Let us try to illustrate this idea. We can see two peaks here. One is really there and remains unchangably the same; it points upwards to the infinite sky, is totally real and is exactly what it looks like. The other peak both looks the same and yet is quite different, for it is only a reflection of the real peak in the lake or mirror of the mind. Unlike the real peak it points downwards towards the mind and the world revealed by our senses. It is like our ordinary empirical self, the 'I' of everyday life, which is anything but unchangeable. It disappears altogether when we are asleep, just as the image of the real peak only appears in the lake when the clouds clear away or allow a glimpse through an opening.

Apart from that, the reflected image of the peak is easily changed in appearance by changes on the surface of the lake, just as our egos, in life, undergo innumerable mood changes and feel anything from elated to bruised in the course of our worldly life. To realize the truth about the Self is to respond to the saying of Jesus recorded in a papyrus found in the ancient Egyptian city of Oxyrhincus and published by Oxford University Press in 1993. It was:

The Kingdom of heaven is within you:
And whoever knoweth himself shall find it.