Me too, so we are climbing this summit together.
This seems to be a part of my ‘growing edge’. Things there are often more intuitive and non-verbal. But it can be a good exercise to try to translate those senses and intuitions into coherent verbal expression.
I think I may opt for the free-form style rather than trying to define everything precisely. I just don’t think I’m there yet.
okay, enough stalling:
Projection and the giving away of power
The latest go-round with this started this morning when I was in meditation.
In the moments of daily real-time interaction, of action and response, we don’t have the ability to just say ‘stop’ and pause everything. So, we have to wing it, and do our best with the ongoing situations that we face.
In meditation, in contrast, it’s like the Star Trek holodeck. We can take any person, or situation, or stimulus, and we can pause, rewind, fast forward, change the size, change the angle…
And it’s interesting to do that with phenomena that we’d consider aversive, ugly, threatening, overwhelming, or…POWERFUL.
In meditation, you can explore your internal experience of a challenging external condition.
A person who threatened or intimidated you. A time when you felt embarrassed or that you had failed miserably.
Sometimes the internal experience of these events will arise spontaneously, together with the emotions and sensations of your reaction to them.
Similar to dreaming.
And yes, we can reframe the situation, or we can courageously face it, and so on and so on…
But there’s also something else we can do.
We can learn about it.
And one thing we learn is that every experience we have is constituted of the same elements. The same elements, configured differently.
We project our ‘mental stuff’ to produce a picture or an experience of the world, of life.
Our inner world ‘reaches out’ and touches the outer world. And at the place where they meet, we experience Reality.
Projection.
A fearful story of shame (or, a shameful story of fear)
One day when I was 14, I was sitting in the basement of my childhood home, studying from a thick, large history book while the television was on. (Poor study habit.)
Between the book and the television, I was doing pretty well at blocking out any other reality. So I was very shocked when I suddenly noticed a small creature crawling disconcertingly slowly across the floor. It seemed to be some kind of rodent. Our home never had any critters other than spiders, and my immediate response was one of visceral fear.
Without even thinking of what I was doing, and in one fluid motion, I literally jumped upwards and backwards, onto the couch on which I’d been seated, and at the same time I launched the large history book forcefully at the animal…
…with what turned out to be deadly accuracy.
Somehow the book thudded completely flatly right dead center onto the creature. When I crept forward and gingerly removed the book, I found that it had been killed instantly.
I felt instant remorse, and I keenly recognized that the animal had been killed not as a result of any threatening nature or behavior, but as a result of my own unprocessed fear.
I had projected fear onto it, and then I had killed it as a way of dealing with my fear.
I took it into the backyard, dug a hole and buried. All the while feeling ashamed.
I promised myself that I would work harder so that my fear did not create as much danger and suffering for others.
Years later and late one night, in a very cheap and rundown apartment that I was renting in the Washington Heights neighborhood of New York City, I was awakened by the sound of a creeping creature.
The sounds quickly revealed to me that it was a mouse.
That past experience had been about 14 years earlier, but it was still fresh in my heart.
I chose to own my fear this time, as my belonging. Not as an attribute of an external agent.
I chose to work through my own relationship to my own fear reaction.
Long story short, though it took me some time, I ended up capturing that mouse in a small garbage bin. I then walked it across the street, and released it. (I’m relatively convinced that it probably just made its way back home over the next day or two. But I wasn’t going to live there that much longer anyway.)
That’s a projection story.
There’s so much more to unpack about it.
But it’s time for a run.