Maybe the only way we can begin to even understand why we are destined to repeat all our cycles from 20 year loops to life times is to take them apart and look at them for unconscious actions that ping the karmic web and set it vibrating such that you get caught and repeat endlessly until you understand why, until you examine your motives, your triggers and begin to learn to control them enough not to react and set that web into motion. Kind of like the great Buddhist middle way?
Just as it is said, ‘Those that do not know history are doomed to repeat it.’ so must we look, examine our own hearts with enough courage to see our truth, even if we don’t like what we see, to finally change it.
Last night at dusk there was a beautiful sunset. I wasn’t out in it, I was in bed when I noticed. And I didn’t just see it through the window from a dark room, I saw it in a mirror in a dark room – through a mirror darkly – and not just that, out a window in my own dark cage – box – reality.
Through a mirror darkly: I didn’t know it was a thing, but something stirred me to google it.
1 Cor 13:12
‘For now we see in a mirror darkly, but then face to face. Now I know in part, but then I shall know just as I also am known.
Hunting further I found Plato said it too.
Loeb translation
‘He who studies realities by means of conceptions is looking at them in ‘images’.
Jowett Trans
‘He who contemplates existence through the medium of ideas, sees them only through a glass darkly.”
To me this means that you must excavate your heart, question your soul with whys, be scrupulously honest in your observations, and be willing to allow for the different and the fabulous, the phenomenal. Until you can do so, you will only see the world through the looking glass at dusk.
Over the years I have had countless times that upon awakening, and other quiet times during the day where I have had this notion of myself lying in bed in a deep coma in some other reality and this that I do here and now is only a dream. But the dream must be a lesson because I keep repeating it, as if it is the same understanding barrier I have with algebra, and every time I finish the equation with an answer, it is different. As if time laughs at me to say there is no Right answer. ‘Right’ is a cage. ?
The sky is my personal symbol of freedom. Not only was I looking at it in a mirror – reversed left and right – but the window had open shades on it that looked like prison bars. As if to say the only way out was in. Maybe the dusk was the dawn and the north was the south, through that mirror. Maybe this world is a reflection of reality and all in it?
Or maybe I’m just trying to find a way out of really looking at my inner beast and loving it in this season of deep inner work we all find ourselves in? Well, I will have to give it my very beast effort… 🙂
In the Mind's Eye 