Thanks Mara! I appreciate your thoughtful and detailed response! Yes, it is so hard for us to see ourselves (or as you put it, behind our eyes), and our culture as a whole doesn’t do much to support self-reflection and understanding. On the other hand, it’s complex and as smart as we think we are, we are still at the dawn of consciousness as a species. I would say that we all project our pasts — that part is inevitable. But what we can do in increase our awareness of our projections and offset them to some degree.