(Prologue: I’ve got first-hand experience that a real understanding of the laws of karma can substantially change our lives for the better. I created this weblog to share information and personal experience with others. May it be of benefit!)

When we don’t like what someone is saying about our behaviour, we may say, in defensive tones, “Oh you’re just projecting.”

They’re right! But it goes well beyond mere defensiveness. What’s more important is that what we call “reality” is made up of our projections.

What exactly does this mean?

First, what are projections? They are our thoughts about things. We see a dog and immediately project “nasty” onto the dog.

Second, what’s the problem with projections? Nothing really, until we confuse our thoughts about things with the things themselves! In other words, when projections become our reality. And it happens so quickly that we are not aware of it. Put another way, we believe that what we perceive is inherently “real.” So we fail to realize that what we call “reality” is actually our own projections coming back to us.

“It is not getting rid of our projections, but copping to the fact that we are projecting. Then we can leave space for things to be as they are.” (source: Jim Lindsey, student, Sakyong Mipham Rinpoche)

For me, the episodes from the old television series called The Twilight Zone, now out on DVD, represent projections in their extreme form.

Example: take the episode called “Nothing in the Dark.” An elderly woman has, she thinks, kept Mr. Death at bay by refusing to open her front door for years!

How do we get out of the Twilight Zone of our daily lives and live directly in the sun? Another way to put this is: what can help us see projections as projections? Click here.

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