By Cathy Eck

You left home years ago.  You felt that you were now the creator of your own life. And yet, mom and dad keep showing up. You’ve married or dated them. You’ve seen your older kids acting like them with your younger kids, and you’ve even worked for them. You know their beliefs are false; so why are they still in your life?

We have to approach this problem the same way that we would view someone in a masculine role who keeps hiring irresponsible employees, has a wife that shops till she drops, and has kids who are addicts. We have to find out the beliefs that got them in this unwanted situation.

Projection

We don’t realize that within our minds both the masculine and feminine roles exist. In the physical world, however, we only play one role. We can’t play two roles at one time. So the masculine role in any situation projects the role that they don’t identify with.  This is why everyone wants those powerful masculine roles.

You see, there’s no unconscious mind. We see the contents of our mind every time we look at the world through the eyes of the masculine role. We view others as separate only because they’re physically separate.  False masculine projection in the illusion creates false-self connections. Ultimately, the false masculine wants possessions — obedient slaves and fans.

If we’re in the false masculine role, we project the feminine roles necessary to fulfill our needs — patients, customers, clients, servants.  We’ll tell ourselves we’re helping them.  But we’re projecting crap roles on those who are feminine to us.  We can clean up the mess quickly and easily.  If the person in the feminine role shops too much, we must realize that we want to buy more, but we hold back. We judge waste, or we think sacrifice is virtuous.  If we think our feminine is lazy, we probably fight laziness with our will.  We have pride in our overactivity.  We see the person in the feminine role as bad or wrong.  We would never be like them.  The payoff is we get to be good or right if we keep them on the hook.

If we’re in the feminine role, the masculine roles project on us. It feels like we have to wake his or her ass up to get free.  And yet, we can’t see how that’s possible.  Their judgment feels so damn strong.  In truth, we do have beliefs that got us into the feminine role as their reflection. We aren’t victims. But we have to understand how our mind holds the false relationship to get free.

File Storage

To solve this dilemma, I had to go back to my computer programming days. There are lots of files on your computer’s hard drive. To find a file, you must know its name. Search for the wrong name, and you won’t find that file.  Let’s say that you find the file, and now you want to delete it. You hit delete, and the program confirms: “Are you sure you want to delete ‘name of file.'” You respond “yes.”  You were able to delete that file because you knew you no longer needed it.  The same is true with our minds; we can delete a file when we’re clear it’s useless.

Let’s say your dad (masculine role) was a bigot. You observed his judgment from the feminine role and stored his bigotry under a file named something like, “Dad is a bigot.” Or, “Southern men are bigots” if you lived in the south and all his friends were bigots. Now you think, “I can’t delete that, it’s true. He is a bigot.” No, it’s not true. It’s real. Your dad has a True Self that’s not a bigot. For you to get free, you have to free him within your mind. If you let go of your observation of him, you won’t notice his bigotry any more. It will have the same feeling as talking about banana soufflé. We feel emotions when others speak falsely only if we believe them.

Let’s say dad had a belief that you’re lazy.  Determine how you stored the file. I discovered that my mind stored such information something like: “My dad believes I’m lazy.” When you find the right words, you’ll generally feel emotion arise.  The wrong words won’t bring up the emotion.

What people fail to realize about letting go is that to get free, we have to free every person on this planet that can generate an emotion in us. It’s daunting, I know. We’re turning everyone back into their True Self within our mind.  You’ll realize this when you completely adopt the mental perspective of life.  If you see something, and are bothered by it, you’re still contributing to it with a belief.

Important Caution

People in false masculine roles often feel no emotion when projecting.  They believe they’re really seeing the other person’s flaw because they see the other as physical only and separate; in truth, they’re seeing their own reflection.  If you’re in the masculine role, like parent to kids, teacher to  students, preacher to congregation, you’re always contributing to any false situation or problem, I.e., win-lose, good-evil, right-wrong, dominance-submission, etc. The masculine role is always responsible.  Just let go of what you see in the other.  Don’t take the credit for the shift.  You didn’t heal the person or situation; you simply stopped torturing them.

Projection makes letting go difficult, but not impossible. We have to decipher our role to find the causal beliefs — the file name. If you feel stuck, just vent to the wall or complain to your diary. You’ll say the belief. Then don’t fall into the trap of justifying your position; just let go. Freedom requires letting go of our false notion of justice, victim and perpetrator, and wanting punishment or retribution. We all deserve freedom.  We’re all victims of the illusion.