Lionel Berman - Little Book of Mirrors

DEDICATION

This book is dedicated to all the mirrors, some very easy and
beautiful, some rather tough, difficult and ugly, that have
enabled me to learn so much about myself and have facilitated
my growth as a multi-mirrored being.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENT

I wish to express deep gratitude to my guides, especially Kurt
and Tom Swart, for all their encouragement, love and support.
Truly magnificent mirrors!

THE LITTLE BOOK OF MIRRORS
Two Scientific Principles
If you were to face two mirrors to one another, the one mirror would reflect into the second mirror, while the second would reflect back into the first. If you were to place an object between the two mirrors, that object would be mirrored back infinitely from the centre outward, in both directions, on into infinity. You have seen this when standing in an elevator that has mirrored walls - you see your reflections receding into infinity. The one image reflects to the other, and it in turn reflects back again. If those two mirrors were to be brought closer and closer together until they were face to face, the darkness between the mirrors would also be reflected infinitely.
This leads us to two understandings that are central to the entire concept of mirrors:

mirror reflections continue infinitely, through the light that they reflect; it is on that energy of light that they reflect.

The creation of the reflection of light depends on the separation of the mirrors to allow light in.

conversely, there is the nothingness, the darkness if you like. This is the nothingness out of which all creation comes. The creation of the entire universe comes out of the nothingness, and that creation is perfect, whole, complete and sacred.

The nothingness is the fullness and the emptiness, the light and the dark - all the opposites combined together. The place of nothingness is from where all creation emanates. It is also a mirror reflection of the co-creatorship of people that says that you all have the ability to co-create. Creation is dependent on words and thoughts and beliefs and those words and thoughts and beliefs go into the nothingness. They enter in an abstract form which manifests in physical form - a literal interpretation of what originally was an abstract conceptualisation.
The nothingness is mentioned in biblical terms as the place of nothingness from which all is created. This is later changed to "In the beginning was the word…" and it is out of the word within the nothingness that everything is created. Of course, the nothingness is not a literal place; it is an abstract place, a place of great energy. In cosmic terms we talk of black holes where there is such density of energy that this energy is drawn inwards, into the darkness, so that even light cannot escape from them. Perhaps energy is released from the other end in order to create new universes on a macro scale.
On a micro scale, within yourself as your thoughts, beliefs and ideas go into the nothingness, they begin to manifest in physical forms to create new universes - little universes for yourself that become mirrors of what you are creating.
While your thoughts, beliefs and ideas are private and secret, their manifestation is there for all to see.
So, based on the two premises: infinite reflections and the nothingness, understand that when you are looking at the concept of mirrors, you are dealing both with creation - coming out of the nothingness - and with multiplication of image upon image going back infinitely into the depths of time. The nothingness, too, is infinite.
The creation and multiplication work hand in glove with one another. What is common to both is infinity. When you observe the mirror reflections, you are also dealing with the concepts of dark and light.
Two Spiritual Principles

Running parallel with these two scientific concepts are two spiritual principles. The first universal spiritual principle is:

everything in your physical existence is a manifestation of spirit.

What happens at spirit level comes down via thought into physical manifestation, including the mental and emotional. This works from spirit, to thought, to emotion, to the physical. Thus, when you are dealing issues on the physical level, understand that you have brought through these issues through many bodies: through the spirit body, through the mental body through the emotional body, into the physical.
If you accept this universal spiritual principle as a premise of all things, then you will understand that whatever you experience in your physical must have been mirrored back, or come about as a domino effect from spirit. Therefore the physical is a mirror of that ultimate spiritual creation.
The second spiritual principle is one that many gurus have put out for many, many years. Many teachers have understood this idea over centuries:

the physical world is an illusion.

Well, it may not seem like an illusion to many people, for if you were to look at your bodies or your clothes or the chairs that you sit on, of course you would say that these are hardly an illusion. In fact, these objects are very real and they can be touched and felt. Even the pain that you feel in the physical, whether it be of the physical body or the emotional body or even the mental body, is very, very real for you. Perhaps there is a misunderstanding of word "illusion", which you take to mean, "does not exist" or "a figment of the imagination". You know that the world does in fact exist, so what needs to be clarified is the meaning of the word "illusion".
When you look into a mirror, you see your reflection. There is no denying that that reflection is real, for you see it and you perceive it. Should you walk up to the mirror, you would notice the reflection moves as well and follows you. You would acknowledge that that is yourself in the mirror. Of course sometimes you have seen this with dogs where they mistake their reflection for another dog, and bark at the intruder. When that happens, it is as real as any reality. Certainly your reflection is as real. However, if you were to attempt to embrace that reflection, you would find yourself up against cold glass.
This is where the illusion comes in: what you perceive in the physical is the illusion - it is the reflection. The reflection is real. However, the actual substance of it is reflected from spirit. It is as if spirit looks into the physical mirror, and it mirrors back to spirit - that reflection is real and that is why you mistake the physical for a very real manifestation.
Combining the Scientific and Spiritual
If you were to bring the four principles together, you would then understand that everything in the physical is the reflection from spirit. Let me give you some examples.
The first example is the idea that all the people in your world must be mirrors - mirrors to spirit but also mirrors to yourself - because they are physical manifestations of spirit. Thus, if you experience an angry person in your world, the usual response would be to ask, "Why is the person angry with me? The person better not be angry with me and if the person continues to be angry with me, I would like to give the person a clout." If you understood the idea that the person is mirror from spirit, then the question would be very different. The question then would be: "I have an angry person in my world. How could I be more friendly to myself?"
How you would jump to this question is your willingness to say that if that person shows you the angry mirror, maybe you're being angry with yourself in some way. The response should then be to nurture yourself and to begin to establish a friendship with your own inner being.
As you settle and understand that friendship and that integration within yourself then either the angry person will move out of your space - I believe you use the words "spiral away" - or would in fact change and become more friendly or become more understanding in some way.
Conversely, if you have a loving person in your world, how often do you forget to thank that person for being a loving person? It is only after a people have died that you say, "I wish I could have told them how wonderful they were". Most people forget to do that, but most importantly you forget to tell yourself that if you have a loving person in your world that person is a mirror to your own loving self.
You therefore need to thank yourself for being a loving person. Loving people tell you a lot about your loving self, just as the angry people, the hateful people or whatever mirrors people show, reflect back from your inner being, from your spirit inner being. This therefore means that you hold all possibilities - you can be loving and hateful at any one time. You would align yourself with loving mirrors in some instances, perhaps with hateful mirrors or angry mirrors in other instances and so on. Those mirrors are constantly adjusting and constantly changing. You do not have only loving mirrors; you have all the other mirrors as well and you draw them up at different times.
It is difficult for you to understand when out of the blue you have the hateful or the angry or the ugly mirror being directed at you, even when you feel quite at peace with yourself. You then say, "But I am fine. I am at peace with myself. I do not have any hatred or anger or anything inside of me." This is where the complication comes in, for you are not a being that exists in a single dimension.
Your Multidimensionality
You are a multidimensional being. Those different dimensions are happening simultaneously. Those parallel present lifetimes are happening constantly in a continuum of infinite mirror reflections, one on top of the other, much like the object that is between the mirrors that is reflected infinitely. Thus, perhaps number five along the way is the one that is angry and therefore the person who enters your space with the angry mirror recognizes that one because that person also belongs to a parallel existence that may connect with yours at different points.
Now, it might look as if what I am saying is not very helpful, because how do you know whether it is I sitting here who has drawn in the hateful or angry mirror or whether it is lifetime number five back down the line that has done this. How do I get in touch with that? This puts me in a very difficult position to recognize what it is all about. This serves only to confuse me.
However, it is not a matter of identifying which lifetime is at play. The important thing is to identify the emotion. When you do this, you begin to understand that the angry mirror that is being held up to you tells you something very important: it is time to be a little bit more compassionate with yourself. It is time to become a little bit more loving towards yourself. It is time to place yourself in a situation where you can affirm to yourself that you are not only a loving person but that you are truly livable and that you need to align yourself once again with your loving being.
You do not need to know the reason why this sometimes happens, other than that it is infinite and infinitesimal, that it does happen and that there are many, many, many lifetimes that "pop up" at different times and different places.
This is very clear in the case of women who are abused - often they keep repeating the cycle over and over again not only in their present lifetime, but in parallel/past lifetimes as well. It is because of those parallel/past lifetimes that they pull out that mirror and shine it out in this lifetime, drawing in the abuser. Thus they repeat that cycle of abuse instead of asking themselves, "How can I heal not only myself but all my other parallels who have experienced this?" Instead, they have this big neon sign above their head that says, "I am a victim. I have been abused." They themselves allow themselves to be abused by themselves and therefore draw in the abuser who becomes a mirror to them - all this in order to prove themselves right.
One of my clients, Amy, came to see me because her relationship was not going well. In fact, it turned out that it had never really gone well. They were so different, so utterly poles apart that she wondered why she had remained in this relationship for some fifteen years. After having explored the concept of mirrors and also attempting to isolate what her husband presents as a mirror, we were able to begin work with those qualities within herself. Her husband also consulted me and identified the qualities she was mirroring to him.
Here are parts of a letter she and her husband wrote nine months later:
"Our eyes have been opened to the beauty, wholeness and magnificence of ourselves individually; the joy and freedom of our marriage and to the spirituality of our family.
Our marriage has risen to new levels. We have a bliss we have not known in the 15 years of marriage."
In this case, as in all conflict situations, each is totally convinced that the other is the problem that "I am right" - that everything exists outside of the self. Using the principles of the mirrors and acknowledging that everything is mirrored out, this couple has been able to identify inner parts of themselves and indeed get around the illusion. The result is forgiveness, understanding and growth. To be "right" is to make the other "wrong" and can only exclude any chance of happiness.
EXERCISE
Consider some of the people and/or situations in your life at present. Using a two-columned page, record each of these in the left-hand column. Say next to each in the right-hand column what are they reflecting to you.
For example: Is there a particularly loving person in your world? What does this person tell you about yourself? Conversely, is there someone with whom you are at odds or with whom you are in conflict? Can you identify what "negative" qualities they are showing you that you have?
A situation might be that you can't seem to get a task done. Everything you attempt comes to naught. What is this saying to you about what you believe about yourself?
Can you see a pattern in all that you have recorded? Under the table, explain in writing to yourself what this pattern is (or what the patterns are, if there is more than one pattern).
If you do this carefully, you will be ready for the next exercise, which will be published at the end of the following section.
What the Mirrors Mean?
The implication of this might seem that it places people out of control of how these mirrors come up, because it seems as if they come up spontaneously. However it is so and here is another principle that I would stress to people:

God does not play dice with the universe. (To quote Albert Einstein)

In other words it cannot be accidental that you draw into your space certain people to remind you of the infinite being that you are and of all the mirrors that you carry with you through many millennia and in an infinitesimal way. There are no accidents when somebody like that comes in, for that is a part of you that reveals itself. Your response becomes the important thing.
Here I am not talking of the need to find out precisely what lifetime, or the addiction to know what it is that has revealed itself. The appropriate, all-important response is to stand back for a moment, take a deep breath and say: "I am a loving person. I am loving towards myself, first and foremost". This begins to shift that mirror, not only of the person reflecting it to you, but the reflection of the many lives as they go backwards in sequence. You need to use this approach constantly, as it is - and I stress again - the response that is most important. That is the key to it all.
In much the same way as people are mirrors to you, so inanimate objects also to mirror back to you. This is especially true of those objects that are extensions of your energy. Your motorcar is an extension of your energy. It takes you from place A to B. You could have used your energy by walking. Rather, you convert your energy via the money that you have earned into petrol energy, putting that energy into the car energy. Do you see how your energy has been extended and expanded? There is a direct link between your energy and the car's energy. Of course, the car must reflect back to you what is happening to your energy, though not necessarily in this time-space.
Should it happen in this time-space that your car battery is flat, it may well mirror what is happening to you now. This is a straightforward mirror - there are no complications in this example: "I'm exhausted. My car battery is flat". No complications. That is very easy to understand.
However, what happens when my battery is flat, but I feel quite energized. What is the problem here? Perhaps it is coming from another space-time dimension - one of those many infinitesimal images of yourself that go backwards in time and begin to reflect back out at this particular point in time and space. This says to you that you are truly beginning to grow. You are beginning to change what happened in that time-space. For example, in other parallel/past lives and time-spaces that could have unfolded in many ways, it may be that your energies were totally exhausted. Now, by means of the present mirrors, you are dealing with that depletion of energy in those time-spaces.
By accepting this, you find the peace within yourself of being able to say: "Yes, I will acknowledge that mirror". The mere acknowledgement and your attitude to the mirror determine whether or not the healing within you begins to manifest itself. This healing happens not only in this time-space, but in all time-spaces.
EXERCISE
Go back to your notes from the previous exercise. Look at the pattern(s). Consider your reactions to those mirror patterns.
Now, over the next month, change your responses to those patterns - from the knee-jerk responses, to new, liberating responses. Record how your emotions change, what physical changes you undergo, as a result of your changing your responses. To what extent do you move out of victimhood? Do you feel the new freedom? Kurt orchestrated a beautiful talk, Casting the Burden: A Tool for the Lightness of Being, which helps you to re-cast your responses to your external world. This is available in audiocasette: See the page, Audiotapes for details of how to obtain it.
Let me know by e-mail of the changes you undergo: third.wave@pixie.co.za. You can choose to have your name published or to remain anonymous when I publish your responses.
Many thanks to Mark Foster for this beautiful response to my book:
ME IN THE MIRROR
I "Woke Up" one day and looked in the mirror
What did I see? ... Me.
I looked at my friends, family and relationships.
What did I see? ... But Me.
I looked at my world,
and what did I see? ... But Me again.
I died in the physical and integrated into the spiritual,
and what did I see?
Oh my God, but you are a splendid mirror of Me?
Mark Foster
When you truly do take a long, hard look at your world and realise it all mirrors you from the inside out, the call is there to think differently, to change your responses to your external world.
Who and What are My Mirrors?
Motorcars, houses, washing machines, telephones - these are all extensions of your energy. To observe what is happening to these objects, gives you an idea of what is happening to yourself as well.
Animals and pets are also mirrors to us. They are in fact fragments from your other time-spaces and are fragments of your own soul. Animals reflect back to you what you do not wish to own. All of nature reflects back to us - perhaps not on an individual basis, but on a group basis. While personal pets apply personally to individual people, animals in the wild reflect the way people are behaving at a group level. There are many mirrors to look into here.
It is often the case that animals take on many of the things that you would normally experience, having brought them through with you in this time-space. For example, sometimes a pet would get cancer or some other illness, taking it away from the owner. The animal is prepared to process that on behalf of the human being. The person has created the animal in a sense in order to help him/her to bear the burden of what s/he is processing out. The one becomes a mirror to the other.
The honouring of animals, the honouring of plants, the honouring of nature, thus becomes extremely important because all of the natural world has the ability to reflect back to you, to teach you and to help you to grow. This is why you need to honour nature in so many different ways.
Certain animals are endangered. If you look at the kinds of greed and carelessness that people display towards the environment in which these animals live, it is no wonder that some animals make themselves extinct. If the animals' characteristics are parts of people or groups of people, then it is not difficult to see why we destroy parts of ourselves by destroying these animals when we see our reflections in them.
It is a very ancient belief - whether it be Eastern, Native American Indian, ancient European or African - that nature is there to teach, heal and instruct us. Indeed, it does so in ways that allow us to reflect upon ourselves and when we are destroying nature, we destroy ourselves with it. You are interlinked and interwoven with nature. The study of ecology says that we are linked to others and talks of the dependence between the human species and nature. Human beings are not separate from nature; we are part of nature in terms of mirrors, in terms of understanding, in terms of the learning, instructing, teaching, healing, role that nature provides for us.
EXERCISE
Last month was a period of action - of deliberately changing behaviour patterns.
This month is a period of introspection. Take time out in your meditations to honour your mirrors. Consider the animals around you, the natural world in which you live, the people around you, the machinery, the appliances you own, and so forth.
Focussing on one or two at a time, thank them for the teaching, the healing, the instruction they have provided for you. Become mindful of their instruction - whether positive or negative.
Above all, reflect this instruction back to yourself:, for these mirrors are reflections of your inner self. Give thanks for the learning that you have given to yourself and for the infinite being that you are.
Co-creation
The group consciousness creation is where a certain reality begins to develop. It is an understanding of the universal consciousness being a mirror to what is happening in the universe. The universal consciousness or the group creation consciousness always begins through groups of people who begin to spin webs, beginning to develop perceptions, perhaps through the media. The media are a mirror to society and with their mirror reflection, the group consciousness tends to grow and grow. A perception begins to grow and manifest itself.
The universe always wants to prove you right, whether it is your belief only, or the belief of three people or the belief of a million people. Obviously the belief of a million people, who all have a particular belief, would have that mirrored back far more greatly than the belief of one person. The universe would mirror back a belief to one person, because that one individual has to be right all the time, but then a million people have to be right as well.
Natural disasters are co-created through people's beliefs. Take for example a natural disaster like a flood. The floods in Mozambique a few years ago are a very local example of a creation that happened over a very long time of working at the very lowest common denominator, turning the country into a killing field. Through the constant death and dying over a long civil war, the people came to a total standstill in terms of their development, in terms of being able to feed themselves and in terms of their natural growth. So it is the will of the people that determines the events. It is interesting to note that just at the turning point of that country's history, when its greatest domestic growth happens for the first time in many, many years, the floods come. While water is always cleansing and washes away the unwanted, in fact this has many benefits in the story of Mozambique. The people could not see this at the time of the floods, because at that moment there was suffering: people drowned, people lost their homes and possessions and so forth. They needed aid desperately.
However, we believe that the zeitgeist of that particular area will improve quite dramatically and is already becoming one of the growth points of the world.
Take the tornadoes that blow across America. There is a different belief system at work there. Tornadoes are a mirror of anger. They come out of deep anger and prejudice. It is always interesting to observe the people living in areas and their belief systems. We do not judge these people, but in actual fact what this points to is angers that build up - angers that lie under the surface - angers that come from under the dust, building up over periods of time, creating wave after wave of tornadoes. They come in cycles, building up and letting go, building up again and letting go again. Of course, a tornado does affect peoples' lives on an individual basis, but it is the group consciousness that creates such huge shifts in weather.
EXERCISE
Find a newspaper article which illustrates a CO-creation - either a natural disaster or a disaster created by people (such as an explosion) - that involved a number of people. Having read the article, see if you can detect in the article -
the commonly-held belief of this group of people
the mirrors that are being held up to these people
the emotions they must have felt at the time of the disaster
how their emerging emotions would have been mirror reflections of what they needed to heal through the experience of the disaster.
Thank you to Winnie Jacobson for this poem brought to mind reading The Little Book of Mirrors: "It brought to mind a little poem I wrote in New York in '92 which I thought I should share."
YOU, I AND ME
I stand here and look at you
I look at you and I see
that you whom I thought I knew
are not who you seemed to be
I stand here and look again
and now I clearly see
that it is not you whom I did not know
it was I who did not know me
Thought as Energy
We now take an idea that we touched on earlier: the idea of coming through the mental body by means of thought processes. Thought, as you know, is energy and the thought has in fact to occur as an energy form. That energy can be seen in physical ways: if you were to link up the brain to electrodes, you will be able to see the thought as blips on a screen. You would know that these blips monitor the chemicals that move between the gaps between nerve endings in the brain. The blips are reflections - physical manifestations - of the electrical energy of the thought process in the brain. These thoughts are capable of great abstraction. The ideas may abstract themselves in many ways such that you do not need the physical to illustrate them.
All thoughts manifest in the physical. A chair could not be created without its having been thought of first. It is the thought of flight that created flying machines.
However, sometimes the thoughts are so abstract that the physical picks them up in a very literal way. Sometimes, because it picks them up in such a literal way and manifests them in such a literal way, you have reflected quite amusing mirrors to you.
One amusing thing that happened in Aaron's life was when I said to him: "You have to expand your energies". Sometimes he is very opposed to a suggestion when it is first made. So, his automatic reaction was, "No, I am not doing that". The next day, he locks his keys in his car and it takes two hours to get the keys out. It is only later on that it is explained to him that the Japanese word for energy is ki. Thus, you lock your energy up, so that you can go nowhere! It is quite amusing that the key would represent ki, while energy would be represented by a key.
The abstract concept of using or not using one's energy, allowing one to move forward or not to move forward, is mirrored here in a very literal situation of a vehicle that moves forward by means of a key which is unable to create the energy to move the vehicle forward.
In this way things become very confusing sometimes, because they are literal mirrors of very abstract ideas. This abstract conceptualisation is very difficult for people to get to grips - for example when mirrors happen in dreams. Here they often happen in symbolic form or in the form of metaphors. If you take a metaphor and translate it into a literal form, you might land up with something very funny. For example, you might say a person has feet of clay. This is an abstract concept based of course on a physical precept, but you do not in your mind imagine the person's feet to be made of clay. The abstraction of it is that the person cannot be relied upon, because his/her feet are not sturdy. If you were living in the prison house of the literal, you would laugh and say, "My goodness gracious, I have not seen anyone with feet of clay. What does that mean?"
Often with the mirrors that dreams hold up to us - because dreams are mirrors also - most people will make these interpretations in terms of the very literal, leaving them rather confused. Raising consciousness is the ability to get to abstract concepts and abstract conceptualisations. The mere idea of looking from the middle of two mirrors into the myriad of reflected mirrors and seeing all those lifetimes becomes a very difficult thing for people to imagine when they are very settled in a literal, physical form.
EXERCISE
Look a a circumstance / circumstances in your life (either positive or negative).
What possible thoughts could have created the set of circumstances with which you are living?
Working With Your Mirrors
So what is the meaning of all these mirrors? How do these help us in our life? The first point that I made is that it is your attitude towards the mirrors that counts the most. It is not so much understanding the mirror, as acknowledging the mirror. You need to acknowledge that this is a mirror and then be able to listen to your abstract consciousness. You need to be able to say to yourself: "Ah well, this means that I need to be friendly."
Turn the mirror upside down. If, for example, you are talking about someone who is angry with you, then maybe you need to be friendlier. So you turn it upside down by taking the opposite point of view in relation to yourself. Take the paradoxical point of view and in doing so, you immediately give yourself some kind of healing work. Thus, by turning it upside down, you begin to heal those different aspects of yourself
As you know, mirrors themselves show the image somewhat inverted or at least turned around. Know then, that you are looking at very different aspects of yourself when you have a mirror shown to you.
In addition, mirrors give you clues as to the infinite being that you are. They enable you to see yourself in relation to the god/goddess/all-that-is, the universe, whatever you wish to call it. To see yourself in relation to that, if these physical things truly reflect back to you what is happening at spirit level, perhaps you also reflect back all-that-is as different mirrors of the universal consciousness.
All of us - whether it is myself in spirit, or Aaron here in the physical, or you in the physical - become little mirrors to make up the entire universe. The universe in turn, reflects to us the completeness, the infiniteness, the eternalness, and the perfection, of all that you are in your totality. Here, two mirrors are working together.
At one time in our development I was showing myself to Aaron as a mirror ball. But this mirror ball had mirrors within mirrors and perhaps what we were showing him was that we have many, many, many mirrors that make up our very being; we are not one single mirror.
This is very confusing to people, for if you listen to a person who says, "Oh, that is a terrible person", another replies, "I do not find him/her so. I found him/her a very loving person." Why would a person change in that way? To think to yourself that it had nothing to do with the universal consciousness, that it had nothing to do with god/goddess/all-that-is, would be to admit that this is all accidental and that it is capricious and that it happens in ways in which we cannot control.
However, that is not so and I come back to the idea that god does not play dice with the universe for there are no accidents, there are no problems that can come out of nothing. They come out of a need to reflect back mirrors. It comes out of a need to get in touch with the many beings that you are in different time-spaces. It is the need to learn to see yourself in the mirror and to see the very different parts of yourself, whether it is to see yourself as being abused, or being loved, whether it is to see yourself as being respected, honoured or reviled.
You need to experience all of those things because the more of those mirrors you gather, the more you become part of the universal blending of consciousness, for the universal has all possibilities of all mirrors.
EXERCISE
Last month you considered one set of circumstances already created through your thoughts.
Now raise your consciousness by looking at the mirrors presented to you on a daily basis. You are looking at circumstances as they unfold:
turn the mirrors upside down
move from the literal to the metaphoric/symbolic
think in the abstract
Reflect the mirrors back to you to see how you can become kinder, gentler, friendlier, more compassionate to yourself.
Your Divine Nature
I return to the point I made previously. If it is so that the universal is a reflection of yourself and you are a reflection of the universal, then that makes you a very key part of god/goddess/all-that-is. This points to your understanding of your universal nature and of your divinity. This is where the mirrors are so useful in that they show you aspects of your divinity. They reflect that divinity back to you.
That divinity is the dark and the light. This is what I talked about at the beginning of this book. The dark and the light are different sides of the same coin. You have to be part of both the dark and the light and in doing so become part of god/goddess/all-that-is. God/goddess/all-that-is is in truth the dark and the light and both of these need to exist in order for perfection to exist. Often people seem to think that being spiritual means living only in the light. That the mark of a truly spiritual person is having only good fortune and a smooth pathway in life. However, if we are looking at mirrors for a start and the physical being a mirror of spirit, and vice versa, then we observe in the physical the phenomenon of "as one goes closer to the light, the shadow gets bigger". This must apply in spirit, too. The way in which the shadow reveals itself is sometimes subtle, and sometimes very much "in your face". The subtle manifestations of shadow include banging your elbow, or stubbing your toe. Have you noticed how those little things make you express anger in a stream of explicatives that sometimes leave you feeling that you may have over-reacted!
The less subtle expressions of shadow are very clear feelings of fear, anger, resentment, jealousy, hatred and prejudice. Regardless of where we have been brought up, or how educated we are, or how "civilised" we are, or how spiritual we think we are, these emotions appear - sometimes at very unexpected moments and we need to find ways to express them in appropriate and safe ways. To deny them, is to seriously play with fire, for they will diminish temporarily, or be suppressed temporarily only to appear in an exaggerated and in many cases, uncontrollable form. One of our clients - a doctor - highly dedicated to his work and his patients, would be in the surgery from early in the morning, through to late at night. He gave little time to himself, always remained cheerful and would not allow himself to partake in any activity that could be seen to be shadow (perhaps taking a drink, enjoying some night life, or indulging himself). The complete submersion of his self in this amazingly "good" life, must, to some extent, over a period of time, slowly begin to build a sense of resentment and anger. One night, out of the dark, as he was closing shop, a man steps out - he cannot see him clearly - and fires a gun at his head, at point blank range, narrowly missing entry and the bullet burning the top of his head as it courses over. (It is not "accidental" that the burn should be at the Crown Chakra, the very point of connection to the Light.) They wrestle, and in the course of the struggle, the attacker bites his hand and makes a getaway. The struggle mirrors his struggle with the shadow aspects of himself and how it comes to "bite" the hand that feeds it.
The acknowledgement that we all are shadow and light, is to recognise the reflections of the mirrors of our divinity and to realise that it is often our shadowed aspects which provide for us our greatest growth and change. The first change that happens to the doctor is that he has to take time off work to recover from the attack, and then to begin to assess why he should be the victim of such an attack when he is such a "good", "helping", and "healing" person. As he explores, he will begin to understand the meaning of balance, of giving back to oneself and of finding his own self expression. In his own words: "I cannot look on life the same as before, having so narrowly escaped death." As a doctor, his view will also change dramatically, perhaps, of what his patients experience.
In this physical lifetime the mirrors would help you to begin to recognize all those parts and begin to integrate them. That is why it is more important to recognize the mirrors more than interpret the mirrors. That is sometimes difficult, but at least recognise them and then through this simple identification be able to say, "All right, then I will change this mirror, or keep that mirror; thank you for the mirror. I recognize it. I recognize yet another facet of my own being".
Looking once again at the idea of the physical as thought manifestation, it points to the kind of attitudes that you would need to have towards the physical if you accept that certain things are mirror reflections of spirit. Then, for example, you would see the garbage that you throw out every day as a mirror of the spiritual garbage that you get rid of every day. You would accept people such as the garbage collectors as great healers who work on all four levels of well-being - physical, emotional, mental, and spiritual. Even though they clear the physical garbage, much of that garbage would have been a manifestation from the emotional, mental and spiritual realms. To what extent are the garbage collectors honoured within our society? I give this example because they are extraordinary healers and yet in terms of society they are really on the bottom rung of the ladder.
EXERCISE
Identify some of your own angers, fears, resentments, jealousies, hatreds and prejudices.
Acknowledge their usefulness in showing you aspects of your shadow self and where there are areas in your life that lack love.
Then, send love to these shadowed aspects so that they have less need to reveal themselves in uncontrollable ways.
Infinity
This leads me to the concept of the inverted mirror - the paradoxical mirror. The infinity sign is a figure of eight on its side. The number eight itself is the number of infinity because it is "as above so below". There is the mirror - "as above so below". If you were to take the mirrors and turn them side-on, like the infinity sign, then what is or what seems to be is not and what is not might well be. It also turns your world upside down: the very things for which you strive are perhaps the illusion. Sometimes the manifestations of spirit look exactly contrary to your perception. You can thus see that it becomes very complicated as well as extremely difficult to discern what is of spirit and what is not of spirit.
Be assured that everything is of spirit. However, what you judge to be of worth and not of worth is often paradoxical. Sometimes it is important to be able to honour the mirrors of your own prejudice, of your intolerance, of your looking down your nose at various things. This is a way of acknowledging the mirrors and the paradoxical nature of those mirrors - "as above so below", but turned upside down.
This is something that is acknowledged in all societies other than where people have forgotten. Certainly, ancient societies understood that there has to be a time for the least in the society to be acknowledged for their contribution to that society. Sometimes it is a little unfortunate that so many people get cast aside in society while they may truly be among the upper echelons in terms of spirit. (Although we do not think of hierarchies, that is the way I would express it to you.)
Mirrors in Your Everyday World
The mirrors are also reflective of the work that is done both in spirit and in the physical. The work that people do in their physical life is usually reflective of what their spirit is hoping to achieve. It is always interesting to notice that the one always reflects the other. Often there is a literal link between the abstract spirit and the literal physical world. Have a look at someone doing construction work: it is a very literal and a very physical thing, laying one brick upon the other. But at a spiritual level this reflects literally building one's spirituality, building one's soul, building one's house and sometimes building one's walls. The one reflects the other perfectly in that particular situation.
In relationships, the one partner often reflects the other. Most often the aspects of the partner that you do not like are very aspects you need to be in touch with in yourself, and vice versa. Sometimes when you recognize great things in your partner you are in reality looking at your own mirror. This works the other way round as well: one complements the other, both on the positive side and on the negative side. If you can recognize that, then it truly becomes the point of growth for the relationship.
The interplay between the spiritual mirror and the physical happens in all aspects of your life, whether it be your romantic life, your relationships, your work, the kind of work that you do and your relationships at the workplace - all are mirrors to what is happening at spirit and what you as a mirror bring to the growth, understanding and development of the universal spirit.
It is unfortunate that sometimes the mirrors are not always easy to look at. The many car accidents are also mirror reflections of what people do with their energies and how they crash those energies. Illnesses are perfect mirror reflections of what has happened at spirit level. They are physical interpretations - often very literal interpretations - of what has happened or what is happening at spirit level. Sometimes this is not from the spirit level of the person in this particular time-space but from another time-space, as I pointed out earlier.
Perhaps there was anger in three lifetimes previously (looking from your perspective) that has been brought physically into this time-space in order to bring healing. Thus your cancer may be a reflection of anger from that time-space. On the other hand, it might be an anger reflected from this time-space as well. More often it is the case that the physical manifestation comes from another time-space into this time-space.
We honour your courage in choosing to come into the physical in order that you may see the mirrors. Let me point out to you that we, the Guides, are mirrors to you in the physical and you are mirrors for us here in the spiritual. Nonetheless, in our non-physical environment we do not need the mirrors, for we can see the bigger picture. We can see the spiritual trajectory of what a soul is seeking to achieve in all its parallel lifetimes, so we do not need the mirrors to give us those clues. However, we still choose to come into the physical. The choice to come into the physical is a choice to see the mirrors from a physical perspective, for they inform and purposefully aid you to grow as a soul.
Coming into the physical takes some courage because it is very difficult to deal with some of those mirrors. The mirrors of illness, the mirrors of work, the mirrors of relationships, are there to remind you time and time again of what you have failed to see in other time-spaces or things that you have learned in other time-spaces that you do not wish to forget in this time-space because you need to build upon it in this time-space.
EXERCISE
This is an opportunity for you to take stock of your growth so far over the year: go back over all the previous exercises. Read what you have written. Begin to see the patterns. Celebrate your growth over time.
Stand back and look at the bigger picture of your life. Meditate on this picture. Acknowledge all your multi mirrors with joy!
The Bigger Picture
So you keep carrying these learnings through, mirroring the one to the other. This is what I would call the back-to-back mirror. It mirrors forward and mirrors backwards, bringing together the view backwards and the view forwards, giving you a much fuller picture as you become aware of the mirrors than you have had previously.
As you raise your consciousness and as you grow into consciousness you extend your mirrors and because you are extending your mirrors you are growing the bigger picture from the little picture. Often the little picture as seen from our time perspective is terribly dismal. Often it seems unfair. However, by recognizing the mirror, you automatically expand your little picture into a bigger picture by recognizing that mirror. Then you understand that the bigger picture is never miserable or dismal or unfair, but in fact has a history reflecting into other time-spaces and into the fullness of what spirit actually is.
The bigger picture always gives people understanding. For example, how can a two-year old get leukaemia? It seems so very unfair: this poor innocent child suffering so. The bigger picture cannot be seen until the mirrors can be seen. When you see the bigger picture, you understand that that two-year old child is not a child, but a soul. That child is a much bigger entity than a two-year old. It is certainly not pure and innocent, or a clean slate. That child's soul has a history and that history can be seen in the mirrors of its life.
Acknowledging your Responsibility
This understanding guides you into a space where you can begin to learn the most important characteristic of the mirrors: responsibility. For as you begin to recognize the mirrors, you have also to acknowledge that you are the creator of your reality. I determine my mirrors by means of my thoughts, feelings and beliefs and through what my spirit is creating. I need to learn to recognize my emotions and how to feel. In doing so, I also learn about my thoughts and how my thoughts work. In turn, I learn about my spirit and I learn that all is my creation.
Taking responsibility for all that happens to you in your life is part of having control over your life. Inner peace and joy comes from being able to recognize the mirror and being able to say, "I know that I have work to do. I take responsibility for my growth. I take responsibility for my spiritual understanding. I take responsibility for my physical interactions. I take responsibility for the situations in which I find myself, for I recognize the mirrors. I can respond to the mirrors".
For us, the most important part of understanding the mirrors and why we would wish to convey the idea of mirrors to you is that ultimately it gives you the responsibility to gain your inner strength. That in fact, is the end result of your acknowledgement of the mirrors. You cannot say it is someone else's fault when in truth whatever happens to you is a mirror reflection of what you are doing. You cannot avoid full and total responsibility.
With responsibility comes growth, because you are now responsible for your growth. You can respond. You are not waiting for the guides, the angels, god or some other external force to give you what you need. You begin to recognize your mirrors and in doing so, you begin to understand, and with that understanding comes responsibility. You then take responsibility for what is reflected outwardly from within you. It always comes from the inside out - never the other way round. Since it comes from the inside out, you recognize what is out there. You know it has come from the inside and therefore you are capable of beginning to reconstruct it, re-create it and in so doing, you become the co-creator and the empowered being that you always have been. Respond, respond, respond!
So you see what purpose the mirrors serve. It is all about responsibility and empowerment, about understanding your own inner power and your co-creatorship. It is a way of taking you into the infinite and also taking you into the nothingness out of which all creation comes. Now you can see how this all links up into one perfect circle.
You co-creatorship ability causes you to want to come into the physical life to identify those mirrors that help you to take responsibility, to become a light unto yourself (for mirrors always indicate light of some sort). You become the co-creator from within the nothingness (because mirrors also bring about the nothingness). You distinguish illusion from reality to understand your infinite eternal being and to understand the true idea of "as above so below". Once you can put that all together, then you have achieved inner peace, inner joy and freedom.
Then you understand, for instance that paraplegics are not disabled by accident. This cannot happen "by accident". God does not play dice with the universe. It is not through misfortune that this has happened. There must be a mirror and if you can recognize that mirror and the responsibility and the growth and the co-creation in that, then you free yourself from having perhaps done certain things in past/parallel lives and bring about circumstances that prevent you from repeating those things, to free yourself from these repetitive actions.

I encountered a paraplegic and before knowing his circumstances, I saw flashed before me parallel/past lives in which he murdered someone else, always at the age of twenty-four. He then told me that he was involved in an accident at the age of twenty-four, causing him to become wheelchair bound. The mirrors were explained to me: in this lifetime at twenty-four years of age he has an accident that makes him a paraplegic. While most may consider him trapped in the wheelchair, he has in fact gained his freedom. The limitation frees him from repeating the same murderous story all over again. His body prevents him from repeating these actions in any possible way. He is now dependent on others, rather than being able to hurt others. By recognising the mirrors, he recognised his freedom, bringing him inner joy and peace.
Confronting these mirrors requires a great deal of courage. This young man has enormous courage. We honour him, and all those that come into the physical, for the enormous amount of sustained energy required for the growth process in this physical existence.
Spirit and Metaphor
Spirit works in metaphor. Spirit does not really understand the physical (and therefore the literal) and so it always works with metaphor. What happens is that the energy waves of the metaphor vibrate at a very high frequency, moving very fast. They have to slow down to become physical and in this slowing down, what is produced in the physical may become distorted.
You can refer here to the conscious and unconscious mind. You tap all those abstract spiritual ideas, the spiritual learnings and the spiritual energy from the unconscious. That energy is thought. As it surfaces into the conscious mind it begins to concretise itself. This very simple process of concretising often results in bizarre and strange outcomes. This accounts for much of the strange world you live in, because those connections are not always very clear and it is not always a one-on-one creation.
One only needs to think here of the religious teachings of the great teachers, whether they are Buddha, or Krishna or Christ or Mohammed. These teachers often talk of things in metaphors. People then take these teachings and automatically turn them into something in the physical and that is where the confusion arises. The way to get around that is to understand that metaphor or abstract thinking is in fact the root to the understanding of spirit. You cannot work in literal ways when you work with spirit because then you really become very confused.
I was asked what a spider bite meant. I answered that it was quite straightforward: The spider in your cultural time-space is an ugly thing and you need to crush one when you see it. However, in other time-spaces - certainly in the early Native American Indian time-space - the spider was considered to be the weaver of creation, and the web of life. That came through observation, not only by the Native American Indians, but also from the collective consciousness, of the spider being the first creature to arrive on a newly formed volcanic island, or to return to a place that has been destroyed by fire. This is a biological fact.
Spiders thus have different meanings in different cultural contexts. But who is to say that this woman attracted the spider to bite her from this cultural context? She may be calling up another cultural context - mirrors going back to other time-spaces, bringing forward a creation from another lifetime, if you wish, into this lifetime - to do with creativity and of spinning new webs. This bite happens on the very day that she begins a new job and the two mirror each other quite perfectly.
What baffled her about the situation originally was that she usually is very allergic to spider bites but she had very little reaction to this spider bite. Now why should there be so little reaction to this spider bite? Because she had already begun the creation and it was just a way of mirroring it to her from a context that she would have understood had she been a Native American Indian or had she been an aboriginal Australian. Thus the physical event comes through the eyes of the aborigine or Native American Indian, not through her eyes at all.
We look forward to your growth - our growth - in light and in love, in peace and tranquillity, always in mindful awe of this great universe of which we are part and of which we are all. Our blessings and greetings to you.