Master classes in projection are all around us every day. We are all enrolled in them, tuition-free, but often are unaware of it.
Spend even five minutes in the subreddit of your favorite team, in any sport, and you’ll see how fans project their unconscious desires for power and transformation onto players and their feelings of helplessness onto front office managers making the decisions.
You also get to experience the curious paradox of how no one hates a team more than its fans.
For example, yesterday millions of us were caught up in the madness of constantly refreshing our feeds as we projected all our hopes onto superstar baseball players at the trading deadline. It seems appropriate for this to occur during Leo season, the astrological stage of ego and performative spectacle.
One minute it’s, “How terrible, our cheap team hasn’t made any trades yet!”
The next minute it’s, “How terrible, they made a trade and gave up too much for it!” even though what the team gave up were minor league players the fans didn’t care about before.
It’s an opportunity to reflect on what our hyper-fixation on external outcomes reveals about our own internal state—and why “withdrawing the projection” is the first step toward peace.
It’s also an excuse to share this James Hollis quote about baseball:
There are few things more rewarding than for a shortstop, deep in the hole, to turn and throw the ball toward second, and see the second baseman intersect base and ball at the exact moment. This is less about practice than about the integration of spirit, the communion of soul (Hollis, p. 124, Under Saturn’s Shadow).
It would be fun to talk about baseball with Hollis, although he grew up in Illinois and there is a risk he is a Chicago Cubs fan (the bitter rival of my team the Milwaukee Brewers). Here’s hoping he is a White Sox fan!
Baseball writers have been making this connection for decades. I found this article about Jungian psychology and baseball which gets at something deeper than stats:
So baseball measures the feats of its heroes by threes and fours. Jung’s belief was that heroic activities in the outer world are manifestations of the hero within us all. This inner hero, if aroused, can perform miracles…
He goes on to tell the story of an 11-year-old boy in 1926 who was dying of blood poisoning. During his final minutes he asked to listen to the World Series game. Babe Ruth hit three homeruns during that game. As The New York Times reported, the boy’s fever began to break after that third homerun and he went on to make a full recovery.
For us, the miracle won’t be as dramatic as that, but the invitation is the same.
When we step back from the performative theater of the game, we give our projections room to breathe. We stop demanding that young athletes or corporate decision makers bear the weight of our unlived lives or our desperate need for a savior. Maybe we even learn to remain unfazed when the fans of the rival team deride us.
That’s when the enchantment of the game reveals itself.
It’s not found in the stats but in the sacred geometry of the diamond—a mandala carved out of grass and dirt. It’s found in the mythic quest every batter makes: leaving Home, venturing out into dangerous territory, navigating bases, and risking everything to find their way back Home where they started.
And as Hollis reminds us, it’s in those rare, luminous moments where our inner and outer actions align perfectly that time seems to pause. It doesn’t belong to the box score; it belongs to the soul. We are free to sit back and let the quiet magic of the game awaken the hero already within us.
Whether your team made a blockbuster trade or not yesterday, may you find your way back Home today.
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In depth,
Anita Ashland
AnitaAshland.com
