Have you ever asked yourself, “Why is this happening to me?” I know I have. I’ve asked myself when people at work seemed to be treating me unjustly, or I felt like I had been deliberately misled in some way. I’ve also asked it when I have gone through a series of accidents. I remember one time when I kept dropping things and sometimes breaking them, like a difficult to replace glass coffee pot, and then one day I had a bicycle accident which ripped up the palms of both of my hands and one of my knees. Many of us ask ourselves why things are turning out as they are, particularly when something we don’t like is happening to us, when we find ourselves suffering over some perceived injustice or we are frightened of something. Some of us look up, shaking our fists to the sky, demanding to know why our spouse has left us or why we have lost our jobs. We demand explanations for our pain. And though it’s less common, some of us also ask ourselves and others the same question when things we really like are happening to us, or we feel undeserving of some blessing like winning the lottery, for example. If we recognize the power of intention, know there is order in the universe, and trust that the universe is indeed a friendly place, we also know that the things that happen to us, wanted and unwanted, are not random events, and the universe is definitely not out to get us. You may have heard a spiritual teacher, a philosopher, or even a psychologist say that what you experience in the world is a reflection of yourself. The very popularly read Deepak Chopra tweeted, “The universe is a mirror of your consciousness. The events in your life reflect who you are.” on August 12, 2017. Our world and our experience of it mirror who we are.
It is comparatively easy to accept that our experience is a mirror of who we are when things that we like and appreciate are happening. When we see the love beaming from the eyes of the people in our lives, though there are admittedly those among us who may feel unworthy, the greater majority of us can easily believe that the love we experience is a mirror of the love we feel and indeed are. When someone shows appreciation for me, it is not a large stretch for me to believe that the appreciation that I’m experiencing is a reflection of the appreciating part of myself. I readily confess that it was not always easy to admit that the love and appreciation I noticed coming to me was a mirror of who I was being at that moment. I spent a large portion of my childhood and young adult life thinking that the appropriate response to a compliment was denial because it showed humility. I believed that the correctly modest posture was to know myself to be unworthy of all good things, that I was at times deserving of punishment, and that I needed to continuously prove myself to God and the world. I was one of the hopefully few people who feel that the negative things that happen to them are a reflection of their inner undeservedness. I am happy to see there are more people today who believe that the good things they experience are evidence of their worthiness. I also know that we are all innately worthy of all the blessings we can handle, and we receive those blessings by allowing ourselves to receive them and being an internal match to them.
Is it equally easy to accept that the things you don’t enjoy or even fear in your experience are also mirrors of you? Can you admit that you are creating your suffering not because it is something you deserve, but that it is showing you who you are being? For example, if you are bothered by anger in your workplace environment, can you acknowledge that the anger is showing you the anger that is part of the person you are being? It is not easy to acknowledge that we equally create our wanted and unwanted experiences. It is perhaps even more difficult to own up to the truth that we not only create the negative things that happen to us, but also that they happen to us to show us who we are expressing ourselves as. In the example of the angry work environment, the environment is showing me the anger that is lurking within myself, whether others see me as an angry person or the opposite, a mousy person who plays the role of the eternal victim, a role I am intimately familiar with. The good news is that even if we are being the person who creates the distressing work environment, we are not doomed to remain that person eternally or even for the rest of our lives in these bodies; it is merely who we are at the present moment. Just because you are the one who is being the insecure one or the angry one and those qualities are showing up in your experience, doesn’t mean that they are your core qualities or that you are trapped with those characteristics until the day you die. We all have the opportunity to change and evolve. Just as I am sure that our Eternal Selves, our souls or our spirits, are ever evolving with our experience, our physically expressing selves also have the choice of moving in the direction of that evolution,, or turning to resist it. We have the choice to turn in the direction of who we are as eternal beings or to move in the other direction at every moment. We also have a few indicators that show us which direction we are moving in, and our experience of our universe is one indication of which direction we are choosing.
If you are experiencing a lot of love or well-being in your environment, in the world you perceive, that is a reflection of your current state. If you are noticing a lot of fights and anger in your experience of the world, that is also a reflection of your current state. One caveat is that not all experience is equally significant for us; some experiences are trivial bordering on irrelevant. For example, just because you see two people fighting on the street doesn’t necessarily mean you need to get yourself to an anger management counselling session. If someone points out a fight on the street, for example, and you acknowledge it but it has little or no lasting effect on you, then that fight was not a significant indicator for you. It might have been more of a reflection on the person who had noticed it and felt the need to get others to share that experience with them. One of the best indicators of how significant an event or series of events is as a mirror of myself, I’ve found, is my emotional reaction to the experience. The stronger and/or the more sustained my emotional reaction is, the more significant it is to me and the more certain it is a mirror for me.
In fact, our emotional reactions, positive or negative, are a result of the mirroring effect. If we had no love in our hearts, we would have no reaction when we observed it either directed at us or at other people. We might not even notice it, but if we did, we would probably note it as a curiosity of some kind. It’s our positive reactions of love or gratitude and our negative ones of jealousy or anxiety that show us that we have that love within ourselves. When we want to respond with violence, protective instincts, or have the desire to run away or hide when we see violence in the world around us even though it’s not directed at us, that is an indication of the violence that is part of the physically manifesting self that we are continually creating and re-creating. Does that mean that a person without any violence would be heartless or cold? Would they gaze upon the suffering of others without any reaction? Certainly not. The one without violence in the heart would look at the victim and the perpetrator alike as suffering beings and be filled with the desire for the movement of all concerned toward their natural and deserved state of well-being. This rare individual may even be inspired to work toward the accomplishment of that improvement. If violence were a disease, our healthy person would be a doctor or a nurse who, when she or he receives a patient does not go out to fight the one who damaged the body of the patient. Nor does the doctor or nurse sit and wail with the patient over their distress. Instead, the good doctor or nurse focuses on the innate potential for well-being and healing of the patient and tries to foster conditions for healing to be accomplished. You may have seen a child behaving in this way with people who are suffering in some way. A child who has managed to retain most of the pure minds that she or he has been born with may go to a person suffering and quietly and softly hold or stroke them to encourage their improvement.
Almost all of us have very complex internal lives and our human egoic minds have a little bit of most everything both positive and negative. We have love and its resistant state of fear, joy and its resistant state of depression, and awareness and its resistant state of ignorance, and so each of our experiences of the world mirrors that diversity with some aspects being more emphasized than others just as they are in our inner worlds. Permit me to emphasize that the mirror is a metaphor. The universe as a whole has no need to actively mirror anything. The perceived mirroring effect is more correctly the result of where our attention is drawn. The Universe is manifesting in much more complexity and diversity than our human minds can process, and so we naturally have to limit what we perceive. We most often select the things to which we give our attention based on how they relate to us. Things that are irrelevant get almost no attention and we have little to no emotional reaction to them. Things that are a match to our psyches get a lot more attention and we are also much more emotionally invested in them. The deeper reason that the Universe has no need to actively mirror what is going on inside of us is that there is no separation between our inner and outer universes. There is no subject object split. There is only one continuum of awareness that is evolving and becoming more self-aware. For something to be a mirror, there needs to be an observer and an observed object with some space between. The deepest reality is that there is only Oneness, but this oneness is more the purview of our Eternal Selves than our physically manifesting minds that we deliberately develop to explore this three dimensional universe of space/time as a fascinating object to our subjective perspective. Our human minds rightly see objects and things out there, and as that perceived out there experience reflects the state of this human mind, the mirror metaphor is very useful for our understanding.
The best way to live the intentional life is to make use of this mirror effect. It shows us how we are doing at following the stream of intention. When we experience a mostly pleasing world, we can trust that we are flowing with our intention. When we experience more things that are disturbing to us or even when we begin to notice that things are a bit off, we can take stock of our inner states. This allows us to continue to make the choice of pointing ourselves in the direction of enjoying what we are creating in the present moment. There will always be times when things or experiences that we don’t like appear, and that is good for at least two clear reasons. One is that when we have created an experience that we dislike, we know even more clearly what we do want. Unpleasant experiences of people lying to us show us the importance and value we place in truth. The second reason is that those unwanted experiences from the unhappy thought to the unfortunate accident reflect the person we are being or are becoming and give us opportunities to make course corrections. When we become aware that we are beginning to move in the direction of becoming the kind of people we don’t want to be, the kind of people that don’t match up with the truth of our Eternal Selves, then we can begin to take action. We can begin to make the course correction that will get us moving back in the direction of our intention and of evolving into the people that we want to be. We could begin or reevaluate our meditation practice. We can find more ways to express our appreciation and our love. There are many ways to begin to release our resistance and letting go of unhelpful or destructive habits.
Our experience of the universe is one of our indicators of how we are doing and how truly we are living our lives. When we see our ignorance, fear, or suffering reflected back to us in one form or another, we can take stock and begin moving back to the Love, Joy, Wellbeing, and Awareness that are our original state and our birthright.
