Expectations, Projections, and Loose Associations

A wiseman once said, “Life is like a box of chocolate, you never know what your gonna get”, simple words to remember. However I prefer life is like a jiggle saw puzzle every piece of the puzzle is but a lesson in life. The pieces are lessons that I have felt urged to absorb in the fabric of life.

Another piece urges me to abandon expectations that anything I say or do will make any difference whatsoever. This means, especially, abandoning expectations that anything I say or do will make the difference that I, in my great, exalted, prescient, and indisputably perfect wisdom, think that it ought to make. I am now quite near the place in which, if anything that I say or do does make a difference, that is fine. If it doesn’t, that also is fine. Whether it does or doesn’t has nothing to do with me and everything to do with what other people hear or experience. That is not my affair, none of my business.

Another piece urges a growing awareness that my mind is a tool that sometimes rests in the hands of an aspect of myself that I’d best keep away from it. Don’t put a hot soldering iron in the hands of a child.

I own one of those minds that make loose associations. That can be fun, and a source of creativity. I can discover how the rain in Spain contains a lesson that ought to be learned by the great unwashed swarming the slums of San Jose. Don’t ask me what that lesson is. I haven’t pursued it. But I’m sure it exists, I’m sure I can find it, and I might even make a book or blog post out of it. This tendency to find lessons everywhere and to make improbable associations often satisfies nothing except my own notion of how clever I can be. Mind in the hands of ego.
Who was it—someone commenting on Freud?—who said that sometimes a cigar is just a cigar? I do need to remember that.

A third piece of my puzzle seems to be special. Do you know how, when you are putting a puzzle together, there is one piece that keeps attracting your attention? Maybe it is bigger than the other pieces. Or maybe it has an unusual shape or color. But you keep noticing it, picking it up, wondering where it goes. Maybe you are sure that if you find where it goes, then the rest of the puzzle will come together magically.

In my puzzle that special piece urges the view that everything I experience (and I do mean everything) is projection. I have lived with that view for periods; lived in Plato’s cave for days or weeks at a time. It is a fine place to live when you know what is going on there. It is free of judgment and blame, and free of victimization. It isn’t damp or cold at all. But I have not taken up permanent residence there, and so I often need to find this piece (and this place) all over again. I pick it up, sense its importance, but then, without being aware of having done so, I put it down and forget where I put it. Then, all of a sudden, there it is right in front of me, asking, pleading, to be picked up again.

These puzzle pieces, and many more, are spread out right in front of me, but since the box that they came in has no picture of the finished puzzle on it, I can’t say what it will look like when it is complete. If it can ever be complete. I keep discovering new pieces, and there seems always to be one piece that I cannot locate.