SELF PROJECTION

By Michael Erlewine

Some of you are not going to like me running this tired idea past you one more time, yet I can’t help but do it. Why? Because it is so very, very important.

As a point of understanding, I agree with you; it’s just another concept. However, as for actually experiencing this, much less realizing it, that is another thing entirely. I am going for realization here yet starting with understanding the idea.

There is no end to this attempt to communicate that there is no such thing as we, the subject, in here looking out, while out there is the object we are perceiving, independent from us. Never was and never will be. We are all together one.

According to the dharma teachings that was a misunderstanding from time immemorial. We are born with it. And it’s true today.

I learned this on May 6, 1964, in Berkeley, California, when I first dropped acid, some Sandoz LSD, fresh from Switzerland. That night was to change my life forever in an instant, although I looked at that instant all that night and did so for the next 30 years or so, until dharma training helped show me how to use it properly. It was a perceived difference that was none, the first I ever knew.

As mentioned, decades later, the same thing came up with dharma practice and dharma realization, although it took me a little while to appreciate that I had done all this before, back in 1964, yet did not know then all of what to do with it, how to work it. It had all the profundity of a realization.

In that instant in 1964 I realized that everything out there in the world, everything I saw out there for my entire life was for the most part my own projection. Yes, LSD enabled me to do that, to see (and in slow motion at that) that I was busy projecting my own innermost fears onto the outside world and then watching them in rapt fascination and being freaked out by what I saw. I had done this all my life to varying degrees. It’s called duality, mistaking two for what is one, and that is what Samsara is all about -- duality.

And in my life up to that point, never, not even once, had I known or even suspected that the outside world was to a great extent my own projection that I was seeing. This never crossed my mind. I assumed that the outside world was the outside world and totally separate from me and I was already 22 years old.

And then, that night, as the poets might say, the dewdrop slipped into the shining sea. And just like that I realized (and realizations are forever) that what I saw out in the world was nothing other than my own projection. I saw this repeatedly that night, in 3D and real time. There was no longer a me in here looking at the world out there, such that I had to protect myself from it. I was in fact creating the world I saw outside of me and I realized this!

The realization was that ‘Me, myself, and I’, along with the outside world, were all together already united and one. There no longer were two, me and them, but only the one bunch of us together, and already totally familiar. Suddenly, I was in on the joke, so to speak.

And a correlate of that realization was that since this was all my own projection, I could do something about it. I could change my perception, which would change my projection, and begin to make friends with the outside world, person by person, and moment by moment. I started that night.

This all may seem obvious, but is it? Here you are ‘understanding’ intellectually what I am saying, yet that is paper thin. In 1964 I was not only experiencing it in real time, but most importantly, I realized it. And as I mentioned earlier, realizations are forever. That’s what the dharma is all about, realization.

It wasn’t for me obvious until that night I realized that the world was my own projection. What a surprise. And so, that’s the power of LSD and I imagine other hallucinogens, the power of perceiving the two, subject and object, as in fact one, united. It plunged me into oneness. There was no choice.

And I was struck dumb by that realization. And like the Tibetans put it, even the light of a single match can end the darkness of innumerable eons. And that’s what happened to me that night, a single realization that ended a lifetime of

 darkness, fear, and suffering, at the same time offering me a differential, a way to gradually change what I saw. Of course, this took time, lots of it.

As Shakespeare said in his tenth sonnet, “O, change thy thought, that I may change my mind.” In an instant, I changed what I thought, I realized, and that flipped me, changed my mind in an instant that night.

This is what studying and practicing the dharma is all about, deconstructing the duality that Samsara is based on. When our dualistic house of cards collapses, unity appears.

[Midjourney graphic prompted by me.]

EMAIL Michael@Erlewine.net

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“As Bodhicitta is so precious,

May those without it now create it,

May those who have it not destroy it,

And may it ever grow and flourish.”