A Mirror and its Reflection (a thought experiment)

Session 6, Assignment for Week 2.

 In the film “Gravity” there is a scene in which Sandra Bullock is spinning wildly in open space after an explosion has torn apart their space station and flung the astronauts afield.  This scene gives you a sense of the vastness of space and how negligible human artifacts are within it.  (Thor Heyerdahl experiences something similar, but in two dimensions instead of three, when he and his crew paddle out from Kon-Tiki and, looking back, see a tiny cork–their whole world for months–bobbing up and down on the boundless Ocean).

After moments of sheer terror, she sees the remnants of the space station and uses her jet packs to cover the distance.  Her discovery of a few pieces of metal in the vastness of space came to mind when I read the following phrase (on the theme that “Thoughts take form out of awakened awareness . . .):

“It is something like letting the images in a mirror guide us to the mirror.” DTS 283.

 What a striking image.  What if a mirror, spinning in space, came alongside someone who is themselves spinning in space, and reflected back the starry firmament?  At first it might be invisible against the backdrop of similar points of light.  But once noticed, the stars reflected in the mirror might appear more manageable than the infinite background–with no measure of distance possible.   And how comforting when this mirror briefly reflects the self back to itself.

 A sense of kinship between the depth of space and this rectangular plane (containing, limiting and flattening its reflections of the whole), might make it possible to notice the vastness of starry firmament to which the mirror’s reflection owes its being.

 Perhaps familiar reflections, viewed in the light of a greater wholeness (field, logos, unified time), can provide such glimpses of another vaster realm.  We just need to sense that these reflections are not the final word—not substantial, not linear, not known entities.