Projection and Perception
What the Course says
Posted by aplecompte on March 2nd, 2010
Instruction in perception is your great need, for you understand nothing. T-11.VIII.3
The Ego and Guilt
The ego is the sign of a limited and separated self, born in a body, doomed to suffer and to end its life in death. W-pII.12.1
The ego made its world on sin. T-19.II.6 The attraction of guilt is found in sin. T-19.III.1
While you believe that your reality or your brother’s is bounded by a body, you will believe in sin. T-19.III.7
The sick attraction of guilt must be recognized for what it is. T-15.VII.3
It is guilt that has driven you insane. T-13.In.1
The world you see is the delusional system of those made mad by guilt. T-13.In.2
The guilty always condemn. T-13.IX.1 To make guilty is direct attack. T-15.VII.6
Projection
The separation was and is dissociation, and projection is its main defense, the device that keeps it going. T-6.II.1
The ultimate purpose of projection is always to get rid of guilt. T-13.II.1
What you project you disown, and therefore do not believe is yours. You are excluding yourself by the very judgment that you are different from the one on whom you project. Since you have also judged against what you project, you continue to attack it because you continue to keep it separated. By doing this unconsciously, you try to keep the fact that you attacked yourself out of awareness, and thus imagine that you have made yourself safe. T-6.II.2
Yet projection will always hurt you. It reinforces your belief in your own split mind, and its only purpose is to keep the separation going. It is solely a device of the ego to make you feel different from your brothers and separated from them. The ego justifies this on the grounds that it makes you seem "better" than they are, thus obscuring your equality with them still further. Projection and attack are inevitably related, because projection is always a means of justifying attack. Anger without projection is impossible. The ego uses projection only to destroy your perception of both yourself and your brothers. The process begins by excluding something that exists in you but which you do not want, and leads directly to excluding you from your brothers. T-6.II.3
Defenses seem to be unconscious because of the rapidity with which you choose to use them. In that second, even less, in which the choice is made, you recognize exactly what you would attempt to do. W-136.3
Afterwards, your plan requires that you must forget you made it, so it seems to be external to your own intent; a happening beyond your state of mind, an outcome with a real effect on you, instead of one effected by yourself. W-136.4
It is this quick forgetting of the part you play in making your "reality" that makes defenses seem to be beyond your own control. W-136.5
Projection makes perception, and you cannot see beyond it. Again and again you have attacked your brother because you saw in him a shadow figure in your private world. And thus it is that you must attack yourself first, for what you attack is not in others. Its only reality is in your own mind. T-13.V.3
What is projected out, and seems to be external to the mind, is not outside at all, but an effect of what is in, and has not left its source. T-26.VII.4
What you project you believe. T-7.II.3
Projection makes perception. The world you see is the witness to your state of mind, the outside picture of an inward condition. T-21.In.1
Perception
Belief determines perception. T-11.VI.3 What you desire you will see. T-21.II.9
Perception rests on choosing. T-25.III.3 Your perception is the result of your invitation. T-12.VII.5
The world is false perception. Eyes deceive. W-pII.3 There is no world! W-132.6
Everything you perceive is a witness to the thought system you want to be true. T-11.V.18
You perceive from your mind and project your perceptions outward. T-6.II.9
Perception’s fundamental law: You see what you believe is there, and you believe it is there because you want it there. T-25.III.1
I am responsible for what I see. Everything that seems to happen to me I ask for. T- 21.II.2
No one but yourself affects you. W-190.5:4 There is no opponent. T-8.I.3
All the attack you perceive is in your own mind and nowhere else. T-12.III.10
You chose to deceive yourself. T-14.I.5
The secret of salvation is but this: that you are doing this unto yourself. T-27.VIII.10
You have withdrawn into insanity; you are as isolated from reality as if you were alone in all the universe; you see only your own split mind everywhere you look. T-13.V.6
You cannot evaluate an insane belief system from within it. T-9.VII.6
Perception is a choice of what you want yourself to be. T-25.I.3
Everyone sees only what he thinks he is. T-22.I.5
It is as needful that you recognize you made the world you see, as that you recognize that you did not create yourself. They are the same mistake. T-21.II.11
Know thyself. T-8.III.5
