The world as projection

I have been thinking about sensitivity. We say we are highly sensitive if we experience energies and pick up on different feeling-vibrations as if they are our own. We call people ’empaths’ because they have a tendency to feel empathy and their boundaries of ‘selfhood’ are not as distinct. These people usually have a hard time, and since my teens, I seem to have become such a person.

In New Age circles, there is a big emphasis on using sensitivity and protecting it, by learning boundaries, being grounded, saying ‘no’ if we feel overwhelmed etc. But these are just coping mechanisms for what I feel is a transitory phase for the ego, just as in New Age circles there is often great activism against the perceived ‘wrongs’ of the world, which is good as it reflects the newfound feeling of compassion to balance out the old survival ego, but this is somehow still in ego because it creates a new ‘other’ to be angry at. Activism coming from true understanding of our shared being, a non-egoic sense of acting in the world, is still rare.

Coming back to empaths… The ego of strength and conviction, with clear boundaries, trust in apparent reality and good self-esteem has eventually been eroded by the polarity of experiencing the darker side of life: being let down by the world or ‘others’, feeling insecure, feeling afraid. These emotions make one doubt one’s ideas and make us sensitive to a wider circle of emotions around us, not just the emotions we ‘like’. Focussing positively out of aversion for the negative is still an egoic state (believing in a small, separate entity that has preferences). It eventually gives up its attempt to control experiences through the ‘mind’, because it is connected to a collective unconscious that it cannot always control. This sudden feeling that actually, we cannot control everything, breaks down some of our naive concrete ideas and leaves us with fewer defences against a range of emotions, often picked up from ‘others’ because our own inner emotions are projected and reflected back. The Law of Attraction is working all along, but we cannot always orchestrate it, as we believe ourselves to be people who can’t possible know our deepest beliefs or even how others’ beliefs are interacting with ours. As Rupert Spira has said, “To know your thoughts, you have to change the whole universe.” It is easier to surrender than to take this on. For people who manage Law of Attraction easily, I can only think that they are using a deep level of trust which most ‘separate selves’ can’t muster, and this is also something their mind structure has allowed them to access.

So these coping mechanisms for sensitive people may be helpful, but the real shift has to be in the feeling of selfhood that is noticing the range of vibrations ‘out there’. This time, the ego may not be so susceptible to being built up again through focussing positive on our own experience, as we realise we are deeply connected with anything we perceive outside of us – it influences the structure of our minds. This time only the gradual disempowering of the egoic identity can help us to truly detach from forms and notice the true background of love and safety that is underneath all phenomenon. From this place, if we have a preference for something, it is not as an aversion to something else or as a security for our small sense of self: it is in order to reflect our sense of true being, rooted in freedom, love, and the safety of the truth that all are one changeless reality, which we feel in the knowing of our true self.

The Judge Inside

Within the mind, there lives an entity called The Judge.

The Judge is a construct of thoughts: thousands of years of human conditioning passed along generations, helping us to define ‘good’ and ‘bad’. This little character sits within the human psyche as a very personal persona, judging not only our own but everyone else’s words and actions. It calculates rewards, punishments, deserving, and so on. It values and evaluates. Of course, its ideas could be a total fabrication. It could be missing vital facts and judging on misinformation. But still it assesses everything it comes into contact with. The worst part is that it separates life into many others ‘out there’ who are behaving in certain ways. It responds to ego because it is an egoic construct. We learn this so acutely as children, being told what is good and bad behaviour.

I am not saying children should not learn appropriate conduct. It is vital and inevitable that they learn to identify different objects and forms of behaviour. But it takes us down the road of confusion as adults when we haven’t balanced this ‘logical’ understanding with the understanding of interconnectedness – the ability to suspend mental noise and judgement and feel as One Totality that whatever is going on around, we can’t possibly know it all mentally.

The Judge that operates primarily against one’s own personality is turned inwards and creates guilt or arrogance. The one that comments on others creates blame, anger, pity, jealousy, vengeance, and so on. But it is the same construct of mental judgement of life, breaking life into tiny pieces of experience we feel we can analyse and label.

From the point of view of consciousness, everything is occurring simultaneously as part of one expression. There are no distinct separations and there is no piece of the puzzle that can be taken out and evaluated. The Judge cannot see its own ignorance until it admits it knows nothing. Once it is witnessed from the viewpoint of awareness itself, realising life is one everywhere, it loses its certainty of labels and gives in to the Unknown.

The Judge that never rests is like a poison in the mind. But eventually it creates so much confusion and sorrow that it poisons itself. The end of the Judge is the end of the subject-object relationship. It is the end of duality.