The Mirror

Real understanding can never be found amongst the pages of a book. But if we can learn to look into everything we experience in the same way that we look at a mirror, we will always be gaining fresh and ever deepening insight, most importantly about ourselves.

Think about how we use a mirror. We’re not really looking at the mirror itself are we, but at what appears in it, the reflection – most of the time ourselves. That’s what we’re really interested in, isn’t it? We’re very keen to know if something needs to be put right, or some dirt cleaned off. In the same way, we need this inquisitiveness about ourselves when we look at everything we experience, things that we see and hear, and the people in our lives and so on. If instead of focusing on what we experience as objects – taking our perceptions of them to be their true qualities – we try to understand how they reflect our own way of seeing things, then we will come to learn a lot about ourselves.

But it’s not easy for us to see our own mistaken ways of thinking, because for so long we’ve been looking in the wrong direction, ‘out there’ instead of inwardly at ourselves. Just think, can you see your own anger in other people’s anger? What does your contempt for somebody say about your own mind? And what makes them ‘contemptible’ in your eyes? Is the source of it in them, or is it in you, in your way of seeing things?

The dirt we see is on our own face, so there’s no point trying to clean the mirror. But just as seeing our reflection in a mirror can help us to clean the dirt from our face, reflecting back on our own afflictions actually helps us to become better people. To recognise our own hidden faults is to have real insight, and this can only happen when we look into our experiences in a very straightforward way, when we are very honest with ourselves. This insight cannot be discovered through reading, but is always available if we are prepared to look in the right direction.