Sankara and The Man in the Mirror - 'Thou art That'

 Who is the man in the mirror?  You are.  You are reflected and refracted by the multiple projections of your personality coming from your self and others.  Like a nebula falling through space and time a personal identity holds it all together like gravity.  Is your identity anything more than  this continuing event?  The analogy of the mirror is regarded as a tantra.  No babies, not the one on the ceiling, in this use tantra is the weaving together of apparently contrary elements.  ‘Thou are That’ is chapter XVIII of Upadesa Sahasri and it is the mahavaka (great saying) of the upanishads that embodies that coincidenta oppositorum.  Shankara uses the notion of reflection as a compendium of advaita.  He writes:

“As it imitates the mirror the reflection of a face is different from the face.  The face which does not depend on the mirror (for its existence) is also  different from its reflection.  Similarly, the reflection of the Self in the ego is alsoregarded (as different from the pure Self) like that of the face which is different from the face.  The pure Self is considered to be different from its reflection like the face (which is different from its own).  In fact, however, the Self and Its reflection are free from real distinction between each other like the face and its reflection. “  #32/33 Upadesa Sahasri by Sri Sankaracarya trans. by Swami Jagadananda

Consciousness itself which is never sublated or eliminated is the single continuing changeless element.  It pervades the body/mind (the jiva)  which in advaita is jada (inert).

“The intellect has no consciousness and the Self no action.  The word ‘knows’ can, therefore, reasonably be applied to neither of them.” (# 54)

That is a shocking observation for most of  Western philosophy in which mind and consciousness are interchangeable.   I have said most because there is a strain of panpsychism in Sophia which  runs contrary to the dualism of body and mind.  Physicalism is its opposite number and monistic in intent.

Here is Yeats giving us his own mighty word:

(from ‘The Tower’ section III)

It is time that I wrote my will;

I choose upstanding men

That climb the streams until

The fountain leap, and at dawn

Drop their cast at the side

Of dripping stone; I declare

They shall inherit my pride,

The pride of people that were

Bound neither to Cause nor to State,

Neither to slaves that were spat on,

Nor to the tyrants that spat,

The people of Burke and of Grattan

That gave, though free to refuse –

Pride, like that of the morn,

When the headlong light is loose,

Or that of the fabulous horn,

Or that of the sudden shower

When all streams are dry,

Or that of the hour

When the swan must fix his eye

Upon a fading gleam,

Float out upon a long

Last reach of glittering stream

And there sing his last song.

And I declare my faith:

I mock Plotinus' thought

And cry in Plato's teeth,

Death and life were not

Till man made up the whole,

Made lock, stock and barrel

Out of his bitter soul,

Aye, sun and moon and star, all,

And further add to that

That, being dead, we rise,

Dream and so create

Translunar Paradise.

I have prepared my peace

With learned Italian things 

And the proud stones of Greece, 

Poet's imaginings 

And memories of love, 

Memories of the words of women, 

All those things whereof 

Man makes a superhuman 

Mirror-resembling dream.