Great Paper: "Passing of the Gods" by David C. Smith ~Only the Light~

Great Paper: Passing of the Gods By David C. Smith

~Only the Light~

Counselor Nihim and Queen Salia stand in a private bedchamber at night. Nihim is brother to the King, and a consort of the throne. Queen Salia is a young Queen of a western empire, now a captive and hostage of war. In the time that she has been in the foreign king's castle she has befriended Nihim, and seeks his company often. Nihim, a sort of priest, gives his attentions and advice to Salia, on a cool dark midnight, in a strange foreign land.

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And though the candles and the lamps burned low, still Nihim and Salia sat in her room and sipped tea and spoke occasionally when their stray glances met. Nihim in his plain robe, unadorned by any jewelry or fashionable device. Salia, beautiful yellow rose of the west, in her poverty of spirit and with that unquelled rage against herself unquiet in her heart, clothed finely in her sandals and long sweeping dress and her ornaments and shining pendants. She was sitting on a divian. It was a wide divian, long and desolate of pillows or cushions. Salia might have stretched herself upon the length of it and been free as though she were upon the length of it and been as free as though she were on a beach; but she did not. She sat huddled in one corner of it, as though the empty space about her were pressing upon her intolerably. Nihim was seated in a wooden chair across the room, watching her in the silence of the night, more aware of Slaia than she was of him.

A stark hollow noise erupted briefly in the hall outside, beyond the hanging wall curtains. Salia arched tautly, turning her head like a startled cat.
Nihim hardly moved. "It is not him," he said quietly. Salia lent him a cruel look, then intently studied her white arms and began picking at her skin and some of the scabs that had formed on scratches she had done to herself. "I know that," she admitted. "He never comes here anymore. It's just as well. I don’t want him to come here anymore. I don’t want him to--" she loomed up and stared into a corner, giving great thought to what she wished to say, how she might phrase it. " I don’t want him to. . . Come here-- anymore."
Nihim, after a long while, rose to his feet, clasped his hands behind him and quietly glided across the floor to the young queen. Salia followed him slyly out of the corners of eyes as he crossed in front of her.
Nihim said to her, "My master Toshin said that it is a good thing to understand others, but true awareness only comes from knowing oneself. I think, Queen Salia, that you do not know others, yet you have suffered from their actions toward you; you have allowed them to make you into something---someone---whom you do not understand. Now you try to understand yourself, you look for yourself, but nobody else has given you the light, they have taken the light away. Your search is confusing and fruitless. You do not know where to begin.
Now she looked at him. It was not scorn in her face, nor mistrust in her expression, but a relief mixed with questioning. "Your master Toshin is a very wise man."
"I think so." Said Nihimn
 "Perhaps you can help me, Nihim, to find myself."
He shook his head. "How could i succeed where others have failed you? You must do this.But you must forget everything you have been taught. You must look into a mirror and not see yourself as you appear; you must force out that image from the mirror. Then you must concentrate on what remains."
Her brows knitted. "Is this a puzzle Nihim? If i force the picture of myself--- the reflection of myself---from my mirror, i will not be there. What will remain?"

"Light" He said before turning to leave her to her quarters. "If ever you wish to speak with me again or see me, you will only need to ask."

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I took me a long while after i had first read this passage before the message of the author began to sink in. When i had first read it, i thought the paragraph was a typo that was misworded somehow. 
Like Queen Salia, i was confused at the prospect of learning something by forcing my personal image from a mirror.  But eventually, i began to understand what Smith was alluding to in the dialogue.  Forcing yourself out of the mirror, is about forgetting your ego. Salia wants Nihim to help, but he cant help enough if she isn't willing to change or appropriate what she thinks. "Forget your own image" He says, and concentrate on the illumination and then maybe he could help.