Conscious Within Consciousness

Much material that is our own, that is part of ourselves, has been dissociated, alienated, disowned, and thrown out. The rest of potential is not available to us. But I believe most of it is available, but as projections. I suggest we start with the impossible assumption that whatever we believe we see in another person or in the world is nothing but a projection. . . We can reassimilate; we can take back our projections, by projecting ourselves completely into that other thing or person. . . We have to do the opposite of alienation. We must identify our consciousness within the energy of all consciousness

Fritz Perls, the 20th century psychiatrist and psychotherapist, wrote those thoughts in his 1969 book, Gestalt Therapy Verbatim. The thought that everything we see in our reality is a projection goes against everything we have been taught to believe. According to Perls, our waking and dreaming reality are filled with self-created messages about the nature of being conscious as well as the nature of the consciousness that exists in all things.

We create projections using our core belief structure. Our core beliefs tend to be invisible. We are not aware of the entire contents of our conscious mind. When we analyze different experiences we put them in a catalogue of sameness based on our beliefs about them. We consider our beliefs facts of life, but they are actually beliefs about life. The belief in guilt for example is the cementing structure that holds similar core beliefs together and strengthens them. Beliefs are psychic matter and in that sense they are alive. They group together like cells and protect their validity as well as their identity. Our beliefs project themselves outward and we experience what we believe about the nature of our reality.

Beliefs are like magnets that attract as well as produce the projections that we experience. Those projections have been experienced in different ways in other environments by other aspects of our consciousness so in one sense no projection is new. They are just dressed differently by the focused consciousness creating them in this linear time reality.