More Astronaut Love
Good day all, Henry here. We all saw the images of the NASA Astronaut who is charged with trying to kill another woman and many of us probably asked how such a thing could happen. It’s hard to understand why someone would do that, but actually Captain Lisa Nowak is just an extreme example of what many, people do all the time. We all know someone who got divorced and remarried at the drop of a hat or someone who followed someone else into a job that turned out to be a huge mistake. Life moves like this tend to be based on projection: We see what we expect to see, whether it’s there or not. Dr. Jung tells us that everything that we are unconscious of in ourselves is projected onto someone else.
This means that we project both our good stuff and bad stuff out on others. We project our own best qualities out on others in elections. People get elected to government because enough people see them as being better than their rivals. Then when we get to know them, or think that we do, we kick them out of office because we decide that they are not as good as their rivals. We do the same thing with movie stars and other heroic figures.
We project our bad stuff out on others also. Some people look down their noses at gay people, women, ethnic minorities and so on, mainly because these people represent some part of themselves that they’re less then happy with.
When we fall in love at first sight, as nice an experience as it is, it is largely based on projection and the same thing is happening when we dislike people when we first meet them. The person who seems wonderful beyond description and the person who just “rubs us the wrong way” are probably both setting of something in us that we’re not aware of.
Another quote from Dr. Jung: “Projections change the world into the replica of our unknown face,” which is a fancy way of saying that what we cannot see it in ourselves, we see outside. We also swear that it belongs outside, it has nothing to do with us. That is a wonderful source of self-delusion. So we go cheerfully through life seeing good and evil, beauty, seduction and rejection where it does not exist and being certain that what we see is the unvarnished truth.
It would seem that this is what happened to Captain Lisa Nowak, which animated her mad dash across the United States to confront a supposed rival.