Throughout our lives, we all encounter people, situations, and environments that cause us pain and sometimes even tremendous suffering. No matter the degree to which we experience the suffering, no one is exempt from it. Our instinctive reaction to such people, situations, or environments is to label them as problematic, as wrong, as negative, as the source of all our misery. But what if they were the perfect, custom-made key to mastering ourselves and our reality?
Every conflict we have with another person or with a certain situation in our lives is a reflection of that same conflict within us. When we have an internal conflict that is significant enough, it is materialised in the external world, not to make us suffer, but to make us aware, to nudge us to go within and resolve it. This is the mirror of reality – and it’s good.
Before we can understand this mirror effect, we must comprehend that everything that happens in our lives is for our benefit – even the most horrifying and painful events are put there by our Being for us to gain the knowledge and experience that our soul decided to gain before we incarnated into our physical body.
We have to understand that from a higher-dimensional perspective, such as the perspective of our soul, our Being, the Absolute, the Universe, God, or whatever you prefer to call it, there is no concept of good and evil; there are only opportunities for soul growth.
How many times have you labelled certain difficult situations as bad, evil, or wrong, yet once you overcame them, they actually made you grow beyond who you thought you could be? That’s exactly what those situations were designed to do, yet from our limited perspective, when we are in the midst of chaos and turmoil, we don’t really see the greater purpose of it all. But there always is one, whether you can see it at that moment or not.
Everything in your external reality is put there to wake you up to who you truly are, and in order to work with it, you must relinquish judgement and look beyond your own internal upheaval, beyond the triggers of the ego, and straight into the mirror. If you can’t do that, if you keep blaming everyone and everything in your environment for not making you comfortable and happy, you will not extract the real value of these so-called problematic situations, which are mirroring back to you a part of yourself that needs to be resolved or integrated, so that you can become more of the real You. Because your highest purpose here, above and beyond any other purpose you think you have, is to “know thyself”. And you come to know yourself by being brave and aware enough to look in the mirror.
So how exactly does the mirror work?
We experience reality from a single perspective – our own, but we are only fractals of the whole of Consciousness. Every living thing on this planet (and beyond) is also a part of Consciousness, so even though we all have our individual perspectives, ultimately, we are all one. We are Consciousness, split into infinite parts, interacting with itself. You are another me. We are two pieces of the giant broken mirror that is Consciousness, reflecting distortions back to each other, not realising that we are parts of the same whole.
This idea is also known as Christ consciousness, or Oneness, and it’s the esoteric truth behind the teachings of Jesus. Jesus was a master who incarnated the universal Christ principle. The word Christ comes from the Greek word “χριστός” (anointed one), and it was given to Jesus as a title because he incarnated the cosmic Christ force. Christ is the highest state of consciousness – it’s Consciousness being fully aware of itself and knowing that it is one with everything in existence.
We live under the illusion that we are all separate, and this is by design. But once you start to awaken, you start seeing beyond this illusion, and you realise how every interaction you have with your environment is really an interaction with yourself. Kindness, love, and understanding towards yourself reflect in kindness, love, and understanding towards others. Conversely, hatred, abuse, and judgement towards yourself become hatred, abuse, and judgement towards others. Because it’s all you to begin with.
This is what makes it easier to have compassion for “others” when they are causing pain and suffering all around them – because really, they are causing pain and suffering to themselves. Nowadays, every time I hear someone say something negative about someone else, I just see them talking to themselves in the mirror, and I think, “Why would they say that to themselves?”
This mirroring that happens in our reality is the real meaning of the Hermetic principle “As within, so without.” You might have also heard that “reality is you pushed out”. This is easily verifiable for oneself, if you just look at any conflict you have in your life, and ask yourself: Did this conflict exist within me even before it appeared in my physical reality? If you truly go within, you will find out that the answer is always “yes”.
For many years, I was working jobs that I didn’t feel aligned with – jobs that had nothing to do with what I knew I could contribute to the world, but I had the belief that it was what I had to do to survive. Most of us have been programmed to live in survival mode, and I had run with that program for most of my adult life, too.
And so, I changed job after job, not really caring about the work that I was doing but performing just well enough to please whoever was in charge of my livelihood. Of course, this made me feel out of place and inadequate. I wasn’t in an environment I could flourish in, and instead of recognising that the environment was misaligned, I blamed myself for not being well-adjusted to it. And this inner conflict eventually would materialise in my reality as a lack of appreciation from employers and a lack of opportunities for growth.
Deep down, I felt not good enough, and my external reality mirrored that back to me in every new job. Of course, the root of this conflict was me all along – I didn’t feel good enough, because I had put myself in environments that didn’t align with my inner truth, and I did that because of the subconscious belief that I wasn’t good enough to work a job that I believe in and be in an environment that sees my value; that I wouldn’t be supported even if I tried. And the environments I was in told me that every time.
On the surface, it seemed that my external reality was making me feel a sense of unworthiness, but what was really happening was that it was just reflecting the subconscious sense of unworthiness that I had originally been programmed with. Eventually, though, I realized that working the jobs that I had been working was like asking a fish to climb a tree:
“Everybody is a genius. But if you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree, it will live its whole life believing that it is stupid.”
The fish will never climb the tree, because it wasn’t designed that way. It doesn’t mean there’s anything wrong with the fish; it just means the fish should go back in the water and stop trying to be a monkey.
Once I comprehended the false belief behind this inner conflict, I started making changes that aligned more with where I wanted to be, and I’ve ended up in a much more harmonious place since.
Taking a good look in the mirror instead of fighting it paid off, and this works with every challenging situation in life. Let’s say your partner isn’t appreciating you, or they have abandoned you – in what ways are you abandoning yourself? Is there a part of you that you are not appreciating or trying to suppress? In what area of your life are you not letting yourself be who you truly are?
Someone rejected you – what parts within yourself are you rejecting and why? You don’t have enough money – are you buying into the narrative that you need to work hard to have abundance? Do you feel, deep down, that you are unworthy of wealth, unless you work your whole life away to get it? Introspection and contemplation always bring you to the root of the problem – and it’s always you.
You are the source of everything in your world – the good and the bad. We all create our own reality, whether we are conscious of it or not. Some people might find that offensive, but they probably wouldn’t be reading this right now. For the rest of us, this is the most empowering revelation – to know that we are the creators of our own reality, and to know that everything we experience is happening for us, for the expansion of our consciousness.
When you don’t know you are the source of everything, you live life believing that you are a victim, that you are helpless and at the mercy of your environment and everyone in it. This is an extremely disempowered state. The truth is, you are so infinitely powerful that you could choose slavery, and you could live your whole life in bondage, bringing people and circumstances that mirror this mentality back to you over and over again.
Your reality reflects back to you whatever you believe in, and the amount of suffering you experience is equivalent to the degree to which your beliefs are misaligned with the one universal truth – the truth that you are an infinite being with no limitations, that you are pure love, that you are worthy of everything, and you have the power to create anything you want. The more pain a certain situation brings to your life, the more misaligned with the truth your beliefs are about it.
Once you realise you are the source of everything and that everything is you, you stop trying to fix the world, and you start fixing yourself. You come to see that the conflict is never really somewhere out there. It’s never separate from you. Trying to fix a problem in the external world is going at it completely backwards. It’s like looking at your frowning face in the mirror and blaming the mirror for frowning, not realising that all you need to do is smile.
Everything that has ever caused you to suffer has been a blessing in disguise if you learned something about yourself from it. If you didn’t, you will most likely experience it over and over again, in slightly different situations, with slightly different people, but the lesson will keep coming back until you learn it.
Ever wonder why so many people constantly go through relationship after relationship, complaining that all their partners are the same? They are correct, their partners really are the same, because they are all serving the same purpose – to be the perfect mirror of some belief we hold that’s keeping us from becoming the truest version of ourselves and living our life in the way we intended to before incarnating here.
Through the mirror of external reality, our Being communicates with us when we are off course to guide us in the right direction. Once you start seeing that everything in your reality is happening for you and that you are creating it for yourself, you will realise that you have power over your experience, and you will no longer see yourself as a victim of anyone or anything. Use this powerful mirror to know the depths of yourself and to master your own reality.