Quotes from James Hollis

but I am further persuaded that sex (and its accompanying fantasy of romantic love) is now carrying the burden of much of our lost spirituality.

My Shadow was not evil; it was the defense against being myself, my own—apparently risky, apparently too costly—self.

Wouldn't a woman who paid attention to her dreams, and tried to adopt choices based on their direction and value system, be successful, even if she were departing further and further from the approval of her family?

Something within each of us is stirred by forms, images, values, to which others may prove indifferent or incredulous. If such images and forms speak to us, occasion resonance , then they express in outer form some analogue to what lies within.

All of life is attachment and loss, an unavoidable, rhythmic exchange.

To this day God is the name by which I designate all things which cross my willful path violently and recklessly, all things which upset my subjective views, plans and intentions and change the course of my life for better or worse.

Personhood is not a gift; it is a continuing struggle; the gift is attained later, and only from living a mindful journey where, prompted by an inner summons, we write our story at last.

all our stuck places track back to the twin existential threats to our survival and well-being: abandonment and being overwhelmed.

Man has only his two feet to stand on, his own human trinity to see him through: Reason, Courage, and Grace. And the first plus the second equals the third.

What usually has the strongest psychic effect on the child is the life which the parents . . . have not lived." Carl Jung

We live in a similarly shattered Weltanschauung where cultural distractions urgently seek to mask the demise of tribal mythologies, where sex, power, money are offered up as "connections" to replace the linking to the transcendent mythic images once granted.

Think of what the word means literally, to de-press, to press down. What is "pressed down"? Life's energy, life's intentionality is thwarted, denied, violated… Life is warring against life….

Go into the fear, deal with it, lest you live a fugitive life.

Life is a loan, and we have to return it to the universe.

Was a particular person a "saint" because she sacrificed her own journey in service to others; was her life as lived in fact her authentic journey, or was she driven by complexes so powerful as to render her incapable of choosing anything else?

people [are] likely to be Muslims or Christians more from a need to belong to a group that would provide emotional reassurance in a difficult world, rather than as a result of a personal search for truth and meaning.

Depth psychology understands that the goal of life is not happiness, which is only transiently possible anyhow, but meaning, which abides.

Violent men don't have the strength of consciousness and character to own responsibility for what is missing in their own psychological life. They pummel others for not carrying their own anguished souls.

Of each critical juncture of choice, one may usefully ask, "Does this path enlarge or diminish me?" Usually, we know the answer to the question. We know it intuitively, instinctively, in the gut. Choosing the path that enlarges is always going to mean choosing the path of individuation. The gods want us to grow up, to step up to that high calling that each soul carries as its destiny.

Notice how shame, consciously or unconsciously, pulls us away from risk, ratifies our negative sense of worth through self-sabotage, or compels us into frenetic efforts at overcompensation, grandiosity, or yearning for validation that never comes. How much each of us needs to remember theologian Paul Tillich's definition of grace as accepting the fact that we are accepted, despite the fact that we are unacceptable.

We have an entire culture of addictive treatment plans, of sensate distraction, and of jejune impatience that is driven by the preference of security through unconsciousness as an antidote to growth.

Anxiety is the price of the ticket to life: intrapsychic depression is the by-product of the refusal to climb aboard.

David McKay, 1900. Wolfe, Thomas. Look Homeward, Angel. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1929. Yeats, William Butler. A Vision

The object is not to win or lose, for that is already decided, and already irrelevant80—for us it is rather to be on the playing field, with utmost exercise of élan and investment of spirit to the end.