The Great Mirror
What would it look like not to recognize our own reflection?
Many years ago I had a pet cockatiel named Pandora. She was a very sweet bird. My partner and I picked her out because when we reached into the bin of little birds, she ran up and hopped right on our finger.
We would let her fly around the apartment. She loved landing on my partner’s shoulder and trying to eat her jewelry. Mostly she just wanted to be wherever we were.
But she hated the other bird that lived in the bathroom.
You see, best as she could tell, there was this huge window in the bathroom. But every time she tried to fly through it, this other bird would suddenly fly out of nowhere and smash right into her!
Of course, that was really her reflection. But she couldn’t recognize it. She just hated “that other bird”.
This is typical of most animals interacting with their own reflection. In fact, most animals can’t recognize their reflection, best as we can tell. (Read the Wikipedia article on “the mirror test” if you’d like more nuance.)
I catch glimpses of this in myself sometimes. Once I was staying the night at a friend’s house out of town, and I needed to visit the bathroom in the middle of the night. As I walked through the hallway I jumped: there was someone in the room next to me! It took me a moment to realize that my friend had a mirror set up in his study and that my own reflection had spooked me.
Given some time to examine it, though, we humans can always recognize that we’re looking at our reflection. We don’t stay confused like other animals do.
Right?
Well… actually, sometimes we do stay confused.
Reflective humility
I’ll give some of my own examples in a moment. First I want to point out some logic.
If there were some sense in which you didn’t recognize your reflection, how would you know?
Pandora didn’t think she was making a mistake. She thought the other bird was being mean.
We notice every time we can tell we’re just looking at a mirror. But if there were some cases where we stay confused… it wouldn’t look like confusion to us. It would look like something else.
In other words, we’re only noticing the mirror tests we pass. We don’t notice the ones we reliably fail.
So, a puzzle for all of us:
How would we need to orient — to ourselves, to others, and to reality — to notice something analogous to the mirror test that we tend not to pass?
Hidden mirrors
I think there are lots of cases of people failing something like a mirror test.
Being “hangry” is an example. When I’m hangry, I might know I could use some food… but that isn’t really why I’m irritated, you see. It’s that all those other drivers are being blasé, and my computer won’t work properly, and I’m stressed about getting my taxes done, and so on. I’m irritated because the world is irritating, right?
It’s amazing how all of that vanishes once I eat. Suddenly everyone else instantly becomes more reasonable!
(Can you see the similarity to the bird getting mad at “the other bird”?)
I’ve also seen this a lot in romance. I used to get clingy in my relationships. But of course, it didn’t feel like that to me! It felt like I was being immensely loving and attending to my partner’s needs.
I remember getting in a fight with one girlfriend. I was about to make myself some food, so I popped into her work area to offer to make something for her too.
“Hey, I care about you, and I’m going to cook up something. Can I make you some?”
“Leave me alone, I’m busy” she replied.
I got upset. Very reasonably, you see! Here I was, trying to affirm our connection, and she was brushing me off! Doesn’t she care about our connection? About my feelings for her?
Never mind that the cause of her reaction was (a) I wasn’t paying attention to her situation and feelings, and (b) she had gotten so used to me ignoring her context that she was tense as soon as my tone of voice conveyed my “kind offer”.
In other words, I was experiencing my insensitivity to her being reflected back to me. I just didn’t recognize it. I was failing a kind of mirror test.
(And yes, I imagine something similar could probably be said for her. But focusing on that doesn’t help me become less foolish.)
Many cases of judging others fall in this category. Like the person I passed on the street a few days ago who seemed to be glaring at me: How do I know he was glaring? The answer is that I don’t. it just seemed that way because I was seeing my own nervousness reflected back to me as reason to be nervous. Maybe he was innocently looking!
I mean… what else would it feel like if I were to keep slamming into “that other bird”?
Insight, not rules
You might think I’m arguing for some kind of moral principle, like “Judge not lest ye be judged.”
That’s honestly not where I’m going.
I’m pointing out that there’s a certain way we’re often confused, and it’s analogous to how Pandora was confused about her reflection.
We can’t fix that confusion with some simple rule like “Don’t judge”. It’s important to be able to notice when someone is dangerous! And it’s really helpful to pick up on someone’s friendliness. Yes, we can try to play games with “judgment vs. discernment”, but that still begs the question: how do we distinguish our reflections from reality in practice?
And not all our reflections show up as other people! I remember working on my dissertation, feeling immense stress about whether I’d complete it. At the time I would have said that the dissertation was stressful… but that’s not really true. I was seeing my fears reflected in the way I thought about how much I had to write in order to pass my defense!
The key problem here is that I don’t know what all the reflections I’m not recognizing are. So I can’t just list them and follow some rules of behavior and thought that get me out of this predicament.
What’s needed here, I think, is insight. Specifically, the insight that comes from honestly and humbly holding a question I hinted at earlier:
What way of relating — to myself, to others, and to the world — do I need to hold in order to notice and pass mirror tests I’m currently missing?
Part of answering that question requires holding the fact that I don’t know the answer.
The point isn’t to have a verbal answer.
The point, instead, is the way of examining my experience that sincerely holding this question inspires in me.
The world as a mirror
To help with this, sometimes I imagine that everything is my reflection.
I mean, if I can’t reliably tell what is and isn’t just my reflection, then anything could be my mirror image, right?
So… what if everything is? What if I’m actually some vast being that’s looking into some Great Mirror?
(I really do mean this as something to imagine. I’m not trying to make claims about the nature of reality here, one way or another.)
Or to say it differently: What if you’re dreaming right now? What if literally everything you see is just part of you, created by you and from you? What if every person, every building, every sound and sight is actually an aspect of your mind?
When you wear this kind of lens, how does the world look? What do your relationships represent? Or how about the state of the world? Or your finances? Your health?
As I write this, Australia is both on fire and getting flooded. When I focus on that, I feel anxious, and thoughts arise about how to get the world to coordinate more quickly about global issues. This whole project I’m doing with Wise Knowing starts to feel a little more dire.
But because I don’t know ahead of time what is and isn’t my reflection, I can pause and wonder: “What if I’m just seeing some part of me I don’t recognize?”
I don’t assume that’s the case. I just hold the possibility.
And in doing so, I can notice the egocentrism that slipped in. I’m holding onto this idea that the world needs saving, and that I have some great profound insight or secret that’s key for saving it.
(That’s an old habit I’m slowly shaking off.)
I use this thought of the Great Mirror to prod me toward insight. It’s a mental tool — one I find immensely powerful, especially for noticing my Shadow.
But how do we tell?
You might have noticed a puzzle at this point. But let me spell it out:
How can we tell when we aren’t seeing a reflection?
(This is equivalent to asking: “How can I tell that I’m not dreaming?”)
The short answer is… I don’t think we can.
And I think that’s fine.
It’s actually perfectly fine not to know what’s really truly real. We’re always already working with uncertainty. This is just admitting that to ourselves, however deeply we choose to practice this acknowledgment.
I’m under the impression that I’m really, honestly writing this post on a computer. That seems like a fine working guess.
But maybe I’m actually just dreaming. Maybe there is no computer, or post, or even people reading this.
Taking that seriously — as a possibility, but not as an assumption — gives me freedom and ease. It allows my mind more flexibility to just look at what’s here instead of needing to cling to a certain way of viewing it.
You don’t have to dive that deeply to use the Great Mirror. You can just look at your difficulties (in relationships, in money, in health, etc.) to try to glean insight. It’s quite a powerful tool for doing that.
But the rabbit hole does go down quite deep, if you care to explore.