mirror meditation help? please

[mewtwo]

I was wondering what happened to me? see i was meditating looking in a mirror and had a thought am i the observer or am i the observee? like what side of the mirror am i on? then i had another thought that it does not matter cause the self does not exist. It lasted for like 5 seconds and then disapeared. did i have a kensho or is this one of mara tricks?

[3L3VAT3]

Dr.Morris has a whole chapter about mirror meditation in his book PATH NOTES... called "mirror mirror seeing through a glass darkly"

 

Peep game.

[Birch]

It's pretty cool as an exercise. And very important in solidifying one's sense of "this is me" - aside from the other mirrors (i.e. other people and life in general)

 

Do you remember seeing your reflection for the very first time? I don't, but I do remember playing with mirrors to show myself other "dimensions" - at the time I was just a kid, pointing the mirror at the ceiling and seeing it as the floor of another room beside the one I was in. Then walking around/acting in the reflected world. I recall finding it really easy to be in both "worlds". My parents told me to stop it because I kept tripping over the ceiling beams I think. Or they just thought it was weird. Either or.

 

There can also be issues with mirrors. For example, a contemporary issue is that young women will look in a mirror and see a "fat chick" looking back at her. And so she will be unhappy. But only if she had looked in other mirrors first (such as fashion mags).

[mewtwo]

butt did i have a kensho?

[Aetherous]

No it doesn't sound like it was.

[Maddie]

I tried some of those things Dr. Morris said in his "Pathnotes" book regarding mirrors before. Very interesting. A couple times my reflection disappeared, and another time I saw myself as an old man.

[Birch]

I don't know!

What really happened for you?

 

I'll let other TTB's assess the kensho-ness of your experience, but I'm assuming from what you say that you had something close to it. Except weirdly, Zen doesn't seem to deal very well with nuances when it comes to this stuff. I suppose there is a clue there. Where are the Zen TTBers?

 

I reckon that in traditional "kensho" you'd yourself ALSO drop off from the experience. So there wouldn't actually be a "you" to experience anything at all. How that would become clear, well, I don't know because it hasn't happened to me yet.

 

The "technicalities" of experience (sic) are best left to more experienced than I. I have had the sense of myself as a person "dropping out" (don't worry/unfortunately it comes back ) and I have relatively low brain chatter. I still hold myself in specific conditioned ways so it's not yet all that...