Mirror, Mirror

The wish that we be significant-to some admirable other-calls up images of magic mirrors and "monkey see, monkey do" to me.   Our copying what we see and becoming what we behold leads me down the garden path to perception, itself indistinguishable to me from life....and all else?   I find it a useful exercise to inhabit the Eastern maxim "There is only one perceiver."   Work at imagining that the force behind your life and consciousness is the Ultimate, which is perceiving through you while the miracle of you is looking into a mirror that is the creation.  You know, the earth, everyone else, the cosmos, etc. etc.  It's the fun house mirror room in ten dimension space time, and God knows how many dimensions of comprehension.  And all six plus billion of us are doing it, aware or not.

Old Hebrew saying: God created the universe for you and you alone, you who are nothing but dust and ashes.

Bill Russel's mom on her death bed:  "No one is any better than you.   And you're no better than anybody else."

Jesus on the most important commandments: "Love God with all your being, and treat others as you would be treated."

Selma Kramer famously wrote of "the child's love affair with the world."  This mode of perception, or being, is a faculty always within each of us, though the daily weight of man's inhumanity to man has a way of burying it.  Seeing what Socrates' mentress was revealing in The Symposium while not becoming pollyannish is a challenge.  A challenge nicely thrown down by Job's Inquisitor asking, "Who is this that darkens my design with ignorance?"   Why that would be you and me.  It certainly has seemed a hell of a lot easier to me personally to investigate that question when I felt (felt mind you) that God or whatever was taking an interest in me.

I think I'll fire up Google earth and see if I can see the Brooklyn Heights home in which I'm writing...from about two thousand feet up.