~ Displacement ~
To be clear, as I am an honest man, before we begin, I should tell you that this ENTIRE BOOK is on the topic of displacement. It may be spoken of in terms of displacing your thoughts or feelings, from a person's Whats, onto the person themselves, but it's still just displacement. In short, displacing our emotions is really just a scientific way to say that we misplaced our emotions, but we did it on purpose, and with the subconscious intention to fool ourselves. This is why the term "Misplacing", as in "mis
take", doesn't work here; because while our shadows may try to claim that this was all just a coincidence, it was not a blunder and it was NOT a coincidence. It's a technique, and it's done with a very clear intent. It's done to protect your vanity, ego, and your self-esteem, at all costs.
So, another way that the shadow hides itself is through “displacement”. You see, displacement is the concept of taking your thoughts or feelings about one thing, and placing them onto another. Unlike projecting, displacement doesn’t involve YOUR WHO, specifically. It is only focused on the WHOs around you. An easy example of this is when you get upset at a family member at home when the real cause of your anger is that you had a rough day at work.
Your shadow has been taking in the pain all day, absorbing these negative emotions for you, as a way to protect you throughout the day, but energy cannot be created or destroyed. In such, these negative emotions needed to be pointed somewhere. Your shadow is a weaker you, after all. That's why it hides, and that’s also why it can’t contain the pain that was meant for you for very long. The second your shadow spots an outlet it can release these feelings onto, it does so without a second of consideration, forethought, mercy, or remorse. It just lets them have it. Be it a movie, a person, or a pillow (among anything else you can imagine; even religions and philosophies are not safe from this weaponized tool), the shadow will let them be devoured by your negativity, or even your positivity, if it means saving, both itself and you, from the burden of overflowing emotions, and/or confusions.
How can you realize your unjust actions in a moment when it's all about WHOS that are outside of you, and not WHO you are? If the moment is all about the outside forces and not you, what can you do to stop it? Truth be told, you’re almost entirely excluded from these emotions until it's too late. Once the emotions are identified by you, they have already been released, full speed ahead, at their target. It’s like trying to stop a bullet, mid-way through the barrel of a gun, after the trigger has already been pulled.
And you're the one that pulled it.
One of the largest, and most common displacements I’ve ever seen, often to people’s detriment, is the idea that people are “scared of uncertainty”. This is madness, and it’s pure madness simply for the fact that one be certain of how they feel about an uncertainty. Honestly, how can one feel a certain way about an idea they’re not certain of to begin with? It’s like saying you know how to feel about someone you’ve never met or heard about at all. You can’t know how to feel about an unknown entity. You can't be scared of a future that doesn't exist. WHOs create emotion, so if you don’t know WHO you’re talking about, you can’t know how you feel about them, and uncertainty is the lack of all known identities, all known WHOs, within any given situation. You can’t feel bad about someone you don’t know anything about. It just doesn’t make sense. You don’t even know what it is, let alone if you like it or not.
Imagine this: A man walks up to you with a large coin in his hand. The coin isn’t rigged, and he’s a stranger with seemingly no ill will toward you. If he says “With your permission, I will flip this coin. If it lands on heads, I’ll give you a trillion dollars, but if it lands on TAILS…
then we go our separate ways, and pretend like this never happened. We go about our lives, and pretend this coin toss never even existed.” If that was the deal, and it was a real deal, would you take the offer? If you say no, tell me the reason in the comments; \ tell me how you came up with it.
And if you said yes, why would you take the offer? Aren’t you scared? It’s a coin toss, remember? It’s a 50-50 CHANCE! The coin toss is the epitome of uncertainty, to the point we use it for fairness BASED ON HOW RANDOM IT IS. My friends, it’s not uncertainty that scares us. It’s the certainty of the worst thing possible happening, that uncertainty allows, that scares us. Uncertainty allows for our imagination to take hold, and we imagine the worst things possible for ourselves. Our minds love doing that. Again, you’re not scared of uncertainty. You’re scared of your own imagination. Uncertainty is required for fear because it creates the opportunity for your imagination to take hold, but that does not mean you fear uncertainty. It means you fear something that uncertainty lets have a chance at you.
Here. Let’s change it slightly: Picture this. A man walks up to you with a large coin in his hand. The coin isn’t rigged, and he’s a wizard with seemingly no ill will towards you. In fact, he doesn't even know you. If he says “With your permission, I will flip this coin. If it lands on heads, I’ll give you a trillion dollars, but if it lands on TAILS…I’m allowed to make ONE life-altering change to your day today. Deal?”
Would you take the offer? Why, or why not? If you wouldn’t, what do you think is gonna happen? Really picture it, with every gory little detail. Good? Got it? Great! Now let me ask you something.
When did I say that the alteration had to be BAD, at all?
Giving you a trillion dollars is a life-altering change, my friend. For all you know, you may have a 100% odds of winning the lottery. And what about neutral changes? What if his life-altering change is that he flips the coin again? What if his life-altering change was simply giving you another chance at the coin toss, and this time with my original conditions (heads you get a trillion $$$, tails nothing happens)? And if tails is bad, how bad does it really have to be? Maybe he gives you one of those itches that moves every time you try to scratch it for a few minutes, that’s an alteration to how your day would have been. I never said the alteration had to be large.
Chances are that you went to death, torture, or wild horrors beyond your wildest dreams, and so you turned it down, or thought "Nah... that's just what he wants me to think". But either way, you decided that the chances of absolute misery, or at least slight negativity, was 50%, when in reality if we count neutral, positive, and negative changes equally, since he’s "a stranger with seemingly no ill will", the odds are more along the lines of 16.67%, and that includes the itch. Your idea of bad probably lies within the 5.56% range if you're seeing blood right now. That’s almost as small as a 1 in 20 odds, and your odds of positivity lie more around the 66.67% range, if you count positive alteration through a tails landing of the coin toss.
I’m not saying that you should try to risk that 5.56%. I’m merely saying that the odds aren’t as bad as you thought they were, and that your imagination goes straight to the pits of hell and torture whenever it’s given a chance. Basically, we humans view risk as a more important factor than any certainty, and we feel that potential losses are to be prioritized more than potential gains. In fact, some studies have shown that our brains weigh our potential losses as being worth nearly twice as much as any potential gain (Cite Thinking fast and slow). Uncertainty might unlock the gates for you to go down there, but it isn’t hell itself. That piece, my friends, is simply you, and your terrifying imagination.
Acting like most people do, based on a scary idea in their minds, is like dreaming that a man will murder you, and so you bring him to court, put him on trial, and say “I dreamt of him killing me, so it must happen eventually.”, and then, somehow, the jury decides to convict him, and you lock the man up for something that you only dreamed of happening.
Do you know the man’s name?
His name, is “Uncertainty”.
It’s not justified, but it happens all the time. People imagine things and treat their feelings about this hallucination as reality itself. Again, displacement is taking how you feel about one item, and transferring it to another. You shouldn’t convict a person, for the crimes that someone else committed. You displace your fears and hatred onto the wrong souls, or the wrong WHOs.
If you say that you’re scared of uncertainty because you woke up this morning and weren’t certain how the day would go, chances are that you imagined a terrible day for yourself, but if it happened to be a fantastic day, you would completely forget about your “fears of uncertainty”. It would be like they never even happened. The real “uncertainty”, in this situation, would have turned out to be a great day. Uncertainty is just an egg from unknown futures to be born from.
My friends, sometimes, when things aren't going "according to your plan", that's only because they're going BETTER than you could have ever planned, and that is due to uncertainty.
If you were scared of having a bad day, and uncertainty created a great one, you should be THANKFUL for that uncertainty, not scared of it, because it has given you a great gift; and it does do so every day, without any thanks or acknowledgments. Uncertainty can bring terrible futures, but it can also bring you miracles. If it’s not impossible for the worst things you've imagined to occur, how can you keep forgetting that the best things imagined, are allowed to happen also?
The key to identifying displacement, so far as I can see, is trying to understand if your feelings towards something really make sense, or if it’s truly “justified”, but how do we know when something is justified and when it's not? Because there are many things you’ll need to know to be able to pull off this type of observation consistently, efficiently, and reliably. I don’t want to give you anything less than that. As such, we’ll be diving deeper into justice much more thoroughly, in Menu 4, but for now, just follow this one rule: Never be certain, in the face of uncertainty. The key to fixing your uncertainty isn't to remove it, but to embrace it. The uncertain lives completely in the unexamined parts of your life, and so, if we can embrace that, we'll develop strength and power unheard of by the more "normal" (and cowardly) society. Embrace the unexamined, and watch as your abilities transform anything into all that's required to protect the smiles and growth, of those you care for.
The truth is, I don’t know how to stop a displacement in progress. I only know how to learn from it, then predict it, and lessen its effects at a later date. The truth is that while you’re learning this step, you’ll probably go through a bit of pain because you’ll realize that you’re hurting people (and things) that you care about, without any justifiable reason, and all you can do is wait patiently and hope that my methods work out for you. You will feel like a movie villain, unleashing havoc on innocent victims, and seemingly doing it without remorse or regret. Please, keep in mind, this is not you. It’s your shadow. It isn't you in your entirety. Unlike most things, the shadow is not "contained" within your cookie jar. It is a smudge that must be wiped from the jar itself. That is what this menu is for. It's so that we can remove the dirt and gunk, and see the jar more clearly, so that we may know what it's worth.
I said it before within the first few pages of this site. Some of these places I’m taking you to, you haven’t just avoided out of ignorance. Some of them, you’ve probably avoided out of fear. Understand, you cannot give into fear, not now, not ever. What kind of person allows themselves to feel comfortable… at the cost of the countless people they’ll be meeting within their lives? Each person you meet will also meet countless more. Are you really willing to let the people, and the people’s people, suffer for your own, self-centered, and greedy need for comfort, stability, or control, and all at the cost, of all of theirs?
Let me tell you what you can learn each time you displace your feelings. First, when you displace something, you’ll be able to notice it in hindsight. That is to say, you’ll have your best chance at realizing its occurrence once it’s already ended and has long since been over with. From there you can look back on it from a more informed, future perspective. To be clear, even though you’re really feeling negative about something else entirely, you will most likely have several “reasons” for attacking whatever innocent thing you choose to strike down. Again, your brain just LOVES to fill in the blanks. Your shadow will whisper in your ear, all these wonderful excuses, and lies, about why you could get away with yelling at your friend, even though you’re really just mad at your coworkers for a rough day at work. The first thing we need to do, in such a case, is determine whether that evidence is real. Then, whether or not it proves a required point beyond a reasonable doubt. And finally, we should see if that evidence may apply similarly, to something else, from earlier in time. Maybe that is what we're displacing from.
Before the end, however, we must remember that there aren't many things that can help a man as much as comprehending all layers, and all categories, in the field of which he aims to attain mastery. Displacement is the overarching theme of this book, and without mastering that, you won't have mastered anything at all. At the end of the day, you must be able to recognize displacement easily, if this book (and these chapters), are to mean anything real to you in the long run.
