Locking Into Our Projections

Credit: WillocqF(Public Domain Photo)

We are projectors. We close our eyes in meditation to pause the projections. To see someone as they are you need to see them through your projection of them. That, of course, is very hard. It’s hard because, as a rule, our projections are indistinguishable from the things they land on, which makes us confuse the projection with the thing.

The question is, how do we accept our projections and still see things as they really are? Perhaps another way to phrase it is, how can we get to the thought behind the projection before we project?

Part of the answer may come when we start the process of shifting our identity from the projection to the observer of the projection. It seems to me that an important insight implied in this simple gesture of mindfulness is that it doesn’t require a revolutionary upheaval of our routine perceptions. It doesn’t ask us, for instance, to leave the theatre or the cave, but instead to “take our seat” in the audience and watch.

The paradox here is in reconciling the most subservient position (audience) with the most sovereign (author). Of course the point is that we are both audience and author at all times. But could it be that being locked into our projections is a symptom of some other inability, perhaps that of being unable to shift freely from being authors of our reality to its audience? From watcher to watched, from observer to observed, from subject to object?