Latest / Divine Dialogue / The Mirror of Erised, Part 1 — What You Think You Lack

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The Mirror of Erised, Part 1 — What You Think You Lack · Divine Dialogue

• 0:01
  SPEAKER_00: Hello, listeners, and welcome back to the Divine Dialogue Podcast, where we dig deeper into the trove of wisdom and guidance stories have to offer.
• 0:11
  SPEAKER_00: Have you ever watched a movie and felt moved?
• 0:14
  SPEAKER_00: Felt called to make a change, or reflect more deeply on your own life?
• 0:19
  SPEAKER_00: If so, this podcast has a lot to offer you.
• 0:22
  SPEAKER_00: For our third episode in our Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone series, we will explore the scene when Harry discovers the mirror of Aracid.
• 0:32
  SPEAKER_00: Listeners, I am so excited to get into this one.
• 0:36
  SPEAKER_00: This scene, really, it's gonna be two scenes with the mirror, at least in the beginning, that we're gonna look at.
• 0:44
  SPEAKER_00: This is gonna be part one of two.
• 0:46
  SPEAKER_00: There will be a mirror of Aracid Part 2 at the very end of the movie when Harry goes into the belly of the castle and confronts Quarrel in front of the mirror, but I have been so looking forward to this.
• 1:00
  SPEAKER_00: In terms of soul meaning and depth and spiritual nuggets, this is a gold mine.
• 1:08
  SPEAKER_00: So much so that this is actually one of the cornerstones of my own spirituality.
• 1:13
  SPEAKER_00: I mentioned in a previous episode, I believe it was one of the Balto episodes, that one of the ways that I return to myself is sitting at my altar.
• 1:23
  SPEAKER_00: I am actually sitting across from my altar right now in my home.
• 1:28
  SPEAKER_00: I have turned my guest room into a essentially sanctuary for mind, body, and soul.
• 1:36
  SPEAKER_00: In one corner, I have a roam machine that I use pretty regularly.
• 1:41
  SPEAKER_00: I have an altar in one corner for my spiritual practice, and I have my desk, which I essentially caters to my mind.
• 1:50
  SPEAKER_00: That's where I write, that's where I record these episodes, and so all three together make a complete balanced picture essentially for me to rest in.
• 1:59
  SPEAKER_00: And at the altar that I have, I have a poster of the mirror of Aracet above it from the Harry Potter, but that one's from the Philosopher's Stone version.
• 2:11
  SPEAKER_00: And I have the Sorcerer's Stone actually on my altar as a reminder because when Harry evolves later in the movie from his first encounter with the mirror of Aracid, he pulls the stone out of his pocket, essentially realizing he had it all along.
• 2:26
  SPEAKER_00: And we will get there at the end of the series, but I just wanted to kind of share a little personal, you know, reflection of my life and what this means to me from the beginning here.
• 2:38
  SPEAKER_00: But I will go ahead and get into the scene recap.
• 2:41
  SPEAKER_00: It's gonna be two separate scenes together.
• 2:43
  SPEAKER_00: It's only five minutes, but I have so much to say about this five minutes.
• 2:48
  SPEAKER_00: And I just started a new thing in the series, and I've gone back and put scenes in most of the episodes.
• 2:53
  SPEAKER_00: I might go back to all the episodes and add these, but I decided to put links in the show notes to the scenes that I'm covering just so you can familiarize yourself with what I'm talking about.
• 3:03
  SPEAKER_00: Even if you've seen the movie, it's always good to kind of go back and look at what I'm covering.
• 3:10
  SPEAKER_00: Alright.
• 3:11
  SPEAKER_00: So, for the scene recap, Harry is breaking the rules again, and he loves to do that.
• 3:16
  SPEAKER_00: We know that from the last episode I did on The Seeker, episode two, he breaks the rules and becomes the Gryffindor seeker.
• 3:24
  SPEAKER_00: Well, he's breaking the rules again to go into the restricted section of the library at night with his invisibility cloak, and he's trying to do research to protect the stone, and after narrowly escaping Snape's intuition, he ends up in an ordinary room with the most unordinary object, the mirror of Irasid, which of course is desire spelled backwards.
• 3:48
  SPEAKER_00: He examines it, and soon after looking into it, his parents appear.
• 3:52
  SPEAKER_00: He stares in wonder and disbelief as his mom touches his shoulder.
• 3:56
  SPEAKER_00: When Harry looks, there's no hand there.
• 3:58
  SPEAKER_00: After a while, he runs back to the common room and wakes Ron to show him.
• 4:03
  SPEAKER_00: But Ron sees something different.
• 4:05
  SPEAKER_00: He sees himself becoming a Quidditch captain and head boy, basically achieving accolades.
• 4:11
  SPEAKER_00: Harry is a little disheartened, thinking that maybe his parents were less real somehow.
• 4:17
  SPEAKER_00: He continues to visit the mirror until Dumbledore meets him at night by surprise and says, Back again, Harry.
• 4:24
  SPEAKER_00: They have a very important exchange, and Harry receives Dumbledore's advice not to dwell on dreams and forget to live.
• 4:32
  SPEAKER_00: Which I would say everything Dumbledore tells him is quite straightforwardly divine dialogue, but that will get us into the soul meaning.
• 4:41
  SPEAKER_00: As I said, I think the mirror is perhaps my favorite symbolism in the entire series, and there are some gems in Harry Potter.
• 4:48
  SPEAKER_00: Another one of my favorites is the Patronus, which we'll get into at a later date, not entirely sure when, but that's going to be a ways off.
• 4:55
  SPEAKER_00: And I find even the name itself is revealing, as I said, Irised is desire backwards, and the inscription on the mirror reads, Irised Stra, Eru Oit, Ub Kafru Oit on Husi.
• 5:10
  SPEAKER_00: When read backward, this translates to the hidden message.
• 5:13
  SPEAKER_00: I show not your face, but your heart's desire.
• 5:17
  SPEAKER_00: Now, I believe actually a better word for the mirror would have actually been lack than desire, because I don't think desire is actually inherently dangerous at all.
• 5:28
  SPEAKER_00: I think desire is part of being human.
• 5:31
  SPEAKER_00: I think it's essential.
• 5:32
  SPEAKER_00: I think it's where our like our passion and our life force meet.
• 5:36
  SPEAKER_00: I don't think that there's anything wrong with desire.
• 5:39
  SPEAKER_00: But when you hear the word lack spelled backwards, it's cakeal, and that's not really cool.
• 5:44
  SPEAKER_00: So I understand why they named it desire, because that just sounds lame.
• 5:49
  SPEAKER_00: But you know, essentially the mirror just shows you, you know, what's in your heart, what's the hidden ache.
• 5:57
  SPEAKER_00: But I would say, even more than that, what you believe you lack.
• 6:01
  SPEAKER_00: And the idea that the mirror is tailor-made to each person is really a fascinating concept.
• 6:07
  SPEAKER_00: Because at first Harry feels like his longings aren't important because they aren't replicated by Ron.
• 6:12
  SPEAKER_00: But it's precisely because they aren't replicated that they are so special.
• 6:17
  SPEAKER_00: No one in this world feels exactly the same, wants the same things, or has the same dreams, the same desires, the same lack.
• 6:25
  SPEAKER_00: And Doubledore explains this so clearly when he says the mirror shows, quote, nothing more or less than the deepest and most desperate desires of our hearts.
• 6:35
  SPEAKER_00: I think putting the word desperate in front of desires clears this up enough for me.
• 6:40
  SPEAKER_00: I agree that it's it's a mirror of desperation.
• 6:44
  SPEAKER_00: And because the mirror is not showing a casual wish, it is showing the place where longing has become urgent.
• 6:51
  SPEAKER_00: The place where the heart says, I need this, whatever this is, to be whole.
• 6:57
  SPEAKER_00: I need this to be safe.
• 6:59
  SPEAKER_00: I need this to finally be okay.
• 7:02
  SPEAKER_00: The mirror shows you what you think you lack.
• 7:06
  SPEAKER_00: Keyword think.
• 7:08
  SPEAKER_00: And I do find it exceptionally important also not to rank and categorize the different reflections people would see in the mirror.
• 7:16
  SPEAKER_00: The energy of lack doesn't care what you think you lack, just that you lack something.
• 7:21
  SPEAKER_00: And I think we tend to think, well, at least I wouldn't see that in the mirror.
• 7:27
  SPEAKER_00: It really doesn't matter.
• 7:28
  SPEAKER_00: Because at the end of the day, if you see something other than just yourself as you are, you're disconnected from your divinity in lack.
• 7:38
  SPEAKER_00: And that's all it takes to separate you from your soul.
• 7:41
  SPEAKER_00: Whether you'd see your family or receiving praise and admiration as Ron does, the separation is the core.
• 7:48
  SPEAKER_00: And we may empathize with Harry a little more deeply because Harry's pain comes not only from never having known his family, but from being treated so badly by the family he does have.
• 7:59
  SPEAKER_00: That creates a very painful void that attacks from both sides.
• 8:03
  SPEAKER_00: The I never had this phenomenon meeting with the even what I do have is so inadequate compared to what it should be phenomenon, which is a perfect recipe, a perfect storm for lack.
• 8:17
  SPEAKER_00: And of course, granted, Ron's reflection is more shallow, and he doesn't get over these reflections for several more years.
• 8:24
  SPEAKER_00: But the separation is the core piece, and that is what really matters when looking at this from a soul lens.
• 8:31
  SPEAKER_00: That is why Dumbledore also says the mirror gives us neither knowledge nor truth.
• 8:36
  SPEAKER_00: That line is crucial, because the mirror may show you something emotionally real, but emotionally real does not always mean spiritually true.
• 8:45
  SPEAKER_00: Harry's longing for his parents is real.
• 8:48
  SPEAKER_00: Ron's longing for recognition is real.
• 8:50
  SPEAKER_00: My longing for a woman beside me is real.
• 8:54
  SPEAKER_00: We'll get more into that when we get to the personal mirror.
• 8:57
  SPEAKER_00: But the mirror does not tell Harry you are only an orphan.
• 9:01
  SPEAKER_00: It does not tell Ron you are only valuable if you are admired, and it does not tell me you are incomplete without a partner.
• 9:09
  SPEAKER_00: It shows the desire, it shows the ache, it shows the place where the heart is tender, but it does not show the truth of all that we are.
• 9:18
  SPEAKER_00: That is why the mirror is both beautiful and dangerous.
• 9:21
  SPEAKER_00: It can reveal the wound, but if we bow to the reflection as the whole truth, we can start building our life around lack instead of love.
• 9:29
  SPEAKER_00: The mirror is not there to shame the longing.
• 9:32
  SPEAKER_00: It is there to help us hold the longing without being swallowed by it.
• 9:36
  SPEAKER_00: In truth, we don't actually lack anything, but the mind is very susceptible to programming and the suggestion that A can only be fulfilled with B.
• 9:46
  SPEAKER_00: The mirror is there to show you where your mind is in error.
• 9:49
  SPEAKER_00: And this mirror actually reminds me of Narcissus, the story told by the Roman poet Ovid.
• 9:55
  SPEAKER_00: Narcissus, as you know, is der is uh the origin of the word narcissistic, and Narcissus was a hunter known for his unmatched beauty, and he rejected all who loved him, and the gods cursed him to fall in love with his own reflection in a pool of water.
• 10:11
  SPEAKER_00: That was his mirror of Erasid.
• 10:13
  SPEAKER_00: And he did go mad, as Dumbledore warned, and died by the water's edge.
• 10:17
  SPEAKER_00: He wasted away in front of his reflection because he was stuck on one part of himself.
• 10:23
  SPEAKER_00: And life is not is never just one thing, you are never just one part.
• 10:28
  SPEAKER_00: And sitting before the mirror or by the water's edge, unable to remove focus from the lack, from the obsession, is like letting water lay standing with no motion.
• 10:39
  SPEAKER_00: What happens to that water?
• 10:41
  SPEAKER_00: It becomes stagnant, it smells bad, it isn't healthy, and it's a great home for parasites.
• 10:47
  SPEAKER_00: And in this sense, the parasites that take over the mind.
• 10:50
  SPEAKER_00: The mirror can be thought of as the temptation of flowing water that is really keeping you in place.
• 10:56
  SPEAKER_00: The reflection moves, looks almost lifelike, but it is a mirage, letting you feel as if you have what you want with no reality to match, because it stops you from living in a way that would let you have what you want.
• 11:09
  SPEAKER_00: Harry learns this very quickly, and impressively for a young boy of eleven years old, with quite a bit of trauma already under his belt.
• 11:16
  SPEAKER_00: Dumbledore says very clearly that this mirror gives us neither knowledge nor truth.
• 11:21
  SPEAKER_00: He means in the sense of who you really are, not who your mind is telling you that you are.
• 11:27
  SPEAKER_00: Harry is not the lack of his parents he sees in the mirror.
• 11:31
  SPEAKER_00: Of course, his parents are irreplaceable connections, amplified in their absence by the fact that his extended family is so cruel to him.
• 11:39
  SPEAKER_00: But he has other channels of connections, other sources of nurturing and love.
• 11:44
  SPEAKER_00: We all do, because you are never just one thing.
• 11:48
  SPEAKER_00: And no matter how powerful a part of you might feel, it is never bigger than the whole of you.
• 11:53
  SPEAKER_00: And no matter how much you may long for it, the mirror is showing you where the mind has attached itself to one image of completion.
• 12:00
  SPEAKER_00: The trick is knowing you already have what the mirror is showing you that you do not.
• 12:06
  SPEAKER_00: The mirror is just there to help you see what you have forgotten.
• 12:09
  SPEAKER_00: And the mirror for me also brings up a couple Bible verses that I find to be diamonds.
• 12:16
  SPEAKER_00: I don't really follow my Christian roots anymore, but I see them reflected in my beloved stories all the time.
• 12:23
  SPEAKER_00: One of them is Matthew 6 33.
• 12:26
  SPEAKER_00: But seek ye first the kingdom of God and his righteousness, and all these things shall be added unto you.
• 12:32
  SPEAKER_00: And Luke seventeen, twenty through twenty one says, The kingdom of God does not come with observation, nor will they say, See here or see there, for indeed the kingdom of God is within you.
• 12:44
  SPEAKER_00: Key word within you.
• 12:46
  SPEAKER_00: I think these two verses may be the most important to be found in Scripture, but not in the way religion teaches.
• 12:52
  SPEAKER_00: Very simply, everything you need already resides inside, and when you seek it and connect to the God within you, not some God outside, all things shall be added unto you, including the kingdom, where you reside on your throne in your soul.
• 13:08
  SPEAKER_00: In Harry Potter, this is the sorcerer's stone.
• 13:11
  SPEAKER_00: And what do we know about the stone?
• 13:13
  SPEAKER_00: Well, it has alchemizing powers and produces the elixir of life.
• 13:18
  SPEAKER_00: When you discover the kingdom of God within, you can literally alchemize energy.
• 13:24
  SPEAKER_00: You can tap into that part of yourself that is eternal, the divine spark, the divine feminine energy in all things.
• 13:32
  SPEAKER_00: The mirror just shows you where you believe you are disconnected from the God within you, but you never really are.
• 13:39
  SPEAKER_00: And we'll come back to the stone when we do part two of the mirror, where Harry has more clearly found his own kingdom and found his real strength within, where he sees only himself and a divine image of him reaching into his pocket and pulling out the stone with a little wink to essentially say, You had this all along, you just had to remember.
• 14:02
  SPEAKER_00: But I want to spend more time on this episode because I really do think the mirror is such a wonderful way to show what so many of us struggle with, which is lack, not feeling enough, the pain of external seeking, and sometimes getting lost in the mirage of the reflection.
• 14:19
  SPEAKER_00: The reflection is not there for you to get lost in.
• 14:22
  SPEAKER_00: It's there to help you remember.
• 14:24
  SPEAKER_00: This is where I have forgotten most deeply who I really am.
• 14:29
  SPEAKER_00: Which brings me into the personal mirror that I've touched on a little bit already in the soul meaning.
• 14:35
  SPEAKER_00: For the longest time, and still from time to time for me, if I were to look into the mirror, I would see myself standing there with a beautiful woman beside me, a life partner, a romantic soulmate.
• 14:47
  SPEAKER_00: For the longest time, I thought this meant I was incomplete, and that I was half of a whole.
• 14:52
  SPEAKER_00: And I want to say this tenderly because longing for love is not wrong.
• 14:57
  SPEAKER_00: Wanting partnership is not wrong.
• 14:59
  SPEAKER_00: Wanting someone beside you is not wrong.
• 15:02
  SPEAKER_00: The mirror lesson is not that we should stop wanting.
• 15:05
  SPEAKER_00: It is that we should not let the wanting become a verdict against our wholeness.
• 15:11
  SPEAKER_00: Maybe the mirror would not be showing me the whole truth.
• 15:14
  SPEAKER_00: Maybe it would be showing me one sacred longing, intensified until it looked like the only truth.
• 15:20
  SPEAKER_00: The happiest woman on earth could look into the mirror and see only herself, exactly as she is.
• 15:27
  SPEAKER_00: The mirror showed me for years that I was looking outside myself for completion.
• 15:32
  SPEAKER_00: And the trick is, whatever you keep seeing in the mirror cannot fully nourish you while it remains the only way.
• 15:38
  SPEAKER_00: When you accept multiple channels of nourishment, you receive what you do not label and lack.
• 15:44
  SPEAKER_00: The woman beside me may be a real desire, a beautiful desire, a holy desire even, and I believe it is, but she is not the proof of my worth, my wholeness, or my belonging.
• 15:56
  SPEAKER_00: And that is the difference.
• 15:58
  SPEAKER_00: The mirror can show me where I ache, but it cannot tell me who I am.
• 16:03
  SPEAKER_00: And that is why the stone resides on my altar as a reminder, because we see Harry receive it in the mirror.
• 16:11
  SPEAKER_00: It reminds me that when I feel like I'm in lack, when I look in the mirror and see a woman beside me, and not just myself, that I actually do have the stone, even if from time to time I forget, and even if it feels so painful that that desire might be bigger than my soul.
• 16:33
  SPEAKER_00: The mirror reminds me that it's not true, it's just my mind is focused on the one thing, but I don't have to keep my focus there.
• 16:42
  SPEAKER_00: And we touched on this a little bit in Balto with the broken bottles, your focus.
• 16:47
  SPEAKER_00: You can focus on the broken bottles, you can focus on the lack in the mirror, but there's a lot more to focus on.
• 16:53
  SPEAKER_00: There's a lot, there's much more to you than you might think when your mind gets fixated on one point of you, one point of light, one broken bottle, one reflection of lack.
• 17:05
  SPEAKER_00: Which leads us into the divine dialogue questions, there's quite a few today.
• 17:09
  SPEAKER_00: Divine listeners, what would you see if you looked into the mirror now?
• 17:13
  SPEAKER_00: Has it changed over the years?
• 17:16
  SPEAKER_00: Does it change from day to day?
• 17:18
  SPEAKER_00: And what might that reflection be trying to show you about the place where your mind has mistaken one longing for the whole truth?
• 17:25
  SPEAKER_00: Where might the mirror be showing you the exact place you have forgotten who you really are?
• 17:32
  SPEAKER_00: And for me, ever since I was of romantic age, it's always been a partner for me.
• 17:42
  SPEAKER_00: Uh I guess, thankfully for my chart placement, being a Taurus, I'm very fixed, and being Venus and Mars and Pisces, I mean, send help, please, because I'm very much a hopeless romantic.
• 17:55
  SPEAKER_00: So I think that's just where my Achilles heel would be, or where my easiest place to forget would be.
• 18:03
  SPEAKER_00: And I think for us, most of us, we can think about where that typically lies.
• 18:11
  SPEAKER_00: I think as we get older, it becomes more fixed only because our patterns become more practiced.
• 18:17
  SPEAKER_00: Maybe when we're younger, the reflection might change more.
• 18:21
  SPEAKER_00: But I do think there's truth in the fact that as you live longer, I would expect that the reflection would become more fixed or more likely to be fixed.
• 18:31
  SPEAKER_00: You can tell me what you think in the comments if you'd like to comment.
• 18:35
  SPEAKER_00: And I also just want to take this time to also redirect you to that you can send fan mail to the show.
• 18:42
  SPEAKER_00: I've added that to the show notes as well as my Instagram profile.
• 18:47
  SPEAKER_00: And if you want to send longer inquiries, I have my email there as well.
• 18:51
  SPEAKER_00: But please, you know, if you hear something that really resonates with you, or if you have an idea for me to go over, please let me know.
• 18:58
  SPEAKER_00: I do have my content planned out for quite a while, but I do only drop once a week, and I would be happy to work in audience requests multiple times throughout the week.
• 19:09
  SPEAKER_00: Maybe I could drop a special episode, you know.
• 19:11
  SPEAKER_00: This is still in its infancy stages, this podcast.
• 19:14
  SPEAKER_00: So I'm very open to other ideas and working other things in.
• 19:21
  SPEAKER_00: So please don't be shy about sending me mail if you just want to have a conversation.
• 19:24
  SPEAKER_00: I love having conversations like this.
• 19:27
  SPEAKER_00: I would hope to develop an audience and a following and people who are genuinely interested in these deep messages because they mean everything to me.
• 19:36
  SPEAKER_00: I love stories.
• 19:36
  SPEAKER_00: I've always loved stories, and the more I watch stories, the more I learn about myself.
• 19:42
  SPEAKER_00: I see how my interpretation changes.
• 19:45
  SPEAKER_00: Some things are bedrock pillars that kind of remain, you know, consistent because I think that they're so rooted, but other things get added on all the time as I watch stories.
• 19:57
  SPEAKER_00: So absolutely love having conversations like this.
• 20:01
  SPEAKER_00: And just to close out the episode, I want to thank you, divine listeners, for tuning into the third episode of the Divine Dialogue podcast on the Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone series.
• 20:12
  SPEAKER_00: Again, if you're new here, please check out the other two episodes of this series, as well as the Balto series that I opened the podcast with.
• 20:20
  SPEAKER_00: We do have a few more scenes to get through the Sorcerer's Stone.
• 20:24
  SPEAKER_00: The next one on the Docket is going to be the episode on the Forbidden Forest when Harry and Draco and Fang run into Voldemort cloaked, basically feeding off the unicorn.
• 20:38
  SPEAKER_00: And what I think the unicorn represents, the slaying of purity, the violation of innocence, essentially, we're going to get into the meaning of that.
• 20:50
  SPEAKER_00: And again, if you have suggestions, please share them.
• 20:54
  SPEAKER_00: Until next time, remember the mirror is there to help you come back to yourself, not get lost in its reflection.
• 21:02
  SPEAKER_00: And I'll leave you with that thought.
• 21:03
  SPEAKER_00: Divine listeners, thank you for tuning in, and I will see you next Friday.