Sometimes we’re Alice, and we live our lives through the looking glass. In a “virtual world” that is filled with images from videos made by people from around the planet, we stuff our brains with strange experiences we never had and with images we never acquired personally. As many have noted, we have become somewhat disconnected by super-connectedness. We have traveled everywhere while traveling nowhere; we have seen everything while seeing nothing; we have become as much disembodied as we are embodied.
Jung would have seen the irony. Archetypes flowing into us from unknown sources and unnamed places simply because we have connected to places and people we don’t know—and could never know. We have become one another. We have gone through the looking glass and bypassed reflection, penetrating like photons.
Photons, as Feynman pointed out, do some strange things. Skip the exact numbers here, but think generally: Fire photons at layers of glass and a certain percentage of them will bounce off as another percentage penetrates. Think of looking through a window from the inside of a lighted room to the nighttime world outside the house (or, conversely, through a window from the daylight outside a house to the relative darkness inside). You get a reflection, but not the “perfect” one you appear to get from a mirror in your well-lighted bathroom. Add thin layers of glass and the percentage changes until a certain point is reached when the original percentage of reflected photons occurs again, and the process is cyclical up to millions upon millions of layers of glass. No one knows why this happens; it just does, as though the photons take turns and all say at some point, “Hey, it’s my turn to be reflected while the rest of you pass through.” And they keep saying it so that the percentage of reflected photons cycles from smaller amounts to larger amounts to smaller amounts to larger amounts. Do they have a crossing guard or flagman who says, “You can pass, but you can’t because I’m keeping tabs on the percentages of reflected and penetrating photons.”
And there you are, Alice. On occasion, you see the real you, one reflected in your personal actions. On other occasions, you see the unreal you, the one who has gone through the monitor glass and entered into the life experiences and visited the places you never had and never visited. You have been through the looking glass and have bounced off it.
And what has the dual life of penetrating and reflected photon mean for you? How has it affected the development of your character? How has it molded your sense of others’ characters. Finally, how has your dual life, Alice, shaped the geography of your mind on either side of the glass?
Jung would have seen the irony. Archetypes flowing into us from unknown sources and unnamed places simply because we have connected to places and people we don’t know—and could never know. We have become one another. We have gone through the looking glass and bypassed reflection, penetrating like photons.
Photons, as Feynman pointed out, do some strange things. Skip the exact numbers here, but think generally: Fire photons at layers of glass and a certain percentage of them will bounce off as another percentage penetrates. Think of looking through a window from the inside of a lighted room to the nighttime world outside the house (or, conversely, through a window from the daylight outside a house to the relative darkness inside). You get a reflection, but not the “perfect” one you appear to get from a mirror in your well-lighted bathroom. Add thin layers of glass and the percentage changes until a certain point is reached when the original percentage of reflected photons occurs again, and the process is cyclical up to millions upon millions of layers of glass. No one knows why this happens; it just does, as though the photons take turns and all say at some point, “Hey, it’s my turn to be reflected while the rest of you pass through.” And they keep saying it so that the percentage of reflected photons cycles from smaller amounts to larger amounts to smaller amounts to larger amounts. Do they have a crossing guard or flagman who says, “You can pass, but you can’t because I’m keeping tabs on the percentages of reflected and penetrating photons.”
And there you are, Alice. On occasion, you see the real you, one reflected in your personal actions. On other occasions, you see the unreal you, the one who has gone through the monitor glass and entered into the life experiences and visited the places you never had and never visited. You have been through the looking glass and have bounced off it.
And what has the dual life of penetrating and reflected photon mean for you? How has it affected the development of your character? How has it molded your sense of others’ characters. Finally, how has your dual life, Alice, shaped the geography of your mind on either side of the glass?
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