Something I have thought about for some time now…
Imagine if there were two mirrors and they face each other... walk between them and it opens the vista of infinite numbers of selves, receding off into the distance. If the mirrors are only very slightly imperfect, then every copy of Self is slightly changed and we'd need to add together all the copies to make the original Beingness.
What if each image seen in either mirror is actually Self in a Reality? We could have no way of knowing which is the real Self until we can see them all - when we turn one way, every self turns as well, so every self would see itself as the largest copy and think, 'I am Self' and when it turns the other way, seeing again itself as the largest copy, it would decide it IS Self.
Maybe if we add that perspective ( : - sorry, but I like puns) to the possibility that The ALL 'sees' us into a coherence with an underlying BOSE-Condensate state we can see a view of how we may have come to Be? (have a read of
Creative Physics - it begins about page 7 of the thread.)
The Illusion may be necessary to have a Reality at all, but also maybe we don't get to transcend it until we can see it... or perhaps 'perceive' it might be a better word. The Octaves analogy seems to hold a lot of promise.
I see the Original Self has to be The ALL...? It was strange but I began using 'The ALL' as an alternate to God or any other loaded term back in the early naughties - several years later I got informed it is a concept or term from Hermetics - something I STILL haven't got to but keep promising myself... le sigh. :D
In the scenario above, the 'others' who reflect back to us are simply reflections of Self to begin with. The more unlike 'my' self they are, the further along the chain of reflections they might be. The ALL would not be able to 'perceive' Self without creating another PoV to look from. It follows as a chain of logic that to know Self completely The ALL would create a myriad PoV's to view Self.
So, if each reflection of Self is in a Reality, and each reflection of Self can learn and grow, albeit in a more limited sense than can The ALL, then perhaps the only way we can achieve the goal of total self-awareness for The ALL is to learn to perfectly communicate between our selves. Once we can achieve that, The ALL can finally 'see' all sides of Self at once.
Perhaps, once we begin to see the other self's as Self, and learn to Be with each other, we might finally be able to 'see' our self in both mirrors simultaneously...