Self-awareness that gets us and keeps us attuned to our own inner conscious self-awareness cannot rely upon mirror neurons. We actually, in adulthood, though we may have learned a lot about cooperation from mirror neurons are not served by the reality that they mirror to us from others. This pseudo-self-awareness is an effort to be validated by and agreed with by others and it interferes then with our own conscious self-awareness of what it means to be who each one of us is if we are defining that by what is mirrored back to us.
What is mirrored to us in adulthood or by friends for example, is what they think we think, is reality, or what they think their awareness of self and other is based on what they are assuming your thinking about them. It can become quite distorted in terms of people mirroring back and forth assumptions at best and thought distortions at worst. And whether assumptions based on how one believes they are being seen or not, heard or not, validated or not, there then becomes a significant degree of projection in what is often thought to be a mirroring back of someone else’s reality in a way that can make them more self-aware.
© A.J. Mahari, July 15, 2015 – All rights reserved.
