You are always at the “apex” of your cohesion as an individualized soul, even if this apex may appear a “less than you can imagine.” I want you to consider not just your entire life, but all your prior lives. If you do not believe in reincarnation (or variants), then consider all the lives of your ancestors ; consider the “code” that you believe is in the DNA that was cultivated by the lives of your ancestors — the material that provides some level of influence when you enter this world. There are things you know that are built-in — not just behaviors, but preferences that seem to have no roots in your current life.
Now with this consideration in mind, consider how all of these experiences & knowledge would culminate into a lens, or a window, as they must. This is easy to do. If you are conditioned to thinking you are “all that is of this life” then just expand your scope to consider you are “all that has come before” as well.
With this mind, then, let us consider: Why are you here? This article is not about why we live or why we experience but why you are here in this moment and not somewhere else. But the more important question is: why can’t you go somewhere else?
“Somewhere else.” What does that mean? Well, you can easily conceive a place “other than here” can’t you? I don’t mean your home versus the grocery store. I mean a place that seems “other” than your “whole conception of the universe.”
And you say, well, there is space and perhaps other dimensions-yet-to-be-discovered and so on and yet even if we accept these explanations there remains one truth in all of this: wherever you go, there you are.
Our consciousness follows us wherever we go and provides the means by which we experience “the outside.” So even if we move, or travel, can we have said to have gone anywhere at all? Not really. Your joys and foibles will follow you wherever you go. You cannot see past your own perceptions. What you see is always you, even if it is reflected off another.
When you understand “wherever you go, there you are”, then you understand that the universe rises up out of you to its maximum potential. That means all the places you can go and all the places you can’t go (the unknown.) You cannot escape yourself.
But your unknown is not necessarily the unknown of the other, or the collective, but you have probably defined it as such. In reality, you are in charge of your own unknown as much as your known.
“You” are a wave that is produced by the confluence of all your past lives. If the ocean is “all of your lives”, then you are a surfer on its surface. This is inescapable. This is what we would describe as “fate” or “destiny.” The waves carry your surfboard, but you decide where to go. You are always at the perfect crossroads of your own being, at the infinite maw of potential, ready to dive in and make the next choice.
The Earth game represents a kind of wave corruption within us. I have said before the Earth game might be best seen as a crucible, or a place to purify the soul. The Earth game is a “House of Mirrors.”
I want you to imagine this house. I want you to imagine you are standing outside of it and outside of it, you are your own perfect conception of yourself. You are in perfect alignment to your “heart” — the intersection I just spoke about. Your maximum potential. You are not God. The “you” outside of this House is not the final destination, for there is no final destination. You have limitations, preferences, things you wish to accomplish and experience.
You enter the house and it is a maze of mirrors. In some mirrors, you are tall, or fat, or short, or distorted. You laugh, knowing these are just reflections and keep walking. But as you go, the mirrors become more complex and more confusing. The mirrors seem to know you and show you things about yourself.
In some mirrors, you see things you despise and for a moment you are tempted to stop in front of that mirror and get angry about it — you wonder briefly about how accurate it seems to be — but somehow you move on. The mirrors keep digging deeper and deeper into you. The next mirrors delves into your memories, triumphant or embarrassing. Sometimes you get stuck at these mirrors, for either you like to revel a bit and pat yourself on the back, or cry tears of sorrow at the remembrance. You are a little suspicious how the Mirrors seem to know so much about you, but attribute it to just a trick of the show.
You manage to walk forward, looking for the exit. But the mirrors keep getting more cunning. Soon the mirrors are not just panes of glass on a wall, but appear all around you. You have trouble distinguishing where the mirrors are and where you are walking. The same images that you walked past before come back again but seem more real and it is easier for you to get distracted staring at these images, which are now lifelike and moving on their own, rather than looking for the exit. They make you question things, because they play out in ways you don’t expect. They are profoundly personal and it is a little uncomfortable seeing them on display.
You walk a little more briskly, maybe thinking this is a bad idea and go back the way you came — but you are lost now and the mirrors just keep reflecting deeper secrets that only you should know. Your progress is often impeded by having to deal with these images — even as you struggle to remember you are just in a House of Mirrors and this is all an illusion — because they are so personal, you can’t help but react to them. The mirrors seem to be “speaking your language” and it is difficult to discern where you begin and the mirror ends.
At times you become indignant, or incredulous or upset at the people who made this place. And when you do, things appear in the mirror that don’t appear to be coming from you at all. You have disowned a part of yourself. They seem to attack you for having this opinion. But you still have a sense of yourself and are able to separate them.
Now the mirrors straight up argue with you, cutting to the bone of your beliefs. They make you doubt this entire idea of having come into a House of Mirrors. They instill doubt into you and there is little recourse but to pause and examine yourself. Like a fading dream, you are having trouble remembering that you came into this House of Mirrors, but it is still there on the edge of your consciousness.
You continue to draw lines and boundaries between “you” and the world being shown to you.
The Mirrors do not relent. You are so upset that you are convinced now that the Mirrors are painting a world that clearly isn’t coming from you anymore. The line between the two is too blurry to distinguish. But this becomes your doom, as you now you freely engage in both fantasies and nightmares that go on without end — thinking this is the way to the exit. When you have had too much pain, you drive yourself to pleasure. And when pleasure becomes dull, you spiral back down into pain. They seem to play off each other in perfect harmony. That memory of a place “outside the House” is now a fairy tale of its own.
In time, you forget all about the place outside of the House of Mirrors. But no longer how long you wander in here, that “nuisance” at the edge of your mind never goes away. For a time, you learn to shove it aside, but it is always there. What is it? You can’t remember. You’re too busy dealing with whatever the Mirror is bothering you with right now. So you now wander the House trying to figure out what this nuisances is whenever you have the opportunity.
As you piece it together and remember some vague recollection of some place that “isn’t here”, The Mirrors now show you a world you yearn for — a world you love. The one that “isn’t here” — a place disassociated from yourself — that you are imagining. They show you all of your highest ideals. But not just your ideals. But the “ideals of the Mirror” — of all the people in the Mirror. The perfect world.
At this point, you are so angry and indignant for being mislead and wandering in circles, you actually reject the perfect world that it presents to you, because it does not match all the worlds the Mirror presented to you before. It is “there” and you are “here” and you are tired of these lies. And here you get stuck, because the “nuisance” that follows you constantly argues with you about the perfect world that doesn’t match your experience at all!
Now you are directly opposite of yourself, arguing for this ideal world — which is really the “place of your heart” that you forgot — seeing it separate and unreachable. And here you begin to fixate the most! For now you are so close, it is almost painful to behold. But no matter how hard you reach, it never becomes — because you cannot reach for something “outside” of yourself.
Now you attempt to “re-create” yourself. Your rally all the visages of the Mirror and try to impose this ideal upon the Mirror world, which always ends in tragedy, because your limitations always result in an entropic, dying world. Because you are an “eternally” limited being, for this is the requisite of all experience and creation.
This little exercise is meant to demonstrate the damnation of fixation and to begin to help you understand how you are sitting atop the crest of a “Wave.” The Wave is always changing and in flux, but it is represents a moving window. When the person in the House of Mirrors starts to overload his window, the memory of him entering the House moves more and more out of view. As it does, he starts to take his fixations as more “real.”
As we are master storytellers, our fixations build more and more stories to support themselves. The Mirrors reflect everything that is within us to construct the story that we experience.
As you pass a mirror that irritates you, or fascinates you, you fixate. You gaze. The mirror can show anything to you, not just visual places, but thoughts and feelings, or arguments and rationalizations. And in this act, you create a “weight.” The mirror tugs on your soul and imbalances you. Whenever you create weight, you create time — a story to explore. But fixation is always a lowering of awareness and always creates imbalance. Some of these fixations can become so deep that we attempt to smash the Mirror, or “become” the Mirror to get out.
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When you can take this understanding beyond a single life, your eyes should really begin to open.
The Holy Grail is to be able to enter & exit this House of Mirrors at will — without ever becoming fixated or lost. This is not to become God, but to realize your true nature. To be able to stare into any Mirror and understand all the while it is just a fun house. To be able to laugh, cry and enjoy yourself without any loss of awareness ; to never give authority to the Mirrors over your agency. To maintain your awareness of your “true self” that enters and — is on the other side — when you exit.
This is almost an impossible task because you must be willing to “betrayal your ideals” — your deepest sense of self — else they become altars for which you become fixated upon. This is where even the most enlightened people get stuck because instead of leaving the House, they attempt to build what is already built. And so divides are created, religions are made, wars are waged and civilizations fall.
If you try to break the mirror, you are only breaking yourself. And if you become the mirror, then you are simply settling down in the House of Mirrors, like a squatter, instead of looking for the exit. Your “nuisance”, though, will not ever leave you alone until you get out. Until you learn enough to become congruent to hold your awareness above the water and not fall off your surfboard.
As you release yourself from the Buffer, your fixation will decrease. As your fixation decreases, you will begin to see the House of Mirrors with more clarity. As this clarity increases, you will also begin to remember the “self” that entered into the House in the first place. To release yourself from the Buffer, you must avoid creating time. You must not fixate. To judge, to react, to plan, to “be triggered” and a slew of other “sins” are acts of lower awareness and increase fixation.
How is this done? You accept, surrender and have faith in your “heart” because it knows better than you do. It is “trusting the ocean to carry you.”
Incredible — as I was finishing this article and went to look for a “mirror test” gif, the giphy.com banner was this –>
Draw your own conclusions!