I may have posted this entry previously, but I'm too lazy to look it up. I have spent some time editing it to make it more understandable to myself, and hopefully for any perspective reader. This is one of the more difficult concepts I play around with to put in words.

The persona is that which in reality one is not,
but which oneself as well as others think one is.
~ Carl Jung

It interests me a lot to read that Carl Jung came to the same conclusion that I have. Or rather, that we both came to the same conclusion some others may have also arrived at independently. The relevance of Jung's statement is something that needs to be understood before any real progress can be made in trancending the conceptual world we created for the survival of our identities as individual people.

This is not to say that I have gotten beyond it, but that I sense that I do understand the meaning associated with Jung's quote now. I have only arrived at that meaning recently.

This all started when I returned from an involuntary out of body experience that happened to me many years ago. Later, when I realized that I was back in my body again, I found myself saying one sentence over and over again. This sentence was the anchor that allowed me to remember I had the out of body experience. The sentence I repeated so repetitiously was, "Everything is nothing but the idea that it is something, and it could be anything at all."

It took a while before I understood what that statement implied, and even longer before I knew what it meant to me in regard to my own world view. Eventually, after repeating this sentence redundantly for a long time, I realized it meant that I was perceiving the sensory world I experienced daily in a conceptual sense, and my concepts and ideas of the sensory world was not the real material world at all.

After reading and studying Joseph Campbell's book, The Hero of a Thousand Faces, and began to understand his description of what he called "The Hero's Journey", I began to associate this sentence I brought back with me from the out of body experience, and this association led me to begin to understand the psychological concept of projection. The notion that we only see ourselves in other people. As I began to understand this better I could see examples of it's truth for me in my own relationship with the sensory perceived world and the possibility of it happening in other people's relationships with the hallucinations of projection too.

When I first began to get it, my nature of being led me to think of ways I could use this concept to get what I wanted from others. I soon realized that what people said about me or any other thing was a projection of what they thought about themselves, and possibly all of us betrayed our innermost secrets about who we think we are with every description we made of the other.

I soon found out that this betrayal of self is very difficult to remain consciously aware of in the moment of betrayal. I thought at first that by acquiring a critical database about how others thought about themselves, I could use that information to manipulate them for my own ends. The second thing I thought of was that the same method was possible for them to use... for better or worse... against me. After that, I didn't seem to have the time to mentally maintain a list of ideated personal attributes on anyone but myself.

Recently, in the past month, I read a book written by a Jungian analyst that, according to Jung's psychology, all of our projected personal attributes and careactoristics dwell in our psyches unconsciously, and this same unconscious material we project on others, is the very materials we desperately need to become conscious of in our own person.

This entire process of my understanding projection had a little twist in it, and it was this skewered twist that changed my entire gestalt. It took a while for me to realize that our own attributes and careactoristics we project on others is not necessarily the way we think we really are.

The judgements resulting from what we perceive in others is what we almost certainly visit upon ourselves. The qualities and characteristics we deem them to have, relates to the same opinion we have of ourselves. What we observe them doing and saying could be true about us too, but if, and only if, they did what they do for our reasons rather than their own reasons. Paradoxically, other people don't seem to do and say what they do and say for our reasons. Nor do we do and say what we do and say for their reasons.

This train of thought is how I arrived at the same conclusion as the Jung quote above. We seem to think that everyone else, at some level, are basically the same as ourselves, that all of us do and say what we do and say for our own reasons. That's true in an ordinary sense, but that is not how we are the same in my opinion. We are the same because each of us projects our opinion of ourselves upon the other, and we are not who we think we are.

We only hallucinate that we are our own individual person, and that we own or possess our identity as individuals. We are not those projections we place on others anymore than others are the projection of ourself we attempt to make them into. We create this conceptual illusion for the artificial purpose of reason, and then pretend that reason rules the sensory world. It does not. Something beyond reason and beyond our conceptual contructs prevails in spite of the games we play with ourselves and others.