Consciousness is like a house of mirrors.
While inside, it is all too easy to get caught up in the distractions of each individual reflection. The mind wants to recognize each reflection as distinct, full – originating on its own. And it is because we believe that each reflection is separate from another that we begin to build preferences, desire and fear. We may find ourselves seeking to distinguish between truth and lies, pleasure and pain, good and bad. But this is all just noise of the mind blocking our recognition of the One.
The search for this One – “the absolute truth” – can become like a search for a mirage in a desert. The moment you think you see it, and begin to approach or try to grasp, is the same moment it begins to dissipate.
By the time you are there – it has vanished from all seeing. Why? Because you think you need to be there in order to see it. This only creates another reflection, and another distraction, in the house of mirrors. You only see the “real you” staring at the reflection, but you can’t see the other you that is staring right back. It is in everything. This is only the recognition of consciousness in every thing that can be attended to.
Each moment is only a reflection in this house of mirrors. It is a snippet of time in the infinite, and utterly empty, consciousness-space continuum. You are not an individual snippet of time-space. This would be identifying with something that is much lesser than what you really are; it would be selling yourself short. You are the flow of time itself – the experience of it – you are the empty awareness of process, change, impermanence, rising and falling, and evolution itself.
By recognizing that we were never an individual reflection, but the house of mirrors itself, we recognize ourselves as inherent empty space, like time, that gives way to all change. No longer do we get caught up in this experience of illusions, false identities, and other mind tricks. We recognize that we are something greater than a single object, a single thought, and a single experience. We are natural, naked, and empty awareness that witnesses all change: failure, success, and growth. We are the flow of change itself, not any of the individual ripples in the tide. Our being is present in all we know and understand as reality. This is always there to be recognized.
This kind of discovery can lead to a sense of new being. A being that is beyond physical and mental activity, or what we might conventionally define as a self. Instead in this state of recognition, we are simultaneously seeing and knowing that the Self is one with the Whole.
In this recognition there is not a busy stream of mental utterances (no attention on the reflections or distinctions of Self and Other). There is only a nurturing nothingness which gives way to all process and all change as it arises in the emptiness of time-space-consciousness. The reflections are still there to be noticed by the mind, but the mind is not present to witness those illusions of permanence and identity. Instead, only One sense of being shines through. It is the only ray of light traveling through the vacuum of space. It is only One.
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