A common metaphor for mindful awareness is the mirror, which reflects all light and everything before it equally. The mirror rejects nothing. The beautiful is reflected and so is the ugly. The mirror doesn’t judge.

It’s a useful metaphor and one that I like to share. However, the mirror metaphor can cause us to overlook something very important: the mirror is not alive.

To be alive means that some of the things that you come across are life-giving and some are life-threatening. The ones that are life giving you are compelled to pursue. The life threatening ones, you avoid.

Adaptation and response to the environment are key characteristics that separate what is alive from what is not. Its very lack of reaction is what tells us that the mirror is not a living thing!

Why does this matter for those of us who want to develop our human capacity for mindful awareness? Because we must recognize that mindful awareness is unnatural. From an evolutionary perspective, it makes no sense for a living creature to observe things without reacting. Yet that is standard operating procedure when we meditate.

Add to that the fact that we practitioners of mindfulness develop the capacity to be aware that we are aware – what advantage would that confer for survival? It takes extra brain energy to maintain mindful awareness. It doesn’t help you find food or a mate or run away from a predator. It makes no sense!

Yet here we are. We sit and observe the mind and watch the flow of experience, without reacting. And as we develop this capacity, it expands to actually INCLUDE our reactions. And gradually we find we can observe our reactions without reacting to our reactions. We observe our thoughts and feelings ABOUT things. We make room for all that arises, without judgment, without resistance, without rejecting any of it.

And we do it on purpose! We practice diligently for decades to master our attention. Why? From the point of view of survival, it makes no sense. It simply isn’t natural.

No, we do it because it transcends mere survival. The capacity for waking up which we nurture through our practice is about a whole lot more than finding food, reproducing and then dying. It’s about a realization. It’s about awakening.

Through practice, we come to realize that there’s more going on than meets the eye. The physical eye sees only creatures struggling to stay alive. The awakened mind sees infinitely more than that. The awakened mind sees beneath and beyond the struggle to stay alive. It doesn’t deny the ongoing struggle to stay alive – that reality doesn’t change. But the awakened mind knows something else.

That knowing has no survival advantage. It’s a bizarre twist in the story of evolution. You could say that evolution becomes aware of itself. Life becomes aware of itself.

The mirror becomes aware of itself.