Mirrors

Our lives are a path of mirrors.  Everyone we know and everything we own is a mirror of who we think we are.  The people we come in contact with provide varying degrees of reflections of who we are to them.  The things we surround ourselves with offer a small reflective window into our likes and dislikes.  

Why do we set ourselves up with a hall of mirrors?

The fear of annihilation of the self is so strong that we constantly search for and need re-authentication of who we are. One interesting shard to this mosaic: we are concerned mostly with how we appear to our external mirrors.  The reflections of these outer glasses imprint on our own vision, changing our perceptions regarding self-identification.  This loop of composition affirmation does not lag unless we seal ourselves off from the distortion of reflection.

In solitude, we are able to examine our own mirrors and ask who we really are.  There is nothing there in that moment to compare ourselves to.  No objects receiving our subjective perceptions.  When the outer echoes are taken away, the house of the ego begins to crumble.  Real pain sets in the closer we get to real silence.  The fear of no-self sets fire to the resolve of self-inquiry and we burn until we finally let go of the last mirror - our own - and surrender to the Universe. Only then will the ubiquitous malady of human life dissipate with stillness.