Oli Anderson

This is a sample chapter from the book Shadow Life: Freedom From BS in an Unreal World:

When we send our soul into hiding because of our fears about ourselves, the world, and reality and the perceived threat (to the Ego) of facing the Shadow Territory then our soul will keep screaming to us from beneath the surface of our unreal faces in an attempt to get our attention and wake us up again.

That’s all fine and dandy but we need to discuss another element of this unwholesome process of hiding ourselves from ourselves:

This element is the Unicorn.

In the terms of what we’ve been talking about in this book, a ‘unicorn’ is really just a vessel for all of the hidden qualities in ourselves – ‘positive’ and ‘negative’ – that allows us to gain a sort of unconscious control over the externalisation of our Shadow and its hidden messages.

It’s a way of experiencing our hidden qualities but without having to face the Shadow Territory and all of the uncomfortable work and the ego-reconfiguration that comes with it.

In short, a unicorn is a kind of ego protection device that allows you to deflect the whispers from the Shadow Territory so that you can remain the same. It’s another, more subtle, form of Control Freakery.

Our consumerist society is basically fuelled by unicorns and, with the rise of social media and the ability it gives us to fine-tune and tailor our image of ourselves and the way that we share with the world, we can even make unicorns of ourselves.

It’s all bullshit, though.

You need to be aware of unicorns and how they have a hold over you if you want to free yourself and forget about the hopelessness of being a fragmented version of who you are in your wholeness.

The most terrifying part of all this is that a unicorn can be literally anything: another person, an object, an intangible concept or idea, or even something that doesn’t even exist.

To make a unicorn of something, all we have to do is project a bunch of heightened symbolic meaning onto it and convince ourselves that it has certain qualities and attributes that we feel we lack in ourselves because of our conditioning and the BULLSHIT we believe about who we are.

In a sense, these unicorns are just an external manifestation of some image that our ego carries. They’re the bullshit belief that the conceptual or interpretational can be real but – as we’ve said in earlier sections of this book – no concept can ever be real and no interpretation is the truth.  Maybe some point more closely towards ‘the truth’ than others but the concept or interpretation itself is simply a signpost or tool.

Worshipping the concept instead of the reality is always going to leave you being removed or disconnected from the whole and that is the main problem with unicorns.

The short version, then, is that unicorns are a substitute for reality that are given heightened meaning because of our hidden emotional ‘stuff’. Because we’re not ready to own that ‘stuff’, because doing so will threaten our ego, we end up projecting it out into the world so that we can still feel it without realising that it’s coming from within ourselves.

It sounds a bit convoluted maybe but it’s pretty simple if you get some examples:

Perhaps the most common place where this unicornisation shows up to protect our egos is in romantic relationships.

We’ve already agreed that romantic relationships that are based on realness can threaten our masks because we can’t really avoid being vulnerable in those contexts.

If we resist this vulnerability, however, we can end up in a co-dependent or dysfunctional relationship where instead of real meeting real we find ego meeting ego.

Most of us have had these kinds of relationships at some stage in our short, miserable lives: they’re defined by a certain sense that something isn’t quite ‘right’ and by a push-pull dynamic as everybody’s conflicting attachment styles lead to a kind of ego dance where nobody really wants to stay and nobody really wants to leave.

This kind of ego dance is what we commonly call ‘drama’, kids.

For whatever reason, we stay in these relationships because they’ve ‘activated’ something within us that we don’t believe we can get outside of the relationship (or we just wanna get laid on the regular, whatever).

This ‘activation’ is part of the Unicorn Trap (aka ‘Unicornitis’).

Even though the relationship is distinctly unhealthy overall, we stick around because we believe we ‘love’ the other person (which we might, but that doesn’t mean we have to have a relationship with them – ‘love’ and ‘compatibility’ aren’t necessarily the same thing).

We probably even have moments of tenderness or intimacy with them – though they are few and far between in comparison to all the push-pull ego drama that unfolds the rest of the time.

Really, what’s happening in this context is that two people who don’t accept themselves are turning the other into a vessel for the feelings of unconditional self-acceptance that they’ve been hiding from themselves.

Read that last paragraph again because it might save years of your life.

It’s a kind of unspoken ‘deal’ that nobody even knows they’re taking part in: “we don’t accept ourselves but we can pretend to accept each other” – something like that, anyway.

The only reason you’d stay in an unhealthy relationship is because you don’t accept yourself in the first place but the feeling you get of being whole or understood in those rare moments of tenderness and intimacy are enough to keep you ‘hooked’.

What you don’t realise, though, is that those feelings aren’t coming from the other person – they’re already inside you and always have been.

You’ve just used the other person as a unicorn which means they serve as a vessel for you to be able to feel a degree of acceptance (or whatever else you’ve been ‘lacking’ because of your disconnection from yourself) without having to actually accept yourself and destroy your current version of the ego.

This is usually because – for whatever reason – you’ve been conditioned somewhere along the line not to give yourself permission to accept yourself and so you have to go about it in these strange and sophisticated ways.

Like I said, I used to be an emotional retard so I’ve been in this situation once or twice myself. I’m not gonna beat myself up over it or anything because I’ve seen a whole bunch of my friends in similar situations so I guess it’s just part of the ‘growth’ process.

A real, healthy relationship is when we use the context of the relationship to shave away layers of fragmentation and grow more real together by finding the Edge (see a later chapter).

The Relationship of Unicorns is what happens when you want the ‘relationship’ part but not the growth – once again because real growth would mean facing the Shadow Territory and seeing the emptiness of the ego.

Even with the ‘real’ relationships there’s a period where things start to settle down and we realise that we’ve created an idea or unicorn of the person we’ve been ‘seeing’.

Normally, we call this the ‘Honeymoon Period’ – all that’s really happened is we’ve projected all of the qualities we lack in ourselves on to this creature we’re now infatuated with and think that they have the answer to the question of our missing soul (which, don’t forget, we’re always on the quest to rediscover).

Over time, once we realise that we’re dealing with a real human being and not a fantasy, we have a rocky return to reality, and then we either stick around in the relationship and commit to trying to see what’s really there – or we move onto our next fix because we need to keep that ego in place and avoid the Shadow Territory.

Humans, eh? We’re all screwed.

Really, this idea of our “missing soul” sums it all up – if the soul is the whole within us, then we will naturally be attracted or repelled by the missing parts of ourselves in the objects of our worship or disgust (unicorns).

Not all examples are as dramatic as the romantic relationships we find ourselves in; there are plenty more mundane examples that we see around us day after day but they’re all based on the same principle of somebody subconsciously trying to fill the void inside themselves instead of simply becoming the void and closing the gap between themselves and the rest of the world and reality.

An obsession that many people have had over the last few years is ‘superheroes’ – obviously, Batman and Superman and whoever else have been around for almost a century so it’s not brand new or anything, but thanks to the popularisation of the Marvel Cinematic Universe (which is basically just an expensive soap opera) people have gone next level in their fanaticism and their fervour for vicarious heroics.

We sometimes forget that the word ‘fan’ is short for ‘fanatic’ which means “Marked by excessive enthusiasm for and intense devotion to a cause or idea”.

Where does this ‘excessiveness’ or ‘intensity’ come from?

From BULLSHIT, of course.

Being excessively enthusiastic or intensely devoted to anything is probably never a good idea but feeling that way about made-up characters in tights suggests that there’s something extra missing in one’s soul that needs to be remedied if one is to ever sort the problem of one’s life out.

We already spoke about ‘heroes’ in an earlier chapter and you don’t really have to be a genius or anything to put the pieces in place and make the connections here, but all of this ‘Hero Worship’ doesn’t really have anything to do with the tights that these guys are wearing – or the adventures that they get in – as much as it does the QUALITIES that they embody and the qualities that have been denied in the people that are unicornising them.

Look, I’ll be totally honest and admit that I watched more than a few of those Iron Man movies – they’re great entertainment and Robert Downey Junior is the man.  I get it.

When I found myself watching these movies, though, it was at a bit of a low point in my life: I’d lost touch with my purpose, I wasn’t working on a book or anything like that, I’d probably just come out of some dysfunctional relationship after unicornising some chick and trying to solve all my mummy and daddy issues, and I didn’t really know what the hell I was doing with myself.

I always end up quoting Henry David Thoreau who said that “Most men live lives of quiet desperation” – look around you and tell me this isn’t true.

Why do most people find themselves in this state?

Because they don’t trust and believe in themselves, they have no vision for their real growth, have lost touch with their purpose, and are waiting for things to make complete ‘sense’ instead of taking the little bits of sense that they do have and making something more with it.

More than this, many – if not most – end up beaten into submission and living as the mask so that they can fit in with the rest of society and live comfortable but miserable lives in the safety of their socially, emotionally, and spiritually ‘acceptable’ personalities.

They’ve shrivelled away and gone into hiding but – as we’ve pointed out – the drive for wholeness and the quest for the soul never stops.

You’re looking for your soul right now. That’s probably why you’re still reading this shit.

Listen, here’s something you need to know and embrace about human beings, if you don’t already:

Every single one of us is fucking awesome.

Really.

We have been designed as goal-seeking, purpose-chasing forces of nature that constantly grow towards wholeness.

We’re not supposed to be shrivelled up and living in a “quiet” or “desperate” manner. That’s something we have to learn because of shame or guilt or trauma.

When people are becoming fanatical about Tony Stark – or any other superhero or unicorn – what they’re really becoming obsessed with is the qualities that they’ve denied within themselves for whatever reason.

Tony Stark doesn’t need permission to do whatever the frick he wants; he doesn’t live meekly; he doesn’t sit around wasting his potential and living a miserable life working in an office cubicle and then going home to his bored wife and snotty kids.

All of the things this guy embodies are exactly what the people who become obsessed with him are lacking in themselves.

But here’s the kicker: They don’t really ‘lack’ it; they’ve just been taught to deny it.

Their obsession is a sign that they need to reawaken these qualities in themselves to grow whole – the mere fact that they even recognise these qualities in whichever hero they end up worshipping means that the quality is definitely somewhere inside them already.

If it wasn’t, they couldn’t recognise it.

All these comic book nerds and other Hero Worshippers have suppressed their heroism (not the unhealthy kind, discussed earlier, but the need for real purpose) and so they’ve turned to unicorns. They don’t wanna face themselves so they experience these qualities through the vessel of [some super hero / rock star / product / whatever].

The tendency to worship unicorns is also used against us all the time for marketing purposes. It’s done by having companies spend millions of pounds on ‘audience research’ which is really just about helping them to understand the masks we wear, our aspirations, and the pain points that led to us being frustrated and unreal with ourselves in the first place.

When we’re queuing for hours through the night to get our hands on the latest [iPhone], or whatever, it’s not the actual object that we’re queuing for but an opportunity to be returned to our own souls for a little while.

Really, in the case of an iPhone, we’re literally just queuing for a bunch of minerals and plastics.

Yes, the coming together of these materials has great functional value in allowing us to better interact with the world and communicate with the people we love and care about or whatever, but, really, any phone on the market can do that these days and we don’t see the hipsters getting in line to buy those with such fanaticism.

Nope, for these unsavoury characters, the iPhone has been heightened to the level of a unicorn (though, to be honest, way less people give a crap about iPhones than they used to – thanks, Universe!).

Instead of it just being plastic and whatever else, it has become a vessel for storing all the missing parts of the human soul and connection to reality that makes life actually worth living.

Because these people don’t wanna get directly in touch with their souls because that would mean denying the ego and having to face the reality of flux and change and all of the complicated things that come with it (DEATH), they decide to outsource these qualities instead and get in touch indirectly.

I’m making assumptions because I’ve never queued for anything in my life unless totally necessary, but I guess the people who act in this strange manner get to feel a sense of superiority because they have some high-status (to other lonely people) technology, they feel a sense of belonging because the Apple Store Monkeys are all clapping for them, they’re getting attention because they might get their picture in the paper, and they get to see themselves as people who “think different” and are unique because of the advertising campaigns – just like everybody else!

It’s all BULLSHIT though (as you probably guessed).

If we take the ‘reverse engineering’ approach, we can make the assumption that a lot of these people really feel inferior, that they don’t really belong anywhere, that they never get any attention and are unworthy, and that they’re just sheep who have to make a concentrated effort to stand out from the crowd.

Those poor bastards.

Honestly, the human ego can make a unicorn out of just about anything in order to protect itself and stop us facing the Shadow Territory and grow through things.

‘Pretentiousness’ is another interesting example, because in this case people make a unicorn out of other people’s work and their ‘understanding’ of it or of abstract ideas and theories that they attach their identities to for ego-augmentation.

It might be something simple like ‘music’ – many of us have probably all been through the ‘edgy teenage music fan’ stage where we think that listening to obscure bands and avoiding things that are mainstream makes us ‘better’ in some way. I even know adults in their 30s and 40s that are still doing that crap – how insecure can you get?

It can happen with whole fields of thought too, though.

For the last few years, I’ve worked with a lot of designers and I must admit that some of them have been the most pretentious people I’ve ever met in my entire life.

In this case, they turned the whole concept of ‘Design’ into a unicorn, allowing it to become imbued with all of the qualities that they want to embody themselves but secretly fear that they never can: a sense of control over the world and the shaping of it, a sense of style and sophistication, a need to be creative and cool, etc.

I’m not saying that design isn’t amazing (look at what we’ve done for the world with it); I’m just saying that a lot of insecure people become attracted to it because of the way that it can be used as a unicorn that helps strengthen their desired image of themselves.

‘Philosophy’ is another unicorn so is ‘Mental health’ or ‘Writing’ – there are billions of them.

The point is that we take mere things or actions and then put all of our ‘stuff’ into them so that we can avoid our own souls.

If you look around you, you’ll see that the world is built of unicorns.

Which means it’s all bullshit.