Projecting your fears?
We all have fears, every action we take has it's roots in either love or fear, we might dress them up with justifications and complicated thinking, but underneath it always traces back to these two base emotions, they are our primary drivers. Fear is the stick that forces us into action, whilst love is what sustains long term effort, it is gentler, yet more persistent and powerful, like gravity it wins the long game, no matter how much you jump around. When we are building a life in alignment with our values and sense of self, it is bringing us in line with love, we become more loving with others and ourselves, our work and actions becomes an act of love, and our perceptions of the world around us is seen through the lens of love. Our limiting factor is the fear that we carry within us and so often it is hidden from our direct view, however we can infer their existence by watching how we project those fears into the world around us and on to others.
Fear is not evil, quite the opposite, it is protective and defensive, it makes us run away from strangers and fire, if we feel our hands burning they will react and move away from danger before the brain even has a chance to notice, that fear reaction is deep in our genes and it generates necessary action based on information the body receives. Fear happens quickly and deep within us, it is never wrong as it does not think, it lack the intention to be evil, that needs to be thought out and executed. What fear does is provoke fearful thinking which reflects the sensations of fear in our bodies, it gives it reason and in turn the fear becomes reasonable in our frame of mind, so if we glimpse a shadow moving that becomes a bear, a demon or an assassin, and we react to protect ourselves, the fear became a thought and then a reaction, this fear rises so quickly and then drops away when we are satisfied that we are wrong.
If only every fear could be dismissed so quickly, the dangerous shadow is easy to dismiss because we can see that we are wrong, it is very binary, either there is a bear or there is not and that kind of fears passes into a relief and amusement in a second. Where fear does real harm is when there is doubt as to whether it exists or not, if you think you see disapproval in the eye of your boss that can generate the fear that you are going to lose your job, and there is no way of knowing if that fear is real, it could be real and that is a reasonable fear to have, but we are not made for such uncertainty. Our ancestors had a lot to fear, life was dangerous but the kind of danger was obvious, the bear was there or it was not, though the fear of social exclusion was and is real, it was also binary you were in a tribe or you were not, and we could lessen that fear with touch.
Touch is the antidote to social fear, back slapping, grooming, holding, we had a small tribe and everyone knew everyone and everyone touched each other, when you stopped being touched you knew you were in trouble, you were being rejected and exiled. That kind of social bonding has disappeared except in families and close friends, there are just too many people in the world and our lives, to have that kind of touch relationships with, (and just to be clear you would be arrested if you tried), which is why the world can feel so dangerous and unpredictable, we are surrounded by people who do not touch us and that feels wrong at a deep level, that is why we feel the most lonely when we are around other people because we do not have the reassurance of touch.
It can feel like a kind of madness to be living in a touch free society, as many of us found out in the pandemic, our fear came to the front of our minds and our misunderstanding of others increased, we had no way of regulating our emotions that touch allows, our minds had no natural safety value to release our fears about our relationships. Instead our fears were projected onto the actions of others without anyway of knowing that they were unfound, that is why the written words is so easily misunderstood, it is a very narrow way of communicating, there is no physical way of convening meaning, in conversation we can hear intent and meaning beyond the words, and it is easier to project our own fear onto the basic words, it is easier to read into them our own confirmation bias. If we feel threaten by someone, that fear can turn the meaning of words into threats and hatred, we interpret them through the lens of our fears.
The only way to deal with this is to recognise that it happens, I hope we all have examples where we were just plain wrong about some else’s intentions, that people that we thought hated us, who turned out to be just going through their own stuff and were being unthoughtful. Once we believe that it is possible that we are just wrong, it leaves open the possibility that we can be wrong again and once we doubt our fear, there is room for our fear to be wrong, that shadow in the corner might not be a bear, and why am I so worried about bears when I live in England which has no bears (except in the zoo) so the chances of one stowaway on a boat, then sneaking it's way through the countryside and hiding in the bushes outside my house is remote (not impossible, but very low).
Of course the mind does not work like that, there are bears in the world (and I admit to having watched a lot of “Alone” where they are plenty of bears running around) so it would prefer to be wrong about the bears in the bush rather than being wrong about them not being in the bush and ignoring them, no matter the mathematical remoteness. What is clear is that the fear comes from myself, it is my projection, you can only fear bears if you are aware of them, we have to internalise bears as being real before we can fear them. It is our fears and concerns that we then project on the world, only people who cheat fear being cheated on, only people who judge others fear judgement, only angry people fear the anger of others. Not that they are not cheated on, judged or experience the anger of others, but they deal with it as others people's problems not their own, which is far more manageable, it allows you to come from a place of understanding and listening rather than being triggered by your own issues.
What is useful for your own development is to recognise that what you see in others is far more about yourself than it is about the other person you are projecting upon, that the projection is the area where you have the most to gain from investigating. If you feel jealous, go into that feeling, ask where it came from, keep digging down all the way to your childhood if you have to and it is annoying how often you have to do so, so many wrong ideas are inherited or learnt in our early years, because we were so accepting of the world we did not have the ability to question it. That is the problem with thinking if one stage or link in your world of logic fails the whole thing collapses, if you get the idea that you are weak (and everyone is when they are a child), that thought can dominate your thinking even when the facts on the ground changes, even when you become a strong minded adult.
Our projections can guide us to a better version of ourselves, they illustrate the path that we need to follow to our hearts and that is the guide which we really need in life, when the fear drops away, love is the only thing that is left. Love is quiet and ever present, it can be missed when fear dominates, fear is loud, it shouts and screams, but it runs out of energy once you deal with it, then you can hear love again, you can have presence with it, it does not force or badger you, it is just there to let you know you are in the right place at the right time. If you deviate or move away from it, it will fade, and when you are close it will be strong, that is the promise of letting our fear projections go, we get to be guide by love instead, so chase down those projections, bore down on their origins and let love rule, as it is the true compass that you need, the only one that truly loves you.
