The Law Of The Mirror: What You See In Others Is Actually Your Reflection
When building each step of our personal growth, we focus excessively on our interior, when much of what we could learn is actually on the outside or around us, when trustworthy. Various legends and myths teach us since ancient times that what we see in others reveals sacred information about ourselves: it is like a mirror.
Is the defect we perceive on the outside or in ourselves?
The law of the mirror states that our unconscious, aided by the psychological projection we carry out during this moment, makes us think that the defect or dislike we perceive in others exists only “out there”, not in ourselves. Psychological projection is a defense mechanism through which we attribute to other people our own feelings, thoughts, beliefs, or even actions that are unacceptable to us.
Projections happen with both negative and positive experiences. Our reality is laid out unfiltered in the outside world, building the truth with our own personal characteristics. A typical experience of psychological projection happens when we fall in love and attribute to the loved one certain characteristics that actually exist only in ourselves.
We project our own reality on the outside
The law of the mirror is reflected when we claim to know other people very well and, in fact, what we do is project our own reality onto them. When this situation occurs, we are placing our projected view of ourselves on the other person’s physical image that is captured by our senses.
Being aware of what we project onto others allows us to discover what we really are. When we gain knowledge of this mental mechanism, it is easy to regain control over what is going on inside us so that we can make use of it and work on the aspects that are present in us that we do not wish to maintain, or that we want to transform in some way.
It is essential to remember that everything that comes to us through our senses we already accept for granted, without recognizing that interpretation often occurs and our subjectivity influences perception. We live according to this way of perceiving reality, believing in negative distortions or those that make us feel uncomfortable when we interact with the people around us, including ourselves.
If we want to use this natural resource of the psyche – projecting – in a healthy and full way for healthy inner growth, meditation will help us draw this boundary, making it easier to learn to see things as they really are. Always remembering the premise that “observing says more about the observer than about what is being observed”.
