I was a New Age believer in the early 1980's before I discovered how many secret bugs or quirks were lurking behind my idealized image of myself as an open-hearted visionary.

I use to pump gas into my pseudo-enlightenment & float away in my hot-air balloon, buoyed along by drafts of magical thinking & ego-in-the-clouds dreams of salvation. While beneath the surface of myself undetected negative emotions bubbled like lava, I chanted my mantras, communed w/Father Sky & contemplated walking on hot coals.

But I couldn't avoid those inner storms of existential discontent. I never knew when the next one would blow in, gusting the gas back in my face & assailing me w/blustery insinuations to the effect:

"Why aren't you succeeding like you're supposed to?

How come you're such a bum anyway?

 Other people can see thru you. What makes you think you're so smart & evolved?"

One particularly stormy day, my pretence flipped out, tipped over my balloon-basket & I crash-landed in south Florida. I prefer not to go into the details. But I began to see a psychotherapist who had a no-holds-barred reputation for "working w/the unconscious."

Self-revelation accumulated in the following months & years as I continued my inner work w/him. Despite my wish to know & to merge w/my true self, I discovered how I was identified emotionally w/a false self. Several bugs in my psychic configuration were holding that identification in place.

e.g., I was posing as a holder of higher consciousness in order to look good to impress others (& myself), because beneath my surface awareness I was emotionally attached to feelings of being a disappointment to myself & others.

I had many childhood memories of feeling myself to be a disappointment in the eyes of my father & mother & I could feel the old shame of it & see how I continued to replay these expectations & take on those feelings w/my wife & others.

In what ways was I a disappointment to myself? Well, I was too short, too skinny & too stiff. My personality was barely passable. My writing didn't sizzle, my French was stilted & my ping-pong game sucked. I was, however, proud of how far I could hit a golf ball.

Deeper down where it really hurt I harbored nagging feelings of being less than others, of being unworthy, insignificant & most painful of all - a loser. God, I hated to look at that!

How distasteful it was to consider that my most intimate relationship w/myself consisted of disappointment, shame & self-rejection. Better to escape in my light-than-air fantasies than face this truth about myself. But my wife & my therapist had me pinned to the ground.

Intellectually, I knew I was a good person. But emotionally I couldn't accept myself as I was.

There was always something about myself I was determined to feel bad about. In the mirror stood someone I wouldn't pick for a friend. The underlying feeling was, "Hey Pete, any chance I can trade you in for someone else?"

As part of my practice for dismantling my identification w/a false self, I had many dialogs, some of them quite touching, in which I imagined my true self saying to me, "Peter, why do you feel that I'm a disappointment? What is it about me that you can't accept? Why am I so dishonored in your eyes?"

I began to develop a new relationship w/myself - w/my true self - in which I'd say to myself, "Peter, you're so ready to believe that what you say or do or who you are is somehow wrong or inadequate.

But it's not who you are or what you do that's the problem. The problem is that you take on & get hit up w/these negative impressions of yourself. The problem is your readiness to doubt, criticize & condemn yourself. Remember, I believe in you, I support you, I love you. I accept you as you are. I'll never judge you or criticize you."

Other negative attachments lurked in the shadows. Though I had always denied it, I was tempted to feel deprived or refused, to indulge in the feeling that life wasn't going to give to me & that I'd never feel fulfilled. I was also ready to misinterpret various situations in order to feel controlled or dominated, especially at work w/my supervisors.

I'd react to someone else's will or agenda by being passive-aggressive, ignoring or conveniently forgetting their requests. Or I would rebel against the feeling of being controlled by initiating some scheme of my own that would invariably be non-productive or self-defeating.

I also had to face & cross on foot the great parched desert of my resistance, find my way across the badlands of self-centeredness & demolish bare-handed the temple of self-image.

Since I've become a psychotherapist, I see that we're all in the same boat or balloon.

We all skim above the surface of ourselves, hesitant to act in our best interests - whether to exercise enough, regulate our behaviors, or confront the bugs that contaminate our wholeness. Part of Luke Skywalker's training w/the Jeti Master Yoda required that he see Darth Vadar's face in the reflection of his own. Luke didn't like it either.

Not only do we deny our secret love affair w/unresolved negative emotions, we also turn our backs on our true self. There's a document on my Web site that gives 12 reasons why we resist loving ourselves.

In my experience, many New Age members have a naive, almost infantile, perception of human nature, especially their own.

As an example, some members of the New Age movement, in seeking a spirituality outside Western tradition, have embraced the lost Anasazi civilization which flourished in the American Southwest in the centuries prior to 1150 A.D. New Agers have made claims to be spiritual descendants of these people & have buried crystals at Anasazi ruins & made arrangements to have their ashes scattered there.

Now anthropologists have found evidence that, among the Anasazi themselves, men, women & children were massacred, dismembered & cannibalized. ("Cannibals Of The Canyon," The New Yorker, Nov. 30, 1998).

Growing evidence suggests this Anasazi civilization might have collapsed about 1150 A.D. primarily as a consequence of the effects of domination, violence & terror within the communities themselves.

If we look in this decade alone at the massacres & exterminations in the Balkans & in Rwanda, this revised scenario of Anasazi life is more in keeping w/the realities of human nature than the peace, love & brotherhood script that members of the New Age movement have wanted to believe.

It appears that some individuals have projected their self-image upon the Anasazi & idealized them, as a projection of their own unconscious narcissism & as a defense against seeing themselves more objectively.

Members of cults commit this unconscious defense as well when they idealize their cult leader, thus glorifying their own egos thru identification w/the leader. Children do it too when, in infantile naiveté, they see mommy & daddy as the smartest & best individuals in the world.

The vision of the New Age movement is indeed worthy & attainable for humanity. But for unconscious psychological reasons, we all have a tendency to take something that's worthwhile & even sacred & hide our egotism & ignorance behind it.

e.g., pseudo or phony patriots do this when, to cover up their emotional alignment w/feeling insignificant & unworthy, they wrap themselves in the flag in order to identify w/the collective & to embrace the feeling of being powerful & special.

We also have a tendency to embrace good causes partly for the wrong reasons. A person who "sympathizes" w/the poor can be doing so because he identifies w/the feeling of being poor because of his emotional attachment to feelings of loss & deprivation.

A person who feels aligned w/the plight of whales & dolphins may have, in different areas of his life, a tendency to indulge in feelings of being victimized & negated. We need to see as deeply as possible into the motivations & intent behind our feelings, beliefs & actions.

Forty years ago Carl Jung wrote in The Undiscovered Self that our lack of insight deprives us of the capacity to deal w/evil. The more we deceive ourselves, the more we are blind or helpless to the deceptions of those who oppose our highest good.

"None of us stands outside humanity's black collective shadow," he said. Sigmund Freud wrote that self-aggression is a powerful drive which we experience in the form of anxiety, guilt, shame & fear. All inappropriate aggression in the world, including degradation of the environment, is a reflection of self-aggression.

All of us have a secret willingness to indulge in or "take a hit on" negative emotions that include deprival, refusal, control, criticism & rejection. Even the most progressive among us can be triggered by these feelings. Most of us have some area of our lives where we get hit up w/feel neglected, oppressed, cheated & victimized.

When that happens, we need to ask, "How am I neglecting myself, how am I oppressing myself, how am I cheating myself out of knowing my true nature as a divine expression of wisdom, joy & love?"

Most people don't realize the extent of their negative attitudes & their negative treatment of themselves. But we can see it all around us, for this negativity is reflected in our interactions w/others, in the situations of our lives & in the collective. Everything is a reflection of us & how we feel about ourselves.

Vainly, we look for love outside ourselves, rather than being responsible for generating it from within. Ask yourself, "If I take away all the visions, dreams & paraphernalia of the New Age, what will I have, who will I be?" You'll have to fall back on yourself.

You'll stand at the abyss, the great yawning, terrifying nothingness into which it feels you'll disappear & which indeed, once embarked within it, will destroy your false identity. Standing there, you'll either go into it to find yourself or you'll run back to the comfort of your dreams.

Remember Socrates - the wise person knows how little he knows. Many individuals that I counsel tell me how much they already know about themselves. These people are among the most resistant to further growth. Approach your psyche w/great humility, receptive to whatever the truth may be & you'll see doors begin to open on the secrets of your soul.

Peter Michaelson is an author & psychotherapist in Santa Fe, NM. More of his articles & information about his books is available at www.QuestForSelf.com.

Reference:
Michaelson, P. (1999). Debugging the New Age Psyche. [Online]. Perspectives. [1999, January 1].