VLVL2 (9.5): "Dustless-Mirror Phase"

[Dave Monroe]

"Though sagging wasn't part of DL's job descripetion,
nevertheless how she'd love to just turn to liquid,
relax--instead, since she'd been with Takeshi down
here, she hadn't been able to sit and get into even
the dustless-mirror phase before some other bullshit
crisis would have paged her back out of the anterooms
of clarity, back down the many levels to a malodorous,
cheaply lit, nowhere-up-to-code assortment of spaces
...." (VL, Ch. 9, p. 176)


"dustless-mirror phase"

The monk asked: What is True Mind, and what is the
Knowledge that is true and bright?

The master said: True Mind is clear and luminous with
no object whatsoever, is still and shining, encloses
the Great Void, never has any purpose, and is always
bright and understanding. It is open without a trace
and folds with no vestige of action. It is as clear as
a lake reflecting the wild fields. It is as clear as a
dustless mirror in the sky that reflects within itself
the infinite universe in all its variety, which is
neither within nor without and which neither exists
nor non-exists. All Holy Ones return there, and all
Buddhas of the Three periods are permanently abiding
there. It is called Original True Buddha Nature and is
also called Pure Dharmakaya. If one rejects this
Dharma to follow or practice others, he can only
become a demon in the end.

http://www.sinc.sunysb.edu/Clubs/buddhism/sudden/main.html

Hamsaduta: You say the chanting cleans the dust from
the mirror of the mind. What does mirror mean? How
does it mean mirror? What is it reflecting?

Prabhupada: Mirror means you see so many things within
your mind. Is it not a mirror, reflection? Don't you
see? As you see mirror reflection of your face, but
you see this body. When you will see in the mirror
that you are not this body, you are something within
this body, that is dustless mirror. Yes?

http://www.prabhupadavani.org/Bhagavatam/text/294.html

The child [...] can nevertheless already recognize as
such his own image in a mirror....

[...]
 
This act, far from exausting itself, as in the case of
the monkey, once the image has been mastered and found
empty, immediately rebounds in the case of the child
in a series of gestures in which he experiences in
play the relation between the movements assumed in the
image and the reflected environment, and between this
virtual complex and the reality it reduplicates - the
child's own body, and the persons and things, around
him.

[...]

This jubilant assumption of his specular image by the
child at the infans stage, still sunk in his motor
incapacity and nursing dependence, would seem to
exhibit in an exemplary situation the symbolic matrix
in which the I is precipitated in a primordial form,
before it is objectified in the dialectic of
identification with the other, and before language
restores to it, in the universal, its function as
subject.

http://social.chass.ncsu.edu/wyrick/debclass/lacan.htm

http://nl.ijs.si/~damjan/lacan.html

According to Jacques Lacan, a phase in the
constitution of the human individual located between
the ages of six and eighteen months. Though still in a
state of powerlessness and motor incoordination, the
infant anticipates on an imaginary plane the
apprehension and mastery of its bodily unity. This
imaginary unification comes about by means of
identification with the image of the counterpart as
total Gestalt; it is exemplified concretely by the
experience in which the child perceives its own
reflection in a mirror. The mirror phase is said to
constitute the matrix and first outline of what is to
become the ego.

http://faculty.uwb.edu/cbehler/glossary/mirror.htm

And see as well, e.g., ...

http://maven.english.hawaii.edu/criticalink/lacan/

http://www.freedonia.com/~carl/lfb/



At any rate, that's a hell of a long sentence (what's
cited above is a little over half of it)!  Not to
mention a hell of an extended metaphor or whatever ...

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