“Mirror Mirror on the wall,
Tell me who am I of all”
Suppose we are back in the wild, with no modern era tools or technology. We didn’t know how we look, how big or small we are or had any ideas of the pimple sitting on our nose. There isn’t any language to describe, no concepts of confidence, self esteem, no ‘she loves me or she loves me not’ dilemma and no money or class. No law, no morality, no church or mosque or temple, no goals, no culture and judgments, no character, no sanctity, no marriage or any peer pressure.
What are we going be left with? Just the survival. Physical fitness would be most important thing because in an environment like that, the basis of survival itself would be based on physical fitness and mental alertness - a complete attention on the surrounding instead of psychological process going on in our mind. The level of presence and awareness, where predicting weather is a common skill known by most, where the possible preys would smell approaching predators from miles away, where everything is a wonder and curiosity is our all day round companion. On one hand clean air, water, earth covered with exotic plants, flowers and trees, fresh fruits and breathtaking landscape; and on the other hand, snakes, crocodiles, lions, deadly plants, swamps, leeches, wolves, flood, cyclones, epidemics and other dangers to life. Beauty and not just any beauty, a kind of mesmerizing existence comes with a risk of life threatening elements. Still it’s worth taking risk.
Among all these, we, the human beings, who now think we are too important and consider ourselves as supreme, as the centre of the universe, were the experiencer - the observer with hardly any psychological image, any self image. For then we were filled with gratitude towards life and being alive. For then we were a part of the whole existence with everything being respected, whether they were conducive or detrimental, all we knew was the understanding of the nature of something without any liking or disliking, without any good or bad, with an understanding of what worked, what didn’t work, when we were aware of the fact that destroying the nature is digging our own grave. It amuses me to see how educated we are and proud of it and still unable to fulfil the very basic requirement that we could do when we were into wilderness. What books have done to us and what we have done to ourselves. We all carry a personal mirror, peeking into it endlessly, forming self image and living in an illusion of self importance. All we think we are came into being through our limited experience with minimal break to well-secured adventures. A mirror that shows our outer appearance, expressions with little room for expression of the inner beauty that we are born with, as a limb of existence itself. Illusion has become a daily practise. The sun doesn’t set, it’s always there. It’s we who don’t see it. There is no light that lights up the whole universe. If that was true, light wouldn’t be travelling in the endless space and darkness. Our perception towards everything has been stuck to just one centre, us, whereas there is no centre in the universe. We think darkness is bad but it’s nothing more than nothingness. Just because we can’t see in darkness, we think it’s bad.
Less we realize, we including every tiny creature in this world is nothing but the miniature of the whole universe. We too have that vastness, that space, that darkness that we are totally unaware about which can’t be seen in a tangible mirror. All we see is the meagre self image, the self created illusion. Just imagine if we had no self narrator, no story as such, no description of ourselves, how different perception we would have.
There is a vast difference between the word water and water itself. That is the difference between us and our self image.
