The mirror and its reflection.

After a certain time, one has the feeling that life, existence and one's sense of beingness is rather like the reflection in a mirror.


Abiding as the "I am"-ness, or beingness is key. We need to start from where we find ourselves in life. For most, this is in total identification with the body-mind complex. We have been conditioned to believe and know ourselves only as this body-mind. Conditioning that has happened over the long course of our entire life (from around age 2), and over the course of the collective human existence as a whole. We cannot think or analyze our way out of this situation, any more than we can think our way out of eating lunch today.
 
By abiding as the "I am" for as much as possible, and whenever possible, we slowly come to know the situation as it really is. A subtle sense of being more than just the body-mind complex becomes apparent or intuited.


The life that we thought we 'owned' starts to reveal itself as merely the play of forces, conditions, and factors, which themselves are reflections in the 'mirror' of being. But this has to be experienced directly, rather than thought about or believed.. lest this too become another belief system parking-spot.


The mirror, its light and the play of the light (appearing as the dancing reflection) is just one wholeness- hence the term 'nonduality'. Any duality appearing in the whole, such as the reflection and its seeming parts, can't be outside or separate from the whole- any more than waves could be separate from the ocean (to coin a commonly used metaphor).