Human perception is not only a psychological, but a spiritual phenomenon. In the way our eyes look, a secret is hidden. The withdrawal of projections is something more than looking within ourselves for the things that irritate us or attract us in other people—it is the way we purify the spirit from our primal passions. Therefore, to understand the true essence of human perception means to obtain the key to creativity and freedom.
The concept of “projection” in psychotherapy
In psychotherapy, the concept of projection is used in two different ways. The more popular one comes from Freud’s psychoanalysis, where projections are viewed as one of the defense mechanisms of the Ego. Through them, we maintain a positive image of ourselves by seeing traits unacceptable to us outside, rather than inside ourselves. But projections also have another meaning—they are a means of knowledge. They are the way through which we perceive and get to know the outside world.
In other words, projections are not only an expression of the distortion of our perception—they are the very essence of human perception! Therefore, both Gestalt therapy and Jung’s analytical psychology claim that we get to know and understand the world precisely thanks to projections. As such, they act as a kind of subjective filter that colors what is seen, attributing meaning and significance to it.
In this sense, projections are simultaneously something that we must withdraw, but also something that cannot be withdrawn. We solve this paradox by distinguishing between the two different meanings of the concept of projection—in its (1) personal and in its (2) cognitive sense.
In its first use, we withdraw projections by admitting that inside us there are the same unpleasant traits that we condemn in others (the so-called integration of the Shadow).
In its second use, we go deeper and what we withdraw is the belief that what our eyes see is “objective reality.” Then we replace it with another belief, which is closer to reality, namely that in our capacity as subjects we cannot claim that we can objectively see reality. Our perception is inevitably always subjectively colored by the peculiarities of our individuality, but there is nothing wrong with that. This is the way human perception functions.
Here are a few examples:
-
When a person is in love, in the face of their beloved they see a beautiful being. After the period of infatuation passes, however, they “suddenly” begin to see the hair on their back and the pimple on their nose. Their emotional and intellectual limitations also begin to constantly stand out in their eyes. Sometimes the change in perception is so great that it is as if they see another person. And they are the same. They have always been like that. Maybe they didn’t have a pimple, but the hair on their back was there. Their limitations were there too.
-
I had a client who suffered from obsessive thoughts related to her hands—she saw them red and ugly. She experienced an extreme degree of intolerance and self-hatred when she looked at them. At one stage of our work, I suggested she visit a colleague of mine who deals with regressive hypnosis and works with the “field of knowledge.” In a subsequent conversation with my colleague, she shared with me that after she connected with the energy field of this girl (entering her role) and looked at her, her gaze changed. She saw her as very ugly, with blood-red hands. She was shocked to discover how much the way of her perception had changed (because in reality the girl with the obsessive thoughts was a very gentle and sympathetic being with a normal hand color).
-
In astrology, from the placement of the Moon by sign and house, as well as from the aspects it makes, one judges the relationship between the child and the mother. Astrologers, however, make a clarification. They say that if the placement in question points, for example, to a cold or controlling mother, this does not mean that in real life this mother is like that. This only means that her child will be inclined to see her this way.
-
“Yesterday” I was looking at myself in the mirror. I saw myself as ugly. “Today” I look at myself again—I see myself as beautiful.
-
“Today” the day outside looks so sunny and wonderful. I wonder how “yesterday,” when the weather was exactly the same, I hated the sun.
Countless more examples can be found that “something stands behind our eyes” which has the ability to see things from the world of people and phenomena in such different ways. But what is this thing? And what is its connection with the Spirit?
Don Miguel Ruiz on “The Art of Dreaming”
Many authors comment on this topic, but for me personally, it is best described by Don Miguel Ruiz, who presents the spiritual tradition of the Toltecs. According to this tradition, there is no such thing as real reality. There is only a dream that we are dreaming. We are dreaming it all the time.
“WHAT YOU ARE SEEING and hearing in this moment is only a dream. Now, in the present moment, you are dreaming. You are dreaming with the brain awake. Dreaming is the main function of the mind, and the mind dreams twenty-four hours a day. It dreams when the brain is awake and when the brain is asleep. The difference is that when the brain is awake, there is a material framework that makes us perceive objects linearly. When we go to sleep, we do not have the framework and the dream has a tendency to change constantly.”
Don Miguel describes the essence of “human perception as light that perceives light.” According to him, in the world of the spirit, we are all “one,” but when we enter the world of matter, we experience the illusion of separateness. It is precisely this illusion that is the “dream” preventing us from seeing our true essence. Because matter is not what we think it is, but a “mirror that reflects light and thus creates images from it.”
Don Miguel learned the Toltec tradition from his grandfather and mother. Initially, for him, it was only theoretical knowledge, until the moment came for him to personally experience what his predecessors had told him. His mystical experience happened in the Sonoran Desert. Due to the heat, he could not fall asleep and so he went out for a walk under the sky. It was then that he first saw the millions of stars as something living:
“The infinite, Mother Earth, the whole of creation is alive. It is a living being. Of course, I had seen these stars many times, but never in this way, from this point of view. Моя emotional reaction was staggering. In my heart, I felt a strong joy mixed with the most exquisite peace.”
This was a prelude to the next, even more impressive experience. He felt that he was not alone and realized that just as he was observing the infinite, in the same way, the infinite was observing him. At that moment, his perception shifted, and he himself became the infinity observing the man Miguel, located in the Sonoran Desert:
“I saw my physical body made of billions of tiny stars, which I knew were atoms, vast as the stars in the sky.”
That night, he understood that the infinity inside his physical body was only a continuation of the infinity around him. That he was part of this infinity, and this applied not only to him but to every object of his perception. Then he reached into his pocket for the small mirror that, as a doctor, he always carried with him. When he looked into that mirror, he saw himself as a precise necklace of the whole creation, which in its essence is a virtual reality created by light.
“At that moment, I understood that my eyes are like two mirrors. Light projects a virtual reality inside my brain, just as it projects a Virtual Reality in the mirror. It was obvious that everything perceived by me was a virtual reality created by images of light. The only difference between my eyes and the mirror is that behind the eyes there is a brain. And this brain allows me to analyze, interpret, and describe the virtual reality that I perceive at every moment.”
It is precisely the latter—the ability for subjective reflection of the images of light—that makes the human a co-creator of God. Creativity manifests in the ability to create a different narrative for what we perceive. It is precisely this subjective narrative that the Toltecs call “dreaming.”
“Now everything began to make sense in my mind. Finally, I understood what my mother and grandfather had been trying to teach me for so long about the ancient Toltec philosophy. According to the Toltecs, people live in a dream. The dream is an illusory world created by images of light, and the mind dreams both when the brain is asleep and when it is awake.” — Don Miguel Ruiz, The Voice of Knowledge
Michael Talbot on “The Holographic Universe”
It is interesting to see the connection between what Don Miguel Ruiz wrote and the ideas of “The Holographic Universe” in the book of the same name by Michael Talbot. In it, the author presents the exact same idea, this time from a scientific point of view. According to it, the universe is a giant hologram in which everything is One and every single separate particle contains information about the Whole. In this universe, matter is not what it seems at first glance, but is built of holograms (Don Miguel calls them “images of light”). These holograms are subjectively perceived as real, but behind their reality stands another reality.
“In other words, there is evidence that suggests our world and everything in it—from snowflakes to maple trees, from shooting stars to spinning electrons—are also only ghostly images, projections from a level of reality that is so far beyond our own that it is literally beyond time and space.” — Michael Talbot
In his book, Talbot presents the ideas of two of the world’s most prominent scientists—David Bohm (a quantum physicist encouraged in his development by Einstein personally) and Karl Pribram (a Stanford neurophysiologist, author of the classic neuropsychological manual Languages of the Brain). Both turn to the idea of the holographic model because the theories they had up to that point were not satisfactory.
“Bohm became convinced of the holographic nature of the universe only after years of dissatisfaction with the inability of standard theories to explain all phenomena encountered in quantum physics. Pribram’s conviction came as a result of the failure of conventional brain theories to explain various neurophysiological mysteries.” — Michael Talbot
Thanks to the holographic model, a number of phenomena that we have not understood so far can be explained. For example, paranormal phenomena such as “telepathy, precognition (predicting a future event that cannot be realized on the basis of present knowledge or be deduced with the help of logic), the mystical sense of unity with the universe, and even psychokinesis, or the mind’s ability to move physical objects without them being touched.”
As can be seen, in this case, it is a matter of changing the scientific paradigm (the meta-theory), and this always happens when the old paradigm has reached the limit of its explanatory capabilities. I am reminded of the rift between Freud and Jung, which was also caused by a change in paradigm (the irony is that scientific paradigms, according to Jung, are also an expression of the processes of knowing the world through projections).
“Viewed together, Bohm and Pribram’s theories provide a whole new way of looking at the world: Our brains mathematically construct objective reality by interpreting frequencies that are ultimately projections from another dimension, from a deeper order of existence that is beyond space and time: The brain is a hologram wrapped in a holographic universe. This synthesis led Pribram to realize that the objective world does not exist, at least not in the way we have grown accustomed to believing. What is ‘out there’ is a vast ocean of waves and frequencies, and reality looks actual to us only because our brains are able to take this holographic blur and convert it into the sticks, stones, and other familiar objects that make up our world.” — Michael Talbot
It seems that the deeper we penetrate into the secrets of matter, the closer we come to the mystery of life. The more we learn the laws of the visible, the closer we come to the laws of the invisible. And thus we understand that the one who observes is connected in a very complex way to what they observe (in quantum physics, this is the so-called “observer effect”: depending on the presence or absence of an observer, electrons behave in two ways—either as particles or as waves).
Jung on the Interaction Along the Ego-Self Axis
The processes of interaction between the two parts of the Self in Jungian analysis are called “interaction along the Ego-Self axis.” One part of this interaction is the earthly Self (the ego), and the other part is the source from which it is formed—the archetype of the total personality (the Self), the god within us.
“The emergence of projection is probably related to the mirror-symmetrical relationship between the Ego-complex and the center of the unconscious personality. The capacity for reflection, from which all higher consciousness originates, is directly dependent on this connection.” — Marie-Louise von Franz, C.G. Jung: His Myth in Our Time, p. 115
It is easy to see the analogy between this interaction and the description of the two parts of the hologram—where the source of the projection is, and where the projected image is realized in matter. The dimension from which the projections come, which Michael Talbot speaks of, is located beyond space and time. The same applies to the world of archetypes, which is also beyond the dimension of space-time.
In his autobiographical book Memories, Dreams, Reflections, Jung writes that two of his dreams shed light on the problem of the interaction between the eternal man and the earthly man in time and space. In one, he dreamed he was walking through a beautiful hilly area and reached a wayside chapel. When he entered, he saw that instead of the Virgin Mary or a crucifix, there was only a wonderful bouquet of flowers on the altar, and in front of it, sitting in the “lotus” position, was a yogi immersed in deep contemplation. He approached the yogi and was shocked to discover that he had the exact same face as his own. He woke up from this shock, along with the thought: “Ah, he is the one who is meditating me! He is dreaming that I am this.” He later clarified: “I knew that when he woke up, I would no longer exist.”
“This dream… represents a parable: my total personality gives itself to meditation and meditates my earthly image. It could also be said this way: it takes on a human form in order to enter three-dimensional existence, just as someone puts on a diving suit to submerge into the sea. When the Self gives up existence in the hereafter, it assumes a religious position, which the chapel in the dream speaks of. In its earthly image, it can experience the experiences of the three-dimensional world, moving further toward realization through higher awareness.” — C.G. Jung, Memories, Dreams, Reflections, pp. 318-319
Creativity and Freedom
But what follows practically from the fact that we have two parts of the Self—one located in the eternal and infinite, and the other putting on the diving suit and plunging into the world of the three-dimensional? What does it mean that our eyes are two “mirrors” upon which a virtual reality from another dimension is projected? How does the knowledge that we are a hologram, which in turn is part of a larger hologram, help us solve problems in our daily lives? The answer is that it is precisely in the change of our perception that the possibility for creativity and freedom is contained. The challenge in this case is to understand what it means to create in our lives, because when it comes to self-creation, this happens on two different levels.
In the holographic model, one is the place from which the image is projected and the rays are split. The other is the focal point where the rays converge and the image materializes. According to the theory of reincarnation, one form of creativity is at the level of super-consciousness, where the plan for the soul’s incarnation is created (here the most famous author is Dr. Michael Newton, but there are others). The other creativity is from “the other side of the photographic plate,” where to create means to participate in the film we have planned and to solve the challenges we have chosen for ourselves.
This is precisely where the opportunity for creativity in our earthly life lies—the ability to change our perception of what is happening to us. Or, to use the words of Don Miguel, to change the “narrator”—that part of the mind that constantly comments on the things in our life. Even if we cannot change the main events in the film in which we participate, we can always change the way we perceive (i.e., interpret) what is happening in it.
The narrative is what changes everything. It is one thing to call yourself a failure who didn’t have the luck to have an easy and comfortable life. It is another to see in the trials and difficulties of your life the means to manifest the hero within you. On Earth, things look different and even diametrically opposite to what is seen from the side of the soul. This is the reason why the researcher of the dimension between incarnations, Robert Schwartz, wrote in his book Your Soul’s Plan (Brave Souls) that “only the brave plan fear.” The visible is often exactly the opposite of the invisible; we change the habits of our internal narrator by changing the coordinate system of evaluation.
The practical consequence of the holographic model of the Universe and the “images of light” projected into our minds is that it helps us step out of the screen in the movie theater and sit among the audience. A part of us will continue to be on stage and participate in the film to experience all those things that make people go to the movies. Besides the main character, there will now be another part in the film that stands aside and watches this film from the outside. It is precisely this internal separation that opens the space of freedom and is the key to creativity in our lives.
In Conclusion
When we create a distance between “that which looks behind our eyes” and “that which it sees,” we will be able to turn the tragedy of our lives into a comedy.
When we realize that our perception is not just the way we register things from reality, but also the way we participate in the creation of that same reality, we will be able to look differently at what is happening to us.
When we understand that suffering and difficulties are what create the conditions for our inner hero’s adventure, we:
-
Extract the spirit from matter, to use the language of Jungian analysis.
-
Connect with the inner observer in meditation, to use the language of the East.
-
Enter the space of neutrality, as Michael Tamura expresses it.
-
Become masters of dreaming and change the dream in which we live, as Don Miguel writes.
-
Connect with the Kingdom of Light, to use the imagery of Kabbalah.
And thus, we personally understand what Marianne Williamson means in her book A Return to Love when she writes that “a miracle is just a shift in perception.”
Kameliya Hadzhiyska
