I found myself this morning humming a Beatles’ song, “Eleanor Rigby” trying to recall the lyrics. For me is like stepping into a time machine. This period in my life was before I set off on my enlightenment quest to eventually sit in meditation in an abounded copper mine searching for pure Mind, which at the time I believed was possible to attain.
This is only a guess on my part based on what I have seen on social media and elsewhere, but this age has gone dark. It seems to have lost or sold its soul having exchanged it for a maze-like house of mirrors in which images of the false self dominate but not a single image in this house is who any of us really is.
These images are, in fact, obstacles which make up the house of mirrors not unlike the one found in the 1928 Charlie Chaplin movie, The Circus, when Chaplin is chased into the ‘Mirror Maze’ by a thief then a policeman.
Looking at our self in a mirror is the first loss of one’s path to the authentic self which, by the way, is imageless. Next, add to this the house of mirrors where now our image can be stored electronically—a fixed mirror at a particular time. I am the young teenager. I am now the aspiring college student. Now I am married. Here is our first child. So many images and not one is our true self. But who is the real self?
This reminds me somewhat of Mumon’s comment to the koan, Zuigan Calls His Own Master.
Old Zuigan sells out and buys himself. He is opening a puppet show. He uses one mask to call "Master" and another that answers the master. Another mask says "Sober up" and another, "Do not be cheated by others." If anyone clings to any of his masks, he is mistaken, yet if he imitates Zuigan, he will make himself fox-like.
Mumon could also be saying, “If anyone clings to any of these images, he is mistaken.” There is, of course, a right answer to this koan. It is eternal and invariant and most certainly unconditioned. But it never appears the way an image does in the example of this corporeal body from birth to old-age and death. Fa-Yung Niutou Farong (594-657) said:
“The Ultimate Essence of things is what is most important. But in the realm of illusion it becomes different from what it is. The nature of Reality is invisible and cannot be understood by our conscious mind.”
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