W hen I was a child I was fascinated by mirrors. My mother had a bedroom dresser with wing mirrors, and it was endlessly interesting to tilt the mirrors so that they reflected each other – creating an infinite cool-blue recursion of reflections that flipped my mind. Interspersing my head into that zone of recursion and seeing myself, a pale kid, somehow involved in, but not understanding, this mystery, was one thing; removing my head but wanting, at the same time, to know what was happening while I was absent (the recursion now presumably spotless) was quite other ache.
Mark West, at his regular Thursday night meeting in the Cross, was on fire last night. I felt for a couple of new arrivals, who (my concern only) might have been struggling with the breadth of material on offer.
Back to mirrors again, and Mark was last night demonstratiing (without mirror) Douglas Harding’s Mirror Experiment (Looking for Yourself):
I find no face here confronting the face in the mirror. I am space here for my appearance there. I am capacity for my face in the mirror.
Over there behind the glass is my human appearance; here this side of the glass is my divine reality. I am both. I have that face and I am this reality. My face there is an appearance of the One I really am – here. (One of my many appearances.)
Mark made a statement, in passing but with absolute certainty, about that head in the mirror, a statement which has stayed with me. Paraphrasing:
We’ve let that head [the one in the mirror] crawl up our arm and sit where we are, and that’s suicide!
This, to me, is a disturbing and true statement about our collective misidentification with who we are, about our construction and virtually constant maintenance of a false “I”, a sad act of continual substitution of the lie for the actually of who we are, of Awareness, of Presence.
What to do about this? As Mark said last night (in response to a great question from one of the new-comers), referring to the simple fact of awareness, to the undeniable fact of our own existence: just “Be warm towards This”. There’s something in the “warmth” that’s for me immediately curative – it’s in our myth of individuality that the warmth is lost, that we live our lives way too cool.
