Mirrors and their reflections
Somewhere in the world there must be a mine of mirrors. Mirror is not something created but something born … What is a mirror? It’s the only invented material that is natural. Whoever looks at a mirror, whoever manages to see it without seeing himself, whoever understands that its depth consists of being empty, whoever walks inside its transparent space without leaving the trace of his own image upon it—that somebody has understood its mystery of thing.1
Reality is like a kaleidoscope: a cacophony of mirrors reflects itself fractally and with infinite precision. But in reality, every reflection is different from every other reflection. Each soul experiences the world in a slightly different way, while at the same time having something of every other soul. It is possible to dive infinitely deep into any image and discover everything through it.
The “not” is the mirror image of the “is”. What is flows from what isn’t, and what isn’t receives what is. Death is the “not” of life, and it is in everything, even deeply intertwined with life itself, fiber by fiber. When I remind myself of this, I feel comforted.
Are the images shown in mirrors symmetric? I mean this: when I look in a mirror, it appears as though the image is flat whereas what is outside the mirror is deep. So then, when the mirror looks at me, do I appear flat to it? Are we each others’ images—that is, each others’ mutual representations? Or is it the case that a mirror is a special kind of thing that creates images which are in some way different from the ones found outside mirror-space? If this is the case, then we would expect this world also to be a representation of some other world (which is, loosely speaking, the idea of Platonism).