Being unconscious is like having lived in a dark room for years – not being able to see and stumbling over the same obstacles again and again….
When we've lived in the dark so long, we feel victimized by the things we stumble over … we feel at the mercy of these obstacles within us and accuse and blame our life situations for holding us back ….
It's like this for us …. living in a dark room until finally one day, we find a light switch. But when we turn on the light and look around at the total disarray of “stuff” we've been stumbling over, we are filled with great dismay and so … instead of celebrating the fact that we can SEE – we immediately launch into ranting about the mess!
…”How could I have lived like this?! Look at this place! What a mess! I'm so ashamed….” on and on … generating so much misery for ourselves that finally it's easier to just turn the light off and return to stumbling around in the dark than it is to go on feeling the way we do about what we see in the light.
This is our tendency with the consciousness process …. We live unconsciously until something happens that brings us into awareness. And then, rather than feeling gratitude for finally waking up, we jump on ourselves with both feet about what we see (“Oh I can't believe I'm really like that! :(). Instead of being grateful for burgeoning consciousness, we self-denigrate ourselves right back into denial (in other words we go unconscious again).
This is what I mean when I say:
Denial follows fast and hard on the coattails of negative self judgment.