This world has the openness that allows us to choose how we see it. In my life I have seen how a seemingly ordinary world transformed itself into a sheer miracle of a place. What gives?
The truth was, the world had always been this way. It was I who had shuttered my perception, not letting in enough of the light. I could not see it for how I felt.
This is, though, how all of our lives are. We each have a choice-to own ourselves and our feelings, or not. But when we choose to not fully own what is ours, a very curious thing happens.Psychologist call this projection.
Projection can happen in a variety of ways, but the effects from doing it are always the same. When we don’t fully own our feelings, we project those feelings onto things. Anything will do; people, places, and things. We will see a person as having the very troubles that lie within our own hearts and minds. Carl Jung, the noted psychologist explained that when it comes to projection, the person who is projecting swears that the fault lies in the Other….be it their neighbor, friend, or family member.
The thing to understand is that as long as we are engaged in projecting, we don’t realize we are the ones who are doing it.
One really good example of mass projection played out on a national scale when Germans believed that Jews were a problem back before Germany invaded Poland. As we all know, the Jewish people weren’t the problem at all. The real problem that gripped so much of Germany was a deep seated dislike of something within themselves. There was a fear of this self, over how it might not be controllable, and this was projected as loathing for the Jewish people. As we can see, the Jews became the first column in a larger effort that was conceived in madness. Liberal, educated, and lovers of culture and art, the Jews were what the Germans, many of them, believed they were not, or perhaps more accurately, feared they were but could not allow themselves to be. The irony in this story is that Hitler sought to steal art work from the Jews and from the countries that he invaded. Hitler was a failed art student who had been deemed unworthy of schooling by a….Jewish teacher when he was younger. You might think this was just about a twisted form of “payback,” but it goes deeper than that. Unable to deal constructively with his own creative drive, Adolph turned his creativity on its head so that it became aggression instead of what creativity otherwise does when used in a positive way, which is that it unifies. We all know how that turned out. The hate within was turned outward onto an innocent people and one man’s madness enlivened the splinters in a large part of his nation so that they became extremely exxagerated. The nation really did believe that the problem were the Jews. They believed this so much that they went to extraordinary lengths to justify their own projections. What the Germans hated in the Jews was actually what they hated about themselves. This had nothing to do with the Jews…but by projecting, the Jews became the skapegoat. Sad, isn’t it?
We see this tendency everywhere when we observe how one person doesn’t “get” another person. They misperceive things about them, or interpret what another person does based less on what is true for that person and more on an inner script that is playing in the mind of the person who is doing the projecting.
To learn how to stop projecting is quite easy. You simply learn to own your life and your feelings. You can stop projecting by bringing awareness into your life because projection always happens when there is a lack of it.
When you feel that twinge inside of you that tells you that the fault is in another, this is the moment that you should ask yourself if this is really true. There is something in each of us that I call The Watcher that gives us the means to step back and examine what is happening, in a dispassionate way, that can unlock the doors of our native perception. You just need to reflect within, gently and quietly, in that moment and then feel deeply within yourself for the truth about where your feelings are coming from.
The truth is that our feelings come from us. We each are choosing to react to any given moment in our lives. Look for any feeling that reveals a sense of resistance, tension, or tightness, in either your mind, heart, or body. If you feel this tightness, then you are resisting seeing and acknowledging a deeper truth about what is happening in the moment. I can tell you that were you to know the truth about why you are resisting and getting ready to think it’s all the problem of another person, the reason fully known to you simply would erase your feelings of resistance. It is always this way. Always.
The resistance happens because our mind thinks one thing and our soul know another. Since the mind is like the surface of a lake and the soul is its depths, the mind can forget what the other part actually knows. But being so focused in our minds, we don’t realize that there is another side to the story. There is always another side to the story!
Ceasing to project means listening carefully to what is being said to you by that knowing self within so that you can hear what is being said to you by others. When we “read into” people’s words, all we are doing is actively projecting onto them our own inner script.
Everyone has their own story….and deep down we actually DO know the story, were it not for all the surface static that our minds create.
This static comes from our beliefs about a host of things. “People are just rude and uncaring” might be one. This belief will cause your mind to leap to conclusions that lead to all sorts of problems. So that person who cut you off in traffic? They might have not even seen you, or maybe they needed to pee so bad that they were just trying to get home or to the gas station across the street. We interject this material all the time, often without even realizing it. We just aren’t being aware enough.
I have found that people who engage in finger pointing are most often hiding the fault, or a very similar one within themselves. I was once married to a person who did this a lot. What I was able to see was that the fault she falsely tried to seed into the minds of my children wound up being the very fault that she was exercising in that moment. Deep down, by saying to my children that I didn’t love them, she was revealing her own inability to love in a big hearted way….a way that I had always had loved them. If her live had been big like mine had been, she probably would not have said such ridiculous things like she did. But suspecting or perhaps fearing that she didn’t love them in a big hearted way, but also being unable to consciously admit this to herself, she saw a “truth” that resided outside of herself in another person.
What this woman actually saw was a man who felt alienated by her behavior and the pain that it caused. It wasn’t a lack of love, but because it had been so abundant and had gotten crushed. THAT was the true story, and as long as her script was running in her head, it has kept her from being able to see what was real.
Projections can come from the most broken part of ourselves. It can blind us to what is happening in front of us. I have seen how I have done this….jumping to conclusions that had nothing to do with what was there, or seeing events in such a way that they mirrored what was going on inside of me instead of the way they actually were. And because the soul can feel this, the people around me can pick up on this and they respond, at least in part, with that soul-knowing…along with their own interperative scripts.
Step back and feel into the source of the resistance. Do you feel angry? Most often, this is a script from your past that is about a hurt you never got over. This is a perfect moment to begin healing it by letting yourself to drift deep into the feeling like drifting in the water of a deep lake. Just relax and stay neutral. Tell yourself that you are not your feelings. Your feelings are based in choices you make about how you want to feel. Drift into them and let yourself feel deeply into whatever the feeling is. Pretend you are a visitor to the lands of your subconscious and ask yourself what the root of that feeling is. Don’t let yourself fall into resistance. Fall into yourself and let the Watcher learn to see. Use your intuition, which is tied to feeling but isn’t the emotions.
Feeling deeply like this, you can begin to access the nonlinear feeling self that knows. If you find yourself feeling defensive, this is a sign that you need to let go more. Then, just let whatever cones to mind surface…no matter how easy it might seem or how quickly you might want to discount it. “Oh, it couldn’t be that” we often tell ourselves. For this moment, let anything come without trying to mediate it in a judging way. Let yourself be willing to free associate. It’s very likely that you grasped something that your rational mind could not.
The key in all of this is when you feel the tightness. This is not the world doing this, it’s you. By owning it, you can gain significant awareness necessary to begin healing or erasing this pattern from your mind. When you see the world as it is, your body does not resist. Yes, there are terrible things that happen in our world, but when you can see the truth behind the horror, the soul always floods in and the heart opens because they both know that the horror is there only because of a stored hurt in another that just needs a little more love to heal. The soul flows in moments like these because it knows that the answer is NEVER resistance, but surrender. Our souls know it because every soul is a spark from a still larger flame. The soul does this because at a deeper level it knows that we are all one.
Doing this work frees and liberates. It is freedom. It lies in true compassion, which requires us to be willing to see beyond our own inner scripts in order to bridge the gulf between all of us.
Nemasté.
Waking The Infinite 