by Matthew Pallamary: One of the tenets of the New Age is the adage that we are all one, connected in our hearts, minds, and spirits…
Ancient indigenous medicine men understood that everything is interconnected, including man, plants, animals, trees, and every part of creation. American Indians often referred to these other beings as brothers.
On an esoteric level, everything is connected within everything else in what modern physicists call a holographic manner. To record a hologram, a coherent light beam passes through a beam splitter. Some of the light scattered from an object or a set of objects falls on the recording medium. The other part of the split beam reflects off of a mirror. This second light beam is known as the reference beam, which also illuminates the recording medium, so that interference occurs between the two beams. The resulting light field generates a seemingly random pattern of varying intensity, which is recorded in the hologram.
An interesting property of holograms is that if one is cut up into smaller pieces, each portion contains information about the whole object.If you look at the Internet with this paradigm in mind you will realize that the World Wide Web is really a huge mirror of the collective consciousness of humanity. All of the information is contained everywhere in the whole and much of this information is not accurate; it comes from someone’s reflection on something which can often be distorted either unconsciously or intentionally.
An interesting property of mirrors is that they often show us what we do not want to see and if the mirror is distorted, then so is the reflection. In World War II before television, those outside of the war zone got their information from newspapers, radios, and newsreels, all of which were filtered through the individual viewpoints of reporters, their editors, and government censors. The Vietnam War has been called the first televised war, but even these images were filtered through a few major networks which were censored by their editors and the government.
In the new age of the 21st century we have Internet access with technological mirrors known as digital cameras, cell phones, and all manner of instantaneous communication. Because of these mirrors the editors and the censors are being by passed and the mirror of truth is laying bare the lies of governments and the atrocities of war.Who hasn’t heard about the Abu Ghraib torture scandal? Everyone is buzzing about Wiki leaks, not to mention the numerous incidents of police brutality that have been captured. The phenomena of Facebook allowed Egyptians to plan out and execute a relatively nonviolent overthrow of an oppressive government and the violence that did occur was instantly transmitted out to the World Wide Web for the entire world to see.
Literally on another front, many believe that our erratic weather patterns are a reflection of the turbulence going on within human consciousness and many believe that this turbulence is the chaos that precedes the birth of something new.
If you do acknowledge that we are all one, then each one of us is a mirror to each other in a holographic manner from the macrocosm of the collective, down to the microcosm of our individual selves, down to the sub-personalities that make up what we think of as “I”, but is in fact many. Some of our sub-personalities we like and we constantly take them out and show them to the world. Others we don’t like and we suppress them, making them our shadow, which we don’t want to acknowledge.
Mirrors often show us what we do not want to see. If you have the ability and the strength to be completely honest with yourself, and you desire to be a whole, integrated person, then the work lies in reintegrating your hidden shadow(s). They aren’t called your shadow for nothing. They are cunning, elusive, and some would rather see the death of you than to be found out. They think that if they are discovered that they will die,which contains a grain of truth because in order to be reborn, a death is necessary.
Most people deny their shadows and the trick that the shadow plays is to project itself outside of you onto others trapping you in self-righteousness and judgment so that the waters are muddied, distorting the reflection from your mirror. This is the key. If you can bear the reflection, then you can gradually come to realize that what you strongly dislike and often hate in others, creates strong emotional reactions, because it is a reflection of that which you do not want to acknowledge or take responsibility for inside of you. It takes great courage to look at your self in the glare of this mirror and admit this.
Take a good look at everyone who is in your life. Some of them are drawn to and support your darker unconscious nature and some of them are drawn to and reflect your lighter more conscious side. Some of their sub-personalities are drawn to both the light and dark aspects of your many selves.
If you believe that we are all one, then the mirrors are out there reflecting back from everywhere that you look. Any time you feel self righteous, judgmental and superior, you can be sure that you are seeing your shadow being reflected back to you.
There are many books written on the subject of the human shadow. In order to help you see clearly into the mirrors of your soul that surround you everywhere you turn so that you can integrate yourself fully, two in particular are valuable guides; The Dark Side of the Light Chasers, by Debbie Ford, which gives you a simplified, easy to understand overview of the dynamics of shadow work, and Transforming Your Dragons: How to Turn Fear Patterns into Personal Power , by José Stevens Ph. D.
