Recently we posted a humourous story about Mullah Nasruddin and a mirror.  Here from Mahmud Shabistari’s response to the seventh inquiry in the Garden of Mystery  is a much more refined rendering of the same idea.  For more about Shabistari, see this post.

Place a mirror in front of yourself;
Look and see the other person in it.

Look at it carefully and ask, “Who is that image?”
It is neither self nor mirror, so what is this image?

Since I am fixed in my essential self,
I do not know what is this shadow-me.

How can nonbeing be joined to Existence?
Light and darkness cannot really be joined.

–from Garden of Mystery
The Gulshan-i raz of Mahmud Shabistari
Tr. Robert Abdul Hayy Darr