 |
| Śrī Yantra: the geometry of return — every line a story collapsing into the bindu of pure awareness. |
The Mirror and Its Dirt
The mind is a mirror.
Whatever stands before it appears within it.
When it is clean, it reflects truth effortlessly; when smeared, it multiplies distortions and calls them reality.
Most spiritual disciplines begin as cleaning — but sooner or later, cleaning turns into theatre. Some people start shouting about the dirt: “I am fallen, I am unworthy, I am the worst of sinners.” Others begin to decorate the grime with light: “I am Śiva, I am Brahman, I am the Infinite.” Both are distracted by the reflection. No one simply wipes the glass.
This confusion has existed in every age. The humble proclaim their nothingness until the declaration itself becomes pride. The proud proclaim their divinity until they mistake inflation for realization. Both extremes share a single premise — the obsession with self-description.
True humility begins when the narrative ends.
Not when the mirror claims to be clean, and not when it despairs of ever being clean, but when it silently reflects whatever is — knowing its nature was never touched by dirt in the first place.
Humility, in its pure form, is not a virtue.
It is the disappearance of story.
It says nothing about “I.” It does not tremble, and it does not boast.
It is the clarity that remains when both confession and affirmation have burned out.
This essay traces that clarity — how devotion becomes self-abasement, how philosophy becomes self-deification, and how both dissolve into the simple act of cleaning the mirror without comment.
The Disease of Self-Abasement (The Devotional Mask)
In many devotional circles humility is mistaken for self-disgust.
The tongue learns a single litany: “I am fallen, I am unworthy, I am lower than a worm.”
The posture appears saintly, but its center remains the same—an endless fascination with me.
This is not surrender; it is narcissism turned inside-out.
The ego survives as a condemned celebrity: always on stage, forever confessing.
It polishes its own humiliation until the performance gleams.
The heart becomes a courtroom where the self prosecutes and defends itself in equal measure;
God is reduced to the spectator.
Then comes the medicine that heals this theatre.
Śrī Ramakrishna Paramahamsa said:
“Bondage is of the mind, and freedom is also of the mind.
A man is free if he constantly thinks: ‘I am a free soul. How can I be bound, whether I live in the world or in the forest? I am a child of God, the King of Kings. Who can bind me?’If bitten by a snake, a man may get rid of its venom by saying emphatically, ‘There is no poison in me.’ In the same way, by repeating with grit and determination, ‘I am not bound, I am free,’ one really becomes so—one really becomes free.
The wretch who constantly says, ‘I am bound, I am bound,’ only succeeds in being bound. He who says day and night, ‘I am a sinner, I am a sinner,’ verily becomes a sinner. One should have such burning faith in God that one can say: ‘What? I have repeated the name of God, and can sin still cling to me? How can I be a sinner any more? How can I be in bondage any more?’
If a man repeats the name of God, his body, mind, and everything become pure. Why should one talk only about sin and hell and such things? Say but once, ‘O Lord, I have undoubtedly done wicked things, but I won’t repeat them,’ and have faith in His name.”
Ramakrishna did not preach denial of fault; he pointed to the danger of identifying with fault.
Conviction, not circumstance, determines freedom.
The mirror may have dirt, but the mirror itself was never dirt.
To keep shouting “I am dirty” is only to grind the stain deeper.
From a clinical view, this habit mirrors learned helplessness—a state where remorse replaces responsibility.
The person gains covert importance through guilt: the special case of misery.
Psychology calls it negative narcissism; bhakti calls it endless lamentation.
Both feed the same hunger for significance.
True repentance happens once, like the first wipe across the glass.
After that, the act is maintenance, not identity.
The mirror does not boast of its cleanliness, nor does it dramatize its dust; it simply reflects.
Real humility begins there—wordless, functional, unafraid.
It bows naturally, not performatively.
It does not feed on guilt or on pardon.
It is the quiet confidence of a surface that knows it was never anything but clear, whatever passed across it.
The Disease of Self-Deification (The Cosmic Ego Mask)
If the first mask of false humility says “I am nothing,” the second insists “I am everything.”
It sounds lofty, yet the same gravity of self-concern pulls beneath both.
The ego that once gloried in failure now glories in infinity.
When the wound of smallness becomes unbearable, the mind reverses its polarity.
It begins to chant, “I am Śiva, I am Brahman.”
The theater of sin becomes the theater of light.
But it is still theater—the same actor in new costume.
From a psychological lens, this is grandiose narcissism:
an ego compensating for inner fragility through cosmic language.
The persona expands to divine scale, mistaking size for freedom.
It does not disappear; it metastasizes.
Ramana Maharshi exposed the mechanism precisely:
-
No Need to Assert the Evident
Genuine realization is silent.
To one who knows fire, it is absurd to repeat “This is fire.”
Likewise, when awareness has ripened into fact, there is no urge to declare “I am Brahman.”
The very repetition betrays doubt; it tries to build certainty through noise.
Ramana asked, “Why should a man shout, ‘I am a man,’ unless someone mistakes him for a beast?” -
Duality in Affirmations
Every statement such as “I am Śiva” still contains duality, two poles: the speaker and the spoken.
The mind creates a miniature altar within itself—one part worships, one part is worshipped.
The Goddess who stands beyond all divisions sees this play and smiles.
She does not pronounce unity; She is unity. -
Risk of Ego Inflation
Declaring divinity can harden into identity.
The seeker begins to act, subtly or overtly, as the awakened one, craving recognition for his own transcendence.
The personal ego dies only to reappear as the cosmic guru.
This inflation is harder to cure than despair because it glows.
The truth is simpler.
Man contains both the god and the pig: the impulse toward illumination and the mud it rises from.
To recognize both is sanity; to identify with either is delusion.
The error is not seeing divinity or darkness within oneself—it is mistaking the transient mud for the mirror itself.
Ramana’s correction was surgical.
Instead of repeating “Śivoham” (“I am Śiva”) or “So’ham” (“I am He”),
turn the mind upon itself and ask “Koham?” — Who am I?
This question adorns nothing; it cleans.
Each honest inquiry wipes one more smear from the mirror until even the cleaner disappears.
What remains is awareness unspoken—neither sinner nor god, only seeing.
Clearing the Mirror — Conviction, Not Story
Abhinavagupta writes in Parātriṃśikā-vivaraṇa:
uktaṃ ca —
yo niścayaḥ paśujanasya jaḍo ’smi karma-saṃpāśito ’smi malino ’smi parerito ’smi |
ity etad anya-dṛḍha-niścaya-lābha-siddhyā sadyaḥ patir bhavati viśva-vapuś cidātmā ||
“It has also been said: the conviction of the bound soul is, ‘I am dull, I am ensnared by karma, I am impure, I am driven by others.’ But by attaining a firm opposite conviction, he at once becomes the Lord — the all-formed, Conscious Self.”
These words strike the very axis of transformation.
The shift is not in what the mind sees, but in what it believes itself to be.
Conviction is a force — it can enslave, or it can liberate.
Ramana Maharshi pointed to the same medicine stripped of ornament:
Even if one be a great sinner, one should not worry and weep ‘O! I am a sinner, how can I be saved?’ One should completely renounce the thought ‘I am a sinner’ and concentrate keenly on meditation on the Self; then, one would surely succeed.
(From 'Who Am I?')
Both Abhinavagupta and Ramana speak of conviction, but not the kind discussed before.
In the first two stages, conviction was tangled with identity —
“I am fallen,” or its opposite, “I am God.”
Both are fixations on a story. One shrinks the self; the other inflates it.
Here, conviction means something else: the recognition that those stories were never true.
Abhinavagupta calls it the “opposite conviction” — not an inflated belief, but a clear refusal to keep repeating the false one.
Ramana refines it further: instead of affirming “I am divine,” he says, cease the sinner-thought and turn inward.
Don’t replace one label with another; look at the “I” that keeps labeling.
Healthy conviction weakens the illusion rather than feeds it.
It is not saying “I am perfect” or “I am flawed” but “these thoughts are not what I am.”
That small shift from story to seeing begins real freedom.
The mirror doesn’t clear itself by denial (“there is no dust”) or despair (“I am filthy”),
but by noticing: “This is only on the surface.”
Attention, not judgment, wipes it clean —
and beneath the marks, the light that never left begins to shine.
The Middle Path — From Servant to Silence
The absence of story is not where one begins; it is where one arrives.
While the mirror is being cleaned, some story is still required — a shape that gives orientation, devotion, and rhythm to the act of purification.
To drop all self-image prematurely is to fall into inertia; the mind that has not yet dissolved needs a noble story to serve until it outlives stories altogether.
For this reason, the healthiest stance during practice is neither “I am nothing” nor “I am God,”
but “I am the servant of the Divine.”
It is the posture of offering, not assertion; participation without possession.
As Bhagavad Gītā 11.33 commands:
nimitta-mātraṁ bhava savyasācin —
“Become merely My instrument, O Arjuna.”
Here the Lord does not abolish action but purifies agency.
The doer remains, yet without ownership.
This is the middle bridge between bondage and being.
The life of Sai Nath of Shirdi expresses this secret perfectly.
From The Quintessence of Sai Charitra:
“Even though Sainath was the master of all that he willed, he was also the master of total humility.
He always said humbly, ‘I am the servant of the Lord,’ even when he sat at the zenith of universal lordship…
He never proclaimed before the world that he was God even though he presented cosmic unity in its pristine form.
The life of the Master was meant to be nothing but a lesson in sheer humility;
what he always said was, ‘I am a servant.’ The phrase ever on his lips was Allah Malik — ‘God is the Master.’”
From a mystical perspective, this servant-stance is the cleanest channel for Grace.
It keeps the current moving without obstruction; it burns ego through service instead of suppression.
When identity bends toward usefulness, consciousness becomes porous — the Divine can act through it unhindered.
From a psychological view, this same humility dissolves narcissism and guilt alike.
The story “I am Her instrument” anchors the psyche in meaning while protecting it from both inflation and collapse.
It gives direction without self-aggrandizement, purpose without control.
It is the healthiest archetype for a mind still in motion.
When practice ripens, even this story softens.
The servant disappears into the service; the instrument becomes soundless.
Then Ramana Maharshi’s instruction stands revealed:
“Your duty is to be and not to be this or that.
‘I am That I am’ sums up the whole truth.
The method is summarized in: Be still.”
(Maharshi Gospel, 33)
Between “to be this or that” lies the sacred apprenticeship of servanthood.
Beyond it lies only being — no roles, no attributes, no narrative at all.
When the mirror ceases even to know it is clean, that is liberation.
The Silence After “I Am That I Am”
The servant-story is the last bridge.
Until consciousness has ripened enough to rest in stillness, this bridge must be walked — not rejected.
It holds the current steady as the ego thins.
Through serving, the mind learns to act without claiming authorship.
Through conviction “I am Her instrument,” it slowly forgets to say “I.”
When the bridge has done its work, it dissolves.
The story that once preserved orientation becomes too narrow for what remains.
The current begins to move without channel; the mirror begins to shine without noticing its light.
Here, even the sacred utterance “I am That I am” becomes redundant.
Words have completed their work; they return to silence.
There is no self to name, no God to address, no witness to affirm the union.
Only awareness, undivided, prior to speech and worship alike.
Self-abasement and self-deification were two poles of the same fever.
The servant healed it by surrendering the “I.”
Now even the servant is gone — and what remains has no name.
The mirror reflects all and owns nothing.
It no longer divides the world into sacred and profane,
pure and impure, high and low.
It simply shines — not as light, but as what sees light.
When the mirror no longer tells stories about its dirt or its shine,
it is pure.
And purity, in its final meaning, is silence.
No comments:
Post a Comment