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James Hollis: Finding Meaning in the Second Half of Life

 
Table of Contents

Introduction: The Dark Wood

  • Dante began his famous, fabulous descent into the underworld with the recognition that midway in life he found himself in a dark wood, having lost his way.
  • Aeschylus, the first great tragedian, observed that gods ordained a solemn decree that from suffering alone comes wisdom.
  • Using the words soul and psyche interchangeably.
  • Mystery in which our journey plays out:
    1. the immense cosmos through which we are flung at warp velocity,
    2. ambient nature, which is our home and our context,
    3. each proximate other who brings the challenge of relationship, and
    4. our own elusive, insurgent Self, forever asking, insisting, not to be forgotten.
  • A life that constricts meaning wounds the soul
  • Jung: “Meaninglessness inhibits fullness of life and is therefore equivalent to illness. Meaning makes a great many things endurable - perhaps everything.
  • Jung once observed that one can travel no further with another than one has traveled on one’s own.
  • inexplicably, it is the soul itself that has brought us to that difficult place in order to enlarge us.
  • individuation, that is, the lifelong project of becoming more nearly the whole person we were meant to be - what the gods intended, not the parents, or the tribe, or especially, the easily intimidated or inflated ego.
  • The Self is the embodiment of nature’s plan for us, or the will of the gods.
  • If we are in the service to the Self, we can seldom be in service to the herd as well.
  • the process of individuation must lead to more intense and broader collective relationship and not isolation
  • In most lives, permission to live one’s life is not something one is given; it is to be seized.
  • “Does this path enlarge or diminish me?” We know the answer intuitively, instinctively, in the gut.
  • each of us is obliged to find our personal path through the dark wood. In the medieval Grail legend the knights, having seen the Grail, and intuiting that it symbolized their search for meaning, undertook to challenge and began their descent into the dark wood. But the text tells us that each one choose a separate place of entry “where there was no path, for it is a shameful thing to take the path that someone else has trod before.”

Chapter One: Expensive Ghosts: How did we get to this point?

  • Paul Hoover (Theory of Margins): “We drag expensive ghosts through memory’s unmade bed.”
  • If we have not had such moments of genuine confusion, perplexity, and doubt, chances are we’re simply living on automatic pilot.
  • Our greatest sin may be choosing to remain unconscious.
  • As Shakespeare observed in Twelfth Night, no prisons are more confining than those we know not we are in.
  • the presence of suffering is already manifestation of the psyche at work.

The Freedom of This Contemporary Hour

  • A young person can’t afford such questions, which threaten to erode the ego’s fragile structure. But by midlife, one may finally be strong enough, or desperate enough, to ask these questions in a committed fashion.

Thee Silent Passage into the Second Life

  • Whatever “The plan” of their lives was, conscious or unconscious, it progressively seemed to not be working too well.

The Midlife Crisis?

  • One has to have separated from the parents long enough to be in the world, to make choices, to see what works, what does not, and to experience the collapse, or at least erosion of one’s projections.

How It Begins

  • The psyche is always speaking, and its urges will manifest as ennui, the more conscious boredom, then inner resistance to our conscious scripts, and, as we continue to turn deaf ears, finally as eruption of invasive feelings and behaviours: interrupted sleep or eating habits, the lure of an affair, troubling dreams, self-medicating addictions, and so on.
  • We experience the unavoidable conflict between the natural Self and the acquired “sense of self”
  • The most common characteristic of this kind of passage, is the deconstruction of “the false self”.
  • It is quite natural to cling to the known world and fear the unknown.
  • is it not self-deluding, then to keep doing the same thing but expecting different results?
  • As Jung once put it humorously, we all walk in shoes too small for us.
  • The person in the grip of this unconscious agenda cannot see that the outer woman is surrogate for his inner life, which has been neglected these many years. The problem with the unconscious is that it is unconscious.
  • Jung: I’ve frequently seen people become neurotic when they content themselves with inadequate or wrong answers to the questions of life. They seek position, marriage, reputation, outward success or money, and they remain unhappy and neurotic even when they have attained what they were seeking. Such people are usually contained within too narrow a spiritual horizon. Their life has not sufficient content, sufficient meaning. If they are enabled to develop into more spacious personalities, the neurosis generally disappears.
  • It is generally through the experience of unsolicited suffering that we grow larger, not because the unexamined life proved easier.
  • What we have ignored or denied inwardly will then more likely come out to us as outer fate.

Chapter Two: Becoming Who We Think We Are

  • Garden of Eden: Partaking of the Tree of Life is to abide forever int he world of instinct - whole, connected and living the deepest of rhythms without consciousness. Partaking of the Tree of Knowledge brings the mixed blessing of consciousness.
  • The birth is also the birth of neurosis, so to speak, because from that moment on we are in service to twin agendas - the biological and the spiritual drive to develop.
  • Twin gremlins of fear and lethargy.
  • The way forward threatens death - at the very least, the death of what has been familiar.
  • People attack gays for stirring unconscious insecurities about their own sexual identities.
  • The daily confrontation with these gremlins of fear and lethargy obliges us to choose between anxiety and depression. Anxiety will be our companion if we risk the next sage of our journey and depression will be if we do not.
  • Yogi Berra: When you come to a fork in the road - take it.
  • psychological or spiritual development always requires a greater capacity in us for the toleration of anxiety and ambiguity. The capacity to accept this troubled state, abide it, and commit to life, is the moral measure of our maturity.
  • Anxiety is an elixir, and depression a sedative.
  • Jung: “The spirit of evil is fear, negation … the spirit of regression, who threatens us with bondage to the mother and with dissolution and extinction in the unconscious.” Mother symbolizes the safe and sheltering harbor: the old job, the familiar warm arms, and the same unchallenged, and stultifying, value system.

Why the Tragic Sense of Life Matters to Us

  • our ancestors believed that we often “offend the gods”, that is, violate energic designs of which they are dramatized personifications.
  • one possessed by Ares will act out of unreasoned anger, with all its attendant consequences. Accordingly, they believed that by “reading” the texture of one’s life, one can identify the ignored or repressed archetypal powers, the gods offended, and offer homage and compensatory behaviours to them to resolve the balance.
  • At birth, each of us handed lens by our family of origin, our culture, our Zeitgeist through which to see the world.
  • “Right relationship with the gods” as a psychological concept means that we harmonize our concious life with the deepest powers that govern the cosmos and course through our own souls.
  • (Is not this deepened journey of the soul, in fact, our “home”?). The tragic sense of life, then is not morbid but rather heroic, for it is a summons to consciousness.
  • Who ignores this summons will suffer the wrath of the gods, the splitting of the soul we call neurosis.

Existential Wounding and the Programming of Our Sense of Self

  • Magical thinking results from an insufficient ability to differentiate self and world.
  • Lacking other “readings” of the world, it is natural fora child to conclude: “I’m as I’m treated”.

The Wound of Overwhelmment

  • Given the message that the world is larger, more powerful, we may logically try to evade its potential punitive effect upon us by retreating, procrastinating, hiding out, denying, dissociating.
  • I have seen people marry someone they did not love because they felt unable to approach the one they did love, because they had reflexively imbued that other with such transferred powerfulness that they were afraid to approach them.
  • The second logical response to overwhelmment is found in our frequent efforts to seize control of the situation.
  • “The world is hurtful and invasive. You must hurt or invade first, or be hurt and invaded instead”.
  • We may pursue education, because to understand is to be in control…
  • Their urgent desire for power is a measure of their inner powerlessness.
  • Accommodation is a learned response, sometimes even necessary for civilization to survive.
  • We say someone is “sweet,” “personable,” “amiable,” “easygoing,” and most often “nice.” When these labels repeatedly apply to someone’s behaviour the consequences to the person’s inner life may be in fact ugly.
  • Codependence is predicated on one’s reflexive assumption of powerlessness and the inordinate power of the other.
  • Learning to find one’s own truth, to hold it, to negotiate with others seems easy enough on paper.

The Wound of Insufficiency

  • the unconscious equation is “I am as I am treated by others”.
  • something in us does dream, and brings an invitation to consciousness, to risk embodying a larger sense of self.
  • what one lacks within one will seek in the outer world.
  • How many marriages are in the service to the hidden agenda of the less psychologically evolved of the two?
  • Narcissist work very hard to conceal their inner poverty from recognition by others.
    • sense of self is predicted upon emptiness, derives from early childhood neglect or insufficient mirroring
    • any argument or disappointment with them will always prove to be your fault and not their responsibility
  • Fate dominates destiny, history dictates future
  • Food, for example, is especially prone to receive the projections of perceived loss and gain.
  • Any reflexive response to stress and anxiety, whether conscious or not, is a form of addiction. The chief motive of any addiction is, of course, to help one not feel what in fact one has already been feeling. Breaking the tyranny of the addiction will require one to feel the pain that the addiction defends against.
  • Whenever we’re fatigued, stressed, or whenever conscious control is lessened, these old patterns are especially prone to reactivation.
  • Seldom are we wholly present to this moment, this ever-new reality, without interference of the past.
    • Faulkner: past is not dead; it is not even past
  • No freedom is possible, no authentic choice, where consciousness is lacking. Paradoxically, consciousness usually only comes from the experience of suffering.

Chapter Three: The collision of Selves

  • It is far easier to talk in the shoes too small for us than to step into the largeness that the soul expects and demands.
  • Most of us are brought into therapy on our knees, or at best in a state of disorientation.
  • A formal, committed therapeutic relationship provides a deeper, more objective, more informed conversation with oneself, through the engagement of another person who has our interest at heart.
  • The invitation to meet oneself is seldom if ever solicited; it is rather brought on by outer or inner events that force one to question who one is, and in service to what values.
  • None of us is pleased to encounter the false self, the necessary fictions in which we invest, until even we can no longer believe them.
  • Perhaps 95 percent of our daily functioning is reflective
  • Come to live his life as a conscious, self-examining being.
  • The ego wishes comfort, security, satiety; the soul demands meaning, struggle, becoming.
  • Stronger soul seek therapy, the more damaged seek someone to blame.
  • He had to complain about his wife, not to look at himself.

Depression’s Therapeutic Gift

  • Grieving is an honest affirmation of the value of the original investment of energy. No grief, no true investment occurred.
  • Many people in therapy have learned that the way out of a depression is through it, asking not what I, the ego consciousness, want, but what the soul wants. Only the reorienting conscious energies in service to other values will lift the depression.
  • Anxiety must be chosen over depression, for it is developmental and depression is regressive.
  • Need to differentiate the forms of depression; namely, does it come from a biological base, a reaction to loss, or an intrapsychic conflict that, becoming conscious, has great information for us about the next stage of our journey.

Relationship As Field of Fire

  • the field of outer relationship is always troubled when we are troubled within.
  • it is much easier to blame our partners, or try to reform them, or leave them.

Projections Eroded, Projections Renewed?

  • Projections always pass through five identifiable stages:
    1. At the onset they feel magical; they literally alter our sense of reality. We are seeing some unknown part of ourselves in the exterior world
    2. The second stage begets disillusionment. The other does not carry through as expected.
    3. We begin to do whatever we can to reinforce the projection, to recover its pristine attraction.
    4. To suffer the withdrawal of the projection.
    5. if we reach this point at all, is to become that a projection has occurred.
  • Every failed projection is quantum of energy, our energy, an agenda for growth or healing, and a task that has come back to us.

Job’s Abrogated Contract

  • a deal is a presumption of the ego in service to its now familiar agenda, which promotes its own security, satiety, and continuity.
  • Robert Frost: Forgive, O Lord, my little joke on thee, And I’ll forgive thy great big one on me.
  • This betrayal by the other - by God, by our lover, by our friend, by the corporation - is a betrayal of our hope that the world might be manageable and predictable.
  • our presumptive contracts are delusory efforts by the ego to be in control.
  • The world is more magical, less predictable, more autonomous, less controllable, more varied, less simple, more infinite, less knowable, more wonderfully troubling than we could have imagined being able to tolerate when we were young.

Competing Agendas

  • If the agenda of the first half of life is social, meeting the demands and expectations our milieu asks of us, then the questions of the second half of life are spiritual, addressing the larger issues of the meaning.
  • The psychology of the first half of life is driven by the fantasy of acquisition.
  • When the ego prevails, change is forestalled, and spiritual stagnation, even regression, sooner or later occurs.

Chapter Four: Barriers to Transformation

  • W. H. Auden (The Age of Anxiety): “We would rather be ruined than changed, We would rather die in our dread Than climb the cross of the present And let our illusions die.”
  • we must recall that the central, universal message of the world to the child is: “I am big and you’re not; I am powerful and you’re not; now find a way to deal with that.” Whatever stratagem we evolve – approach/avoidance; trust/distrust; fight/flight; control/placate – has a tendency to get locked in as a core relational paradigm for self and world, a reflexive strategy for survival and means for getting one’s needs met.
  • It is essential that we not judge ourselves, for we cannot be blamed for choices we made as children.
  • A complex is a cluster of energy in the unconscious, charged by historic events, reinforced through repetition, and generating a programmed response and an implicit set of expectations.
  • Folk wisdom has long recognized the presence and power of complexes in such homey sayings as, “Count twenty before you say something”, or “Write the letter but wait a week before you send it.”
  • If I’m not my ego state, then who am I?
  • when a complex is at work, there is always some seizing up of the body - a constricted throat, flutter in the stomach, sweating palms
  • A complex takes place when an unconscious stimulus is received.
  • historically generated but invisible clusters of energy are activated over and over that patterns (complexes) form in our lives, patterns which seemingly have a life of their own and are seldom consciously chosen. For this reason, our ancestors speculated that the hand of an offended divinity was at work.
  • A person in the first half of life is so swarming with the power of these unconscious forces
  • Zen saying: “Everywhere you go, there you are.”
  • “the middle passage” occurs only when a person begins to discern that his or her repetitions, compensations, and treatment plans for life have their origin not in conscious life but in unconscious history.
  • Ixion: the wheel of repetition.
  • St Paul: while we may intend the good, we seldom do it.
  • lethargy - Lethe, the river of forgetfulness in the classical topography of the underworld. Forgetting that we are summoned by each moment to make life-defining choices.
  • Perhaps to greatest addictions in our culture do not include street drugs, but are television and food.
  • Blaise Pascal noted that popular culture has become a vast divertissement, a diversion from the engagement with the Self. Even the king had to have his jester.
  • our age, where lethargy of the spirit is merchandised by very intelligent people and lulls all of us into the sleep of reason, and the slumber of the spirit.
  • Growing up, leaving home, require two practices.
    1. we must take responsibility for ourselves, and stop blaming others: the society, the parents, the partner, the malevolent gods.
    2. we have to look within to see the repetitive core ideas, the complexes, and the historic influence where the true enemy lies.
  • Rumi mused: “A king sent you to a country to carry one special, specific task. You go to the country and you perform a hundred other tasks, but if you have not performed the task you were sent for, it is as if you have performed nothing at all. So man has come into the world for a particular task and that is his purpose. If he doesn’t perfdorm it, he will have done nothing.”

Chapter Five: The Dynamics of Intimate Relationship

  • Rumi (“Sometimes I Forget”): “Sometimes I forget completely What companionship is. Unconscious and insane, I spill sad energy everywhere.”
  • Of all the ideologies that possess the contemporary soul, perhaps none is more powerful, more seductive, and possibly more delusory than the romantic fantasy that there is someone out there who is right for us, the long-sought soul mate, what I call “the magical other”, the one who will truly understand us, take care of us, meet our needs, repair the wounds, and, with a little luck, spare us the burden of growing up and meeting our own needs.
  • its chief rival: the fantasy that material goods will bring us happiness.
  • In earlier epochs the notion that one might find fulfillment in this life was considered laughable, even impious. This world, our predecessors believed, was a “vale of tears” and could only be compensated by an afterlife.
  • It is far easier to be disappointed in the other than to call ourselves to account.

The Psychodynamics of Relationship

  • All relationships begin in projection.
  • As historically charged creatures, we have a tendency to transfer those historical patterns, and their predicable outcomes, into every new relationship.
  • Either choice is dictated by the unmetabolized events of the childhood.
  • If we are sincere, and really do wish to improve relationships, as so many popular books and magazines claim, we may usefully ask: “What do we project, and what do we transfer onto the other person?”
  • An imago is a very deeply charged image.
  • Our intrapsychic imago of the beloved other will most commonly have been shaped by our most primal experiences of relationships. This imago most likely derives from our experience of our parents.
  • the surest evidence that a complex-ridden imago is in charge is the ready availability of a rationalization to justify it.
  • This search, this fantasy, is the chief fuel for our culture - the fantasy of romantic love, the fantasy that there is this other who will make our life work for us, heal us, protect us, nurture us, and spare us the world’s trauma.
  • The mere presence, appearance, or context of person B can activate the unconscious of person A, triggering a projection, with its attendant transferential history. When this engagement occurs, powerful emotion, be it attraction or repulsion is activated.
  • Not only do individuals relate to each other in these powerful but unconscious ways, but so do groups and even nations, often with tragic, repetitive outcomes.
  • When two parties are caught in a mutual projection, they may have strong repulsion to each other or strong attraction. When however, this projection is of attraction, a strong desire to merge with that other occurs. This projective identification is called “romance”.
  • Folk wisdom observes that lovers are fools, lovers are blind; we also speak of a folie a deux because in this mutually projective state, the person is acting not out of a conscious relationship to reality, but out of archaic and often overwhelming power of personal history.
  • Behind our projections, is surprise, surprise, a mere human being like us. Whoever they are, whatever they are, their imperfect reality will inevitably wear through the projection until a different picture emerges.
  • Rarely does one truly analyze the phenomenon and discern the humbling truth, that some dynamic, script, expectation, or project from our consciousness has been unwittingly projected onto the other.
  • The weaker the consciousness of a person is, the more he or she is likely to get fixated in the projection.
  • Spousal violence similarly derives from the failure to honor the reality of the other when it does not conform to projective expectations. A weak ego can only tolerate discrepancy by resorting to violence.
  • Violent men don’t have the strength of consciousness and character to own responsibility for what is missing in their own psychological life.
  • it is virtually impossible to do therapy with a person “in love”, just as one cannot work with a drunk.
  • We find ourselves repelled by a stranger, a character in a sitcom, and for what reason?
  • Generally speaking, whatever moves us, whatever consciously or not, will somehow be found as touching a deeply buried aspect of ourselves.
  • The much greater risk of truly loving the other presents a quite different agenda, a more demanding summons.
  • When the other does not conform to our relationship agenda, we often seek to control them through admonishment, withdrawal, passive/aggressive sabotage, and sometimes overtly controlling behaviours. We profess innocence when confronted for we usually believe our own rationalizations.
  • “we wish to colonize the other,” and like most imperial powers, we are flush to rationalizations to justify our agendas of self-interest.
  • “What am I asking of my beloved that I need to do for myself?”
  • Difficulty of couple’s therapy is getting each party to look rigorously at the psychodynamics they bring to their disagreement without continuing to blame each other.
  • The failed projection is experienced by the ego as a frustration and a defeat.
  • inescapable truth of any relationship is that it can achieve no higher level of development than the level of maturity that both parties bring to it.
  • It is not a fault to have a childish region of our psyche, for we are all recovering children, but it is a culpable act to impose that disempowered, narcissitically driven history on the present beloved.
  • What another really can bring to us, their greatest gift, is not an imitation or confirmation of our limited vision, but the gift of their quite different vision, their otherness as otherness. The immature psyche needs confirmation to be secure, a cloning of interests and sensibilities, and there is no surer path to staying immature and undeveloped than seeking agreement in all things.
  • A more mature relationship is based on the “otherness” itself, on the dialectical principle that demonstrates that my one and your one together create the third. This “third” is the developmental process that results as we influenced each other in turn;
  • Consciously loving another obliges risk, courage in the face of ambiguity, and the strength of tolerance. Whoever lacks these qualities will never truly have relationship.
  • that wholeness only comes through relationship with another. Only in such fashion can the third appear.
  • The more we wish another person to repair our wounds, meet our needs, and protect us from having to grow up, really grow up, the more dissatisfying the relationship will prove over the long haul.
  • The problem is not romance, but what extra baggage romance is obliged to carry.
  • we’re asked to confront the essential mystery that we are with the essential that our partner is. When we can tolerate this mystery, we are already becoming a larger person.
  • What we fear in ourselves we will fear in the other; what we avoid addressing in ourselves we will avoid in the other; where we are stuck with ourselves we will be stuck with the other.
  • constant companion of Eros is pathos, desire and suffering are twins.
  • the cure for loneliness is solitude
  • Without Eros, the life force, pulling us into the world, we would all stay home and perish.
  • engagement of the soul’s agenda is our real task, this journey is our real home
  • Accepting the journey as our home will free the relationship to serve the agenda of life, the agenda of growth, and the agenda of the soul. When we have accepted this journey, truly accepted it, we will be flooded with a strong supportive energy that carries us through all the dark places. For this energy we have an appropriate word. It is called love. It is love not only for the other, but love o this life, this journey, and love of this task of soul.

Chapter Six: The family During the Second Half of Live

  • idea of marriage, with sufficient sanctioned powers to govern and channel the wild swings to which Eros is so often to prone.
  • family became the one stable unit in the world of change, hostile invasion, depredations of nature, and constant search for food and shelter.
  • Jung: When a situation occurs which corresponds to a given archetype, that archetype becomes activated and a compulsiveness appears, which, like an instinctual drive, gains its way against all reason and will.
  • “How many of my family can I save?” “One”
  • marriage and family therapist know that family interactions are typically arrayed around its most damaged member. Except in the case of a catastrophic illness of a child, that damaged member is inevitably one of the parents, and sometimes both of them in their pas de deux.
  • Of every family we must ask, “How well did the soul flourish here; how much life was lost through the failure of modeling a larger life, granting permission to follow one’s own course, or was constricted by the glass ceiling of familial fears and limitations?”
  • Tostoy (Anna Karenina): all happy families are happy in similar ways, whereas unhappy families find their unique ways of being unhappy.
  • having not taken on the journey, remain narcissistic, demanding
  • My advice to parents is always the same: Hold your breath - they will finally grow and leave, no doubt blaming you for everything until they find that their problems have followed them. Try to model the fuller life, and such ethical standards as you wish to affirm; give permission to them to be different, to be, that is, who they are; manifest unconditional love while maintaining standards, boundaries, and reasonable expectations.
  • Until they can be wholly responsible for their own journey, and not project it onto the child, such parents are not grown-ups either.
  • What a terrible dilemma facing a child: “Please my parents and die within, or live my separate journey and lose their love.” Such deformation of the child’s unique journey is a kind of spiritual violence.
  • Robert Frost: home is where you go and they have to take you.
  • The difficult task is to balance one’s own need for personal freedom and personal growth with the needs of others. Failure will ensure burnout, resentment, and depression, which is typically anger turned inward. However great one’s sense of responsibility, no good fruit comes from a such contaminated tree.
  • rather than mellowing, most people become more of that they already are.
  • guilt that compels compliant behaviours is really anxiety management.
  • stand up to the anxiety and be the only adult on the scene, the only one capable of knowing when enough is enough.
  • I have already told my adult children that I do not expect, nor do I wish, them to take care of me should I become dependent, or even mentally incompetent.
  • Just as they knew they always had my love, so I know that I always have theirs. We do not have to prove that through some compliant acts.
  • family is the chief arena for pathologizing of the child.
  • The modern healthy family posits the nurturance of the individual as its highest value - all the individuals in that family.
  • None is there to serve the narcissistic needs of any other. Each is there to support that growth and feel that support in return.
  • The more the family can be a holding environment in which differences are valued rather than suppressed in service to the anxieties of a parent, the more each person will flower.
  • The parent’s first task is personal growth, allied with the conscious assumption of responsibility for the growth of others.
  • One treats the other as one would wish to be treated in return
  • service not to selfish agenda but to the Self, which in turn is service to the soul. The ultimate test of the family is not whether it provides safety and predictability, but whether or to what degree each person can leave it, freely, and return, freely, as a larger person.

Chapter Seven: Career Versus Vocation

  • I always wondered if such parents really thought they were helping their children by enlisting them in their own security needs.
  • Freud once noted that two requisites necessary for sanity: work and love.
  • many find that their work drains rather than energizes them.
  • Making a living is the easy part, but far more critical is what liberates us from the limits of our family and cultural history. What values, what ways of critical thinking and discerning evaluation do we possess to enrich our lives? What understanding of history allows us to escape its binding repetitions? What personality development and differentiation will we carry with us through all days of our journey?
  • Nietzsche once observed that the teacher is ill-served whose student do not surpass him.
  • unaware of that cause issue when they arrive, focusing on their emotional state rather than the source of it. So often the work of therapy, certainly not to be narrowed to career counseling, is to examine the forces that brought about the original choices.
  • I discovered that I had lost interest in much of the body of knowledge I had acquired and was more keenly focused on where it came from within us, what it activated in us, and what meaning it could have in the conduct of a larger life. I found that I was more interested in the symbolic life than the intellectual life - the symbolic engaging the soul, while the intellect engaged only the mind.
  • “May God grant your soul no peace.” I came to accept as one benefit of that blessing the powers that moved me from a fine career to an even richer vocation.
  • Yes, we need to earn a living, support ourselves and those who depend on us, but there is another call to serve, a summons to serve spiritual enlargement. An that is our true vocation.
  • we are more than economic animals.
  • most women do not recognize that man have fewer inner choices
  • What was not modeled in the family of origin, what was not made available in the popular culture, becomes a personal task for each of us in the second half of life.
  • he had in fact left what he loved, in service to the expectations of parents and spouse, and grown miserable in turn.
  • If our work does not support our soul, then the soul will exact its butcher’s bill elsewhere. Wherever the soul’s agenda is not served, some pathology will surface in the arena of daily life.
  • We may choose careers, but we do not choose vocation. Vocation chooses us.
  • In the first half of life there is a place for ambition, for the driving powers of the ego.
  • Jung: “We cannot live the afternoon of life according to the program of life’s morning - for what was great in the morning will be little at evening, and what in morning was true will at evening have become a life.”
  • Thoreau noted a hundred and sixty years ago that we had grown imprisoned by the abstractions we created. His longest chapter in Walden is titled, and decries our growing enslavement to, “Economics”.
  • Contrary to Sartre’s bon mot, Hell is not other people; it is ourselves, constrained by the world we have constructed for ourselves, or allowed others to construct of us.
  • In the second half of life the ego is periodically summoned to relinquish its identifications wit the values of others, the values received and reinforced by the world around.
  • the very achievement of ego strength is the source of our hope for something better. We need to be strong enough to examine our lives and make risky changes. A person strong enough to face the futilities of most desires, the distractions of most cultural values, who can give up trying to be well adjusted to a neurotic culture, will find growth and greater purpose after all. The ego’s highest task is to go beyond itself into service, service to what is really desired by the soul rather than the complex-ridden ego or the values of the culture.
  • One engages in work because it is meaningful, and if it is not, one changes the work.
  • Being well adjusted is a trivial goal when one factors in the soul. The soul has no interest in social adaptation as such.
  • Hindu scripture: It is better to do your own duty badly, than to perfectly do another’s; you are safe from harm when you do what you should be doing.
  • In the end, the meaning of our life will be judged not by our peers or their collective expectations, but by our experience of it, and by whatever transcendent source brought us to it in the first place
  • Meaning is found, over the long haul, through the feeling of rightness within. No one can give that to us, although we may allow others to take it away from us.
  • At such moments of surrender to the soul, we are in the presence of the divine, and in harmony with its intent.
  • we are here to bring consciousness to brute being.

Chapter Eight: The New Myth Emerging from the Psychopathology of Everyday Life

  • world where we are bombarded by sensations, driven by addictions, medicated beyond accountability, agitated into constant motion, and further from our selves than ever
  • we also had to become psychological, because the spiritually charged images that once linked humanity to nature and to the gods had eroded with the waning powers of tribal mythologies ans sanctified institutions
  • four orders of mystery: the transcendent (the gods), the environment (their home in nature), the tribe (the social fabric), and their own psychological grounding (personal identity).
  • What fills this existential void, this meaning gap, this time between the gods who vanished and the gods not yet arrived (as Heidegger put it) is the stuff of our daily life.
  • Our ancestors could seek the relief of their personal and tribal problems by asking which god had been offended and then offering propitiation to reestablish right relationship with that god.
  • A culture without living mythological access to the mysteries is a culture in trouble.
  • materialism, hedonism, and narcissism
  • Without a “vertical” sense of participation in divinity, humankind is condemned to a sterile, “horizontal” existence, circling its own absurdity and ending in its own annihilation.
  • Being connected to the mystery only comes, Jung suggests, “when people feel that they are living the symbolic life, that they are actors in the divine drama”.
  • fundamentalism and the culture of sensation
  • Fundamentalism, be it religious or political or psychological, is an anxiety management technique that finesses the nuances of doubt and ambiguity through rigid and simplistic belief systems. If I can persuade myself that the world is perpetually founded on the values of another, culturally limited, less conscious age, then I do not have to address the new subtleties.
  • fundamentalism is a form of mental illness that seeks to repress anxiety, ambiguity, and ambivalence.
  • The culture of sensation - pop culture. News that runs twenty-four hours create info junkies.
  • A modern Dantean descent into Hell might be defined as taking a good thing, asking too much of it, and being left only with it.
  • The culture of sensation can only produce addiction and broken hopes, just as fundamentalism can only produce rigidity and a very large shadow.
  • Addictions are found in our reflexive, frequently unconscious anxiety-management behaviours.
  • dreams, the ongoing commentary offered by the Self as to just how things are going and how they might be better.
  • all addictions have as their motive anxiety reduction through some form of connection with the “other”.
  • anxiety is further deepened by the loss of connective mythologies, those charged images that link us to the gods, to nature, to each other, and to ourselves.
  • it is most commonly through suffering that we are stretched enough to grow spiritually. The road of continuous ease results in the circular trap of addiction.
  • Similarly, paraphilias have us in their grip
  • Desire itself derives from a Latin nautical term which means “of the star.” To have desire is to have a vector, an intentionality, a direction.
  • paraphilias of our time, disturbances of desire, include sexual addiction, pornography, substance disorders, and toxic consumerism, which offer to fill the empty space of the soul.
  • “Success” has become an unquestioned cultural icon.
  • The difference between an icon and a symbol is that the former contains only its own limited meaning, while the symbol points beyond itself toward a larger ream of mystery.
  • T. S. Eliot: in a world of fugitives, the person who is headed in the right direction will appear running away.
  • The erosion of tribal life and linking mythic systems has more and more melted the glue that held us together. We sit now behind locked doors, in front of glowing cathode tubes, and robotically rehearse our common cultural conditioning.
  • We can be enlarged only when we are exposed to a wider range of images, such as are provided education, travel, learning, dialogue with others, and the soul’s frequent visitors.

Living Myths

  • opened a person or a tribe to mystery.
  • A person who dreams of possessing a new object, or a position in life, in order to provide some large measure of happiness, inevitably ends in dissatisfaction. The vitality of the object or position, which unbeknownst to the person is an unconscious aspect of his or her unaddressed agenda, has been spent, and has autonomously reentered the unconscious, where it awaits a new goal upon which to project.
  • Jung: People speak of belief when they have lost knowledge.
  • Whenever the level of conscious attention is lowered, perhaps in times of personal or cultural crisis, the tendency of the ego to project what is not addressed in the inner life increases its fascination with the outer -
  • bewitchment - They speak to something deep within us without requiring us to know our own part in them, or pay the price of consciousness and personal responsibility to truly make them ours.
  • To free ourselves from bewitchment we are obliged to begin to read the world psychologically:
    • “What is this touching in me?”
    • “Where does this come from my own history?”
    • “Where have I felt this kind of energy before?”
    • “Can I see the pattern beneath the surface?”
    • “What is the hidden idea, or complex, that is creating this pattern?”
    • “Is there something promising magic, Easy Street, seduction, ‘solution’ here, when as we know life will always remain raggedy and incomplete?”
    • “Am I made larger, or smaller, by this path, this relationship, this decision?”
  • The unconscious fantasy of a child is that in taking care of the other, perhaps fixing them, the child guarantees that other will be there to take care of them.
  • The “enemy” we face in situations like this is never the “other”; it is the power of history.
  • the individual human psyche is the arena in which both outer world and inner world meet and are experienced.
  • It is so much easier to be seduced than to assume sole responsibility for our consciousness, for ourselves. This is the deepest psychopathology of daily life - the routine flight form the summons of the soul.
  • Being psychological means that one will need to find the new, the personal myth from within.
  • The greatest gift of depth psychology is returning to us again the possibility of a deep dialogue with this mystery. To be psychological does not mean that one must enter therapy, although with the right person, that decision can be transformative. It does mean that one ask, much more radically than ever before, what is going on beneath the surface.
  • reconnected with our journey, that we found our myth again.

Chapter Nine: Recovering Mature Spirituality in a Material Age

  • The recovery of a mature spirituality is one of the most difficult task of our time.
  • We flee from growing up and being wholly responsible for our experience.
  • move from victimhood to participation in the meaning of our journey, and to recognize that in all events, even the traumatic, there is an invitation to greater engagement with depth, with mystery.
  • In the second half of the life there are two major tasks. The first is the recovery of personal authority.
  • We believe ourselves conscious agents, when in fact much if not most of the time we’re subject to these authority clusters derived from the fortuities of our personal history and the variegated values of our time.
  • personal authority = to find what is true for oneself and to life it in the world. If it is not lived, it is not yet real for us, and we abide in what Satre called “bad faith,” the theologian calls “sin,” the therapist calls “neurosis”
  • task of discovering a personal spirituality
  • confuse the spirit’s longing for largeness with familiar institutions, creeds, dogmas and practices.
  • Our culture is crowded with spiritual snake oil.
  • It is of paramount importance that our spirituality be validated or confirmed by fidelity to our personal experience.
  • Only what is experientially true is worthy of mature spirituality.
  • A mature spirituality will seldom provide us with answers, and necessarily so, but will instead ask ever-larger questions of us, Larger questions will lead to a larger life.
  • religion is for those afraid to go to Hell, and spirituality is for those who have been there.
  • Growing up spiritually means that we are asked to sort through the possibilities for ourselves, find what resonate with us, what is confirmed by our experience and not the consensus of others, and be willing to stand for what has proven true for us.
  • Symbols help bridge us to the mysteries of the cosmos, to natural events, to each other, and to our own mysterious selves. Mysteries are not knowable directly. If they were knowable, they would not be mysteries.
  • Symbol and metaphor are our greatest gift, for they make culture and spirituality possible.
  • Limited as we are, we are nonetheless able to approach the largeness of mystery through the tools of metaphor and symbol.
  • He (Kant) was not saying that external reality does not exist; rather, that we can only know it subjectively. Our psyche takes the raw chaos of stimuli and organizes it into coherence according to categories of time, number, spatiality, and other elements of our minds.
  • Teilhard de Chardin came closest to bridging these worlds when he said that matter is spirit moving slowly enough to be seen.
  • Over time, the ego tends to privilege its own constructs and confuse them with external reality, or confuse them with the mystery. Our finite sensibility cannot ultimately know that infinite mystery that has been called God.
  • The immature person, or culture, proclaims “our God is superior to your God,” the way children do.
  • If I insist that my taste is right and yours is wrong, then I have offended your humanity by denying the reality of your experience.
  • Remember that the word “soul” is designation of the autonomous energy that courses through the material guises of the world - in you, in me, in nature, in dream images and so on (Ishavara).
  • tragic devaluation of the spirit has led many to reject the possibility of transcendent and to throw themselves into the addictions and diversions of popular culture as antidotes for the pain of this great loss. It has led others to cynicism and depression.
  • Early cultures experiences the world as “en-souled,” that is, all things being the embodiment or carriers of soul energy. The tree had soul (from which we still derive the expression “knock on wood”, as a summoning of the anima within the tree to stand by us for good fortune).
  • Comte noted that the sage of animism was replaced by the theological sage.
  • We see the transition from the animistic to the theological occurring when, for example, the immense power of the sea is embodied in a specific deity, Poseidon, whose name appropriately means “earth-shaker.”
  • By the mid-nineteenth century many noted thinkers, from Kierkegaard to Nietzsche to Dostoevski, had concluded that “the gods had died.”. They were making psychological statements even before psychology as we know it, not metaphysical statements.
  • cultural forms of the gods, and their attendant value systems, no longer evoked the immediacy of personal experience.
  • rise of secular surrogates such as scientism and materialism
  • animist understood that survival, and meaning, depend on the capacity to read the signature of the invisible at work in the visible world.
  • One may see in popular theologies the same heresy as in psychology, namely the confusion of the image with the energy that animates it.
  • world is de-souled, when what it needs is reanimation
  • religious experience. Most people intuit this threat, this likely summons to largeness.
  • Dogma serves as a reassuring program of answers to questions that arise
  • The dogma itself does not carry the mystery, though it may sincerely seek to sustain the impact. Rituals have the intent to re-crate the encounter with the mystery, to summon up the spirits, and hopefully reanimate the original encounter.
  • In time they tend to become rigid, inflexible entrapments of soul rather than summers to largeness. Similarly, the cultural forms of dress, behaviour, ethics that distinguish one group from another can grow arbitrary, disconnected, and cultlike and become the source of alienation from other groups
  • institutions - encapsulated entities that are most invested in preserving themselves.
  • sterile kingdoms of atheism and materialism, in which no transcendent expression will be found.
  • Any project to revivify by going back is doomed to failure. New wine does not come from old wine bottles.
  • These questions never go away, they go underground, into the unconscious.
  • move us, that is set off a resonance within us
  • we know that that image has some meaning for us. We feel it.
  • when the spirit is present, we’ll be moved.
  • eternal questions will arise in quite different guises in all times, and persist in determining the value of our lives whether we are conscious of them or not.
  • inquire seriously
  • only when it begins to hurt too much to deny any longer
  • reclaim our lives from our history
  • resonance, that is, inner confirmation as opposed to external authority
  • often the conscious values we adopt, and cherish, are apotropaic defense against evil, rationalizations of our wounds, flights from the terror of being alone, or unwitting confessions of intimidation at the prospect of conducting our lives on our own authority
  • each of us has to make that discovery on our own
  • not psychologizing, that is reducing everything to subjective experience alone, but acknowledging that without that subjective confirmation, nothing finally will have a reality for us.
  • Jung is suggesting that the “truth” within the image can be only true for us if it becomes a psychological fact, that is inwardly apprehended and experienced by us.
  • Serving a past image unconsciously may very well prove to be that oldest of religious heresies - idolatry! Idolatry is often a comforting artifact of the ego, but it does an impediment of the renewing agenda of the soul.
  • dreaming - an average of six times per night, we are visited by this other world, which is nonetheless our world.
  • The new myth will not come from above. Only totalitarian ideologies, or ego-crafted appeals to our complexes, will appear in such fashion. The new myth will come as it always has, rising from the depths, greeting the tribe, summoning the individual to serve that which enlarges rather than diminishes.

Chapter Ten: Swampland Visitations

  • “In the midst of my day I shall go to the gates of Hell.” Isaiah 38:10
  • powerful fantasy of progress that lurks beneath the surface of contemporary culture
  • Nowhere is this fantasy more identifiable than in our preoccupation with health, with youthful image, and with resistance to aging and mortality.
  • The avoidance of our mortal transient condition is pathological.
  • those who handle aging and mortality least well are those who fear that they have not been in this life, that they have not been here, that they have not lives the life they were called to live. Those most preoccupied wit appearance are typically those most resistant to the task of inner authority, for they continue to seek validation from the world out there.
  • suffering that forges larger and larger consciousness.
  • magic versus the daily work of constructing our lives, and reward us with only superficial engagements with the wonder of terror of being here.
  • Pain is physiological and should be always alleviated when possible, for pain can erode the spirit’s vitality. Suffering is spiritual, for it inevitably raises question of meaning.
  • medieval adage: “suffering is the fastest horse to completion.”
  • Koran asks, do we expect that the pathway to the Garden of Bliss will be less troubled for us than for those who have preceded us?
  • a West African metaphor that someone’s “feet are in agreement.” That is a metaphoric euphemism for death.
  • We are implicitly asked: “How am I to enlarge consciousness in this place; how embrace life here amid peril; hot find the meaning for me in this suffering?”
  • ego’s central project is maintaining itself and privileging its own narrow position, we can see that without some challenge to that agenda, we would never grow larger than the messages of childhood and the limits of familial and cultural environment into which fate places us.
  • ego’s agenda of reinforcement, comfort, order, control, security.
  • fantasies of untroubled lives
  • Jung has made clear, fidelity to “The Self is manifest in the opposites and in the conflict between them”

Guilt

  • guilt is a necessary companion to a life of value, a life in which responsibility is assumed, in which moral vision matters.
  • acknowledge the wrongs they have committed to redress them wherever possible, or to at least make the attempt to symbolic compensation and restoration.
  • unacknowledged guilt is an unconscious anchor that weights upon the soul and siphons off its energy
  • existential guilt
  • Deeply programmed into us by adulthood is the fear of loss of the love, approval, and cooperation of the “other” in our lives, be it parent, partner, or institution
  • archaic warning system. Guilt then acts as an internal governor, shutting down our natural selves and recalling the agenda of adaptation rather than authenticity.

Grief and Loss

  • Loss seems to be the price of abundance, the counterpoise to the richness of life.
  • Grief, which etymologically is related to the word gravity, from the Latin “gravis” (“to bear or carry”) is in due proportion to our commitment to life.
  • The Greek myth of immortal Tithonus relates how he found his life meaningless because every choice this hour could be reversed in another. So he petitioned the gods to grant him mortality, so that his life, through his now risky choices, could be experienced as meaningful. They so blessed Tithonus.
  • Grief is honest acknowledgement of loss, which is based on honest acknowledging of value.
  • We cannot have the richness without the possibility of loss, and without loss we cannot fully treasure the gifts we have been given.
  • “serenity” is Gelassenheit.
  • market-fueled fantasies of acquisition, control and ownership

Betrayal

  • “betrayal” is the betrayal of our expectations for such contracts. As Ecclesiastes recognized millennia ago, the rain falleth on the just and the unjust alike. So much for “deals”.
  • Those who are incapable of trust live in a conspirational, fear-flushed world and suffer the overgeneralizing, paranoid fantasy of betrayal. Often this sensibility is derived from actual slights, injustices, and abuses in the past.
  • Such a person, so defended against betrayal, will never experience the richness and depth of relationship. In protecting our vulnerability we blunt all our possibilities.
  • Most relationships, especially those most intimate, have an aura of disappointment about them, for we silently feel the other has betrayed us by not meeting our agenda for that relationship.
  • Betrayal may unmask our hidden dependencies.
  • The subtext of most relationship is dependency, rather than mutual support of the independence of each party.

Doubt and Loneliness

  • In seeking certainly they are courting the death of the soul, whose nature is forever churning possibility, forever seeking the larger, forever riding the melting edge of certainty’s glacier.
  • Jung: “People who merely believe and don’t think, forget that they continually expose themselves to their own worst enemy: doubt. Wherever belief reigns, doubt lurks in the background.
  • hysterical certainties propagated by political and religious institutions are in fact unconscious confessions of their own insecurity.
  • Our anxieties lead us to grasp at certainties. Certainties lead to dogma; dogma leads to rigidity; rigidity leads to idolatry; idolatry always banishes the mystery and thus leads to spiritual narrowing.
  • the more we seem to know, the larger the mystery grows.
  • How can we not doubt everything when the world is so rich, and our conscious capacities so limited? Our doubt, then is a form of radical trust, a trust that the world is richer than we know.
  • loneliness, the place without external validation.
  • Loneliness is not one of the greatest disorders of the soul, but the fear of loneliness is.
  • Those who manage to find respect for themselves, who learn to dialogue with themselves, who find that their dreams and other such phenomena are communicating with them from some deeper place within them are not really alone.
  • The failure to accept ourselves makes it very difficult if not impossible, to accept others.
  • “Loneliness is not inimical to companionship … for companionship thrives only when each individual remembers his individuality.”

Depression

  • work our way through the depression to its meaning.
  • for who among us has managed to live a life wholly in accord with the soul when we’re all trying to serve the cultural agenda at the same time?
  • “A neurosis is an offended god.”
  • The therapeutic secret of a depression is not found by suppressing it with biochemical agents, but by asking its meaning. This investigative approach is enlarging, and the soul will not fail to offer direction if we are willing to be open.

Addictions

  • No one is free of addictions, for addictions are anxiety-management techniques the purpose of which is to lower the level of psychic distress we feel at any given moment, whether we are conscious of the distress or not.
  • compulsive character, which means that they have a life outside our conscious control of awareness.
  • the subtlest, and most pervasive, of addictive management techniques is habit itself, for habit is one of the means by which we hold off ambiguity and anxiety. Simple reflect on how irritated, that is how anxious, you feel when your habits, your daily routines, your conventional expectations are interrupted.
  • caught in a circular response to life that can only replicate itself, and the pain that lies at its core
  • To ever break the stranglehold of addictions, one is going to have to face what the compulsive behaviour is a defense against.
  • It is to break the tyranny of anxiety without ceasing to feel anxious.
  • as Heidegger observed once, “the terrible” has already happened.

Anxieties

  • At bottom, all of our problems can be traced back to the omnipresence of anxiety.
  • Angst is the German word for therapeutical anxiety. threat of annihilation is palpable and present from our first to our last breath.
  • An acceptance of this angst as normal is healthy; its denial pathological.
  • Anxiety is free-floating, unattached, not unlike the fog that obscures the road we drive. Fear, however is specific.
  • Our fears are typically derived from our powerless past.
  • when one learns that beneath the current anxiety there is a buried filament that reaches back to the childhood fear, then one learns the secret of the disabling power of the anxious present.
  • Philo of Alexandria: “Be kind. Everyone you meet is carrying a big problem”.
  • Accept the normality of anxiety, seek the roots of identifiable fears in that anxiety, then simply do the best we can and forgive the rest.

How Do We Avoid Swamplands

  • swamplands are inevitable and necessary counterpart to our conscious fantasies of power.
  • The more we have conquered in the outer world, the more the disquiet of our inner world.
  • task of life asks that we embrace this agenda of apparent loss as much as the agenda of acquisition that the first half of life served.
  • The flight from the swamplands of the soul, however unpleasant they may be to consciousness, is the flight from the wholeness of life, a wholeness that may only be expressed in paradox, and any psychology or worldview that excludes paradox is excluding half of life itself.
  • Wholeness is not about comfort, or goodness or consensus - it means drinking this brief, unique, deeply rooted vintage to its dregs.
  • The task of ego consciousness in the second half of life is to step out the way and embrace a larger spiritual agenda.
  • Jung: “A life without inner contradiction is only half a life, or else a life in the Beyond which is destined only for angels. But God loves human beings more than the angels.”
  • Nikos Kazantzakis: “the report to a general: This is what I did today, this is how I fought to save the entire battle in my own sector, these are the obstacles found, this is how I plan to fight tomorrow.”

Chapter Eleven: The Healing of the Soul

  • devotion to change
  • psychology has banished psyche, or soul, from its serious consideration, in favor of the lesser forms of behaviour and cognition and biochemistry.
  • For all the changes that have occurred over the last four centuries, perhaps our greatest loss is the diminution of dialogue about that mystery toward which the word soul is meant to point.
  • the world once summoned the priest in his black gown and then, when he could not save, transferred their demands to the physician in his white gown.
  • Living the questions that serve the ego, or culture’s insecurity, will only infantilize. We need questions that ask that we grow up.

What has brought you to this place in your journey, this moment in your life?

  • Destiny is a word that originally meant following a course, as a river within its banks, subject to modification, risking draying, flooding at times, being replenished, but always coursing toward an outlet in the large, tenebrous see of the soul.
  • Consciousness is a task that renews its challenge every morning

What gods, what forces, what family, what social environment have framed your reality, perhaps supported, perhaps constricted it?

  • We are not summoned to perfection; that is the realm of gods; we are rather called to mindfulness, to approach such fields of divine reverence with sensitivity, respect and humility.
  • deep split evolves between fate and destiny, between the forces of determination and the possibilities inherent in all of us
  • “Whose life have I been living?”
  • we are the only character who is present in each scene, so we must be held accountable in the end.
  • accountability. If you do not like your life, change it, bust stop blaming others, for even if they did hurt you, you are the one who has been making the choices of adulthood.
  • We are, in the end, mythological creatures.
  • relationship to the inner world (what Jung called the anima, Latin for “soul” that which is compensatory to his outer masculine identity and role.
  • Why would he not have unstable, inconsistent relationships with women when this is the relationship he has managed to his inner feminine?

Why, even when things are going well, do things not feel quite right?

  • Gnostic Gospel of Thomas: the kingdom of God is spread all over the world and we do not see it.
  • Clues everywhere! But these clues are so often drowned by the cacophony of messages from the world around us, as well as the committee of complexes within.
  • siren calls?
  • Why is that “success” in achieving these goals so often feels empty? Why, having followed the plan, served the marching order, does one not feel an inner assent, a lightness which confirms?

Why does so much seem a disappointment, a betrayal, a bankruptcy of expectations?

  • Joseph Campbell: we can spend decades climbing the ladder, only to realize too late that we have places it against the wrong wall.
  • No person, no role in life, however rewarding, can ever carry the complete aspirations of the soul - only our move toward wholeness can**. Wholeness is not found in perfection.**
  • the youth needs projections to pull him or her into life.
  • The first half of life feeds on these projections. During the second half of life, these projections lose their powers in the face of abrasions of daily life, and one suffers ennui, disappointment, or even a sense that the presumed contract has been betrayed.
  • Could these so called symptoms prove precisely the clue for which we seek? Are they not the rejected gods of the underworld, speaking in their symbolic ways? Is what week to be found not “out there,” but beneath our noses? If such projections are necessary for the first half of life, then their erosion, their bankruptcy may be necessary for the second half of life.
  • What, indeed, does it profit one to gain the world that the projects have offered, and to find the price is loss of relationship to one’s soul? It is in the swamplands of disappointment, then, tat the task of personal ownership of the soul may be reclaimed.
  • As long as we continue to cruise along, buoyed by the success of projects, we will be seduced into unconscious identification with trivial values.
  • The bad news for ego’s fantasy of sovereignty is that we suffer; the good news for the soul is that we suffer.
  • The projections, if examined carefully, diminish life through their narrow frame; growing up enlarges life, makes it more interesting, and we might even become thereby somewhat less of a problem to those around us.

Why do you believe that you have to hide so much, from others, from yourself?

  • The less supportive the environment, the more troubles or preoccupied the family, the more costly the child’s disclosures of his or her natural narcissistic needs will prove.
  • permission will not be given; the adult must seize it
  • paying of forgotten dues, is the requisite for reforming one’s life

Why does life seem a script written elsewhere and you barely consulted, if at all

  • most important message of life comes from the primary relationship with mother, father and siblings, and then ever-widening circles, the culture as a whole.
  • The psyche is autonomous and will express another, deeper script than that we received from our fated family of origin, culture, and peculiar histories
  • surrender to this will
  • sense of purposefulness
  • The loss of alignment with the soul is both the origin of suffering and the invitation to redemption.

Why have you come to this book, or why has it come to you, now?

  • well all retain an intuitive tie to that great, immortal sea from whence we came.
  • We have mastered the language of the outer world through physics and chemistry, but the principle of synchronicity acknowledges that there is an inner world of causality as well. When the moment is ripe for us to hear, then the word is spoken.

Why does the idea of the soul both trouble you and feel familiar, like a long-lost companion?

  • Jung: “It is not I who create myself, rather I happen to myself.”
  • The soul is intuited in childhood, pushed aside by the adaptive choices of consciousness, and recovered in adulthood only when we are willing to open to it.
  • So the idea of the soul, the felt presence of the soul, intimidates while it sustains, and the summons to the ego is to relinquish its fantasy of sovereignty and be held in that fell.

Is the life you are living too small for your soul’s desire?

Why is now the time, if ever it is to happen, for you to answer the summons of the soul, to live the second, larger life?

  • We live amid politicians and theologians who infantilize us by fear-mongering, and scientist and psychologist who trivialize life by addressing only what can be empirically verified. We are so much larger than that. Just as much theology has forgotten the psyche, so much psychology has retreated from the soul.
  • This spiritual homesickness gives us the journey; the journey gives us our life, once again.
  • Poet Paul Eluard: there is another world and it is this one!
  • Everywhere we look we see intimations of the soul.
  • Here you are, in this mysterious now.
  • Called to witness, and to serve, to serve something much larger.
  • Even when surrounded by many other, your journey is solitary, for the life you are to choose is your life, not someone’s else.
  • Finding what supports you from within
  • Agenda of growth, purpose and meaning that we all are meant to carry into the world and to share with others.