“Mirror, mirror on the wall, who in the land is fairest of all?”
Of course, 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.
When you wake up in the morning, the first thing you do is walk into the bathroom. The next thing you know is look at yourself in the mirror. You check whether you look the way you are used to. You touch your hair into place it is supposed to belong. Then you start to wash your face, brush your teeth, and take shower. In front of the mirror again, you dress up to look the way you think you should look. You get used to with the image you have been seeing in the mirror. Anything deviated from that firm image you hold on to is not acceptable. When something drastic comes into your life; it doesn’t matter whether you think it is positive or negative, you might want to change your look – coloring your hair, changing color of your outfits, changing lipstick colors etc. – just to look different, just to welcome new things into your life.
You walk out of your house. You smile to people who smile to you. You don’t feel good when people you expect to smile to you don’t smile. You walk into the office with the same pace, greet your colleagues with the same words and you expect them to do the same thing. When things don’t happen the way you think it should be, you start to wonder why, and then you start to be uncomfortable. They are your mirrors.
They reflect how you perceive and expected from people. If the image starts to twist from the way you believe, you start to question. You start to find ways to blame – the environment, the people around you. You start to question whether there is something wrong with them. You start to question the world. Have you ever thought of questioning yourself, what disturbing you can be your image – your mirror? The environment may not change. People around you may not change. But it could be you, who change. You react to things coming towards you. You expect things to happen the way you want them to happen.
Our emotional image starts to be stirred when something touches or invade into 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 is twisted by our emotion. It is our mirror image.
Mind is a great machine. It will perceive things the way we want to perceive. When we go shopping for apparels, all we see are apparels. Sometimes we would be surprised that we never noticed them before.
Our mind can link our past emotion with our current situation. Many times we generalize things just to fit with our frame of references. They 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 activate effectively and it becomes behavior.
Our mind is selective. It will set a perfect frame to our value and belief. We tend to select what fits into the frame and act on it. All emotions, anger and frustration will filter to what we want to hear. We conclude what we listen to fit into the frame we set.
Information is like rain pouring down from the sky and our mind is a glass to collect. We will be able to grasp the rain as much as the size of the mouth of the glass. If we pretend ourselves to be the ground, the earth that can entertain everything, it will help absorb all the rain that pours. It takes a great mind with great generosity to be able to receive everything with no judgment. Let it absorb with no reaction and with no linkage with the set value.
The glass is like our mind, water will change its shape the same way as our emotion changes, sometimes twisted with jealousy, sometimes torn with anger, sometimes encompassed with pleasure or rounded with relaxation. The same person can hold the same rain pour differently at different time or by different persons at the same time. The rain the glass holds will shape itself in the same shape of the glass.
When you sit in your office, and your assistant comes in aggressively shouting yelling about what he is not happy about the situation in the office. How would you react:
“I am your boss, why don’t you 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 of his issues?”
If you do the first thing, he is the twisted mirror image of you. He becomes a threat. Your image is being a “boss”. You want to see the mirror as the person who will look at you with respect and at the same time comes with a more obedient manner. You are linking the word “boss” with “polite and obedient”. You would dislike “aggression”.
If you do the second thing, he is the your ugly mirror image. He is ugly because he always acts like that with no reason. You are linking the current behavior with the previous collective perception that you used to hold. Is there any link in that? The reason he does it this time might be different when he did it last time.
If you smile and pay attention to his behavior, you might understand more of the issues. You don’t presume that you have the mirror in front of you. You have a preset value. You become selfless. Whatever you see from the mirror is the real image of him, not your mirror image any more.
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. Is it too important to lose oneself? When it rains, the ocean is the place that can hold every 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-image Mind is just like dominoes; when one falls, the rest will fall. If we take every other piece in the row away, each one that falls will not lead others to fall. Can we remove those dominoes? Rows and rows of dominoes are our values and believe. They are just like our backbones. They make us stand straight to be a proud person with so-called “integrity and pride. When we remove them, will we be able to stand? Can we remove the idea that we have the backbones? Can we see ourselves 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. We hold to our past perfect image. Sometimes, we keep looking in it and trying to project our future in the mirror. The mind is so great in twisting the images. We see our suffering towards the current uncomforting situation. We see ourselves as progressively happy when we dream of being something great. But, we never see our current situation as it is. When we wake up 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. We 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. But he has to deal with a scarier 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 it. 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. We have to pick it up ourselves. It doesn’t bounce back. We have to make sure it is still in our 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. Our mind would be so hungry to fight for food to survive. When it has no food it will start to eat into its own self if we allow it to.
