Recognize Your Reflection

All that you behold is within. Sometimes a particular event suddenly brings home this key tenet of Neville’s teaching.

A person I recently met explained to me, just out of nowhere, his philosophy of life. This person, no longer young, did not waste time on small talk, and had evidently come to certain conclusions. He said, “I don’t criticize, I don’t judge, and I don’t complain. This way, I have a happy life.” This seeming chance encounter has implications.

First, it was a synchronicity to meet someone who had deliberately conceived psychological rules for self-application. In this, I see myself. He endeavours to live his philosophy, instead of drifting through life.

Next, I took his words as a message, as instruction to myself. I applied his maxim. Noticing, subsequently, where I was criticizing, judging and complaining, I saw that I was often doing so because of what I think to be a principled position, in response to the political and social currents of the day. Now, on one hand, there is nothing wrong with having a principled position. But on the other hand, I was wasting energy and my precious time in (as Gurdjieff once put it) “a thousand useless emotions.”

Once putting a stop to objecting (to what, even so, I still think is objectionable), I reached a moment of clarity. I was able to “resist not evil”. Good and evil are, curiously, undefined and always relative (”...to him, it is unclean”). At a certain point, you become suspicious of the whole matter.

Well, the law I am exploring is this: all that I experience is a reflection of my own psyche, both in the personal sphere and on the scale of society at large. This recent encounter was like an experiment to see if I could notice and learn from what I am “decreeing” through my own mental activity. I glimpsed how automatic is this law.

Be on the lookout to recognize your own reflection.