In mirroring ourselves, we lose naturalness in the name of spirituality

Today I read a chapter in Robert Saltzman's book, The 21st Century Self: Belief, Illusion, and the Machinery of Meaning, that ended up so filled with highlighting of passages that I admired, the chapter only had a few unhighlighted areas.

That's how much I liked "The Mirror."

It addressed a question that has been in the back of my mind (and sometimes in the front of my mind) since I embarked on a spiritual-but-not-religious path some twenty years ago after giving up an Eastern form of dogmatic religiosity.

What I've been wondering is whether there's something seriously wrong with my deep commitment to spiritual searching. I meditate every day. I read books about Buddhism, neuroscience, mindfulness, and such every day. I do my best to be a good person to myself and others every day. I examine my shortcomings every day.

And yet…

There's something strange about all this spiritual searching. Increasingly, I wonder whether my basic problem isn't something lacking in my makeup, in how my mind works, but the fact that I'm convinced there's some sort of problem that needs to be addressed.

At times it feels like I'm hitting myself on my head with a baseball bat while wondering how I can make that damn headache go away. 

That's why I'm drawn to writers like Joan Tollifson, who speaks of the importance of simply living life as it is, rather than desiring to add anything to our experience of what is happening right here, right now. It was an emailed essay from Tollifson that clued me in to Saltzman's newest book, which I bought based on her recommendation.

I'm glad I did. Because Saltzman explained the nature of our discontent in a manner that was clearer than any other writer I can recall. The beginning of "The Mirror" chapter drew me in like our dog smelling a bag of buttery popcorn being opened. (I favor the Lesser Evil brand; it's air popped with Buddhist'y packaging.)

Saltzman says:

It seems I've spent my life trying to understand what it means to be alive. Not as an abstraction or as a philosophical theory, but viscerally, directly — in the only terms that ever mattered to me: what is this, right here that I call me?

In the beginning I gave it no name. I just lived. There was no need to understand, define, or explain. I laughed when laughter came, cried when tears came, felt uneasy when my parents argued, and sank into the dissolving pleasure of music, of water, of the weightless mystery of dreams. If there was a self, it wasn't something I looked for or questioned. It was simply what was unfolding.

But then came the mirror.

Not the literal mirror, though that came too. I mean the reflective moment — the arrival of that recursive loop in which experience becomes objectified. I was no longer just crying — I was someone who cried. No longer just frightened — I was someone who was afraid. And with that split, the watching began.

It's a small leap, cognitively, but a vast one existentially. Once a watcher appears, so does the possibility of judgment. Crying is not just crying, but weakness. Fear is not just fear, but shame. Joy is not just joy, but something to be hidden lest it be mocked or misunderstood. Every moment now contains its echo. Experience is no longer just felt — it is catalogued, narrated, assigned to a self-image. A self must be maintained.

So the mirror grows. 

And once the mirror is in place, it never stops reflecting. You watch yourself walking, talking, even thinking. You wonder how you appear to others, then how you appear to yourself appearing to others. You anticipate judgment and try to preempt it. You defend positions you aren't sure you hold. You perform intimacy while feeling alone. You rehearse authenticity. 

This isn't pathology. It's not something to be fixed. It's just what it means, for many of us, to be human. 

But what, then, is this mirror? It's not the same as self-awareness, not exactly. It's a kind of reverberation — a recursive echo chamber in which direct experience is endlessly bounced back, interpreted, qualified, and turned into identity. And in that reverberating, we lose contact with the immediacy of being. Or rather, that immediacy is never quite gone, but it's obscured, layered over with performance, justification, and story.

Some try to break the mirror. Spiritual seekers especially. They meditate, fast, chant, or take psychedelics in pursuit of "ego death." But even the attempt to dissolve the self becomes a new act — a new identity. "I am the one who seeks dissolution." "I am the one who knows there is no one." This too is the mirror. 

And so, at some point, if you're lucky — or perhaps just tired — you begin to see that you can't get rid of the mirror by effort. You can't shatter it from within. But you can stop mistaking it for the whole truth. You can begin to notice that beneath all the interpretations, there's still something elemental happening. The breath still comes and goes. The eyes still see. The hand still moves. Before "me" and "mine" and "what does it mean," there is simply this. 

And that this is not a theory. It's not something to be believed or disbelieved. It's not an idea about nonduality or presence or awareness. It's just what is here before the mirror begins to speak.

We tend to trust what we see or think we see. And we tend to trust even more what we think we see about ourselves. This is the special trap. It's one thing to mistake a shadow for a snake, or a snake for a shadow. But it's something else to mistake a thought for the thinker. Or an image for the one being seen.

"The Mirror" chapter goes on. But I'll share that going-on another day.