by Gregg Braden
The mirrors of judgment are subtle, elusive, and possibly won’t make sense to everyone who becomes aware of them. When my friends and family heard of my decision to “do nothing,” they felt that I was in denial about what had happened. “She took your money!” they said. “She violated your trust! She left you with nothing!” On one level, their observations were true enough—all of those things had happened. My sense was that if I had followed the typical pattern of retribution and getting even, I would have found myself in the vicious cycle of thinking that feeds just such an experience. On another level, however, in simply being who they were, each of the three people showed me something about myself that would become key in the business decisions that I would make in the future. That something was a powerful lesson in the discernment of trust.
Prior to that time, I’d wanted to believe that trust is binary. That is, we either trust someone or we don’t—and if we do, we can trust them fully. While I didn’t like to think of the world in another way, I had learned from these three relationships that there are levels of trust that we’re left to discern in one another. Often we trust others to a greater degree and with more responsibility than they can even trust themselves. And this is just what I’d experienced.
The recognition of judgment reflected in a relationship is a powerful discovery that has reverberations that will touch every aspect of life. To the people who helped me with my lessons, I give thanks. And to those who showed me my humanness, I offer my deepest respect and gratitude for impeccably holding up the mirror before me. What a beautiful validation of the mystery of the second mirror of relationship!
(Note: In the previous story, I’ve alluded to reconciling the charge of judgment without fully describing precisely how that reconciliation may be accomplished. It is addressed fully in my 2006 Hay House release, Secrets of the Lost Mode of Prayer, as “The Third Secret: Blessing Is the Release.” To summarize this powerful key to transforming our judgments, blessing is the ancient secret that releases us from life’s suffering long enough to replace it with another feeling. When we bless the people or things that have hurt us, we’re temporarily suspending the cycle of pain. Whether this suspension lasts for a nanosecond or an entire day makes no difference. Whatever the period of time, during the blessing a doorway opens for us to begin our healing and move on with life. The key is that for some interval, we’re released from our hurt long enough to let something else into our hearts and minds: the power of “beauty.”)
THE THIRD MIRROR:
REFLECTIONS OF WHAT WE’VE
LOST, GIVEN AWAY, OR HAD
TAKEN FROM US
“The kingdom of the [father] is like a certain woman
who was carrying a [jar] full of meal. While she was
walking [on the] road, still some distance from home,
the handle of the jar broke, and the meal emptied
out behind her [on] the road. She did not realize it;
she had noticed no accident. When she reached her
house, she set the jar down and found it empty.”4
— The Gospel of Thomas
Your love, compassion, and caring are like the meal in the jar of the preceding parable. Throughout your life, they are the parts of you that comfort, nurture, and support others (as well as you) in the tough times. When we lose the people, places, and things that we hold dear, it’s our loving and compassionate nature that allows us to survive and get through those experiences.
Because we share them willingly, love, compassion, and caring are also the parts of us that are most vulnerable to being lost, innocently given away, or taken from us by those who have power over us. Each time we trust enough to love or nurture someone else and that faith is violated, we lose a little of ourselves to the experience. Our reluctance to expose ourselves again to such vulnerability is our protection—the way we survive our deepest hurts and greatest betrayals. And each time we shut off the access to our truest nature of compassion and nurturing, we’re like the meal slowly leaving the jar that the woman is carrying.
When we do reach a point in life when we really want to open up and share ourselves with another person, we reach inside for our love, only to find that it’s gone and has left a reservoir of emptiness in its place. We discover that we’ve lost ourselves little by little to the very experiences that we trusted enough to allow them into our lives.
The good news here is that those parts of ourselves that seem to be absent are never really gone. It isn’t as though they’re obliterated forever … they’re part of our truest essence, a part of our soul. And just as the soul can never be destroyed, the core of our true nature can never be lost. It’s simply masked and hidden for safekeeping. To recognize how we do the masking is to embark upon a fast path of healing. Calling back to us the parts of ourselves that we’ve lost may be the greatest expression of our personal mastery.
Early in my career in the defense industry, I worked as part of a team developing software for weapon systems. My colleagues and I shared a small work space in typical Air Force–regulation desks, chairs, and cubicles; and we spent long hours together in close proximity. As you can imagine, there was little privacy. As the phone conversations bounced from the stark Sheetrock walls and drifted over the tops of the cubicles, we got to know one another very well—so well, in fact, that we quickly became virtual advisors to one another for everything from career choices and dating options to family matters and personal lives.
Several times each week, we would go for lunch together, occasionally cashing paychecks and running quick noontime errands. It was during one of those lunch-hour adventures that I had the opportunity to see firsthand the mirror of an experience that created a personal “hell” in the life of one of my colleagues, a man who had also become a friend.
On any given day, my friend would “fall in love” with the women he met throughout the course of his business. It might be the server who had taken our order or the cashier at the checkout line of the grocery store. Honestly, it was almost anyone who crossed his path during the day (anyone female, that is). It happened everywhere, and the pattern was always the same: He would simply look into the woman’s eyes and “feel this feeling” that he couldn’t explain. Without understanding what it was all about, he placed his experience into the only explanation that he could find for what was happening. He felt that he was in love! And he fell in love many times each day.
The reason why this was such a problem was that he was married. He had a beautiful wife who loved him very much and a beautiful new son, and he loved both of them tremendously. The last thing he would ever want to do was hurt them in any way or destroy what they’d created together. At the same time, his feelings for other women were nearly overwhelming and something that he simply didn’t understand.
On this occasion, we had just returned to the office following a quick lunch and gas-station/bank run. It was in the bank that he got into trouble. There was a beautiful teller working at the window where we deposited our checks. (This was in the old days before electronic deposits.) By the time we got back to the office, all he could do was think about her. He couldn’t work or focus, and he was unable to get her off his mind. “What if she’s thinking about me right now?” he asked. “What if she’s ‘the one’?” Finally, he picked up the phone, called the bank, found the teller, and asked if they could meet for coffee after work. She agreed. But while they were at the coffee shop, he looked into the eyes of the woman serving the drinks and fell in love with her!
I’m sharing this story because for reasons that he didn’t understand, this man was compelled to initiate contact with women he honestly believed he had feelings for. In doing so, he was risking everything that he held dear, including his wife, son, and career. What was happening to him?
Have you ever had a similar experience (although hopefully to a lesser degree)? Have you ever found yourself in a perfectly happy, committed relationship, and suddenly “it” happens? Or maybe you’re not in a relationship
or even looking for one, when—without warning—there you are walking down a busy street or in a mall, grocery store, or airport, and you have “the experience.” Someone you’ve never seen before passes you, in that instant your eyes meet, and—zing—there’s that feeling. Perhaps it’s just a sense of familiarity or possibility, or it could be a nearly overwhelming impulse to stand close to this person, to get to know him or her, or even to initiate a conversation. I’ve asked about this many times in workshop situations. Interestingly, I’ve found that if we’re really honest with ourselves, this kind of connection isn’t so unusual.
When it happens, the encounter commonly goes something like this: Even though two people’s eyes have met and they’ve obviously felt the “feeling,” one of them will discount the moment. For a brief fraction of a second, however, something undeniable happens … there’s an altered state and a sense of unreality. In that fleeting instant beyond the casual glance, their eyes communicate a message. Each person will be saying something to the other in that moment that probably neither is even aware of.
Then, almost as if on cue, their rational minds will create a distraction—anything to break the uneasiness of the contact. It may be the sound of a car or another person passing by. It can be as simple as a leaf blowing across the street, or a sneeze. It could even be sidestepping gum on the sidewalk! The point is that using anything for an excuse, one of the people will shift his or her attention, and the moment will be gone, just like that!
When we have such an experience, what has just happened?
FLNDING WHAT WE’VE LOST IN
OTHER PEOPLE
When we find ourselves in these situations, we’re faced with a powerful opportunity to know ourselves in a very special way—that is, if we recognize what the moment is all about. If we don’t, then, as my engineer friend discovered, this kind of connection can become confusing and even frightening! The secret of such encounters is the essence of the mystery of the third mirror.
To survive in our lives, we’ve all compromised huge parts of who we are. Each time we do so, we lose something inside in ways that are socially acceptable, yet nonetheless painful. Taking on adult roles and missing out on childhood following a family breakup; the loss of racial identity as cultures are forced together; and the survival of an early trauma through repressing emotions of hurt, anger, and rage are all examples of losing pieces of ourselves.
Why would we do such a thing? Why would we betray our beliefs, love, trust, and compassion, knowing that they’re the very essence of who we are? The answer is simple: It’s survival. As a child, we may have discovered that it’s easier to remain silent, rather than voicing an opinion at the risk of being ridiculed and invalidated by parents, brothers, sisters, and peers. As the object of abuse in a family, it’s much safer to “give in” and forget, instead of resisting those who have power over us. As a society, we accept the killing of others during war, for example, and justify it as a special circumstance. We’ve all been conditioned to give ourselves away in the face of conflict, disease, and overwhelming emotion in ways that we’re only now beginning to understand. In each instance, we have the opportunity to see a powerful possibility, rather than the judgment of what’s right and wrong.
For every piece of ourselves that we’ve given away to be where we are in life today, there’s the emptiness that’s left behind, waiting to be filled. We’re constantly searching for whatever it is that fills our particular void. When we find someone who has the very things that we’ve given away, it feels good to be near him or her. The person’s complementary essence fills our inner void and makes us feel whole again. This is the key to understanding what happened to my engineer friend and in the other examples previously discussed.
When we find our “missing” pieces in others, we’ll be powerfully and irresistibly drawn to them. We may even believe that we “need” them in our lives, until we remember that what we’re so attracted to in them is something that we still have within us … it’s simply sleeping. In the awareness that we still possess those characteristics and traits, we may unmask them and reincorporate them back into our lives. And when we do, we suddenly find that we’re no longer powerfully, magnetically, and inexplicably drawn to the person who originally mirrored those traits for us.
Recognizing our feelings toward others for what they are and not for what our conditioning has made them out to be is the key to the third mirror of relationship. That unexplainable feeling that we have when we’re with someone else—that magnetism and fire that makes us feel so alive—is really us! It’s the essence of those parts of us that we’ve lost and our recognition that we want them back in our lives. So, with this in mind, let’s go back to the story of my engineer friend.
Certainly, there’s a good possibility that without knowing it consciously, my friend had seen in those women pieces of himself that he had lost, given away, or had taken from him throughout his life. There’s a good chance that he ran across them in men as well, but couldn’t allow himself to have the same feelings because of his conditioning. In his experience, the things that he lost were so prevalent that he found some trace of them in nearly everyone he met.
Not understanding what his feelings were all about, however, he was compelled to follow them in the only way he knew. He honestly believed that each encounter was an opportunity for happiness, because he felt so good while he was with the women. He still loved his wife and son very much—when I asked him once if he would ever leave them, he looked shocked. He had no desire to end his marriage, yet he followed the force of what he felt into compromising situations until the loss of his family became a very real danger.
HOW TO DISCOVER WHAT YOUR
FEELINGS OF ATTRACTION ARE
TELLING YOU
Each of us has masterfully given away the portions of ourselves that we felt were necessary in the moment for our physical or emotional survival. When we do, it’s easy to see ourselves as “less than” and get trapped within our beliefs about what remains. For some people, the trade-off occurs before we ever know it, and we don’t realize what’s happened; for others, it’s a conscious choice.
One afternoon while I was working in the same defense corporation with my engineer friend, an unexpected invitation landed on my desk. It was for an informal presentation that was to be made to White House and military officials for the newly funded weapon system named Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI), popularly referred to as “Star Wars.” During the reception that followed the event, I had the opportunity to listen in on a conversation between one of the high-ranking military officials and a CEO from our company.
The question that the CEO asked related to the personal cost the other man had incurred to be in his position of power. “What sacrifices did you have to make to get where you are today?” he asked. The official described how he’d risen through the ranks of the military and the Pentagon and into a position of authority with a large multinational corporation. I listened intently as the man answered with unusual candor and honesty.
“To get where I am today,” he began, “I had to give myself away to the system. Each time I advanced in rank, I lost another piece of myself in life. One day I realized that I was on top and looked back at my life. What I discovered was that I’d given away so much of myself that there was nothing left. The corporations and military owned me. I’d let go of the things that I loved the most: my wife, children, friends, and health. I traded those things for power, wealth, and control.”
I was amazed by his honesty. Even though this man had admittedly lost himself in the process, he was aware of what he’d done. He was saddened, but to him it was a price worth paying for his position of power. Although probably not for the same reasons, we each may do something similar over the course of our lives. For many of us, however, the goal is less about power and more about survival.
When you do encounter someone in your life who ignites a feeling of familiarity, I invite you to immerse yourself in the moment. Something rar
e and precious is happening for both of you: You’ve just found someone who’s kept the pieces of you that you’re searching for. Often this is a two-way experience, with the other person being drawn to you for the same reason! Using your power of discernment, if you feel that it’s appropriate, initiate a conversation. Begin talking about anything—anything at all—to maintain eye contact. While you’re speaking, mentally ask yourself this simple question: What do I see in this person that I’ve lost in myself, given away, or had taken from me?
Almost immediately, a response will come to you in your mind. It may be something as simple as a feeling of realization or as clear as a voice within that you recognize and that’s been with you since childhood. Answers are often single words or short phrases, and your body knows what’s meaningful for you. Maybe you simply perceive a beauty in this person that you feel is missing within you for the moment. Possibly it will be the individual’s innocence in life, the grace with which he or she moves down the grocery aisle, his or her confidence while performing the task at hand, or simply the radiance of his or her vitality.
Your encounter need last only seconds, perhaps a few minutes at most. Those brief instants are your opportunity to feel the joy and exhilaration of the moment. This is you finding part of yourself in another person, something that you already have, as well as the feeling of what it’s like to have that something awakened.
For those of us who dare to acknowledge the sense of familiarity in such momentary encounters, the mirror of loss is probably something that faces us every day. We find a completeness in ourselves as others mirror to us our truest nature. Collectively, we’re looking for our wholeness, and we individually create the situations that lead us to find it. From members of clergy to teachers, older people to youthful individuals, parents to children, all are catalysts of feeling.
