Projection

Projection. Human beings are experts at it. In all likelihood we are the only creatures that do it—though that would be hard to test (but I suspect not impossible). Projection bridges the existential gap between our inner thoughts and feelings, which we are sure of, and the outside world, which we can never be sure of.

Projection is both conscious and unconscious. We anthropomorphize and personify. We project motives, thoughts, and feelings onto other people, animals, events, and even inanimate objects. We merge our own points of view and beliefs with the outside world so completely that we often cannot distinguish between the real and the imagined.

I think this is part of the reason our screen activities merge so seamlessly with our lives—because it is so natural. We have simply substituted the screen of our minds with the screen we hold in our hands. In fact, projection is precisely what the technology is designed to do, but in reverse: to understand our beliefs and desires, and to project a curated world back to us that reflects them. And then the world we inhabit digitally becomes pure projection.

Psychologically speaking, projection has utility. It has both positive and negative aspects. On the positive side, it is necessary for sympathy and empathy. To empathize with others, we must imagine that they feel (and suffer) as we do. On the negative side, projection can be a source of self-delusion and denial—an evasion of truths we find uncomfortable to confront.

Projection is also a form of identification. It feeds our powerful need for belonging. It reassures us that we are not alone, that there are others like us—and who like us. On another level, it aligns us with a seemingly indifferent and unknowable world. We want the world to make sense, by which we mean a world congruent with our personal thoughts and feelings. Nothing is as threatening to our sense of safety as lack of control, and projection offers a kind of control, however imagined. At its base, it is a product of fear, will, and desire—a denial of the true agency and independence of others and of the world itself.

In his talks, the Hindu sage Nisargadatta Maharaj spoke of moving beyond illusion. Illusion, by definition, is false—and the false is the source of all suffering. Freedom from suffering, the only true freedom, requires clarity of mind. This begins with recognizing that there is an unchanging reality to which we may have access, but which is obscured by the projections of the mind. Mistaking this projected world of illusions for reality, we are not fully conscious or aware.

Nisargadatta gives the example of the world as a screen and the self as a projector of images upon it. The screen is real and unchanging, but blank—one might say disinterested. The images are projections of the mind. The energy that animates them—the light—is the energy source of all life.

We have, he says, the capacity to discern the difference between the screen, the projections, and the light itself. Through stillness and self-examination, we can attune ourselves to the workings of the mind. The more attuned we become, the more elevated our consciousness, and the closer we draw to the unchanging light source—what he calls Love, Reality, or Truth. He uses these words not religiously, but as expressions of awareness and connection to the only thing we can truly know: our own mind.

For those of us shaped by Western thought, the first step is to accept that the universe is indifferent and uncontrollable. It doesn’t care about us; events happen. Believing they happen 'for a reason', as the old self-comforting adage goes, is projection and therefore false. Any notion that the world was created by a well-intentioned deity for our benefit is the epitome of projection. It is no mystery that our conception of the Creator is expressed in human terms—merciful, wrathful, jealous, loving.

Yet the universe, though it may not “care,” has produced us out of its own energies and forces. We are inseparable from it. Perhaps this is what appeals to many about Eastern thought: it acknowledges our innate connection to the universe without the need to invent a Creator or intermediary. It offers a practice of mindfulness that deepens that connection.

And as the falseness of projection and illusion dissolves, what remains is a quieter kind of happiness—a generosity of being. Perhaps this is all that enlightenment means: the light that remains when we no longer insist that the world mirror us, but let it simply be.

Some Time

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Those days were pretty wild,

We went to all the shows. 

Knew every verse by heart,

Had nowhere else to go,

Wore the future like a charm,

Danced to incantations.

We were mystics immune from harm,

Princes of provocation.

Our bodies had no limits,

Except to test the imagination.

We moved in synch like spirits,

The night was our education.

There was no giving up,

No matter how we got knocked down.

Always another chorus,

Always another round.

The hour may be late,

And I may not be in my prime.

But I'm here to tell you, girl,

I've still got some time. 

The ingredients are still there babe,

Not as fresh as they used to be.

But I can still remember, 

All of the recipe.

Don't call me nostalgic, 

Don't say I'm old fashioned.

If you're willing to go there, babe,

I don't have to search for my passion. 

The hour may be late,

And I may not be in my prime.

But I'm here to tell you, girl,

I've still got some time. 

I've still got some time... for you.

Belonging

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We wear the weekday hats 

and costumes, 

in the stores, the factories,

the offices,

and weekend gatherings,

baseball 

and football,

warrior games,

flags and anthems;

and at night

in the bars,

the face paint, tattoos, dances; 

and on weekends

in churches and synagogue, 

the skull cap and fringed shawl, 

psalms and tribal chants, 

and every refrain means 

we belong, we belong, we belong.

Beneath the melodies,

between the words,

a silence, 

a nakedness

covered by the caps

and uniforms, 

stillness

like the moment 

we were born,

helpless and beheld -

on the edge between

death and life,

being and longing to be -   

when we witnessed  

that before anything

there was only

love.

The Power of Love

In the 1960s the Beatles told us that love was all we needed.

A decade later the British glam band Sweet compared love to oxygen: “You get too much, you get too high / Not enough and you’re gonna die.”

By the 1980s, Howard Jones was already asking the more skeptical question: "What is love anyway? Does anybody love anybody anyway?"

But perhaps it was composer Sammy Fain and lyricist Paul Francis Webster who said it best back in 1955, as sung by Andy Williams: "Love is a many splendoured thing. It’s the April rose that only grows in the early spring… the golden crown that makes a man a king."

Admittedly, looking for guidance on the meaning of love in pop music may seem strange, but together the songs testify to love’s eternally puzzling and multi-faceted nature. Romantic love is beautiful, intoxicating, and transformative. Spiritual love is defiant, transcendent, and awesome.

Poet Dylan Thomas assured us that love endures even beyond mortality:

"Though they go mad they shall be sane,

Though they sink through the sea they shall rise again;

Though lovers be lost love shall not;

And death shall have no dominion."

Even the pop refrains point us in the same direction. Huey Lewis & the News declared in 1985 that love is a power beyond explanation: "Make-a one man weep, make another man sing… And with a little help from above, you feel the power of love." Even here, love is not just a fleeting emotion. It requires “help from above,” suggesting something eternal and transcendent.

And love has long been recognized as the cornerstone of Western morality. Leviticus 19:18 commands us: “Love thy fellow as thyself” - ve’ahavta l’re’echa kamocha. One of Judaism's greatest sages, Rabbi Akiva, called this a klal gadol, a great principle of the Torah.

This insight is shared in the East as well. In the non-dualist teachings of Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj, love is not selective but boundless — not an emotion directed toward one individual, but the very connective tissue of existence. When the ego dissolves, desire and fear give way to an inexhaustible energy of giving. “You are neither the husband nor the wife,” he taught. “You are the love between the two.” True love is not confined to bodies or personalities; it is the space of shared consciousness.

Seen this way, the journey of love is really the elevation of consciousness — the realization that beneath our separateness we share the same being, the same life. This is the universalism behind "love thy fellow as thyself": love as recognition, not preference. Or as Nisargadatta put it: “Love says: I am everything.”

From the Beatles to Dylan Thomas, from Huey Lewis to the Torah, the message converges: love is both mystery and power, both intimate and universal. But the essence of love is actually as simple as it is transcendent: act with kindness and compassion. The rest, as they say, is commentary.

When We Stop Creating

I used to feel proud to be part of humanity.

It felt good, because human beings had done wonderful things. We created majestic works of art, wrote magnificent books, sang joyous songs. We built cathedrals and pagodas, carved temples out of stone, and raised cities from the ground. We eliminated smallpox, split the atom, and stood on the moon.

Of course, we have also done terrible things. Atrocities, wars, cruelty beyond measure. But you cannot deny the Sistine Chapel, Saint Peter’s Basilica, the Taj Mahal, Angkor Wat, Machu Picchu. You cannot deny the poetry of Emily Dickinson and Yeats, the novels of Dostoevsky, the music of Bach, Beethoven, Gershwin. The songs of Joni Mitchell and Leonard Cohen. Humanity has proven itself capable of staggering beauty.

Growing up, I felt part of that story. When I read the books, visited the sites, sang the songs, I felt I belonged to a lineage of creators. It seemed to me that I was part of a species with limitless creative potential, because of what we had already achieved. Surely there was so much more ahead of us. And maybe—just maybe—I could play some small part in it.

Lately, though, another thought troubles me: What happens when we stop creating? What happens when the machines do it for us—the image-making, the music-writing, the story-spinning, the thinking itself? What happens to humanity’s sense of itself when we outsource the very acts that once defined our spirit and soul? 

In the film The Social Dilemma, technology critic Tristan Harris speaks of a paradigm shift. For the first time, he says, we have invented a technology that is not merely a 'tool'. From the wheel to the printing press, from the telephone to the personal computer, technologies have historically been designed to help us accomplish tasks more efficiently. They extended human agency. The printing press spread ideas. The telephone allowed voices to carry across distance. These were tools that worked for us.

But social media—and now machine learning systems—work on us. They use us as much as we use them. Algorithms learn our preferences and in turn shape our thoughts, desires, and behaviors to serve commercial or political ends. The more we rely on them, the more they influence us.

In some sense, this is not entirely new. Newspapers, television, and radio were always used to persuade and to sell. But the intimacy of today’s technologies is unprecedented. Our phones are not just media channels; they are companions, advisors, decision-makers. They mediate every aspect of life: work, shopping, travel, communication, entertainment.

And now, increasingly, they mediate creativity itself, which is troubling to me. 

Art is not just another domain of human activity. It is where we meet our own soul. Through stories, music, paintings, films, poems, we connect to one another and to the depths of our humanity. Art is not decoration. It is recognition: the proof that someone else has felt what I feel, seen what I see, longed as I long.

What happens when machines make the films we watch, the music we listen to, the stories we read? What happens when the mirror of human experience is replaced by the reflection of aggregated data scraped from the internet and optimized for engagement, but untethered from lived life?

I fear that as we outsource creativity to machines, we risk losing our faith in ourselves. We risk ceasing to believe in the potential that human beings are capable of. If beauty no longer carries the weight of human struggle, love, or imagination behind it, then it will not connect us to one another in the same way. It may dazzle us, but it will not bond us.

And without that bond—without that sense of belonging to a lineage of creators—we become disconnected, apathetic, and lonely. Just as great art once elevated our sense of humanity, machine-made art may begin to flatten it. If we consume only the reflections of algorithms, we will become their reflection: soulless, mechanical, cut off from our own depth.

The danger, then, is not simply that machines will replace us. It is that we will forget who we are and care less about each other. The moment we stop creating for ourselves, we risk losing the very thing that once made it feel so good to be a member of the human race.