I'm Just Projecting
on how we project ourselves onto each other and why
Within the unseen spaces of others, those hidden folds of personality and heart, reside many layers we may never understand.
Every person, no matter any similarities found on surface or more spiritual levels, has more uniqueness than we would ever believe from the faulty ways we’ve been trained to think.
People believe they understand others, me included — lies.
We make presumptions of rightness in the self-made understandings we craft about our neighbors, ignoring the fact we’ve filled those spaces of creative projection with our own ideas. It’s our own self, and the way we work, which we really find in all we believe about others.
Sometimes we get things right, which can make it confusing. We do share much with many. Beyond that, some people truly are built harmoniously, their own precious alignments so fittingly near our own, a kind of divine synchronicity and presence born in those times we get together. Still, even with these others our hearts are so built to love, the true multitude of difference most often goes unobserved.
The depth of every person’s unique nature isn’t respected in the way we view each other. We simply don’t hold enough space for the best in everyone else, or their intricately distinctive modes of existing, projecting our self-judgements and traumas onto everybody, laying them overtop what could otherwise be witnessed in whole; our others, sisters, and brothers.
We often assume the worst, a habit borne from too much time seeing terrible things perpetuated in this world. We’ve watched civilization crumbling from the inside, before our eyes, not being taken care of personally by any means that would satisfy that definition, every last one of us.
People who say otherwise are lying to themselves, and they’re projecting that. No one is happy here, in this world we’ve built on these lies and the remnants of our own history’s evil, not one person. At least, that is, when the self-deception is finally stripped bare.
All of us have been let down by this abomination we call our civilization, yet we pretend as if others haven’t, that it’s just us in pain. We believe we’re alone in our sorrow, and that makes us calloused, turning us against the very people who’d see us into heaven by the things we could create together in harmony.
We are not alone. We are all suffering here.
We cannot understand anyone else’s pain unless we truly learn to listen.
