The mirror is the surface upon which the ego projects its reality.

When the dreamer awakens from a dream, how do they know they are not in fact drifting off into a dream, away from a state of conscious awareness? Which is the dream and which is the reality? The mirror can serve to clarify or confuse this question. What is the function of the mirror? The mirror reflects and magnifies our expectations, fears, thoughts, feelings, belief systems, and the hidden mental and emotional structure of the subconscious mind. Therefore, the projection always seeks to reinforce its current ego perspective.

The nature of the projection dictates the clarity of the reflection. The clarity of the reflection is dictated by the level of consciousness of one’s projection. The more unconscious the projection, the more opaque and unclear the reflection. The more neutral and unattached the quality of the projection, the more clear, bright, and pure the reflection. This reflective neutrality is often described as possessing the innocence of a child, tasting every experience as if it were the first, coupled with the wisdom and faith of a holy man.

The ultimate mystery of projection lies in its ability to mistakenly convince the conscious mind that the reflection is not a reflection, but a perception of the phenomenological world. This phenomenon is called the ventriloquism of the ego, or the ego’s ability to deceive the conscious mind into thinking what it sees derives from something outside of itself, rather than something indigenous. It is the exception rather than the rule that man moves through the world with the conscious understanding that the undeveloped self is constantly attempting to convince us that something or someone else is creating what we are experiencing as our lives.

The challenge of perfecting one’s projection lies in the affirmation and internalization of the reality that we are both in control of, and responsible for what lies before the mirror, because it is in a very literal sense a product of our own projected self. And we must delve deeply within the subconscious self in order to fully understand which version of ourselves we are projecting out into the world, thus creating our reality.