The mirror and the encounter
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There comes a moment when every search becomes quiet. This happens not because everything has been understood or explained, but because you can finally rest in what is. The questions that brought me here — what narcissism is, why it's increasing, how humanity lost itself and how it can return — are, in essence, variations of one ancient longing: the longing to come home again.
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Home, not as a place, but as a state of being. A sense of anchoring in something larger than the self, yet intimate enough to feel like skin.
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The mirror
The mirror is the central image of our time. It glimmers in every screen, every selfie and every digital reflection. It promises recognition but offers only return. It keeps us occupied with how we appear, not with who we are.
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And yet, the mirror is not our enemy It reveals the contours of our absence. Through it we see what we have lost: the vibrancy of direct presence, the warmth of reciprocity, the shimmer of something that cannot be captured. The mirror, cold as it may be, becomes the silent teacher of our time. It shows us what no longer works, and therefore what longs to be restored.
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The encounter
Opposite the mirror stands the encounter. Where the mirror reflects, the encounter resonates. It creates space for the unpredictable, for the living that cannot be directed. In the encounter something new arises, something that's not mine and not yours, but can only exist between us. It's there that love, truth and empathy converge: love as the willingness to see, truth as loyalty to what appears and empathy as the bridge that lives between them.
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The encounter is not an event but a state of presence. It asks that we release who we think we are and listen to what life itself is saying, in the gaze, in the silence, and in the breath of the other.
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The healing power of nearness
Every true encounter has something sacred about it. Not in the religious sense, but in an existential one: it restores the order of the heart. In nearness the world becomes tangible again; we remember that we are not isolated but threads in the same fabric.
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Therapy, in that sense, is an exercise in encounter. Art is a form of encounter. So are silence, meditation, nature — moments in which the world touches us again. In that touch, the emptiness dissolves. Not because it's filled, but because it is taken up again into meaning. We no longer need to deny it; we can carry it the way the ocean carries its own depth.
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The return of connection
If we look at the whole, the narcissism of our time is not an endpoint but a transition. A mirror that has burned too long, until we dare to turn away from the image and open our eyes again to reality.
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We live in a time in which the world has grown loud: images, opinions, and performances tumbling over each other. That noise is not the cause of our absence, but it is the backdrop against which absence becomes visible. Precisely within this overheated mirror-culture, the need for real encounter becomes palpable again.
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The human being is not meant to reflect endlessly. He is meant to respond: to the world, to the other, and to the life that wants to move through him. That is connection: not disappearing into the other, but remaining present in relation.
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When that movement returns, something like harmony begins to form. Not loud happiness, but a quiet clarity in which everything can take its place: pain, joy, longing, loss and not-knowing. Everything belongs, because everything is part of the same whole.
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The human being as bearer of love
Perhaps this is the simplest and at the same time the deepest conclusion: the human being is a bearer of love. Not in the sense that he possesses love, but that love expresses itself through him; the way music expresses itself through an instrument. Once we remember this, life itself becomes a gesture of love.
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Every action, no matter how small, can resonate with that original tone. Caring for a child, a glance of understanding, a silence that leaves space for the other — all of them are forms in which the universe remembers itself.
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Final reflection: the quiet reversal
I believe this is the true reversal our time is asking for: not a revolution from the outside, but a quiet turning from within. A shift of attention: from mirror to encounter, from projection to presence, from fear to love.
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When more and more people embody this reversal — in their relationships, in their work, in their thinking, in their care — the world changes not through struggle, but through resonance. Through the soft strength of what is genuine. That is the counter-movement already felt everywhere: in conversations where people really listen again, in small gestures of care that do not ask for attention, in silences that create space instead of filling it.
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It needs no leader, no ideology, no system. It begins again and again, every time one person decides to see instead of mirror, to listen instead of speak, and to love instead of control.
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Epilogue
I do not write this as a spectator, but as someone who has walked through that mirror herself. Everything written here has been lived, not invented. That's why this ending does not feel like closure for me, but like a beginning.
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Perhaps later it will be said that the beginning of the world’s healing did not lie in grand gestures or new systems, but in small, invisible moments of humanity: in eyes that dared to meet again, in words that did not persuade but made true, in hands that did not grasp but carried.
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These are the moments when the empty middle becomes tangible again; the middle that was never truly gone, only drowned out. For what saves us is not knowledge or power, but remembrance — the remembrance that we are made of the same substance as life itself:
love in motion.
