(Alone to Alone : From Awareness To Vission)
One who is of a different race or colour is not an alien; nor one who is of different sex or age; nor is one the alien who practises a different art or craft, or belongs to a different class or caste; and nor one who believes differently, nor the stranger nor a foreigner. None of these is alien but one who is closest to you, who has possessed you from the very outset of your consciousness, who passes for your likeness, who has foisted himself on your back, who is your counter-image. If you are an unembodied reality, he presents you with body; if you trace your race with the archetype above you, he cites the evidence of your parents; if you relate to life beyond death, he ridicules you and brings in a vast range of arguments against it; it puts on your appearance, your face and your name, and a time comes when you end up regarding him as your only reality.
This appearance now so firmly entrenched as your identity fully utilizes your physical self and the body of the world to force upon you a constant dream-state. Its one fear is that you should not wake up.Your awakening is its departure.
The counter-image has vast negative powers. Its success in passing for reality gives it a power to wreck life after life. Watch for those who assume the role of a counter-image of your true self.
Let us make this affair as clear as possible: first is the Soul which has nothing to do with body for its existence, knowledge, and power; then is the body, the creation and expression of the wisdom and art embedded in the Cosmic Soul; and then the conjoint of body and soul, the seat or instrument of your perceptive knowledge and of your pains and pleasures, a tool or a lyre in the hands of its true agent, namely the Sage or the Gnostic. But so far the Alien is not in sight. But he is close, almost upon you for he is the image of the conjoint in your tendency to self-will and self-ownership. The image soon takes over.
The image is the alien, not the body, not the conjoint of body and soul*.
The image as such isolates you from all your former and future lives. It obstructs your awareness on matters that go far beyond one life you are living now. It does not allow you to consider that you are perhaps back to pay for a former lapse or debt, to complete things left incomplete in former life, and that you may rise higher or fall lower as you eventually leave this world. So you are like Sinbad. Ask the one who has foisted himself upon you to get off from your back so that you can once more rise to your full stature and look further into vast distances both before you and behind you.
*The Enneads 6.4 by Plotinus
Spiritual Human 