MirrorOfTheSelfTest
The "mirror of the self" test is an empirical subjective test that can fairly reliably measure the relative degrees of Living Wholeness in a pair of objects or situations. It was invented by ChristopherAlexander.
To perform the test, you need the two objects or situations you are judging between in close (temporal or spatial) proximity, so that you can compare the feelings they generate.
Ask, "which of these things would I choose as an image of my inner self—my true self, everything that is good and bad about me?"
You can also ask "which of these things makes me feel more alive?" or "which one makes me feel the greatest increase in my humanity?" These questions all mean the same thing.
It can be hard to bring yourself to answer this question honestly, because it requires you to be vulnerable: to let out a little piece of information about a part of yourself that you may want to keep hidden from everyone. You may not even want to admit it to yourself, because it contradicts what you like. It may go against your tastes, against the "self" you want to construct. But the mirror-of-the-self question is not about what you like. It is about what you are like.
To confuse matters even further, we are nowadays used to hearing words like "joy", "humanity", and "self" thrown about in the workplace, where they often mean very little. To answer the mirror-of-the-self question, you have to go much deeper. This notion of self has very little to do with the self that you show to other people, or that other people say they want to create in you.
Still, if you can get over these hangups and just look at the two things you are comparing, then whichever one makes you feel more human—whichever one convinces you, if only for a moment, that you are looking into your innermost self—that is the one that has more Life.
Compare the two images below, both rare and valuable carpets from Christopher Alexander's collection. Which one is a truer picture of your innermost self?
Note that I expect you will arrive at a particular answer, though I don't give that answer here. If you have an opportunity to get a large group of people together to vote anonymously on this question, I would be very interested to hear the results (ben.christel@gmail.com).
The mirror-of-the-self question seems subjective, in the sense of "answerable only by reference to fundamentally arbitrary opinions, rather than inescapable facts". In spite of this, the question yields statistically significant results for many pairs of objects. The results are consistent across individuals and demographic groups. For certain pairs of objects, agreement on the question "which has more life" approaches 100%. My personal view, based on the results Alexander talks about in TheNatureOfOrder, is that the stronger the agreement, the greater the difference in the degree of life possessed by the two objects.
Alexander's explanation of these results is that the degree of Life in a thing inheres in its structure, and that humans have an innate ability, independent of their culture or preferences, to perceive this non-biological kind of life.
These variations on the test were invented by me. Use with caution.
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"Think back to when you were younger and played make-believe games. Which of these objects would you choose as the protagonist in your story? Which would be the sidekick, or the antagonist?"
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"If these two objects appeared in your dreams, which would be more likely to appear in a good dream? Which would be more likely to appear in a disturbing dream, or a nightmare?"