The mirror and the video cam

801: 

This point of this blog might not seem obvious but, on balance, I think it might be worth making, because self-change is governed so strongly by perception.

            We’re all the product of our own perceptions - what I see in the mirror is what I believe about myself and what I presume others see when they look at me. Maybe I don’t see an evil face staring back at me, I see what is familiar and what I want to see. I like to think it’s okay, and like most of us when mirror-gazing, I probably like most of what I see. Most of us (sort of) like ourselves, and if truth were known we are our own biggest fan. If anyone else loves us it’s their attraction to this likeable image, the one we can see in the mirror.

Perhaps there are many sentient creatures who can recognise their own image in the pool’s reflection. It confirms the “I am” ... that is, until a distortion appears. Perhaps a breeze breaks up the flat surface of the pool and self-perception becomes disturbed. Or maybe there’s a crack in the mirror distorting our image. At that point we question what we see and go on to suspect that our self-perception isn’t as reliable as we thought. “Perhaps there’s an uglier side to me than I thought”.

In our culture we believe that the human is the grandest being. We let the mirror tell us that, until we see a nasty side come up, something we can’t deny. On a superficial level, it’s a surprise when we see ourselves on video cam. It’s not the same as the mirror. We see another ‘me’. It’s unfamiliar. It’s what others actually see. It’s the reverse of what we know (from the bathroom mirror).

The first thing I thought, when I first saw myself on video was that my own vanity had hoodwinked me. At that point, everything we see on screen is up for grabs; we may start to see the connection between our own vanity and the violence in our personality, which we never saw before. We see how we really look (to others) and how it might be a good thing to take another look at our own public image. And this mightn’t be important were it not for the fact that one mistaken image throws light on another. And perhaps for the first time we see our previously-unnoticed mistakes. I’m trying to set up an introspection here, a reason why we don’t see that other side of ourselves, where we might have made some fundamental mistake, because everyone else is making the same mistake; we’ve always used others as the mirror to assess ourselves.

It takes just one surprise, one shock, to bring us to re-examine what, up until then, we have taken for granted - to realise that perceptions aren’t as reliable as we thought. Vanity shields us from seeing our mistakes. We see that these are often mistakes of arrogance, and it becomes clear that we are composed of attitudes which are held in place by this vanity.

As humans we have violent and violating attitudes, and spend our lives not realising it. We either knowingly or unknowingly create self-delusion to comfort and cushion our lives, and we’re so cushioned that we preserve our credibility in aspic.

I’m suggesting that today there are many people who want to settle accounts with their mirror. The mirror has shown us nothing true about ourselves. The truer visual recording of our attitudes shows us that we can’t go any further down the road of self-delusion and cushion-comforts. That’s surely one healthy step towards self-development.