Vodou 501: The Mirror in God

The process of elevation is the sharpening of the reflection of god in a priest. But while god becomes clearer in the priest, the priest is forced to see their own reflection in god.

As god moves, the priest moves. As the priest moves, god moves. Opposite and same.

It does not take much humility for that to raise the little hairs on the back of your neck. The image is familiar, recognizable, but distorted outside the capacity of the consciousness not to object—even as we recognize our own reflection, it is more than we can recognize and more than we are prepared to understand. The recognition and its compliment, the alien nature of something that is us but is a self we cannot quite comprehend, at once infinitely larger than we believe ourselves to be, but true in a way we recognize only with something that the consciousness cannot play host or communicate directly with, something the consciousness greets with discomfort and even panic.

There is a great deal of horror in the process of elevation, of learning to be comfortable with discomfort.

And yet, in that recognition somewhere outside of consciousness, we overlap with the image. What god shows us about ourselves is us. It compels us: recognition is sympathy, an unconscious mirroring of the image in the person we are now. We cannot help but move with it, having beheld it. The image impresses us, and even consciousness must move along as long as we can see it. God is the priest, as much god as the soul can move with. The image moves. The priest moves. The priest is the image and the image is the priest.

Fortunately for us, that’s typically a temporary state. The consciousness comes out of that state and promptly piles as many things as it can between itself and looking in that mirror again. We immediately, as if we have encountered a near death experience, want to put something visceral between us and what we just experienced: a stiff drink, a cigarette, the first person we can jump on and messily be embodied. It is, in fact, a death experience for the ego. Beholding god, what is not in the mirror is our connection to ego, and ego is keenly aware of it. Where the priest and god move together, ego does not command and cannot play god.

Ego is in the all, but it is not the all. Being a part of the all is never enough for ego. Ego wants to own the mirror, the reflection, the priest, and god. For ego, these are separate things to be either conquered or a slave to. Ego has either slaves or masters, either winners or losers. It is disinterested in learning, in healing, and strongly resists change—dividing or attempting to divide the all into groups that can be permanently less or more and can stagnate.

Unfortunately for us, once we have seen ourselves in god and god in ourselves, that knowledge does not fully fade. The consciousness might lapse in and out of an acute awareness of it, but the rest of the soul does not. The experience wears away at the influence of ego, and itself happens when the ego’s influence on the person is weak enough and they are strong enough to behold it.

Rejecting the reflection is false humility—the idea that you can reject that relationship to god at the root of it. Whether because the priest should never be so large or because the priest should never have such aspirations, ego will do its best to try and blunt or dilute the experience. However, the image cannot be seen until the person is ready to behold it. Once seen, it cannot be escaped.

The experience leaves the priest looking at god and wondering why god is not larger, more alien, more ‘perfect’. Why is the reflection so small?

The reflection is not small. The consciousness that tries to understand it is, fixating on what it sees as imperfection and trying to do what it has tools to do: reject, judge, and categorize. Until the soul of the person is complete and not fractured, until the priest gazing into the mirror is not just their consciousness, the reflection will seem small. As the person becomes complete, the reflection and the mirror become deeper. They reflect the soul of the person as it becomes more whole.

When the person is complete, there is no glass. God finally knows god.