Everything is an object of projection – even God.
God has made us in his image (Genesis 1:27), but through our projections we have made God in our image.
I have a strong suspicion, that God is not a separate, external being. To me it feels more like God is incarnate in each of us as our God Self. I believe, we remain largely unaware of this inner authority because it is tempting to project it onto a particular spiritual teacher religious tradition.
It is too much for us to accept just how vast our power is, that we create everything out there and within ourselves. So, we project that power onto a god, fate or life ‘doing to us’. In other words, we give our power away and so absolve ourselves from the responsibility which that power brings. The existentialists among us might take this argument to the point of saying that we project a world and a god to give it cause and purpose.
The notion of God is the Ego’s salvation when it is confronted with aspects of the Self which it cannot explain. Ego cannot accept that it does not have control over us. It tries to contact via prayer and scriptures the very Self that it must deny the existence of, in order to stay in control.
In my personal experience with projection, I realize now that the emptiness I used to feel was actually a yearning for Self. My search for deep connection, perfect understanding and absolute oneness with another person was my projected desire to be one with Self.
I projected my strong yearning for home – Self, onto my partners, where it became a destructive drivenness. I put pressure on them to be all sorts of things they weren’t, and I never took the time to appreciate who they actually were. No wonder I found my relationships challenging, and I felt like a fish out of water. I now understand that no other person can be the Self I am searching for.
Thou shalt have no other Gods before me (Exodus 20; 3-5)
On the road to wholeness, along with all our other projections, we need to recall this God-projection too. Once we have connected with our Self, we can connect with the entire universe.
There is no home other than that which we create for ourselves in our centre. It is constant and accessible – always and everywhere. Self is and always has been our home. It is the complete, self-sufficient whole that we share with others, but don’t look to others to complete.
For me, it has been a succession of transitions from ‘God out there’ to ‘my Higher Self as God’ to ‘God as my Self, my core, overshadowed by Ego-mind’. Chipping away the stone to reveal the sculpture, it has been a journey from self striving to be Self to simply being Self, discarding all that is not me.
Once we have accepted and embraced all parts of ourselves, we no longer need to project anything out there and we are at peace with the world.
Collapsing mentalized reality
Recalling projection collapses ‘mentalized’ reality. Once we realize that everything is an object of projection, that our entire world is our own projection, we are free of it. If we collapse all our externalized history back into ourselves, we become pure potential once again.
We have to realize that we are doing all this to ourselves, no matter what the form of the attack, who the attacker or what the seeming cause of our pain and suffering. Then we are free to make a new choice.
We climb out of this separation until all steps have been retraced, the ladder is gone, and all the dreaming of the world is undone. The journey ends where it began, no trace of it remains – Course in Miracles
If you’d like help with recalling your projections, get in touch with me at www.freetoflylifecoaching.com.