You are not an image

Like others, I am haunted and plagued by images, reflections of others and self that bring dread and anguish, or mount a being on a peg from which it seems it will never escape. Today, from somewhere, a little medicine, a clearer view of the idea that we are not images, a little more explanation of what Rumi meant when he said "You are as you are, an indescribable message coming on the air."

When Jacob Boehme describes the fall of man in The Way to Christ his language intimates similar freedom. When he writes "The poor soul said "What shall I do that I may sprout forth again and come to my first life which I had in peace before I became an image," I recognize that constant but subliminal process by which my mind generates images of myself and others that I then start to honor as if that image were the thing, that same process that always incipiates the living death.

Hypnotized by images, we are driven to perfect our own reflection, to self-glorify, to perfectly adorn something which never existed in the first place. We are not images. Of people striving in this way, slaves of vanity, Boehme wrote "they run, but they are not made to run." We continually tailor the cloak of the mundane to perfectly fit a dressmaker's form that has no substance.

In Boehme, to fall is also to fall asleep, to take images for truth. Adam, "In his sleep, died to the angelic world (quality) and fell into the external fiat, and it now ocurred to the external image according to God's generation. Then his angel-form and might lay on the ground and fell in helplessness." So often we are helpless to the mental slackness by which we take images for truth, wherein the passive imagination continually mounts signs that lead us down roads toward identification and conflict, over and over again, where a trickster serpent mongers us out of our inheritance of peace and unity once again.