foreign people think somebody who really sees food projections is really smart because they come up with really cool unique innovative ideas or they act in a way that's seemingly not normal but yet it works and it's not so much really that they're smart or not smart it's that they don't see the same level of limitation on everything that somebody who fully buys into their projections sees welcome to the art of accomplishment where we explore how deepening connection with ourselves and others leads to creating the life we want with enjoyment and ease I'm Brett Kistler here today with my co-host Joe Hudson today we're going to talk about projections so Joe you've talked about projections a lot in our courses this idea that that from our past experience we create these beliefs that we carry into the present and that this shapes our reality in the moment and I'd like to get into that a little bit further today so Joe what are projections it is such a complicated subject because the word projection is used for many things right so there's the psychological projection which is you know somewhat stems from like Young's work and some other psychologists and that's this idea that the parts of ourselves that we can't own the parts of ourselves that are either good or bad but that we we can't have full ownership over we project onto other people and this is something that happens when you're deeply triggered so an easy way to look at this just briefly is you look at most politicians and if you see them like really just accusing somebody else of something you can see a way in which that is true about what they're doing as well so or if you're dealing with somebody they're like oh my God they're so arrogant like that comment in itself is arrogance right it's like as if you can presume to know what their reality is so that's projecting the unknown parts of ourselves and it can be positive things too like oh my gosh they're so smart they're so they understand everything and I don't that can also be unowned parts of ourselves positive on parts of ourselves that we then project onto other people so there's that there's that's what what we'll call psychological projection and then there's this projection onto the world and that's um more about how we lived our first eight or nine years of life when we're in Theta brain waves and where we're basically learning what life is and we might learn that like love is associated with shame or money is associated with lack or Authority is associated with anger and then we go and recreate those projections in our life because we're like okay that's what we learned it is and so you go out into the world you're in your 20s your 30s your 40s and you find out that everybody who you choose to have a romantic relationship with has a tendency to shame you or that you see money as something that's there's not enough of and then you don't you're not able to have the money that you want or need so there's that that kind of projection onto the world and then there's like the projection of self and the projection of self which is closely related to the next projection but I I wanted to want to make a distinction between the two the projection of self is that we don't really see the world we see ourselves and so or we don't really see reality we see ourselves in reality and so that would be like if somebody is a thief they see the world as a world of Thieves if somebody has a deep relationship of self-love then they see the world as love and even when they see the atrocities of the world they see it as people trying to love themselves and they're not capable so the way that we see ourselves and relate to ourselves then is how we interpret the world so that's another level of projection the projection of self and then the final projection that I see is the projection of I which I'm making a distinction here though there's not a real one but I think it's useful to make the distinction and that's just the idea that there is a you that is separate right so we have this identity the way humans work is we have a sense of identity and we don't know if other animals have that sense of identity but we have a sense of identity and at the very core of that sense of identity is the idea that there is an eye that exists as separate and like a tremendous amount of spiritual modalities um Ramona Maharishi is like kind of the the most known example where a lot of the work is really to see the self not as something to be protected not as the body not as an emotional state not as something that's existed for 45 years or whatever it is but as illusionary in nature or to see the self as the awareness of all those things and that's the last way that I I think about projection so it's those four ways that I think about projection okay so yeah so those four basically are you've got psychological projection where you are projecting onto essentially someone else's psychology kind of making assumptions about about their intent or their experience and in that case it's disowned parts of yourself parts of yourself that you don't fully want to accept about yourself okay yeah and these can be like parts that you judge about yourself but also parts that you judge about yourself not having like correct like uh in the case of admiration towards somebody yeah and they can be specifically they can be things that you don't actually see in yourself right it's so disowned that you can't even see it in yourself so if you see somebody as like super brilliant there's no person I've met that doesn't have their own level of Brilliance in in some capacity and so if you see that admire that put that up on a pedestal it's a strong indicator that you can't see it in yourself similarly if you are like that person's a thief there's and you can't see that you also have that in you and in your actions then it's that's the psychological projection okay yeah so that's the psychological projection and then you've got the projection onto the world which is sort of you're you're baked in assumptions about how the world works from your Early Childhood experience yes right then you've got this projection of self uh like really like a projection so this isn't a projection onto yourself is it a projection of yourself I'm all fond of the world seeing the world as the way that you are internally organized correct that's right so I use the example of like the saint in love but it's you know if you think that it's really important uh to be dressed and put together then you're likely to think it's important for other people to be dressed and put together that's like the simple version of it and so what's good or bad for you is good or bad for the world the way that you see yourself and relate to yourself is the way that you relate to the world right so if it's weak for you to cry then it's weak for others to cry correct yeah great great example yeah okay and then the last one is the projection of I which is you're distinguishing from the projection of self as this one is more of a like meta projection that you are a separate self from the world yeah that you have an identity yeah that there's some boundary that is you correct right so if you think about that like if I cut you in half if you think you're your body and I cut you in half which half is you or a split brain experiment right you know where they cut the corpus callosum and then people had basically two very separate identities each controlling half of the body right at odds with each other exactly or people think I'm emotional well you were emotional but what happens if that emotion just stops you you still emotional like is it essentially you what is essentially you is the question it's in Romana marishi's language it's like who am I um the deconstruction work of almost all spiritual Traditions are getting to the the basic underlying question of of what are you essentially what is it that you are that you have always been that from the moment of birth to the moment of death what's the unchangeable unmutable part of yourself right which I suppose is really just a process of seeing through projections of the self yes which changes our experience of the world as we do that yes so as you mentioned emotions like how how do emotions play into projections how do they interact when we have big emotions we learn differently right part of how people brainwash folks is that they have they create big emotional experiences for them and then that's what allows them to change habits right when we have big emotional experiences it's when it allows us to learn so if you want to redefine somebody's idea of themselves or idea of the world basic training is an example of this you create these big emotional experiences and then they have a different sense of themselves at the end of it so emotions are are useful in that way right and and they're evolved to do that so if I get bit by a snake and I have this big emotional experience and a big physical experience I am less likely to be bitten by that snake in the future so what this does is it makes traumatic experiences really key definers of who we are right if we've had uh long-term abuse or we had a car accident or if we've been in a war it starts to Define us because it upends our learnings from those early days and it changes or maybe it even happens in those early days of life and and so they're they're really important that way I think the Nuance that people often don't quite get is that oftentimes people recognize when they have big emotions that they are out of control themselves right they're at they're either you could say they're acting in trauma or you can say they recognize that when that big emotion takes control they do stuff that they don't want to do and so the natural movement when they see that correlation is they assume causation and in that Assumption of causation they say I need to manage my emotions so that I don't have big emotions or I need to be in control of my emotions and what that path ultimately leads to is a level of disassociation the emotions are still there they're still moving us but we disassociate from them and so they become harder and harder to recognize and the other way to think of it is to assume correlation like oh these things are are together and my job isn't to control them or suppress them or push them down it is to learn how to surf them and to love them and to um accept them deeply and to find the joy in them or to not resist them and as if we take that step then what happens is the emotional occurrence of our life become vitalizing we fall in love with them there still isn't the control meaning that we we don't find ourselves succumb to these big emotional experiences because we start to see that that is just another level of resistance but we don't disassociate from them and we don't uh stop to see or recognize the massive impact that these emotional currents are having even if we've pushed them so far down that we don't feel them anymore if we don't disassociate we start to recognize that these big emotional currents um in our life are more like road signs uh rather than causation it almost sounds like you're describing sort of a chicken or egg thing with projections and emotions where the the emotions that we have in our in our early youth you know children are very emotional and that correlates highly with their learning rate and how quickly they soak up information like a sponge and they create these projections and then we carry these projections into our lives and tend to see the world as it was when we were kids which will then tend to bring us back into those emotions that we had when we were kids and if we let ourselves feel those emotions and process them then being an emotional in this emotional state can allow us to shift our projections yeah that's exactly it I would say it's not that we only see the world we create the world right when we're living in and through a projection it's not just that we see the evidence that it's true right but you also attract the same experiences right and you also manipulate events to create the same experience and on an emotional level what's happening is that emotion that wasn't allowed to be felt all the way through that wasn't allowed to move all the way through you is looking to recreate circumstances so that it can move all the way through you and then the circumstances stop getting recreated so that's how it works on an emotional level okay so yeah then feeling the emotion completely allows the projection to shift into I don't know maybe some generalized form because it seems like a projection is sort of a limiting a limiting perception on the world yeah and that doesn't mean that they're bad or good right they're just kind of useful or more useful or less useful meaning like I project onto snakes that they're deadly right right and now obviously all snakes aren't deadly and I might find a snake and think it's deadly and jump away but it's not deadly and so the question is what are the projections that are are useful that create peace and joy productivity love in our lives um purpose whatever it is that one one thinks that they're after and what are the projections that create the things that we're not after and this is why it's so difficult for people to like the when you're doing the work when you're doing the the Deep work the stuff that was programmed in the early days right like if you were lucky enough to have parents that just deeply loved you and were attuned to your emotional experience and wanted you to feel safe and protected and weren't emotionally trying to cajole you into certain emotions and not other emotions then it's really easy for you to reproduce that kind of love in your life but if you didn't get that then it's more challenging so it is those early projections that we now because we have a rational conscious mind we can say okay is that the world I want to live in do I want to live in a world where love is conditional or love is shame or love is control or do I want to live in a world where love can be different and we have the choice and then the work is not just feeling the emotions but falling in love with them on an emotional level intellectually to be able to just see them to just identify them can be incredibly freeing and then to work with them and say oh wow I'm in a projection what if I take a contrary action you know so intellectually that's that's that way to work on them right right so it also sounds like falling in love with the projections is part of this path too because I I've definitely seen and experienced in the process of discovering that projections exist and that everybody's doing them there can be a process of like oh I've identified a projection that's bad you know like projections are bad which is just another way of disowning yourself like the only way that you can navigate a chaotic world is to create some kind of sense making system of projections yeah you know I've never thought about it as like falling in love with projections but I think that just it's a it's beautifully sad that's right you fighting against your projections is only a way that increases their stability well it's like I imagine like going uh bird watching but you don't like birds how many of them are you gonna find you know like if you if you love finding a projection it's like oh wow I'm projecting right now cool that might be useful right also it might be useful to do it a little bit differently or to experiment with it a little bit yes and it's great because that's when you say how many birds will you find it's like proof so so for instance if you talk to somebody and you say hey tell me about a trauma that you had and let's say that their trauma was that when I was a kid I had a dad who would always yell at me and the lesson that I learned was that I had to be quiet too not get yelled at let's just say let's keep it simple and so that's the data that they picked up the data that they didn't pick up was the ways that they still asserted themselves even by not speaking up they didn't learn that wow I can survive a a tyrant in my home not that I have to but I can the information that they didn't pick up was that Mom was actually loving me the whole time or I didn't pick up the information that Dad did love me from time to time and that there was kind of this love that was available so what's interesting is our brain is adapted to pay more attention to the negative things and so oftentimes one of the ways we recreate these things is to only see the evidence that supports the pattern the projection so what is what is the practice then of becoming more aware of these projections and re-engineering them I mean it's different for the different levels of projection right so in psychological in the psychological projection like everywhere you're triggered you're projecting an unknown part of yourself that's just it doesn't mean that you shouldn't be triggered it doesn't mean that you're not right it just means that you're also projecting it onto somebody else so every time that you're triggered is a great example of how you are projecting a disowned part of yourself or any way in which you idolize somebody you're projecting a disowned Part of Yourself so that's a good way to work on the psychological projection the projection on the world is just a really easy thing to do is just like list out 10 things are important to you like money love Authority decision making whatever they are and then ask yourself what was the essential learning you had from your childhood about money and love and authority and notice how you're recreating those things right and notice notice how you're manipulating the world into it and I'll give you an example in a second here how you're attracting it and notice how you're approving it so an example of this is you know just like almost everybody at some point in their life you know you keep on dating the same person with different names and so I used to like attract or create this world in which I was going to be emotionally abandoned so one of the things that I did was I attracted people who were more likely to emotionally abandon me right and and I was attracted to them the other thing I did was I manipulated the world to do that right so when you know I felt unheard instead of saying ouch this I feel unheard and I'd really like to be heard I'd be gotta get angry well you're not hearing me because I was in my trauma and then that of course would push them away even further and then I would look around the world and I would say see that person emotionally abandoned me in that person emotionally about me but I wasn't noticing all the people who weren't or who really wanted not to and I wasn't allowing to right that I was abandoning them so that's the way to look at it as far as like um that level of projection and then on the projection of I I mean the easiest thing to do is just say what am I and really sit in the question rather than to look for an answer but there's other things that you can do as well which is just notice the part of yourself that's always been there or put your attention on to attention there's lots of things that help you see through the the false sense of of identity and and the kernel of that identity being that you exist as a separate thing or as a non-separate thing even that kernel the identity is that I exists another area that I've heard this this concept that kind of a metaphor here is something called like object fixation or Target fixation like if you're flying a parachute and you want to land in a field but there's a tree in the field if you look at the tree you're probably going to hit the tree or like driving a motorcycle around a corner if you look into the ditch you're going to go into the ditch yeah that's a beautiful metaphor I really I really like that metaphor any other there's been like lots of times in my life where I've seen some kind of disaster coming in business or like in a relationship and I'm like not wanting it but I'm just like scared of it which makes me think of it more which makes me see the see and look for the evidence of it more and not see the other paths available to me and then the thing happens yeah I'm all surprised for some reason yeah yeah I'm like right now I'm I got in touch with an old friend and he's in a state of you know believing that he is bad and incapable and so you can watch this this reality that he's living in create itself right so he needs to do something at his job and he doesn't want to feel the anger of his boss so he doesn't do the thing that he needs to do to make sure that the job is done right because he's trying to avoid the anger and then by not doing the thing he needs to do he's got more evidence that he's bad and incapable because he's trying to avoid the feeling of being bad and incapable by being yelled at by his boss right like so that's how the whole thing moves it's like as we see ourselves as a certain way subconsciously or consciously we're recreating that over and over and over again all right so then that's how this ties into this like projection of I sort of being the base level projection of all these really because the more you see yourself as any certain thing defined by any particular characteristics or identity then that's going to set the context for the projections you're going to have in your relationships and in the world and upon yourself yeah that's right unfortunately even if you see through the eye it doesn't really resolve the emotional stuff right so you can have a lot of cognitive Freedom you can have a lot of intellectual freedom when you see through the personal eye when when you have that that kind of Awakening but it doesn't change the emotional experience of stuff in fact it can make the emotional experience harder to access because it starts operating at a more disassociated way or in a lower level way harder to recognize way so the freedom of the intellect is great but it's far more productive to meet it with the emotional Freedom as well with the loving of all the experiences that are all the emotional experiences that are happening yeah that's really interesting to me um because like I'm very intellectual like I don't know heavily weighted on the intellectual personally and so like the more I start to recognize some of my own projections they can easily just become a way to be not good enough because I'm still living in this I don't know how to get out of this particular projection but I see it you know but I'm frustrated by it now so then there's this layer of frustration as an emotion to feel on top of whatever emotion is driving that projection to begin with yeah that's one way it happens another way it happens is that the emotional scenery becomes more and more um in the background but it's still driving you right because I know we've talked about this is that you know we can't make decisions intellectually all of our decision making is emotional like if you remove the emotional center of a brain then a person ceases to make decisions even though their intellect is their IQ is still operating at the same level and so the emotions are still moving us but they've become so far in the background and there's this kind of way of saying ah well nothing is real nothing is true there's no I and yet all these emotional decisions are still happening and still there's like this level of dramatic drama and Chaos in life even if you go and move to a monastery and you know it's still there what then is the way to you know take the information from this episode and understanding this existence of projections become more aware of them and use that as breadcrumbs into the emotional experience underlying that on the intellectual level I think the the underlying problem that people experience when they start to recognize projections is they will be confronted with the reality that everything is a projection that there is no there's nothing that we see or do that isn't a projection and so if you want a direct experience of this like just look at a tree it's better if you look at it like a living thing and see it as a tree this is a tree I see that's a tree and then see it not as a tree see it as like oh this is just this thing that's in front of me No Label no projection no right not no need to identify classify and just be in the presence of the tree right this is what when people talk about deep presence this is what they're talking about is to have a moment or two without like the projection operating at full speed not that it's not always operating not that it's not accessible to us at any time but to really just be in what is in this moment without any of the labels and stuff and you can get that really direct sense of being more in projection and less in projection so the issue that arises like I was at least trying to trying to say was that at some point you see the whole world as a projection the whole thing there's no thought that you can fully trust there's no emotional experience that you can fully trust there's no body Sensation that you can fully trust it doesn't mean you can't trust it but it is literally like the world becomes a kaleidoscope and that's some scary because if you interpret it as I'm out of control oh my God it's a kaleidoscope now I don't know what to do I'm out of control it can be very scary it can be something that you really really want to avoid and so the idea of projection itself is something that often people like will accept and embrace very slowly because they have to confront this thing and if they do it really quickly it's just really important if you really can all of a sudden just see oh wow this whole world is a projection it's really important to see that essentially that's not going to stop you from operating at any level at all right it's like it just is what is and there's this huge freedom to it there's just like oh wow I don't have to take anything seriously and yet I can still enjoy myself and yet I can still have purpose and yet I can still be productive but I can take everything with like this light-hearted joy that comes about so that's the intellectual issue is that at some point you come across this idea that everything's a projection and you're like oh crap you know there's this fear as far as the emotional part goes it's kind of different for people who haven't had the kind of identity of self-switch to awareness or to the infinite and those who have had that switch happen if this switch hasn't happened then leaning into your emotional states loving your emotional states inviting your emotional state seeing that the emotional Statesman they're out of control is just another form of resistance allowing them to move through your body looking forward to them that's the work that's the really powerful work if it's afterwards that's the same work but you have like a another step on top of it like a a step for the before which is to dig them out it's to really deeply go in and look for the most nuanced little emotional shift and Plumb the depths of that and almost magnify it you know one of the people who taught me about this stuff he used to work with um monks and I think he worked with like Trappist monks into Benton monks and all sorts of monks and he said when I do the work with them it's like dragging them back into hell because they have to go back into the emotional experience that they had had you know pushed so far into the background and when that's happening the thing is is that you see people who have that peace but without the joy when they have that like calmness but they don't have like the exuberance of life like if they don't laugh easily and that's a pretty good indicator that the identity has shifted but the emotional experience has been suppressed yeah so a lot of these conversations reminding me of this uh there's kind of like a psychological test that could be conducted where you take you think of an object and then you have like 10 minutes to write down how many uses for that object you could think of like let's say for a brick you might just if like your projection would be that this is a brick it is used for uh masonry and you could build a wall with it but the more you start to see the brick just as an object as just something that's not a brick then you could start to see other purposes for it like a counterweight for an elevator or you could break it into sand and make Play-Doh out of it or a million other uses and I think the same thing can be true for any motion that like a projection might come from we might be like Oh I'm angry that means somebody else has wronged me and it's their fault it's like okay well that's one projection of this emotion but if I just go into the essence of the emotion and feel that then what else might that mean for me what else what other richness might there be in that experience yeah that that's cool first of all never heard it explained that way which and I'm really digging that and then second of all I thought you were talking about something different which it also applies to but so let's start with the emotional experience right like that anger could be uh an indication that I haven't drawn the boundary I need to draw that anger could be an indication that I'm not taking care of myself that anger could be the indication that somebody's wronged me and you're right all of that is like levels of projection the thing that I thought you were talking about which also seems like a really cool idea to me is you know the brick could be this the brick could be that it's the same with projections right so oftentimes something that happens when peoples start seeing through their projections they have a lot more opportunity in front of them they see a lot more options like they're the array of possibilities opens up to them and so a lot of times people think somebody who really sees food projections is really smart because they come up with really cool unique innovative ideas or they act in a way that's seemingly not normal but yet it works and it's not so much really that they're smart or not smart it's that they don't see the same level of limitation on everything that somebody who fully buys into their projection sees right right and that is that is something that I meant by that as well I went into the motion route um but really this I think this applies everywhere and this is really kind of a core as a core of how Vue can change our lives because like particularly like impartiality and wonder but also vulnerability for other people to have this experience with you with getting more information and empathy being curious about other people's experience and being with them and it these characteristics or these you know traits lead us to have a more granular awareness of reality beyond the initial assumptions that we might have had even though those initial assumptions still exist and they still can guide our behavior and allow us to act quickly and effectively the more we can become aware of them and the more we can see them as see them for what they are as projections then the more granular our awareness of the world around us can be and the more we can start to see other possible interpretations of the world than the ones that we started with again that I think it's the third time on this podcast yeah I've never seen it that way and it's such a beautiful articulation of it it's such a great story to build around it because it that's absolutely how it works when you look at it that way of course it's also just a projection and of course it's also she has a projection right that's the thing so that's another thing that's really cool about this work is you know I mean I know you've seen this in my work but you know I'll go and pontificate on something and you know because that that's what I'm asked to do and and then they'll say you know you're totally wrong about that and I'll be like yep that's true like I can absolutely see the world in which everything that I'm saying is incorrect and because I do I can see that there is some correctness in every point of view and some fallacy in every point of view and the fear for me when I was like entering into that that way of looking at the world was like oh I'll never be able to act you know like how will I act if I don't know what's right and what's wrong right how will I be able to act if I don't know like if I know that everything is and isn't true and you act the same way that you would if you were an animal or a dragonfly like the action still exists and you're still processing information and you're still having emotions and but what happens is you start choosing the projection that serves you best the projection that allows for more freedom that allows for more love that allows for more joy and you start choosing it but you can't stop seeing through it you just realize at some point like if all of it's true and not true then I actually just get to be who I am who I want to be yeah and I think the more that you accept all of your projections rather than labeling some of them as good or some of them as bad then the more all of them can kind of be present in each moment and your entire past experience can sort of average out to one statistically most likely scenario to be one specific Next Step from each scenario that is likely to have the better outcome but nothing is guaranteed yeah and you don't really give a if it's guaranteed or not because whatever shows up in your field it's not resisted and it's not labeled you know it's like if I was to choose hey do I want to go to prison and love myself or do I want to stay out in the Free World and hate myself you know it's like consequences become less important than the actual freedom to see yourself in the world in a way that is enlivening that is joyful yeah that seems like a great stopping point for this episode do you have any integration questions for us Joe so one question that arises is if you write down four of the things that trigger you most in the world in what ways are you judging or disowning your that part of yourself in what ways are you judging or disowning that part of yourself second question is if you're looking deeply at who you admire who you put on a pedestal what are the parts of them that you admire and how do you not own that aspect of yourself and the last question is what's looking out behind your eyes yeah that's a good one and I encourage you not to answer that question just be in it wonderful thank you Joe yeah thank you Brett thanks for listening to the art of accomplishment if you enjoyed what you heard today please subscribe and rate US on your podcast app we'd love your feedback so feel free to send us questions or comments you can reach out to us 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