This development is called discriminating mirror-like consciousness. Everyone and everything is seen as it is. This is the realm of the mind in which it is seen that emptiness is form and form is emptiness. Your mind is spacious and empty; your consciousness is released so that everything is seen as it is. All the content of experience is seen exactly as it is, without a wish to manipulate, or label, or value things according to the unconscious. This is also experienced as clear mind, a sense of clarity and precision. Forms are exactly themselves, thoughts are just thoughts, feelings arise without impression or response, things are seen without the subjective filter. It is seeing things without the past, completely fresh and new. Cosmic consciousness is more primordial than this quality. Cosmic consciousness is the knowingness itself, the capacity to be conscious. In the mirror-like consciousness, the fundamental capacity for consciousness is functioning to simply reflect back what is there without distortions.

This primal quality -- the most original, intrinsic nature of the soul -- is pure clarity, transparency, luminosity, awareness. Thus, the soul is primarily an organ of perception with the capacity to see things as they are. You could say that Being perceives through the soul. How does God see? Through the soul. How does Being experience? Through the soul. This basic quality of the soul is sometimes called "mirror-like awareness." It is mirror-like in the sense that it functions in the way a mirror functions. A mirror reflects things exactly as they are with no distortion. Part of the development of ego in the context of inadequacies in the holding environment is the loss of this mirror-like awareness, a loss that is both a result of the reactions based on distrust and a factor causing the reactions. This loss is the loss of the capacity for objectivity, for seeing things without subjective filters.

We refer to this perception without recognition as nonconceptual awareness, for recognition and knowing require concepts. There is awareness of content but no recognition of it; recognition requires a further step in the functioning of consciousness. The traditional metaphor for this pure perceptivity is the mirror. The mirror analogy describes the soul’s primordial and original condition, which is the pure nonconceptual awareness of experience. This is the fundamental ground of any experience, which is the pure nonconceptual bare awareness of experience before recognition, reaction, categorization, or any such phenomena occur. Becoming conscious of this nonconceptual awareness is an important aspect of inner work, and something we begin to understand from the first glimpses of recognizing the soul. Simply understanding that the soul is a medium that is aware of experience within its own field, we begin to understand the mirror-like quality of the soul. A mirror reflects forms without adding anything to them. It merely registers the shapes, colors, and movements of the forms. Our consciousness functions like a mirror with respect to the forms that arise within it. This nonconceptual awareness is fundamental to the soul, a function that underlies and precedes all other functions of consciousness.

The real mirror—which is the self-awareness you are cultivating in learning to mirror yourself—is to see yourself without judgment, without comparison, without self-hatred, without reification, and without conceptualization but with compassion and courage and kindness and love and presence and awareness and intelligence. The teachings in this book have been offered as support for the process of becoming your own mirror in these different ways. They can help you develop the confidence that you can learn to sit and meditate, to inquire, to recognize yourself where you are, to see your own personal thread and be able to remain with it so that it unfolds and reveals the truth of what you truly are—your True Nature. This is a practice that requires a sustained meditative, focused exploration apart from the activities of daily life. It takes quiet times of attention and reflection to develop the subtle attunement in our soul to our inner whereabouts. Only after continued regular practice with concentrated attention to our ongoing experience can our contact with presence withstand the constant distractions of our own busyness.

Buddhists call this condition “mirror-like awareness”: The self is completely transparent to itself, can see and be itself fully, just like looking in the mirror. We then see things just as they are, without opinions, without projections, without ideas, without distortions: completely objective. When we realize mirror-like awareness, that transparency, clarity and complete colorlessness is seen at the same time to be complete perfection. This awareness makes us clear about ourselves, all the way to our true nature. So we are clearly and transparently cognizant of our condition at the moment. In the work of self-realization, the self regains its light, which is perception, which is awareness, which is clarity, which is understanding, which is consciousness. The inner journey is a matter of increased awareness, increased consciousness, increased clarity, increased perception, increased understanding, and increased knowledge, which inherently embody the spiritual qualities of love, compassion and so on, and the various faculties of functioning. Self-realization is the realization of the potential of the self with full awareness and appreciation.