Seeing Your Face Without A Mirror (Mindfulness Stories of Self - Realisation)

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In this book the sage invites the reader to come to the truth of who you are, to see your original face, your face before you were born.

Discursive communications on such themes serve to obfuscate rather than clarify, often leading to outrage, confusion and division. On the other hand parables and stories transmit deeper truths intuitively, conveying an understanding way beyond the mind.

These stories are only pointers but also catalysts – they precipitate understanding and guide their inherent wisdom to seep gently to the heart.

Dr. Francis Vallor is an author and international speaker. His life long quest brought him in contact with many wonderful spiritual teachers, friends and several masters and sages such as Anthony de Mello. It was he who set him on the path of Awareness. After de Mello's death, Francis worked as the director of Sadhana Institute in Lonavla, India for fourteen years before spending two years as a visiting scholar at the University of Notre Dame. Currently he lives in Dublen, Ireland where he works as a Clinical Psychologist in practise and conducts Awareness workshops and retreats. He is the author of A Dewdrop in the Ocean –Wisdom Stories for Turbulent Times (2009) and The Ocean in the Dewdrop – Awakening the Sage Within (2010).

The themes and stories in this book are those the author has grappled with throughout his life. He finally recognised true self-understanding is outside the realm of concepts, images and words. The author is like water in which these stories are reflected. He sees them as memos, aids to re-member who you really are.

The expression, "looking at your face without the aid of a mirror" comes from the writings of Dnyaneshwar, a young 13th-century Indian mystic and poet. Self- realisation or self-understanding is experiencing and knowing who you really are. This involves moving from the limitations of self-identity to own, accept and realise the marvellous truth of who you are.

Self-realisation is in fact-recognition, a seeing of yourself without means or the instrumentality of a reflective process that discloses you to yourself. It is not asking you to recall your face before you were born. It is remembering what you have always been, even prior to consciousness.

The power of such a Self-awareness is that the moment you see it, your life is forever changed. Your perceptions of what is real and what is apparent, what is ephemeral and what endures, and what is essential as different from what is trivial, are no longer the same. The illusion of separation ends with the realisation of the Oneness of all that is. In brief, now you are "transparent to the transcendent." (Karlfried Graf Durckeim)

The one purpose of life is to come to this which is indeed the unmasking of the Divine in you. This is something that is realised, not something that is believed. Beliefs are made up of ideas and concepts which are inadequate even to communicate such an experience. Nor is it attained by practice, prayer or penance, but it is something you wake up to see.

Mystics and sages have made attempts to communicate the experience using metaphors. They wrote poems, parables and stories, as pointers, to evoke an experience and effect a transformation. In our common daily life function of language is to convey information, and the currency of the realm is concepts and ideas.

Most of the stories in this volume revolve around this theme. The author is grateful to the many teachers of the present and from diverse cultures, traditions and places whose teachings provided some of the inspirations for these stories. These include J Krishnamurti, Anthony de Mello, Ramesh Balsekar, Kabir Ramana Maharshi, Jan van Ruysbroeck, Meister Eckhart, Joseph Campbell, and many others. The wisdom of such men and women is perhaps more easily accessible as stories than though descriptive and didactic writing. And they will have served their purpose if even a few of them help the reader come to a deeper self-understanding.