Quotes from James Hollis

If we are not willing to risk all, again, then we are precluded from intimacy.

Walnut Trees of Altenburg: The greatest mystery is not that we have been flung at random between the profusion of the earth and the galaxy of the stars, but that in this prison we can fashion images of ourselves sufficiently powerful to deny our nothingness.2

The thing about all complexes, splinter personalities, and fractal assignments is that they have no imagination. The can only replay the old events, scripts, and moribund outcome of their origin. But we do have an imagination, the power to image something new, or at least alternative.

Physical death is only one form of dying. There are other forms of dying: We die whenever fear governs our choices. We die when we sacrifice growth for security. We die whenever we choose a convenient certainty over an inconvenient mystery.

You must be successful, affluent, powerful, married to the right person," and so on. Each child is thus launched in service to the parent's neurosis, and gets further and further from his or her own soul.

third choice was to strike off toward some new projection—a new job, a better (different) relationship, a seductive ideology, or sometimes to drift into some unconscious "self-treatment plan" such as an addiction or an affair.

If you want to cure a neurosis, you have to risk something."2

Only a spirituality that confesses that it knows not has a shot at growing, evolving, engaging the perils and uncertainties of the journey and of staying by our side when things get rough.

Jung once observed that we cannot grow up until we can see our parents as other adults, special to our biography certainly, wounded perhaps, but most of all simply other people who did or did not take on the largeness of their own journey. We have our own journey, for sure, and that is large enough to take us beyond our personal history toward our full potential.

I contradict myself? So, I contradict myself! I am infinite. I contain multitudes.

What I cannot accept in myself, what I cannot handle in the complexity of the world, what I fear in you, often leads me to repress you if I can.

The first half of life, at least for most of us, is essentially a giant, unavoidable mistake.

gurus who will do the simplistic thinking for us and remove us from the suffering that forges larger and larger consciousness. They foster narcissism, naiveté, self-absorption, and indifference to others, promise magic versus the daily work of constructing our lives, and reward us with only superficial engagements with the

What we have become is typically an assemblage of defense mechanisms and anxiety-management systems generated by the adaptive needs that our fate-fueled biographies bring to us.

None of us would admit to having "bad character," although we have all done bad things. In fact, a person who has never done anything "bad" will be a pretty superficial, infantile being, and that is a bad thing.

Where do you refuse to grow up, wait for certainty of wisdom before choosing, hope for solutions to emerge fully formed, expect rescue, or wait for a guru to make sense of it all for you?

Later—much later, if at all—we reluctantly come to recognize that those choices we made were reflective of our character, our limited field of vision, and our presumption that we knew enough to know enough.

Without a larger measure of consciousness, we cannot begin to struggle with fate. We rather remain its prisoner. It behooves all of us to look at the prevalent patterns of our lives and ask what "story" they might be serving.

Going through means that we have to experience what we not wish to experience, for to flee it is even worse.

And how meaningful Beckett's admonition is to me today: Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better. Rilke's paradoxical words also draw me onward still toward the unlived life that haunts all of us. Our task, he writes, is to be 'continuously defeated by ever-larger things.' 145

since the other cannot in the end, and should not ever, carry responsibility for the task of our life, the projections inevitably wear away and the relationship has a tendency to deteriorate into a power struggle. 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 behaviors.

An analytic colleague, Alden Josey, once employed the telling metaphor that secretly "we wish to colonize the other," and like most imperial powers, we are flush with rationalizations to justify our agendas of self-interest.

We have to recall the functional definition of the Shadow as that which renders us uncomfortable in confronting in ourselves.

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.