The World is Your Mirror

If you see a racoon in your back yard, what would be your reaction?  What would be your child’s reaction?  The typical house owner would see a scavenger, a pest.  A child would probably see it with curiosity, something cute to be petted.  A scientist’s perspective of a church is very different than that of a priest.  The sight of a diamond ring instills entirely different sets of emotions in a bride to be, compared to a senior citizen.  These examples may seem obvious.  So obvious in fact that we take the truth they point to entirely for granted.

How we see the world is a complete and total reflection of the ego-identities in which we have entangled ourselves.  Our conditioning is the lens through which we view and interpret the input through our senses.  To put it another way, the world we see is a mirror of what is inside of us.

The implication is easy to miss if we don’t point it out.  For example, if there is hatred within, we see people to hate at every turn.  It’s not the other way around – it’s not the inherent aspect of the other person’s race let’s say, but rather that it triggers something already inside the hateful person.  On the other hand, if there is love within, whatever we look at will spark the experience of love.  We tend to believe that we actively judge the merits of something and draw conclusions, but it would be more accurate to realize that those judgements are inevitable based on our wiring, if we let things run on autopilot that is.

That brings us to conscious living.  It brings us to taking responsibility for how we are.  Normally we are happy to look at whatever is out there, pass judgement, and then declare it to the world!  But if we are interested in maturing fully to our human potential, the invitation is to see this mirror into ourselves.  With curiosity and self-love, we are introspective about our triggers, reactions, and emotional responses.  With self-awareness comes a call to action.  It has little to do with the object we are looking at, and it has everything to do with our internal mechanisms.

Can we take responsibility over all of the impressions, conditioning, and tendencies that lead to our behavior?  We may need to address past trauma, psychological disturbance, energetic imbalance, impurities, or a host of other issues that are at play.  Karmic impressions also play a role of course.  Every reaction should be seen as feedback.  Our triggers are clues to the rough edges of our egos.  So, the challenge is to recognize what is being reflected back to us, as we experience this fantastic world in all of its richness, and then translate that into re-engineering the inner self for a more joyful expression of itself.