By Gonny When a dog looks in a mirror, he barks.
A monkey checks behind the glass, looking for another monkey.
A cat jumps back in shock.
But when I look in a mirror, I see… “me.” Gonny.
That’s the face I know.
The hair I sometimes hate and sometimes love.
The eyes that look back at me as if they remember something.
No doubt about it: that figure in the mirror is me.
This is the first awareness we have of ourselves, even if it’s only the version that identifies with the reflection.
It feels natural. Almost unquestionable.
A milestone in evolution, we’d say. That’s good. That’s progress.
Right?
And then… one day, a book lands in my lap.
For me, it was A Course in Miracles.
For others, it might be a poem by Rumi, a YouTube talk about consciousness, or a phrase from Plato or Vedanta.
But strangely enough…they all seem to whisper the same thing:
This world is not what it seems. It’s an illusion.
The Course goes even further and calls it “a dream.”
“The world we see is a reflection of what the Son of God, i n His dreaming mind, believes Himself to be.”
Let’s pause here and unpack this.
It says the world we see is a reflection…not of truth, but of belief.
And what belief is that?
The belief that something, a separate self, can exist outside of Oneness.
Outside of God.
Outside of Love.
Now, we’re free to believe anything we want.
We can believe in Santa Claus, in being right, in knowing the truth, in the existence of differences, in big and small, beautiful and ugly, good and bad.
But does believing something… make it true?
I don’t think so.
Do you?
And yet… the same happens on a much bigger scale.
Just like I believed this morning that the reflection in the mirror was “me,”
there is a deeper part of the mind…the part that dreams this whole Cosmos, with all possible dimentions, that also believes in its reflection.
It sees a Cosmos filled with separate trillions of diffferent forms and stories,
and it says: “That’s me. That’s what I am now.”
This dreaming mind…the one that forgot its true nature…is what the Course calls the Son of God.
Not a person. Not a religious figure. But the one shared Identity we all have, still one, still whole, still Spirit, but asleep and dreaming of being many.
And that brings us to a big, honest question:
Why are there so many different forms in this so-called reality?
So many kinds of people, flowers, insects, galaxies, thoughts, voices, stories, tragedies, miracles, chairs, diseases, dimentions…
It seems endless. And it is… as long as the dream continues.
So again why so many? Why so different?
Because the ego (the thought of separation) needs variety to stay alive.
It needs distraction, fragmentation, contrast.
If there were only one image, we might see through it too fast.
But with trillions of forms, our attention stays safely stuck to the surface.
The Course explains it directly:
“The world was made as an attack on God. It is the symbol of fear.”
Each form says:
“I am not that.”
This tree is not that rock.
You are not me.
That hand is mine.
That body is yours.
This star is far away from this brain.
Forms are symbols of separation.
They’re like masks covering the face of the One Self —
each whispering the same lie:
“You are just a body. You are alone. You are different.”
But here comes the shift and it’s a gentle one.
The Course tells us:
“Nothing I see means anything. They are but shadows of thoughts in my mind.”
What we see are projections.
Thoughts of separation, made visible in form.
The ego, which is nothing more than the belief in separation, uses endless variation to keep the dream convincing. As long as we search for truth in form,
we cannot remember the formless truth of what we are.
But here’s the good news:
The moment we stop using forms to confirm separation,
the Holy Spirit can use them to undo it.
A smile, a meeting, a sentence in a book, a Workbook lesson,
a feather on the ground….can suddenly take on a new function.
ACIM: “Once forgiveness takes the place of judgment, everything becomes different.”
The symbols soften. Not to make the dream prettier, but to remind us:
You are not a form.
You are not a symbol.
You are not a body.
You are Spirit.
You are the One Son of God.
And You Son of God are dreaming.
And now… we can begin to become aware of Who we truly are and wake up.
Gently. Lovingly. Not by fixing the reflection, but by remembering Who is looking into it. And that, dear friends , is how the mirror turns from a prison…
into a portal.
And one day, we will smile and whisper:
“Thank God… finally home.”
With love and light,
G.