Resistance to Growth and Progress
by Peter and Sandra Michaelson

Social progress is seen as change, and for many of us change brings up fears of letting go of what is familiar--our self-image, our entrenched beliefs, and our cultural notions of reality. Emotionally, we thus associate social progress with loss, powerlessness, and confusion.

We fear losing status, influence, and money, which we associate with security and feelings of worth. They provide us with our sense of identity, a feeling of survival, and our orientation in the world. We don't know who we are or how to be without them.

The degree of social progress mirrors our personal inner progress. Our cultural obsession with violence and opposition is reflective of our inner violent opposition to our true self. Outer enemies and other external restrictive forces symbolize the inner restrictive force that sabotages our wholeness.

Racial prejudices and hatreds mirror our own self-hatred. Our blatant disrespect for other life forms mirrors the disrespect we demonstrate for ourselves. Our escalating divorce rate has its roots in self-hatred and our emotional attachments to feelings of being refused, controlled, rejected, and unloved.

Inner progress involves a growing insight into our unconscious self-sabotage and our identification with a false self. It involves a growing identification with our true nature as beings of light and love. As we embark on our journey to clear away the negativity in our psyche, the more we are inspired to enhance the collective condition and consciousness.

Venturing forth upon this path is essential in order to empower ourselves and our culture. This means owning and acknowledging our personal and collective resistance to transforming our lives on both personal and cultural levels.

We start the process by looking at ourselves and our personal resistance to growth and wholeness. In spite of our conscious desire to love ourselves, we nonetheless are mired emotionally in ways that cause us to fear, doubt, reject, criticize, and even hate ourselves. To overcome this, we need to acknowledge the origins of our fears and experience the ways we are identified with a limited and negative sense of ourselves.

Fear is a major inner defense that covers up our unconscious readiness to immerse ourselves in feelings of being deprived, helpless, oppressed, criticized, negated, and hated. Our fear covers up a deep, dark secret--our unconscious wish to embrace these negative feelings as well as our inner aggression. In our unconscious defense, our fear enables us to say: "I'm not secretly expecting to be deprived or oppressed. Can't you see how much I am afraid of that!"

To make our defense more effective, we want to believe that our fears are validated by outer events and external circumstances. And the more fearful we are, the more we see external circumstances as oppressing us, thereby justifying our fear. Guns, crime, and war represent our inner aggression projected on society and acted out on that level.

Inner conflict induces us to create external enemies and fight them on the wrong battlefield. When we take responsibility for our fears, we are more likely to act against oppression in an effective way, rather than go on colluding in the feeling of being victims of it. Where the streets and neighborhoods have been taken back from drug dealers and other low-life, it has often been citizens, not the police, who made it happen. Coming together in a common purpose, these neighbors became responsible for overcoming their fears and halting the deterioration of their communities. Neither the police nor any other authority can make us as safe as we can make ourselves.

Real safety abides on the other side of our paranoia and fear, where illusions have fallen away and we have come home to ourselves. Most of the time, as we discover, our fears are greatly overplayed and our helplessness is not so debilitating as first experienced.

Ultimately, our fear represents separation from our own self. When we undertake a new relationship with ourselves, we are empowered to improve our relationship with others, and thereby to create the benevolent society we all yearn for.