Self awareness

Few animals can recognise themselves in the mirror.

Maybe this is where our tests begin. Rather than being at one with an experience, we realise the burdon of this being we must care for and defend.

We attribute the conscious self to material form. We assume survival or one leads to survival of the other. Yet prophets and sages advise the opposite, to die to the attachment to the material or seen self to meet the true self.

I wonder how those who have never seen their own reflection may philosophise life.