But we cannot accept our current image as it is. Like what the Buddha put it, “Not to mourn for the past, not to worry about the future, and not to anticipate troubles, but to live the present moment wisely and earnestly.”

I think that is why during the meditation process many monks go to the cave, into a dark room so that he would see no mirror.  And he has to deal with more scary mirror inside his mind – darkness, loneliness, seclusion, solitude, sadness, and all are pure emotional mirror.  When we cannot relate the images from outside as the mirror, we are dealing with inner side of self image. That mirror is even scarier and more uncontrollable. Like we are throwing a ball to the wall, it would bounce back but when we lock ourselves in the dark room – we are throwing ball to ourselves, to our body and we have to pick it up ourselves to make sure it is still in the hand.  The backbone that used to support us is even stronger because we want to straight it up even further to stand against something in us.  But for how long it could stand since there is nothing for it to lean on. There is no food from outside to feed in our ego. It would feel so hungry to fight for food to survive. When it has no food it will start to eat into our own mind if we allow it to.

Advertisement