Shutting Off the Projector

Have you ever observed how suspicious you can get if you think about what others are thinking, especially when you have a rocky relationship with them to start with?  Have you ever noticed what is going on inside your head when you sometimes even fight with your loved ones?  Do they really all have the problems that you are accusing them of, or could these problems be just a product of your imaginative mind?

In all these cases you are projecting. You are taking your mental filter and super-impose it on someone else. Perhaps you can think of your mind as a projector. Whatever it is that you don't want to acknowledge in yourself you project on someone else. So next time when you feel that your blood pressure is rising, or when you hear that your voice is cracking up, slow down and be mindful of what it is that you want to project on others. You have a priceless opportunity - a golden moment - to monitor what it is that you want to get rid of. And when you manage to catch yourself, see how the anger is immediately deflating, pushed away by the surprise to discover that mental monster that you had safely kept in a dark corner.

One never-ending experience of a spiritual traveler is that love is always about others, while anger is always about yourself. It is as if the world and your understanding of time shrink and problems that seemed to have been external before somehow become internalized instead. Once in a blue moon you my still feels anger rising, but with it comes a curiosity, an amusement at the idea that one must be projecting something. After all, the Tao has taught us over and over again that anger is always about ourselves, so what is it that we could be projecting this time around? As the mind desperately searches for clues one is kind of too busy to  let the steam of anger develop into anything.

Fact of the matter is that all spiritual travelers learn to see reality with new eyes. The Course in Miracles states "The alertness of the ego to the errors of other egos is not the kind of vigilance the Holy Ghost would have you to maintain." Leave the thoughts of your soul siblings to themselves, you have a priceless opportunity to work on your own filter instead. Removing the filter from your perception is all that you can do. Leave everything else to the Tao.

You might say, "Yes, but aren't we all biased on one level or another?" and you are certainly right. Psychologists have developed a fascinating test to quantify our biases by associating in-groups like colleagues, neighbors, or people of similar ethnicity and beliefs set with positive meanings and then testing how much longer we take to make similar associations with people we associate less with. But being biased doesn't mean you can't still choose love when the Tao encourages you to. The experiments only show that it requires you more energy to override your subconscious mind consciously, but it is certainly possible. Let the Tao present the people and situations in your life that enable you to make this choice. That is what spirituality is all about. An ongoing choice in favor of love.

So you see that spirituality is really an experiment with a new mindset. You step outside of the conflict-ridden path of the past and say to yourself, " let me know this brother as I know myself" and then see how he responds to that changed attitude. Why don't you give this hypothesis a shot, it is certainly much more fun than the vicious spiral of before where your suspicious mind always managed to find corroborating evidence. Maybe today is a good day to turn off your projector.   We have seen enough of this movie, haven't we, and we know in the meantime how it ends.  Just give our new perspective a try and see for yourself what you experience.

By Christian and Su Zhen