1/ People, carrying a constant mirror to themselves in their mind's eye, wish to disperse with hopelessness, anxiety, confusion, as if it were an article of clothing that does not fit their imaginary reflection.
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5/ In today's view, everything appears to be geared toward securing the continuation of our reflection, all else be damned. The ancients knew better than this; their advice was in the form of riddles, pithy, abstruse commandments, rituals. They were questions more than answers.
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6/ We want answers like we want to take a suit to a tailor and have it fitted. The suit, being continuously crinkled and stretched by the very nature of our own metamorphoses, our human condition, never quite fits when holding up that imaginary mirror.
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7/ Alas, there are however, plenty of tailors more than happy to oblige. A few curious minds will notice that they, too, are secretly frustrated by their inability to tailor their own suits–but the suits of others, why, they appear quite the expert at dealing with that.
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8/ The ancients made it plainly clear to the seeker that the one who asks the question, is carrying the answer himself, and must discover it. Their task was to avert the seeker's gaze from their own reflection and point it back to themselves, back at the source.
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9/ In stark contrast to today, where we prefer a patchy, incoherent story, a reflection that requires continuous psychological games to maintain, an ill-fitting suit rather than our naked humanity that communicates through such states as anxiety, hopelessness, frustration.
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10/ We have forgotten how to listen, this is the first thing. We only want to speak over ourselves, and because of that, we are driving ourselves insane. What is hopeless is not the individual, but their insistence on never listening, never acknowledging, never acquiescing.
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11/ We have also forgotten how to see. In our marvelous superiority over the ancients, we have complicated matters that pertain to our humanity to such a degree that we cannot untangle ourselves from our faulty conceptions. This is an immense obstacle we face.
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12/ A word, or perhaps a few words, used to be enough to occupy one's thoughts for weeks. People meditated on what was said, thought, and heard. By this very act of attention they paid and the importance they gave, any word had the potential to lead them back to themselves.
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13/ We rarely pay such gravitas any more, to anything. We change the question as often as we hope for a different answer that works. We jump from one method to the other, one silver bullet to the next, never understanding that we doom ourselves to a perpetual desperate seeking.
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14/ Coming back to Narcissus, it was not his narcissism that killed him finally, but his naiveté. It is this very same naiveté, born out of a refusal to drop the mirror for a while, to see, to listen, that is the very danger our deep-seated anxiety warns us about.
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15/ If we refuse hopelessness, if we refuse anxiety, confusion, frustration, and every other message our wise bodies transmit to our consciousness, we are walking, mirror in hand, towards the edge of Narcissus's lake, and one day we are sure to drown.
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16/ The mirror offers no growth, no evolution, no transcendence; this, too, the ancients knew in some wordless, instinctive manner, and they would not tolerate a minute of the so-called elevated word-games of psychobabble we throw around today to make us feel smarter.
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17/ My beloved Henry Miller wrote “Once you have given up the ghost, everything follows with dead certainty, even in the midst of chaos.” It is through chaos that one arrives at this certainty, and through giving up the ghost of that elusive mirror.
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PS
@IntegralStory is of course, correct, in pointing out that I have omitted many aspects of the story of Narcissus in my using it in this impromptu thread. The actual myth itself is a subtler and more meaningful affair than what I portrayed, and is recommended to all.Show this thread
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