What am I supposed to do?

But this beauty of Nature which is seen and felt as beauty, is the least part. The shows of day, the dewy morning, the rainbow, mountains, orchards in blossom, stars, moonlight, shadows in still water, and the like, if too eagerly hunted, become shows merely, and mock us with their unreality. Go out of the house to see the moon, and 't is mere tinsel; it will not please as when its light shines upon your necessary journey. The beauty that shimmers in the yellow afternoons of October, who ever could clutch it? Go forth to find it, and it is gone: 't is only a mirage as you look from the windows of diligence.

In class today we took a quick tour of Emerson's Nature. I found it both enlightening and worrying. I'm finding Emerson's writing very abstruse. It's possible that part of my problem is that the Transcendentalists' ideas are so woven into the fabric of the humanities at this point in history that they seem self-evident to me; I expect the ideas to seem alien, and when they don't I suspect myself of not looking deep enough. That interpretation would let me off easy. I'm afraid I may just be having trouble following his sentences, not to mention his aphoristic leaps from one subject to another.

The quote above is from Nature. It's one of those Transcendental ideas that has crept into the humanities of our time (perhaps having originated elsewhere earlier) and which I see echoed in advice from friends, self-help books, New-Age platitudes, and my own unexamined assumptions. If you are doing the work you are "supposed" to do, then the beauty of nature will reveal itself to you as you move through life. It's come to be associated with an eastern notion (or pseudo-eastern notion, I'm not sure) that one's life should be balanced and harmonious.

A friend handed me a book when I was going through the crisis that led me to my pursuit of an academic career. I was in a job I hated, I felt trapped in that job, and I was finding it increasingly difficult to focus effort on it. I felt it was just a matter of time before I really screwed something up and everything came crashing down around me. This book said that your unconscious self will undermine you and sabotage all you do until it forces you onto your true path. By the same token, when you are on your true path, things will seem to fall into place because your conscious and unconscious selves will be in accord. You'll also see beauty all around you instead of horror. It sounds very woo-woo, to be sure. To be fair, the author pointed out that this doesn't mean you won't have problems, just that they'll be easier to solve because you won't also be fighting this subconscious war within yourself in addition to whatever real problems the world throws your way.

So, what can I learn from this? Am I finally on a path of which my unconscious self approves? It's hard to say. I'm doing better work now than I was, no doubt. But I still have trouble making myself sit down and tackle that work. Assuming that this line of thinking has validity (a big assumption, I know), part of my present difficulty probably has to do with other imbalances only tangentially related to my pursuit of an academic career.

What term would Emerson ascribe to this "unconscious self" or "unconscious mind" that I'm told is (or at least was) sabotaging me? How would he understand it, and would he agree with this modification of his idea?