The face in the canal, the sky through the window

Two old models for how one consciousness appears as many people. One needs a mirror. The other only needs a window.

By Sovandarapor (James) Kong · 2026-08-21 · Nondual

Chapter 10 of 18 in Ninety minutes with a swami

Ask how Advaita gets from one undivided consciousness to one particular person in one particular chair, and Swami Sarvapriyananda says the tradition has several models and none of them is the truth, they are attempts to picture what is going on. He gives two.

The first is reflection. Think of the sun in water, or your face in a mirror. Telling it in Amsterdam, he reaches for the canals, the whole city reflected in them, buildings and trees and sky. When a mind appears, consciousness is reflected in it the way a face is reflected in glass. The ego, the thing that says I, is a thought like any other thought, except that it carries the reflection and so it always feels conscious. From the ego the mind is lit, from the mind the senses, and then there is a world.

The difficulty with this picture, and he admits it, is that it seems to give you two faces, one here and one in the glass, and then you want to know how to get from the reflected one back to the real one. The swami's answer is the detail I wanted to keep. When you shave in the morning, you see your face in the mirror and you do not forget that the face is here. That is the enlightened state. Nothing about the mirror changes. The world appears, the body carries on, everything runs exactly as before. The only difference is that the person is also aware of the real face, and not only the reflection.

The second model does without the mirror. Look up through a window with a lattice in it. The sky appears in squares and triangles and circles, big ones and small ones. None of those shapes are in the sky. They are in the window, imposed on the sky by the frame, and yet what you are seeing through the frame is the real sky, not a copy of it. The mind, on this model, is the lattice. Consciousness is not actually divided by it. It only seems to be, by the thoughts and moods and the sense of I that cut it into shapes.

I prefer the second model and I am suspicious of my preference. It is more flattering. It says that what I am already looking through is the real thing, which is a nicer thought than being a reflection in a canal. He does not rank them. He says they are ways of talking, and what they are talking about is not a theory.

I looked up through the window above my desk afterwards. Rectangles. It did not feel like a revelation. It did feel like a slightly different room.