I Thought I Was a Fraud, Until I Met the Self

Sages of the last 2000 years have been saying we are not who we really think we are. Ancient spiritual traditions, such as Buddhism, Advaita Vedanta, and Christianity, say we are living blind to our true nature. They encourage enlightenment, knowledge, and awareness to see beyond the illusion, but what does this really mean? Is it just a bunch of incoherent babble, or is there a deeper wisdom here? I explore this topic using my own life journey through various traditions, highlighting what I found along the way.

The Journey

I studied Psychology at University, and while there, I joined as a member of the Buddhist society. Monks would often visit the university and take a small group of us to mediate during lunch hours. I looked forward to these meditations and found a peace and discipline in them. Later, I was invited to the forest monasteries in Bundanoon. There, we spent a week in mainly silence, waking up at 5am, meditating, eating once a day, and learning new types of meditation and introspection. I kept up this practice after university, returning to the monastery by myself for a week or two at a time. I loved it! It gave me the skills for silent introspection and led to my first awakenings, seeing clearly the stream of endless thoughts that run through my head and entering the deep void. Needless to say, it had a deep impact on my life.

Going deeper into Buddhism led me to Indian Philosophy, its spiritual birthplace. I studied Advaita Vedanta, a philosophy of non-duality. It suggests that we see the world as an illusion of two opposite forces, when in truth there is only one reality. The goal of Advaita Vedanta is to see through the illusion using intellectual and spiritual practice, to experience ourselves as this underlying oneness. I travelled to India and sat at the feet of various sages, hearing their ideas and meditating with others. I saw similarities between these connected practices: Buddhism and Advaita, which talked of a deeper reality. I read the works of their sages: Ramama Maharshi, Papaji, Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj, who talked about the real nature of the Self. According to them, it is the underlying human condition that we must pursue and seek.

But were these gurus fraudulent? Or was there something real here? I was eager to find out, so I spent years exploring this idea: Was there a real me? And if there was, then who is the person I’ve been living all these years?

Ramana Marharshi

I travelled to my cultural homeland in Latin America, and explored the shamanic traditions which took me onto a different path. Their world was of an alternate spirit dimension that penetrated the physical world. Shamans communed with the spirit world in order to have health and success in this material world. According to the shaman or animist, it is the spirit world which is real, while the physical world is only a mirror reflection. Their rituals were initiations of ordeal where they meet with their guardian spirit, and allow themselves to be transformed by them, gradually through ritual, knowledge, and identification. While they used different terminology, different cultural concepts, I saw a similar idea here: that we were living a lie and don’t know it. They seemed to mirror the idea that the goal of life was to uncover the illusion and assume an alternate and truer nature.

Once I returned to Australia, I spent time reading the Western philosophers and psychologists such as Plato, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Kirkegaard, Maslow, Jung, and Freud. Interestingly, they spoke a message similar to the sages, but using different terminology. The thought that humans are meant to evolve into something other than what we are now, and this journey would bring us ultimate fulfilment. Anything less would lead to pain and regret. I wondered: Could this actually be true? Why did I have to change myself to enjoy my life? It didn’t make sense. Couldn’t I just be satisfied with who I am?

On this journey, I also explored the Christian roots of my own religious heritage. In Jesus Christ I saw a figure who also embodied the same principle. His story is one of coming into baptism in his 30s, taking up a ministry where he taught about love, human nature, and about a Father God in heaven. This was controversial for the time and against the prevailing Jewish theocracy. He said amazing and heretical things like “I and the Father are one”, or “You must become like children to enter the kingdom of heaven”. He eventually was crucified for it, and as the story says, he rose from the dead and ascended into heaven. In his teachings and story, we find an idea of transformation, of not realising our true nature and having to dig deep to understand who we are, our relation to God, and the truth of our spiritual nature.

I wondered if all the religions, sages, psychologists, and philosophers could be tricking us? Could they be mistaken? Or is there something wise there? A piece of universal human wisdom that has been stated in a million different ways throughout history, but only a few have been able to hear, and even less, able to actually put into practice.

Christ Pantocrator of Saint Catherine's Monastery from the 6th century AD.

Christ Pantocrator: mirror images of left and right sides showing the two selves within man: the human (left) and divine (right) which matches with Jesus’ teaching.

As a final example, I’ll use Carl Jung, the prominent psychologist of the 20th century. While I loved studying Freud, I later preferred Jung, as his psychology seemed to have more personal, cultural, and spiritual depth. Jung provided Western culture with a psychological basis to explore the enduring ideas about transformation and human nature. This resonates with the modern mind that doesn’t want religion, spirituality, or exotic cultural regressions (unfortunately, the new age has often simplified and diluted his thought). His message is essentially that we are the Self, a deeper personality within us that wants to emerge. But in order to do that, we must first gain awareness of who we are not.

According to Jung, we are not the things that keep us in a perpetual state of ignorance, such as the persona and social conditioning. Furthermore, our wholeness has been sacrificed by being born into society and culture as an ego. In his psychology, to become whole we must transcend the ego. This means, we must strive to overcome our false identities, repressions, and fears, to regain the parts of us that we have disassociated from. Through this process we allow the Self to emerge.

Carl Gustav Jung

I explored this idea throughout my life. I used my meditation skills to introspect, my love of reading to expand my knowledge, and music to express the inner realm through creative practice. What I found was a deep impulse, a need, an insatiable pull to grow, develop, and transform…what Schopenhauer called the “Will to live”. I could distinguish between an instinctual will, who wanted food, pleasure, sex, power, and desire. And another higher will, one that wanted service, love, connection, fulfilment, unity, and joy. These two selves were vastly different and emitted different feelings and sensations. The instinct was driving, incessant, insatiable. The higher will was quiet, reserved, subtle, but ever-present. It stayed in the background and would emerge at moments in life when I went against my values, morals, or gave into my instincts. It would emerge as a conscience, a deep feeling in my gut that I had let myself down, that I was being watched, and that I needed to do better, that I had a purpose.

I had studied enough Freud to know the distinction between the Id, ego, and Super ego. Could this just be my social conditioning? My internal father figure? Or the super ego’s social rules and regulations? I had to distinguish between these selves to find out.

Seek and you shall find

I needed a mentor to help me on my journey, and luckily, I found a therapist to work with. For years, we worked through various processes together, and my therapist became a mentor and spiritual guide. She developed a system of meditative introspection that merged psychology, meditation, visualisation, and catharsis. I wasn’t sure what it was at the time, but it was extremely deep psychological work that had instantaneous effect. It was a perfect fit for me, because it used my skills in meditation, background in psychology, and fulfilled my need to see real results, not just a pep talk. I realised that it was very similar to a method that Jung had discussed in his Red Book, a method which he called active imagination. It is the exploration and dialogue with internal figures of the psyche, leading to knowledge and emotional catharsis. In my own experience with this method, it produced an emotional purging that often led to insight, peace, and a sense of freedom.

Active imagination

Salvador Dali- Galatea de las esferas

I continued to use this method after our sessions ended, and it became one of the prime ways I explored my psyche, gained deep insight, and freed up space within for growth and development. Each time I used this process, I felt more in touch with myself. I developed an inner knowing of the parts of me that gave my life meaning and purpose, and strengthened the disparity between instinctual and higher selves. While tough work, it helped me rid myself of many bad habits and develop better ones.

This is how active imagination worked for me.  

When a feeling, mood, or image came up that I felt as meaningful and persistent in my life, I would close my eyes and sit with it. I would follow the feeling to where it resided in my body through deep meditation. Over the next 10-20 minutes, I went deeper, got quieter, and dived into the feeling or image. Once there, I would let the image evolve, and typically, the psyche would provide me with other images, leading me to the root where the pain, mood, or feeling resided. I would not force it, but let the process unfold. Sometimes I would reach a distant childhood memory or emotion that wanted to express itself. At other times, the image would connect me to a mythological story, one that would give my current life situation transpersonal meaning. At other times, I would touch on a deep existential fear that had been buried there since childhood or another meaningful life event. Each image peeled away layers of emotion, fears, and repressed memory like onion layers, bringing up new images until I got to the source.

The source was usually some long held emotion, fear, or way of thinking that I had to purge. It came up as raw unfiltered emotion, as if years of stored mud had suddenly been brought to the surface. The feeling was strong, cathartic, and left me with a sense that I had cleared away a part of me that was holding me from true feeling, love, and expression. I typically felt alive and euphoric afterwards, which would last for a couple of weeks. I would enhance the process by expressing it through creative form. Maybe I’ll journal, maybe write a song about it, maybe sketch a picture. This helped to further excavate the wisdom that was emerging naturally through my psyche. I found that the creative process helped me integrate the knowledge and enhance the fruits of the experience.  

Back to the beginning

Jung talked about this method a hundred years ago, and its message resonates with the ancient teachings of the last 2000 years. This message says that there is a greater reality available to us, but we need to do the work to see it. The shamans say it resides in parallel dimension; Jesus says it’s in heaven; the sages say it’s an inner spiritual dimension; while Jung says it’s a deeper psychological reality. Each teacher battled against the mainstream thinking of the time to suggest a different pathway. To reach the greater reality, we need to dive into who we are, and peel back the layers of social conditioning, each time letting more love flow into our lives. It’s a difficult process and sometimes I think “why can’t I just be content with who I am?”.  

Here’s the catch…

We can try to stay content with who we are, but eventually a deeper self comes calling. It appears as inner dissatisfaction, boredom, pain, or struggle, and forces us to seek something more profound and meaningful. Without awareness, we usually take it out on the people around us, break up our relationships, destroy our friendships, or leave our jobs. But with enough awareness, we come to see that this is not an external drama, but an inner one. In shamanic terms, we must enter the spirit world (our inner psychic world) to recover our soul. Jung would call it the recovery of the Self. When we search inside, we stop projecting outwards. This is the start of a process of real change, from outer to inner life. 

Many never attempt this hard journey, but it is embedded in our minds and hearts through our cultural stories, arts, and innate yearnings. Jesus Christ had to go through trials, suffer, and was killed, before arising as a new Self. We must do the same, although symbolically. We do this by letting go of the fears that hinder us, to make way for a new sense of being. One that is in alignment with that quiet voice within, the whisper we hear in our hearts- this is the eternal process.  

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