Quotes from James Hollis, Ph.D.

So, then, now you know your task: to become what the gods want, not what your parents want, not what your tribe wants, but what the gods want, and what your psyche will support if consciousness so directs.

Spiritual crises happen to us every day. Most of them are sufficiently low grade, devoid of enduring consequences, so we pay no attention and keep on rolling. A spiritual crisis occurs when our identity, our roles, our values, or our road map are substantially called into question, prove ineffective, or are overwhelmed by experience that cannot be contained by our understandings of self and world.

We must examine what we envy or dislike in others and acknowledge those very things in ourselves. This helps to prevent our blaming or envying others for what we have not done ourselves.

The meaning of the midlife affair is the imperative to go back and pick up what was left behind in one's development. Since what was undeveloped agitates from below consciousness, it is still unknown.

Either we die unto who we were, in order to move to the next stage, or we die through staying stuck, and suffer stasis and stultification.

Thus we are forced into a difficult choice—anxiety and depression. If we move forward, as our soul insists, we ... In such difficult choice one must choose anxiety, for anxiety at least is a path of potential growth; depression is a stagnation and defeat of life.

Imagine what our story would look like if, rather than succumbing to the insistent voices of family or culture, we determined that our vocation was to be a better human.

The turbulence of the Middle Passage may resemble a psychotic break wherein the person acts crazy or with draws from others. If we realize that the assumptions by which the person has lived his or her life are collapsing, that the assembled strategies of the provisional personality are decompensating, that a world-view is falling apart, then the thrashing about is understandable.