Perception is Projection
How to be empowered to take responsibility for our own thoughts and projections.
“We can only perceive what is already in our consciousness.” Carl Jung
Where does it come from?
This comes from a fellow called Carl Jung, who was a Swiss psychologist and one of the 3 fathers of psychology, along with Freud and Adler.
Perception is projection is a theme that encourages empowerment by logically arguing that if we feel in some way negative about someone or something else, then that is just our projection. It empowers us to take responsibility for our own thoughts and projections.
Jung hypothesised that what we perceive is who we are. What we perceive outside ourselves is who we are. That means we can’t perceive anything out side of ourselves that is not us.
What Carl said was, “We tend to take our most unconscious material and project it on people and events around us. That which is unconscious must, of need, be projected on people and events that are around us.”
Why is this important?
The reason this is important is that when we encounter that projection, then we can become conscious of it and deal with it. When we get the learnings, then that projection will change. This has an impact on results.
This has been proven with kids. They took a group of kids and told a teacher that the “special needs” teacher was not available this year and they will have to teach them and just do the best they could. The kids all got around a “C” average. The next year they took the same kids and told another teacher that the kids were gifted and the teacher who should take them was not available. So, they would have to teach the kids and that year the kids all got A’s and B’s. So, the point of view of the teacher was projected onto the kids and their performance.
We tend to perceive people and events around us based on our preconceived filters which means that much of our perception and therefore much of our projection are influenced by our personal values, beliefs, attitudes, choices, decisions, etc.
According to the Hungarian Biologist, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, we get bombarded by around 2 million bits of information per second through all our in put channels. (Scientists now say it to be more like 11 million.) He said that we can only process around 134 bits per second. Everyone’s 134 bits of information is unique, because we each delete, distort and generalise differently based on our internal filters.
People cannot be any other way than how we project them to be. What this means is that it is impossible for us to perceive something that we are not. So, whatever you perceive in someone else or something else is your projection.
When the projection is unconscious we think it is someone or something else’s fault that things are the way they are. The thing is to realise pretty much everything is you. This is powerful, especially as this brings you back to being at cause. To the extent that you have negative emotions about someone or something else, the more likely it would be a projection of yours.
What next?
So, ask yourself, “What is it in me that I need to deal with so that I can stop having this negative experience?”
It means that we deal with what we are projecting, so that we don’t have a major negative reaction to it.
We could say to the extent that you have negative emotions about someone, you can be sure that it is a projection. To the extent that you have positive emotions or to the extent that you have no negative emotions, then you can be sure that you have incorporated that inside of you… because everything is a projection.
