The Limits of Projection
Can it possibly all be a dream?
The short version: Many people exploring spirituality and healing take on the belief that all of reality is a dream or projection in some way. This is a walkthrough of a visual doodle loosely defining the context of projection, a simple relationship with healing and truth, and the necessary existence of external, objective reality and truth.
Common Ground
One major problem in the world today is the way we treat each other.
We live in a time of cultural and political discourse where discussions often explode into arguments and personal attacks.
One contributing factor to this problem is that many people have been led to hold a view that the world is more self-defined/subjective than it actually is and even so far as to say that everything is a projection of one’s own mind.
This makes it challenging to find common ground to stand on when discussing important societal issues.
Being Human
We often wonder through life scratching our heads curious at what this whole thing is about. We take in new experiences and have to sort through emotions, thoughts, and complex relationships.
The person seeking spiritual truth will likely stumble upon traditions that claim the true nature of the world is an illusion, the self is an illusion and/or philosophers who think we can’t actually know anything about the real world out there.
Sometimes this get’s referred to as the world best being seen as a projection of the mind.
Is it a projection of the mind though? What does it mean to project?
to project — the presentation of an image on a surface, especially a movie screen.
So it’s as if many people are saying they are generating their experience of the world and somehow putting it outside themselves.
I can certainly project some things like anger onto others or even minor hallucinations of images if I really try. However, I can’t make others see things that aren’t actually there. When I say actually there, I’m pointing to a public necessary truth.
So, it’s important to point out that our experience of reality exists on a spectrum from public to private.
Public vs. Private Experience
We have all sorts of experiences, some of which are fully private like our emotions or just hard to communicate like our thoughts. But much of our experiences are built on a shared context with others. We live in a largely public world.
For example: Assuming we are sitting together, I don’t need to debate with you about the existence of the chair that I’m sitting on or that I’m sitting in front of you since these are objective, obvious, shared experiences.
Now I’m not saying that we all don’t have our own unique experience of the world, we do, but the existence of a shared, public, objective world and truth, in general, is what allows us to know the difference between projection/delusion and truth.
Our private subjective experiences are framed against the rest of our experiences in objective reality.
The leaky past
Sometimes though our internal private stuff unconsiously leaks out onto others, causing a distortion in the way we perceive the world. This is called projection or more explicitly, psychological projection.
Psychological projection is a defence mechanism in which the human ego defends itself against unconscious impulses or qualities (both positive and negative) by denying their existence in themselves while attributing them to others.[1] For example, a person who is habitually rude may constantly accuse other people of being rude. It incorporates blame shifting. — Wikipedia
I might, and often am, unconsciously mapping some of my past unresolved emotional material onto people in my life. It can be messy.
It’s generally not good to project onto people since it is akin lieing.
Luke — use the Truth — disentangling delusion
Fortunately, we have this wonderful sense of truthyness which we can utilize to disentangle our experience individually and collectively.
Were there no objective truth or sense of truth then we would not ever be able to delineate between hallucination and reality. It would be some sort of ungrounded dream.
For instance, I may be projecting onto a friend that he is mad at me. It might go something like this.
Me: You mad bro?
Friend: No
Me: Oh, am I mad bro?
Friend: Maybe — how you feel bro?
If I anticipate my friend is mad and act as if he is, I will be operating on false information and likely make bad choices. Through some dialogue about this he and I can navigate our shared experiences of what is true.
To really fully entertain the idea that it is all projection would be akin to saying “I create the truth”. Which is only “true” to the extent that one’s subjective opinion is equated with the truth.
As one’s opinion is true it can be said to be really true. And there are some purely subjective, private truths that no one can know, such as how or what one is feeling in the moment.
But for most of the world the truths, the truths, the truth!
Embodied Inquiry
Healing is often correlative with the revelation of hidden truth. I reckon this is one meaning of “the truth will set you free.”
The questioning process of what is true in myself or in or about another in dialogue gives us the opportunity to discover something about ourselves.
The projection, when found to be untrue in my external world then causes me to inquire into my private/internal experience of my body, mind, and emotions for what could be going on.
If I have been psychologically projecting onto someone, there will be, by definition, something I was unwilling to face or come to terms with, in my internal subjective world.
As I search with my awareness, I may find something like a repressed memory locked in the body and mind in some way. Past traumas which have been unresolved, tend to collect in the unconscious as Bessel Van Der Kolk writes about in The Body Keeps the Score.
It’s all my projection
But to say that the entire world of my experience is somehow my projection. How can that be? Are people saying they’re creating all of reality? Generating it as a sort of private experience? That’s can’t possibly be true.
I think people are often saying they feel they’ve become one with reality or feel not separate from the world that then the whole of reality feels like themselves in some sense.
Though I don’t think it’s really the case for most people, the problem is that if we buy into the claim that it’s all a dream or projection then we concurrently lose a sense of what it even means to be awake or not projecting anything.
Our sense of falseness is built on direct, firsthand knowledge of the truth. To flip the whole thing around and say the world is an illusion, dream or projection is a delusion.
It may have a benefit for one’s subjective experience of freedom but freedom built on delusion is not good for anyone. Better to name it for what it is — a fool’s paradise.
