The World Is a Reflection of Me


This belief, which unfolds at the deep ground-water level of every exploration into consciousness, is a far reach, and a far-healing truth. To be able to even tolerate the belief with equanimity as a thought is a considerable intellectual accomplishment. The certainty in spirit of the belief, of course, transcends the intellect and every other intellect one has ever thought to deal with.

Consider the paradox of the being who believes that the world is not a reflection of himself, but something he must take arms against and adjust to his needs and intentions.

He stands before the mirror, greatly concerned with what effect he can produce on this contumacious image, unwieldy, intractable. His brushes, his grease pencils at the ready, he moves in on the reflection and re-designs the eye-brow line. Damn! It doesn't quite match up with his intention. The lines he has drawn, as he steps back for a better view, don't seem to be where they should. The effect is quite wrong. Deftly, he whips out a tissue and removes them (only vaguely noticing the movement of the world as he does so). Then he begins again; he darkens the eye shadow, deftly applying the mascara to the glass. Again he steps back to see how he has changed the face of the world. Again, the lines are not as he imagined them, and he discovers a twinge of annoyance as he delicately removes his handiwork and rethinks his vision of how to change the world. Somehow the face of the world is avoiding his artist's touch.

As the afternoon wanes, and he begins to lose his light, he grows tired, cranky, and whimpers inside his mind at the great things he might have accomplished if only the image on which he was trying to place his oeuvres didn't keep shifting about so! His life draws closer to its end in a cloud of bitter disillusionment; he has learned that the ambitions of the artist are false, misguided vanities. At last, he has settled and matured in his travails; he has achieved a fullness of reason and grown into his true potential, free of false ambition; now he has become a realist.

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