here’s looking at you, kid!
I recently listened to a presentation by the visionary teacher (and Scotia, NY native) David Wilcock on Gaiam TV. [Amazing spiritual / new thought programming, not to mention about 300 yoga videos to choose from if you’re into that. Do the 30-day trial and thank me later. Now back to our regularly scheduled article.] Okay. So David was talking about the spiritual path and making a choice between living a solitary life like a monk in a cave, or choosing to live “in the world”. He was making a case for the latter.
He put it this way: “To live alone is to live without mirrors. To live with others is to live in the hall of mirrors. People see themselves in you, and you see yourself in them.” The Hall of Mirrors. I love that way of looking at it. It’s the idea that, though we see a multitude of human forms, there is really only one of us here. And each “reflection” we encounter brings up another dimension of ourselves that we didn’t know was part of us. A lot of those reflections bring stuff up that we find hard to accept. “Hmmm. She’s being a real louse. I’m out of here.” Our buttons get pushed. Other reflections may inspire us – “Wow, look what that reflection can do! That is so cool! …Damn, I wish I could do that. Show off!” Oops, I guess that pushed a button, too.
Here’s the thing about buttons. They make you react. Something’s in your face and you have to make a choice right then and there. I have a tea kettle with a pretty loud whistle. I’m in here typing on my computer, looking forward to my next cup of tea and here it comes. It’s so shrill that I have to drop what I’m doing when I’d rather take 5 more minutes to finish this paragraph, and jump up and get it the heck off the burner. That’s kind of what happens when one of your “reflections” pushes a button. You make a split second choice to either accept and love whatever just happened, or to get your hackles up and push back in one way or another.
Going with the hackles (that’s a strange word, the more you think about it) is going to keep that discomfort you just experienced ricocheting around the hall of mirrors and it’s eventually going to come back and get you right between the eyes. If you choose love and acceptance, however, it brightens up the whole place instead. That’s why we will all eventually make the better choice, like Bill Murray’s character in Groundhog’s Day. (You’ve seen that, right? Don’t make me do another commercial.) Wilcock says, “You can ultimately become very loving because you’ve recognized that everyone is you. And if you love yourself, you love other people.” And though it may look like a shambles at the moment, eventually this Hall of Mirrors is going to be looking pretty darn spiffy. In fact the mirrors will have fallen away, we’ll be seeing each other for the radiant beings we truly are and we’ll discover an amazing feast spread out before us. It turns out that that hall of mirrors is actually the banquet hall of heaven.
See you at the table.
Peace and blessings,
Roger