' John Welwood from Journey of the Heart '...

Idolizing someone we fall in love with is an example of a strange trick we play on ourselves-what psychologists call projection. Simply stated, this means heightened sensitivity to certain qualities in another person that we fail to acknowledge in ourselves. The classic example is the person who does not acknowledge his own aggression, but imagines that other people are out to get him.

When romantically idolizing someone, we project not our own unacknowledged negative feelings, but all the power, beauty, and richness of our being, which we usually fail to recognize inside us. Human nature is vast. Our being actually reflects and contains the whole range of peaceful and wrathful energies of heaven and earth, fire and water, sun and stars. But we usually inhabit only a small portion of our being. We live on the island of our conditioned self, a complex of memories, notions, and images of ourselves that constitute our identity as we know it. Yet the larger expanse of our being-its vastness, intensity, and depths-we do not usually identify as intimately our own. Even though this larger being is more truly who we are-since it is not an invention, like our self-images-we do not know it as our true nature. Since we have a hard time perceiving our own vastness and beauty, we project it outward instead, where it is easier to see.

Just as the individual who denies his anger finds it coming back at him from the world, so we discover the radiance of our own being in and through our beloved, who mirrors it back to us. We are dazzled by what we see. We want it, we must have it at any cost. Since we can't live without it-for it is, after all, our own being-we wind up not only addicted, but further alienated from ourselves as well.


Abraham Maslow once wrote that "we are generally afraid to become that which we glimpse in our most perfect moments," no doubt because our larger being threatens us in many ways. If we were to open to it fully, perhaps it would disrupt our cozy little habits and throw our familiar, small identity into question. So, just as early peoples worshiped as gods what they feared and did not understand, so we, who are primitives in regard to our larger being, tend to worship our greater powers at a safe distance, by letting others carry them for us. Thus we "fall" for the beloved, whom we place above us, granting him or her power to uplift us from our "fallen" state of hunger and unworthiness.


Journey of the Heart pp 62,3