Building on the idea that we can work with the stories that bind us in order to experience more freedom and possibility in our daily lives, we will examine the psychological process of projection. By recognizing and changing the way we relate to this process (and to our stories about others), we have a chance to dramatically transform the quality of our relationships and our general emotional state. Come join us for a journey into a bold new world of being that is always available in the here and now. Themed music provided by Michael Schoepe and Paul Dankers.
Can we change our stars?
The song Rocket Man doesn’t tell its source story in full, but you can feel the throbbing, broken heart of Ray Bradbury’s story within it.
That story, written in 1951, is about the child of a man born in 1997–the Rocket Man. In Bradbury’s world, which unfolds just a few calendar years from today, we get to visit a place where everyone helicopters rather than drives, where food appears at the touch of a button, where the game kick-the-can has only just gone out of style, and where Rocket Men hop from planet to planet all about the solar system.
As alien as that sounds, Bradbury’s story could just as easily be the story of a workaholic father–the kind we meet in Harry Chapin’s Cat’s in the Cradle–or the story of an alcoholic one, perhaps. It is the story of a man caught in a loop he can’t get out of and the son who loves him desperately and who is confused by that love into an act of projection.
Rather than recognizing how much he simply wants his father back–a thing that fate has decreed he cannot have–he decides he wants to become his father, to travel among the stars as his father does.
His mother, meanwhile, performs a different act of projection.
Bradbury writes,
I asked Mother about a few things that morning after Father had been gone a number of hours.
“Dad said that sometimes you don’t act as if you hear or see him,” I said.
And then she explained everything to me quietly.
“When he went off into space ten years ago, I said to myself, ‘He’s dead.’ Or as good as dead. So think of him dead. And when he comes back, three or four times a year, it’s not him at all, it’s only a pleasant little memory or a dream. And if a memory stops or a dream stops, it can’t hurt half as much. So most of the time I think of him dead-”
“But other times-“
“Other times I can’t help myself. I bake pies and treat him as if he were alive, and then it hurts. No, it’s better to think he hasn’t been here for ten years and I’ll never see him again. It doesn’t hurt as much.”
“Didn’t he say next time he’d settle down.”
She shook her head slowly. “No, he’s dead. I’m very sure of that.”
“He’ll come alive again, then,” I said.
“Ten years ago,” said Mother, “I thought, What if he dies on Venus? Then we’ll never be able to see Venus again. What if he dies on Mars? We’ll never be able to look at Mars again, all red in
the sky, without wanting to go in and lock the door. Or what if he died on Jupiter or Saturn or Neptune? On those nights when those planets were high in the sky, we wouldn’t want to have anything to do with the stars.”
The news of the Rocket Man’s death comes a short time later, and this is how Bradbury completes his story:
His ship had fallen into the sun.
And the sun was big and fiery and merciless, and it was always in the sky and you couldn’t get away from it.
So for a long time after my father died my mother slept through the days and wouldn’t go out. We had breakfast at midnight and lunch at three in the morning, and dinner at the cold dim hour of 6am. We went to all-night shows and went to bed at sunrise.
And, for a long while, the only days we ever went out to walk were the days when it was raining and there was no sun.
The title of my reflection this morning is “Astral Projection and Interdimensional Travel for the Resolutely Earthbound.” Thanks to Micha’s inspired song choice, I discovered this tale of Ray Bradbury’s and found in it a perfect depiction of the kind of projection I want to discuss… the psychological phenomenon rather than the psychic one.
That said, before we fully dismiss the psychic variety and move on, I have a podcast recommendation for you. It’s called “The Telepathy Tapes.” If you, like me, have a hard time believing in dimensions of reality that cannot be scientifically validated, I strongly encourage you to give it a listen. My sister-in-law Ayana recommended it to me last time I was here and I began devouring it on the car ride back.
While there are reasonably authoritative and well-documented stories of gurus and other spiritual seekers accomplishing reality-defying feats, and while the military and CIA are known to have invested millions over three decades on projects like Project Stargate, which were dedicated to the psychic act of remote viewing, I’ve generally taken those stories with a grain of salt and a healthy dose of skepticism. The Telepathy Tapes, however, blew me away. The podcast focuses on the experiences of non-speakers with autism and methodically documents an increasingly extraordinary set of phenomena that seem as strange as a journey to Oz. And just as with Flatlanders entering the third dimension, you might find your view of reality permanently altered.
But again, astral projection in the psychic sense is not our focus today. Rather, I want to explore the ways in which we project psychologically. Starting with Sigmund Freud and developing further in the work of his daughter, Anna, and the work of Carl Jung, psychological projection has generally been defined as the way we project unconscious feelings or desires that we might feel are inappropriate (anger, jealousy, that sort of thing) onto others. It is a defense mechanism by which we can blame others for our own shortcomings. The office gossip complains about someone else spreading rumors. The student who failed to study denounces the teacher’s lazy methods. The cheating partner grows ever more suspicious and accusatory of their spouse.
While I acknowledge that such a mechanism clearly exists and in abundance, I want to say it doesn’t stop there. As I have explored the ways I project onto others, I have discovered it’s not just a matter of distancing myself from uncomfortable parts. Rather, it is something I’m doing in every interaction at every moment of every day.
Twenty-four centuries ago, Plato wrote his allegory of the cave. He described the world as though we all were chained in the depths of a cave, subject to a parade of shadows marching across the wall before us. In his allegory, one man gets free. He sees that the shadows are merely projections cast by a parade of icons being carried past a fire. He climbs out of the cave and into the three-dimensional world beyond with its brilliant sun and vibrant colors. When he tries to go back to free his fellows, they resist him, noting how his exposure to the outside world with its blazing sun caused him to be blind in this one. They decide that if anyone should try to drag them away from their safety and comfort, they would react with violence and even murder to protect themselves.
It’s an excellent allegory that has weathered the centuries well and been adapted numerous times in literature, film, and television. I think its popularity speaks to the profound truth it carries. Only, I would say the fire and the parade of icons is not behind us, it is coming from within.
We all know how the same act–a person making a particular comment like “are you sure you want to eat that?”–can seem perfectly harmless to one observer and perfectly deadly to another. We understand that the impact has to do with the meaning of the comment. But we tend to think the important part is the meaning embedded in the comment. We believe if we could just determine what the speaker intended, we would understand the objective meaning and we would be able to effectively judge the statement as good, bad, or indifferent. Is the speaker asking “are you sure you want to eat that?” because they know the cookie is part of a batch that was slightly overcooked, or are they asking because they want to help a dieter stay on course and the dieter has asked for support, or are they asking because they think the person grasping the cookie is a fat, ignorant slob who is worthless if they gain even a particle of additional weight and indeed is not even competent to know what they want or don’t want and therefore needs to be policed like a criminally incompetent fool.
Wherein lies the true meaning?
I want to suggest that the answer to that question is intimately tied to the question: can we change our stars?
I want to suggest that the answer to one of those questions can answer the other.
And all of it hinges on the difference between two acts: one is the act of interpretation, the other: adaptation.
Over a century after its composition, we’re still not sure what L. Frank Baum meant by The Wizard of Oz. He published the children’s novel in 1900. In 1902, he produced a stage version. The stage version was overtly political with numerous references aimed at an adult audience. Theodore Roosevelt and John D. Rockefeller are mentioned, among many others. Partly due to those references, some interpreters looked at the yellow brick road and Dorothy’s silver shoes (they didn’t become ruby slippers until the 1939 film) and suggested that The Wizard of Oz was an allegory for bimettalism, one of the hottest political issues at the turn of the century. Oz is called Oz because of the abbreviation for ounce. The yellow brick road leads to the Emerald City, an ultimately fraudulent place. Like the fiat currency of greenbacks, Emerald City is powerless at its core even as it tries to devour and destroy the purity of the yellow brick road and the silver shoes and sweet, innocent Dorothy.
An interpreter in 1990 claimed the novel was an allegory about the demonetization of silver in 1873, whereby “the cyclone that carried Dorothy to the Land of Oz represents the economic and political upheaval, the yellow brick road stands for the gold standard, and the silver shoes Dorothy inherits from the Wicked Witch of the East represents the pro-silver movement. When Dorothy is taken to the Emerald Palace before her audience with the Wizard she is led through seven passages and up three flights of stairs, a subtle reference to the Coinage Act of 1873 which started the class conflict in America.”
To all of this, I offer a decidedly disinterested shrug. I mean… I’m interested. It’s intellectually fun, but does it matter what Baum meant? Does the meaning of the story rest with its originator, or does it exist somewhere else?
I love the 1939 movie and the meaning it stirs in me about realizing how the terrors of the world may seem frightening but ultimately they are nothing that a splash of water or a tug on a curtain can’t resolve. Even when we get our hopes up that we can be saved by these grandiose external powers, we find them merely full of hot air, floating away on the breeze.
Instead, the movie prompts us, let us recognize the gifts we already have and realize they were always sufficient to deliver us our heart’s desire.
I think every story–whether it’s The Wizard of Oz or The Knight’s Tale, the question: “are you sure you want to eat that” or the tragedy of a father falling into the sun–is an equally blank projection screen. What we see on it is not an objective interpretation of its inherent truth but rather a place where our internal state projects out. What we see is never the original, it is always our own adaptation.
Can we change our stars?
Bradbury shows us how our acts of adaptation can doom us. The mother in his story spends 10 years living with a ghost. Rather than being with what is, she makes up a story to try to save her from pain, but we can see it only prolongs that pain, so much so that when her husband actually dies, the sun is adapted into a villain she must hide from for years. Imagining that the source of her pain is her husband’s absence or the devouring sun, all she can do is hide and pretend. The wicked witch, the dreadful wizard, they boom with their malevolence, never confronted, never unveiled. Seeing the pain as outside of herself, there is nothing she can do about it. She becomes the prisoner of a star.
The Wizard of Oz shows us how acts of adaptation can save us. Not only does the 1939 adaptation show us the other side of the rainbow, a new dimension of possibility popping with color and magic, but it teaches us the power of realizing what we already have. After all, it’s not just the ruby slippers that save Dorothy. The real hero has been with her even before those shoes slipped onto her feet. Who is it that gets her out of her trudging drudgery in the first place and into a twister that carries her to another dimension? Who helps her reveal the cowardice of the lion or the man behind the curtain? Who but Toto?
Toto, however, is still not the real hero. Toto is, frankly, a pretty annoying little yappy dog. Because Dorothy loves him however and has the courage to care for him, she crosses dimensions, overcomes lions and witches and wizards, and ultimately discovers the joy and possibility in her once black-and-white reality.
Adaptation is magic and magic is power. When Gregory Maguire took on adapting Oz, he brought new life and new possibility to the story, helping us imagine even further beyond the curtain to ask where wickedness really comes from. He shows us how the projections of Elphaba as wicked because of the color of her skin ultimately turned her into the wicked witch.
At a key point in Elphaba’s journey, she meets a wise elephant who tells her, “Listen to me, sister,” she said. “Remember this: Nothing is written in the stars. Not these stars, nor any others. No one controls your destiny.” Tragically, Elphaba doesn’t fully learn this lesson and instead becomes how she is seen, undone by the lie that the meaning people see is inherent to the thing they are seeing.
What we see is what we get.
Stephen Schwartz’s musical adaptation of Maguire’s book carries the story in yet another direction still, each artist functioning in a great unfurling chain of ongoing creation, spirals churning through a galaxy of possibility and chance.
The other night, Ori and Jess and I were watching A Knight’s Tale. Jess pointed out the way in which the antagonist count kept throwing up challenges to Heath Ledger’s character that inevitably came out in his favor.
That sparked a thought in me that the role of every antagonist and antagonism in our stories is in fact a secret servant to the protagonists, giving them precisely the challenge they need to become who they are.
To which Ori replied, “that’s the difference between antagonists and protagonists. Challenges are always happening to them both. The protagonist is the one who is willing to grow along with the changes, rather than be defeated by them.”
This has been my reflection entitled “Astral Projection and Interdimensional Travel for the Resolutely Earthbound.” A quick review–Astral Projection: what stories do we project on our shifting stars and can we take responsibility for them, adapting them by an act of shifting our perspective and thereby shifting from one dimension to a vibrant other, sparkling with color?
But what is it to be resolutely earthbound?
I want to suggest it is to be strapped to a starship spinning through seemingly infinite space, rotating through seasons and cycles of life in which the same stories seem to play out before us, but really they are always changing, sometimes up, sometimes down, each one inviting us to align with them, to become the authors of our own destinies not by changing the stars, but by adapting.
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