Mirroring (true and false) and the Psyche

To a great extent, what I see in the world is what I unconsciously feel to be the case – psychologists call this projection. A lot of the time, I am projecting onto the world the film that runs behind my eyes, unaware that this is what I'm doing.

Writers are often dimly aware that their stories come from the unexamined regions of their minds.  This makes many of them wary of psychoanalysis, for they fear that understanding where their images and story lines come from might stop their creative flow.  And they might be right.

Aztec

John Milton, for example, seems to have read Paradise Lost – as if it had been written on his own heart, with all its astonishing detail of motivation and physical detail.

He describes the paradise of Eden, the serpent's wiles, and the dynamics between Adam and Eve, God and Satan with the kind of intimate clarity I have only ever had about my own inner life, my own thoughts and feelings, and then only when I'm paying particular attention! It is as if Milton had found, in the story of the Fall in Genesis, an adequate myth to describe his own experience of complexity and struggle, the inside of life as he knew it.

For present-day Western readers of Paradise Lost, there is a disturbing irony - because the lush and graceful perfection of ‘unfallen’ Nature Milton evokes has been so massively marred and compromised, in the intervening centuries, by the impact of our industrialising culture, here in the West and indeed all over the world.

(Danny Boyle's much-celebrated Opening Ceremony show for the Olympics shone a light on the devastating effects of industrialisation on landscape, while skipping lightly around the issues of slavery and colonialism.)

Looking at the last three hundred years of our Western history in Milton's terms, it seems as if, having tasted the fruit of the forbidden Tree of Knowledge, thanks to the budding natural sciences, our hitherto Christian (Protestant), Western European society set about privatising the earth, and littering and polluting paradise with the by-products of our ever-expanding ‘knowledge’ and technological-industrial capacity.

containers at Cape Town

In other words, by our treatment of one another, of other creatures, and of the earth which has given birth to us, brought us into being, we seem to have made our guilt-stricken cultural myth about ‘fallen’ human nature come true.

In addition, (rant warning here) -

we have deceived ourselves about the reckless and compulsive quality of our accelerating, headlong rush into the future. 'Modernising' has been used as an unthinking term of approval.

We Westerners have glossed over our own distasteful and inexcusable behaviour, as we scrambled to the top of the global heap, by using respectful words to describe what we were fighting for, like ‘civilisation’, ‘progress’, 'development' and ‘growth’.  We like to think that our Western history, taken as a whole, represents a kind of ethical and political triumph, a proof of our superiority over other cultures and their histories, and of our right to lead the way.

Indeed, we have committed our destructive acts in the name of 'a better life', and trying to 'improve' the world as we found it.

Cape Town

The way we have treated the world is a big example of the ‘false’ form of mirroring – projection - whereby we recreate in the world around us an accurate reflection of the self-justifying and/or self-undermining scripts that prevail in our psyches.

We have made Milton’s moral-theological nightmare into a physical reality – not on purpose, of course, but unconsciously - because we have not looked inside ourselves, to see what’s really going on.  We have evaded self-awareness.

True Mirroring

One lesson of self-awareness is that my view of reality, looking outward at the world around me, and the people I interact with, can only be as clear as my view looking in-the-way, into my own heart.

The more insight (self-awareness) I have about my own feelings, my capacity for self-deception and my reactive patterns, the more I can sense the impact of my behaviour on others, and sense also how other people are feeling, their states of mind and motivations, their feelings and limitations.

If my heart has become tarnished, or twisted - because there are things I would rather not remember, or acknowledge to be true, or if I am harbouring feelings I have never admitted to - then my inner mirror can give me only a distorted reflection of life. 

My thoughts and perceptions will express my own disowned, and thereby long-preserved pain, rather than being an appropriate response to the reality I find myself in right now. (I speak from experience here!)

Inner clarification is like cleaning my heart-mirror, so it reflects accurately what’s going on in my life. This clarity is not abstract, or intellectual – it is not verbal at all. It grows slowly, along with my restored capacity to feel my feelings without panicking, or cringing, or fearing punishment.

So, in summary, true mirroring lies in the clarity of the open, untroubled heart.  It is aided by neutrality and detachment, and non-reactive sensing and perception of the world – including, and by way of, our feelings.

Whereas false mirroring is what happens when ego is in charge, and I externalise my discomfort, fears and self-blame onto others - calling it ‘the way things are’, and slandering life, creating around me in real life, by projection, the nightmares I resist waking up from.

updated 5/1/12