The House of Mirrors
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The House of Mirrors
Have you ever visited ‘The House of Mirrors’ at a fair, where every wall has reflective glass that makes your body look strange and stretched out? Maybe you giggled as your head became five foot tall, your hands twice as big as your feet and your legs elongated like a big stick insect? After a while, it can be a relief to go back outside and return to the normal proportions of life at last. When we look at ourselves in the mirror, in our own home, we come back to things as they should be, what is normal and correct and who we truly are – or do we?
Growing up I spent what seemed like weeks on end looking at the mirror in our family bathroom. Some days I could tolerate the image of a young man that stared back at me. Other days all I could see was an array of horrible flaws: my hair not right – too curly and shaped quite odd, my muscles small and not enough, my ears too big and stuck right out, my frame too long, my chest curved in, not proud and big like other men. Rather than seeing a loving being, I was often depressed and demoralised by what appeared, distressed at the way my body looked and my ‘ill fit’. I spent many hours going over what I could do to change my physique, to answer the endless critiques that were running in my head:
“You are ugly and a circus freak.”
“You don’t look normal and never will.”
“How could you expect to find a partner when you look like this?”
“When people see you, they must find it hard not to point and laugh.”
“You will never fit in and be able to live a full life.”
Writing these words down in black and white, it’s impossible to miss how intense and harsh they are, more like something a vicious bully would say to make you cry. At the time I thought this torrent of abuse was reserved just for me, but is it possible this derogatory internal commentary is much more common than we think?
In recent years there has been an increasing trend around the world, to use plastic surgery to change the way our bodies look. In the USA alone cosmetic procedures have increased by 22% over the last 20 years - with 2.3 million taking place in 2020. And these figures don’t include the more ‘minimal’ procedures like Botox (4.4 million) or soft tissue fillers (3.4 million) that were completed too.[1]
On a day when the mirror sent me into a spiral of thoughts and despair, I’d often end up contemplating plastic surgery as the only viable route ahead for me. If I could just change how I looked then maybe all these thoughts and dissatisfactions would go away. After all, they would have no fault on which to pick – right?
I booked a consultation with a specialist but somehow couldn’t find it in me to proceed with the surgery. So, I returned to the mirror as my go-to-place to tell me how I was going in life. Did I look tired or fit today? Was I handsome or downright ugly? Acceptable or not enough? Had what I’d been doing been good for me? The mirror never lied in its replies – or did it?
When I voiced the thoughts that I had, those close to me rejected what I said: “No you are fine and there’s no problem”, “This is all in your imagination – that’s not what I see when I look at you”, ”You always look great to me”. Whilst it was nice that they didn’t seem to see the faults that I did, the fact that they saw things so differently left me feeling disturbed and confused inside. If the thoughts in my head and what I saw in the mirror each day were not true – then what was really going on with me? And how could I gauge what was the right way to proceed? I continued with my life with this psychosis bubbling underneath, often coming to the fore when things got challenging and hard.
When I came across the work of philosopher and author Serge Benhayon, what stood out from the very start was his presentation of the simple fact that life is all about energy first. Before what we see as life occurs, an energy is there proceeding it, making it take place. In addition to this he also presents the fact that there are two qualities of energy that make up this world: Fire and Prana, one that is supportive of Love and Truth and one that is not.
Throughout our everyday, we are effectively immersed in a sea of energy, which we contribute to with the way we all choose to move, speak and live. Spaces and environments, objects and our belongings all hold energy too – everything is, in essence, made up of energy and nothing is impervious to being understood this way. We may think by use of words and labels that life is made up of separate objects that exist like islands in a stream, but in truth energy is constantly passing through every one of us each moment we are alive, even making us think we think.
Serge Benhayon’s presentations deliver yet more bombs – specifically around the factor of the existence of two aspects of us all – our Soul and our Spirit. Our Soul impulses us to live with stillness, joy, harmony and truth. Our Spirit thrives on individuality, constant motion and stimulation - good or bad it doesn’t care, as long as the distraction from oneness is there.
So when we look out at a mirror in our life, for a ‘reality check’, what we see is effectively determined by which of these aspects of us is impulsing us to look in the first place. Additionally, on a simple point of physics – the image we see in the mirror, that we implicitly trust, is actually the opposite of what is truly real. So, from the start the image we review is flipped in reverse from what other people receive… but the theme of ‘oppositeness’ doesn’t stop there.
Serge Benhayon has gone further to make it clear that our senses don’t even operate the way we think they do. When we walk around and experience life, we don’t actually look out at life to determine what is there, but in actual fact we receive it back. Light flows into our eyes, to be flipped, detected and reconciled. We are not scanners but receptors, designed for truth to naturally arrive, but we have developed a way of being where like sentries we constantly focus on surveying life, searching the horizon for the next threat or risk.
When we are impulsed by our Spirit, we project onto life – fears, emotions and issues we have been fed. From this place we don’t see life for what it truly is but instead are sucked in by what we are fed to think is there. If you’ve ever been fascinated by how people can see the same object but come away with very different accounts of what was there, then this science starts to make a great deal of sense.
So when we look out at our world and use what we see to make our next step, it is not the solid base we like to think. In reality, it’s more similar to walking in a House of Mirrors and using this as our guide for living life.
As it’s become clearer in my life that I am being constantly tricked by energy, I have started to make the focus not solving what the mirror says but addressing the quality inside me first. If the energy I am in is rushed and stressed, anxious or angry – what I see confirms that life is hard, I am deficient and not enough, that others are out to get me and are mean. If I’m connected to the truth that we are all one, can feel my delicateness and the part I play in the ‘bigger picture’ of life, and how each of us alive has Love at our core – then what I receive confirms all that.
We talk in life sometimes about looking with ‘rose tinted’ glasses on – but this revelation is more like realising you’ve lived your life with spectacles (or a veil) designed to emphasise lies. When we get that we can simply take them off by moving in a different quality of energy, this is one of the greatest transformations and realisations you can have.
The saying goes that ‘beauty is in the eye of the beholder’ – but it would be truly said that when we behold the world connected to our Soul, we cannot but see the true magnificence of us all.
The factor of energy and its quality applies, of course, not just to how we look out but the way we move, how we speak, make love or choose to eat. Each step has an energetic emission into the sea of life that is much more powerful than we are led to think. Like a domino effect it puts in motion a momentum that can be difficult to arrest and change, a bit like a run-away train.
As I live, I have found that the simplest way to know the truth of what is at play is not through mirrors or selfies on a phone, but through the sensation and vibration that I feel in my body’s cells. No matter what is going on, my body never lies: if something is amiss it cannot hide the tension, soreness, roughness, or stiffness that is there, in the place where tenderness and delicacy should normally be.
“The body is the marker of truth.
Serge Benhayon Esoteric Teachings & Revelations Volume I, ed 1, p 569
It is that which can with accuracy spell-out all that is and has been.”
No wonder then that so much of our life is lived in a rush, rough-housing ourselves to make it through the day’s events, eating foods that leave our body heavy and dull – for if we were to stop and simply feel, our body’s particles can’t help but instantly reflect back the truth of what has taken place.
The more we give power back to our body this way, the more the inclination to photoshop our physique and life into appearing a certain shape, dissipates. We start to understand at last that our outer world is actually a reflection back of our inner state – or more precisely the energy we identify with as us.
Every day, as life’s events unfold, they reflect back the energy and intent that is at play underneath. If we are willing to realise this, each day can be like a textbook helping us to appreciate the power of how we live. Then, in our own process of making choices we can’t help but mirror back to each other in turn, the truth of what life is actually about.
This reflection of truth shone back to you isn’t always comfortable or easy to accept when you have lived for eons in a way that was warped and distant from our natural state. But when we return to the truth of energy and the forces that are constantly at play, it finally makes sense how we are all bullied from day dot to hate and critique and attack ourselves, like no other organism alive – for the power we all have when we choose Love is huge and instantly reflects back to humanity that there’s a different way to live.
When we align to the vibration of our Soul, of our true magnificence, we live in a way that is no longer owned and controlled. We are free at last from distortions and projections of ‘Normal Life’ which is exposed for the House of Lies it truly is.
We finally appreciate and get to realise our body was always just a containing frame, a vehicle for a quality that is divine and way beyond this earthly plane. As we live and move in harmony with this essence, we realise we are constantly held in an absolute and immeasurable field of Love – we are in The House of God. When we move our body as part of this whole, we will never critique or attack, but celebrate and appreciate how every part of us reflects back Love and is part of a much bigger plan.
“For thousands of years a certain ancestry of teachings, specifically from or with the Ageless Wisdom, has been telling us that we are living in an illusion, and that part of our real evolution, which can also be described as a correction or re-correction, is to realise that fact, that we are living in a complete illusion. And then, once realised, and realised in full, we can begin our true way forward, which in fact, is actually a way back and not ‘forward’ at all.”
Serge Benhayon Time, Space and all of us, Book 1 – Time, ed 1, p 232
“We have not truly learnt what the body can actually be until Divine Design is the way we hold and allow our bodies to be.”
Serge Benhayon Esoteric Teachings & Revelations Volume I, ed 1, p 572
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Filed under
Body image, Self-empowerment, Self-esteem
