One of the biggest influences drawn from Carl Jung and later from NLP is the idea that everything we perceive is on some level influenced by our unconscious mind and our mental filters. Once we take this into account it allows us to understand the subjective nature of our viewpoint and provides great insight into helping us understand what UNCONSCIOUS behaviours are playing out in our life.
The advice with this idea is to apply it ONLY to: a) ourselves and b) those people who have explicitly given us permission, right now, to reflect the patterns we see playing out in their lives Don’t become that person who walks around accusing everyone else of ‘projecting’ but refuses to look at their own illusions! ‘Perception is projection’ addresses the notion that we can NEVER get outside of our own heads. If we can perceive something, we are on some level creating it. We see the world through our filters which include (but aren’t limited to) our five senses, our beliefs, our values, our culture, our current emotional state, our memories and so on.
Literally ANYTHING we experience is simply a mirror of our internal environment. This doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist outside of us, simply that we will never experience an unfiltered, unbiased, unconditioned view of it. We will never know ‘the truth’, only ‘our truth’. In fact, because our filters are SO strong we constantly filter the world (which is infinitely complex) and look for events and experiences that confirm what we already believe to be true. This is a large part of why we play out the same patterns over and over again. It’s also part of why clearing one simple emotion that holds an old belief in place can allow us to experience something we never thought possible (like effortless financial abundance or deep love and intimacy without fear or letting go of twenty years of grief in a single moment). We live inside the world inside our head, not inside the world directly. Knowing this empowers us to realize that if we want to change the world, we must first change ourselves. A simple rule of thumb is, if I can see a trait in someone else, I definitely possess that trait myself. Maybe they’re expressing something I’m currently repressing.
Credit: The Spiral School of Awakening
