Mirrors and Windows
Posted on | September 12, 2008 |
Josiah McElheny: Modernity, Mirrored and Reflected
I’m getting a little anxious to start school next week. I’ve got to do some shopping over the weekend for the minor supplies like pencils and paper - the major ones have to wait until I cash that financial aid check. I don’t know how prepared I am for this next year. It’s going to require a greater degree of memorization than the previous year did (which while challenging was in a more philosophical manner than an academic one).
I was reminded of a quote by Sydney J. Harris: “The whole purpose of education is to turn mirrors into windows.” I can’t think of a better way to describe the growth process that we are all going through.
It’s interesting to notice the classification scenarios we had started to use last year as we learned about the five phases and the possibility of constitutional types. We began to put ourselves into boxes based on these ideas and when we thought we had figured it out for ourselves, we started putting the other students in those boxes. Lo and behold, a teacher finally hauled each one of us up to the front of the class and had us read an excerpt from a sales catalogue. Based on the energy in our voice reading, he determined the phase energy that we most emobodied. I embodied wood. Another student fire. Still another earth - and that was fine tuned even more until she became “A Stomach.”
During the last year I have been pegged as A Heart, A Pericardium, A Triple Warmer (San Jiao), A Spleen and A Gall Bladder. When things have seemed a bit foggier, I’ve just gotten stuck with, “she’s a wood,” or, “I can see how you’d be a fire.” I even called myself these things. Based on our classifcation of each other, we are not only treated in certain ways, but we begin to take those roles on in the group. If you classify me as A Gall Bladder and treat me as a champion with an anger control problem, I will certainly become that…and that’s where I have started to see this as a real learning experience in our education - one that is going on under the scenes and we aren’t receiving any credit for.
We all come into this school with projectors on our foreheads - and we’re playing movies of ourselves on our classmates foreheads. OUR illnesses, OUR habits, OUR energies - they’re all playing out on our classmates foreheads, so how do we break those mirrors and start enabling ourselves to see through the windows? How do we stop projecting?
I can’t help but wonder: if I’m sitting next to a classmate and I am judging them as Fire - is it because they “are” really Fire? Is it because I “am” Fire and I’m feeling too much heat? Is it because I “am” Wood out-of-control and I am hypersensitive to your balanced Fire because of it? Is it because I am Metal out-of-balance and sitting next to you is making me feel warm and whole, but it’s just because I am so Fire deficient that your healthy amount of it is causing a change in me? Or is any of this constitutional stuff even real???
What happens to a patient when they come into my office for the first time and I do something like this? I listen to a passionate account of their bike ride to my office, and then use this information and tell them that they are a particular phase type and describe that phase type to them. Most certainly they will take on whichever characteristics of that phase type that are lacking in their personality, and I would even expect that they would go out of their way to play that role for me when they came back to my office.
Bill Frazier says that as individuals, we play certain roles within certain groups - but those roles are by no means the same everytime. I “am not” a Lung, but in THIS group at THIS time, I have taken on the Lung’s role of Prime Minister. I think this is a much better way to identify what’s happening, as it has a spacial and temporal quality to it that allows the person some ambiguity, and that ambiguity leaves lots of room for change and growth.
As it is right now, I’m still seeing mirrors everywhere and hoping that at some point I can get to know and recognize myself so well that I can see when I’m looking at myself, move the mirror out of the way and start enjoying the view out the window!
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This work is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution.
December 10th, 2008 @ 1:30 am
“The whole purpose of education is to turn mirrors into windows.”
Becky you amaze me sometimes. I love your interpretation of what this means to us. Ive really been trying to be aware of this.
thanks