Mirror

Her mind pondered on gravely and intently, thinking to herself, "Well -- there you are again, you curious creature!" It was indeed a fierce mania of Mary's to stare into her own eyes at the looking-glass. She did it as a rule more angrily than with any other feeling; and, when she did it, she always thought of the self that looked back at her there as something quite different from the self she was conscious of really being. Her real self didn't seem to have eyes or nose, or mouth! Her real self seemed compounded out of pure ether and totally independent of bodily form.  John Cowper Powys, "A Glastonbury Romance"

Let go care and become wholly clear of heart, like the face of a mirror without image and picture. When it has become clear of images, all images are contained in it; that clear-faced one is not ashamed of any man's face.  Rumi

His form has passed away, he has become a mirror: naught is there but the image of another's face.  Rumi

But we all, with unveiled face, reflecting as in a mirror the glory of the Lord, are transformed.  St. Paul

The whole body will become like a mirror: it will become all eye and spiritual substance.  Rumi

The Buddha Mind, unborn and marvellously illuminating, is like a bright mirror. A mirror reflects whatever is in front of it. It's not deliberately trying to reflect things.Likewise, when the object being reflected is removed, the mirror isn't trying not to reflect it, but when it's taken away it doesn't appear in the mirror. The Unborn Buddha Mind is just like this.  Bankei

One our retreat participants once joked in a morning session: "I looked in the mirror and didn't recognize the face, but I shaved it anyway." He didn't recognize his own face because the stories associated with his face, his this-is-who-I-am habits, were simply not there. Since childhood I have had similar experiences with the face in the mirror. I remember passing mirrors as a young girl and stopping, suddenly stunned and curious about the creature whose reflection I saw there. I would look at the image with intense but impersonal interest as though I had rounded a corner and come face to face with my clone. I recall in those memories not only the the sense of "What is that?" but, as the awareness bolted from its usual confines, the larger sense of "What is all of this?" From Passionate Presence by Catherine Ingram.

Without question, the one "thing" to which we give the greatest value, out of all proportion, is the "thing" we see when we look in the mirror. The body in the mirror is not our Identity, any more than Macbeth is the identity of the actor playing that role. The one and only Identity is That which is being the consciousness that perceives the body in the mirror. Awareness is the action-activity of That which is being the body in the mirror, the mirror itself, the door frame, the house, the world and the entire universe, every bit included in (as) the Awareness that looks in the mirror. Identity, then, is infinitely more than a single outline in the consciousness of images and things. As a matter of fact, Identity has no more to do with a particular body-outline than the picture hanging on the wall. The Identity-being-I is being every object of perception. It is well, we say again, that.the images in the mirror (and all other objects of perception) are neither real nor unreal; they are nothing in themselves. The "value," the "something," is That which is being images! The "That" is Reality, Supernal Isness, God. From A Guide to Awareness & Tranquillity, by William Samuel

One can know oneself only with one’s own eye of knowledge, and not with somebody else’s. Does he who is Rama require the help of a mirror to know that he is Rama? Ramana Maharshi 

back to top