Project Projection
I was five years old when my father died.
That’s when death, sudden, tragic, untimely death, became a part of my reality.
Losing my 33 year old father was the first loss I experienced in my life.
I can’t say how many nights after that in my childhood I cried myself to sleep thinking about what it would be like if my mother died as well, in a sudden, untimely way.
This was a projection.
It was a prediction of and rehearsal for a moment I had reason to believe was coming for me. It was an experiential reality created by my mind.
This projection shaped my behavior. It fed me thoughts about the demise of loved ones when I hadn’t heard from them. It fueled practices throughout my whole family where worry was synonymous with care.
It’s also the reason I know for a fact that the last words I said to my mother were “I love you.”
That projection came true. It was always based in a fact. My mother would die someday. Then it turned out she did die suddenly, tragically, at the untimely age of 49, before her two younger children were out of high school.
Projections are the things I imagine. ALL the things I imagine. If I am not perceiving it with my senses, it’s a projection. When I interpret what my senses perceive, it’s a projection. I am imagining meaning and larger context and also imagining how real those fantasies are.
What I imagine is limited by my exposure and experiences.
The experience of losing my father formed the foundation of my projection of the death of every other person I loved.
Was this a good projection or a bad projection?
It’s a projection I have given certain powers and applied in specific ways. It’s a projection that has given me experiences and meta-experiences of my reality. It has flavored and textured most of my moments and forms the foundation of my worldview. I use this projection as a heuristic in challenging moments, “What if this is our last moment together, how would I want this to go?”
This projection is a particularly useful one because it’s the one that puts all other projections in their place. Projections are bits of the unknown I get to play with until reality shows what IS. Just like no human is promised another breath, none of my projections will certainly come true.
The trouble with projections is how often they do come true. That’s what gets us believing them, sometimes more than we believe the reality in front of us—they come true! Sometimes because we are intelligently and intuitively interpreting the cues of reality; other times, like a self-fulfilling prophecy, projections rule an interaction until they make themselves true.
Whatever makes a projection come true, whatever makes me sure in the moment I imagine it that I know it is true, I still know that it is a projection. It is a plaything in the unknown. It is giving me a now-moment experience, which is the only kind on offer because there IS no future.
The way I rule my projections gives me agency of experience every now. Mastery of my projections is what it means to be Abundantly Boundaried on the inside, capable of the silence required to be responsive to only and exactly what is in front of me right now.
When I allowed my projections to rule me and my life, drama brought the intrigue that is the rightful offering of mystery. I cycled through certainty and disappointment, stability and upset, I slogged through lengthy misunderstandings that would have been prevented by an open question posed early on.
I have not “fixed” my tendency to project, I have ceased to pathologize it. I regard projection as inevitable and invaluable. I have a process for refining projections, for discerning projections worthy of investment, for checking the biases inherent in my projections, for cultivating curiosity, most of all, when I am sure I know something.
My mother’s death coincided with me discovering the universal laws of manifestation via The Secret. I had a burned copy of the audio and one of the disks didn’t work, so I knew I was learning from an incomplete text.
Is that why I didn’t arrive at the toxic positivity, the attraction-as-colonization, the attachment prison so many people come to via that text, was it knowing that it wasn’t complete?
Or was it the way I was blown apart by grief in the middle of brainwashing myself, such that I could not deny that pain is a part of reality regardless of how pure and pristine I manage to keep my thinking?
As always, it’s everything, exactly when and how it happened. It doesn’t matter why, here is what is:
I know how to see my own projections, how to inquire about them, how to discern their value. I know how to choose valuable projections and when and how to drop the projections all away.
I experience in real-world moments the agency and empowerment I have in relationship by knowing my own mind.
Others have actual emotional safety and permission to be human around me when I know the influence I am bringing to bear on my own experience here and now.
Relationships are low stakes and consensual when I know my projection-based experiences are beyond the scope of others’ influence, beyond the influence of material circumstances.
I am free to receive of the world as it is, free from the certainty/disappointment cycle. All intrigue is supplied by the mystery as an unforeseen reality appears to delight me again and again in the unimaginable emergence of life.
I’m able to maintain emotional connection, hold relationship sacred, and stay on the same team with my loved ones even in the face of massive disappointment, bewilderment, and grief. In emergency situations, in instances of violence, in moments of crisis, the processes to which I subject my projections are my greatest assets.
I learned from teachers how to see my projections, and I learned for myself how to use them to greatest effect, without alienating grief or those in pain. I’ll be teaching the techniques and applications that integrate projections as a tool of experiential engineering Tuesday and Thursday.
Join us this coming week for Project Projection, the capstone masterclass for the 12 month Village Principles Curriculum.
