Prints size 80x106 cm
“Who looks outside, dreams; who looks inside, awakes” (Carl Gustav Jung).
We need a mirror to know our outer appearance, and inner as well. One of our main delusions is the belief that our thoughts and feelings are hidden from others. The paradox is that most often they are hidden from us. Protecting ourselves from traumatic emotional experiences, we force some feelings and desires out into the depths of our consciousness and lose sensitivity to them, forbid ourselves to have or experience them. But the more we hide from them, the more power they have over our lives. Quite often it happens through projecting suppressed feeling or intention onto others and getting into situations that cause them, when a deeply buried boiling emotion creates too much internal tension and breaks out. However, what we think and feel creates a certain field that all living beings feel and react according to our condition. Over the past year, we have seen millions of people claiming the neighboring country as Nazi and stubbornly fighting against it, without noticing that by all indications they behave exactly like Nazis. Or terrorize the entire world community, unaware of their own panic fear, clearly visible behind every threat. Propaganda reveals what society does not want to see in itself and will gladly project onto the enemy. For many people the war brings long-awaited relief. Peacetime is more difficult, because surrounding people and life circumstances will become enemies and it is not allowed to beat and to kill them, at least physically.
Anyway, reality exists by itself and we have to deal with it. However, by influencing circumstances alone, or even more so, running away from them into a workaholic, hedonist, monastery or Bali, we miss the most important thing - our inner state. To change the world, we need to learn ourselves. But to learn ourselves, we need to go into the world. This is the very mirror that reflects us through situations and events in which our true essence is manifested with all its scars and dark spots. As Sartre put it, “Hell is other people” but Heaven is also other people. And even in the most incredible and difficult conditions of life, we may find those, in whom our reflection is so beautiful that it is hard to believe in. In whom we will see the happy child, we all had been, and something deeper, eternal and incomprehensible. This meeting will be the only true beginning of our path, because only then we know both the goal and the direction. I wish all of us to become this mirror one day. This is the essence of “changing the world”.
Anyway, reality exists by itself and we have to deal with it. However, by influencing circumstances alone, or even more so, running away from them into a workaholic, hedonist, monastery or Bali, we miss the most important thing - our inner state. To change the world, we need to learn ourselves. But to learn ourselves, we need to go into the world. This is the very mirror that reflects us through situations and events in which our true essence is manifested with all its scars and dark spots. As Sartre put it, “Hell is other people” but Heaven is also other people. And even in the most incredible and difficult conditions of life, we may find those, in whom our reflection is so beautiful that it is hard to believe in. In whom we will see the happy child, we all had been, and something deeper, eternal and incomprehensible. This meeting will be the only true beginning of our path, because only then we know both the goal and the direction. I wish all of us to become this mirror one day. This is the essence of “changing the world”.
