Mirrors and shards
If you bring forth what is within you, what you bring forth will save you.
If you do not bring forth what is within you, what you do not bring forth will destroy you.
I first heard these lines from the Gospel of Thomas quoted by professor Elaine Pagels, the authority on the Nag-Hammadi scriptures and the apocryphal, gnostic gospels. A lady who knows what she’s talking about, in short.
Such truth, such a powerful image. The words are several thousand years old, but they summon Jung, Jeckyll and Hyde, and so much more.
Allowing that what lives within us to flow freely can be deeply frightening. We show ourselves naked and vulnerable if we do. And it’s not just about what most people deem to be ‘beautiful’ qualities; pain, sorrow or other aspects of ourselves we usually don’t want to pay too much attention to have to be able to flow just as freely when they present themselves. In that very moment of deliverance, honesty and dignity are born.
But don’t go there, bottle it up, hoard it in some deep down basement, and it will start to fester in the darkness. At some point we all make that false call. As children, we are even taught to do that very thing: ‘You’re not supposed to feel like that!’ ‘You’re not supposed to think those thoughts!’ Something is judged inappropriate and since we seek our surroundings’ love and approval, the unfavorable thing is quickly stuffed inside a big dark backpack we intend never to open again.
We sport the naïve hope that what we stash out of sight will disappear of its own accord. But it doesn’t. All it does, is grow stronger, like a reservoir gradually filling to the brim because no water is ever allowed out. Until the dam collapses — and it always does eventually — and the consequences are disastrous and devastating, for ourselves and very often in one fell stroke for our relationship with those around us as well.
All too often we are unaware of what exactly we have stowed away and suppress behind the dam. No wonder, since that is exactly its function: to help us deny and forget. And when it bursts, we are usually just as shocked as our surroundings.
The only solution in order to avoid that ‘what you do not bring forth will destroy you’, is to become conscious of it. If you realize you are angry, you can give that anger a voice and a place, instead of suppressing it until it makes you turn aggressive.
But how do you do that? And especially: how do you become aware of those things you have for so long wanted not to be aware of? For whoever put anger in his backpack as an unwanted emotion long ago usually does not care to be reminded of it for sheer, true fear.
There’s about a hundred possible answers to this question, of which there’s one I would like to highlight here now, because it is instantly applicable, and it is offered to us about a hundred times a day: be aware of your emotions concerning what other people are doing. Because what we feel as we are watching someone else’s actions has little or nothing to do with that other person, and everything with ourselves.
Regardless of whether what you are witnessing is a despicable deed or a gesture of warmth and beauty, the extent to which you react to it emotionally is a gauge of how you yourself are wired. The basic rule of thumb is: if it resonates with something within you, it will touch you more profoundly than if it does not resonate with something within you.
It is one of the most valuable lessons I ever learned: if you get angry at someone else, look at yourself. What exactly in his or her behavior is pushing your buttons? Nearly always I had to admit, blushing with shame, that what was egging me on was exactly the sort of behavior I displayed, too, (or wanted to), but that I didn’t approve of in myself and had therefore stashed in my backpack or hid behind my dam. Whenever others mirrored it back to me, by doing things that reminded me of it, I would get angry at them. Blaming others is so much easier than admitting you are tangled up in some sort of personal mess and you have to do something about it.
I think of this frequently, and especially at times when there is another hate crime reported, the abuse of women standing up for themselves, or the shooting of black of LGBT citizens like in Orlando. In the latter case, the shooter frequented the gay bar where he ended up killing fifty people, and he turned out to have a profile on an LGBT social network site. Sadly, this does not surprise me. Rabid haters of everything gay often turn out to be homosexuals themselves, but unable to cope with that fact. The mirror shown to them is one they can’t take, and rather than go for a round of genuine soul searching, they demonize the person presenting it to them.
If you do not bring forth what is within you, what you do not bring forth will destroy you. And others along with it…
After hate crimes the social internet canals over overflowing with messages that spell every shade of ‘love must triumph’. Whenever I read that, I feel the urge to reply: if you truly want love to triumph, get yourself in front of a mirror and start loving what it is you see there. If we honestly try that, we will have less need for smashing mirrors and injuring innocents with the shards.
