James Hollis: A Summons to a Deeper Life

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• Psyche - Greek for “soul”
• Who am I?
• Knock of the door. Initiatory moment to question.
• Deeper voice within us. In the long run tells us what’s right for us. Not the ego.
• Escaping the dictate of the time and place: right place, right attitude, right neighborhood, right career.
• Five stages. Kuebler-Ross. Denial, anger, bargaining, despair, acceptance.
• Living an authentic life. Escaping the programming. So much of our life is routinized and patterns. Often good goals. At the same time psyche has another point of view.
• Nature calls us the sick animal.
• Society required compromises and tradeoffs. But the greater the tradeoffs the greater the self-estrangement.
• Dreams operate within us from a different perspective than the ego consciousness.
• We keep mobilizing life’s energy counter to the depth and wisdom and purpose of the soul. The price is burnout, boredom, depression.
• Feeling function is also autonomous. We don’t choose feelings. Feelings are autonomous responses to our circumstances from the perspective of the deep self.
• Ego cannot account for the autonomy of others.
• Jung: anyone who really discovers the power of unconscious knows from that point on one is not the master or mistress of one’s own house. That’s a certain dethronement of ego’s fantasy of sovereignty, omniscience and omnipotence.
• Whenever I need to know something important for me I need to wait.
• If you wait upon the silence, it ultimately speaks.
• There is a wisdom in me that is wiser than the conscious self. Those two are not enemies, they need to be in conversation.
• Fitting in is critical for the child and the infant. But if it dominates the intentions of one’s soul, you lose yourself.
• Growing up: when I’m fully accountable. I’m in.
• There is a needy part in us, that is wanting people to take care of us, lift burden of life for us. Explain things for us. … Wake up. You’re in.
• One of the aspects of traditional rights of passage was ordeal and isolation. One had to learn to depend on oneself. These are the attributes of adulthood. They are not developed by our culture nor by our elders.
• Children and adolescents are impulsive, impatient, don’t like ambiguity, want clarity, resolution. Too insecure to own their own stuff so they are always looking for somebody to blame it on. Organize their life evading as much responsibility as they can. They are looking for someone to explain it to them. It’s a culture driven by sensation. You don’t have to reflect upon your self if you’re distracted all the time. Our electronic world has made distraction more possible than any time in history.
• Blaise Pascal (17th century): Even the king grow miserable if he reflected upon himself, so we invented the jester to distract the court. All of our troubles stem from one thing - that we cannot bear to be alone with ourselves in our private chambers.
• Our culture’s answer to the existential anxiety of being human is distraction.
• Little questions give you little answers.
• Richness of your journey.
• Fear and lethargy (wants to pull us to the sleep of the childhood) are the only enemies of us. We carry them wherever we go and they’re with us.
• We long to make sense of things.
• If I don’t try to make sense out of my journey somebody else will do it for me. Authorities will tell you who you are, what your values are and what choices you’d make.
• Task of meaning has shifted from the shoulders of the tribe to the shoulders of the individual. What a burden and what a privilege. Psychologically we were never freer. We can use the distractions, avoidance, anesthetization processes trying not to show up.
• Walt Whitman: I loafe and invite my soul. Sometimes you have to do that by doing nothing.
• Choose meaning over happiness. Happiness is momentary, transitory, feeling state. The problem is it’s transitory. Happiness is very contextual, idiosyncratic.
• Frank: Logotherapy. Gr: logos = meaning. They can take everything from me but the power to chose the attitude, when I could not choose my circumstances. Final freedom.
• We’re not against happiness but you cannot bottle it up and store.
• Terrible in-between where something at some level has to die which is how nature renews. The ego is never thrilled with that.
• Welcome to 2nd half of your life. Something is dying. What’s dying is your old understanding. Your old roadmap.
• Sooner or later we visit swampland places. Here lies a task.
• Jung: work of an evolved human being consisted of three parts. Insight, courage and endurance.
• When we don’t challenge our stories they are going to make choices for us. And that’s where insight is important. You’re not what happened to you. You’re what is wanting to enter the world through you. You’re in some way the unfolding journey that we have.
• If it would be easy we would not use worlds like “courage”.
• If I would not believe in people changing I would not be a therapist, a writer.
• Just as we were creatures of adaptation. Security and adaptation were the no. 1 priorities. Power of security often diminishes us. We cling to the shore. We live a small life.
• Embrace of ambiguity is what opens us to enlargement. Ambiguity inherently is unpleasant to the human ego. That’s what produces one sided behaviour, maladaptions, fundamentalism … is the effort rid us of ambiguity. With clear marching orders I don’t have to stop and think who am I.
• Ambiguity is what gets us our journey. We don’t grow through certainty. We grow through doubt.
• We’re not here to fit in, to please the world. Not about narcistic self-indulgence. It’s calling for humility and sacrifice. What’s being sacrifice? That ego’s in charge, that it’s the boss. Ego’s job is to execute as consciously and faithfully as possible what it needs to do to be in the world more authentically.
• In a true dialogue with the depths of one’s psyche ego will often find itself put into a precarious position. That’s where our life takes on its fine edge and that’s where it gets most interesting. That’s where we get to life the fine drama of the soul.