Creating a Life: Finding Your Individual Path

by James Hollis

The more you are like the others, the more secure you will feel, yet the more your heart will ache, the more dreams will be troubled and the more your soul will slip off into silences.

What has been denied in the individual will breed monsters in the tribe, as ancient literature shows.

As social adaptation is obligatory, some measure of self-alienation is universal.

Consciousness is the gift, and that is the best it gets.

As creatures of history, we are forever imposing that history on the present moment.

When consciousness is dominated by the materials of the unconscious, one is, for all practical purposes, in the past and not in the present.

Only when the self mirrors itself in so many mirrors does it really exist—then it has roots.

The self appears in your deeds, and deeds always mean relationship.

Making fictions consciously is sanity and pragmatism; making fictions unconsciously, and being captivated by them, is madness.

Tithonus of Greek myth was immortal, yet found life empty because no choice mattered.

He asks a blessing of the gods, that he be given mortality, so that choice could be decisive, so that life could matter.

permission to be who we are was so often conditionalized in childhood that most persons have to attain that existential freedom along the way on their own.

Most often, the anxiety aroused by the summons to a larger life is more than we can bear.

The agenda of the soul will not be denied though it may be repressed. It will show up in depression, listlessness, ennui and fantasies.

It is the endeavor to live the life one has imaged which constitutes the sum and purpose of the whole second half of life.

The test of a psychologically mature person, and therefore spiritually mature, will be found in his or her capacity to handle what one might call the Triple A’s: anxiety, ambiguity and ambivalence.

sometimes even the brightest do not know enough to know that they do not know enough.

wherever rationalizations are found, there complexes are present.

the spiritual and political landscape of our time is in the hands of those who are governed by anxiety, ambiguity and ambivalence. This is why they seek power in the first place and respond autocratically, dogmatically and with no little totalitarianism.

The resonance within us cannot be willed; it happens. No amount of willing will make it happen. But resonance is the surest guide to finding our own right path.

The chief symptom of our culture is its banality. The chief antidote to banality is the willingness to accept the transformative suffering of depth.

paradoxically is demonstrated by the sometimes terrible choice we have to make between fear and anxiety. When we elect the fearful path, we regress, we infantilize, we oversimplify, we cut ourselves off from development and enlargement. When we embrace the anxiety attendant upon our condition, we open to the power of the divine.

In that mysterious, inexplicable smile, Sisyphus says yes to his life, a condition he cannot chose, but an attitude which is entirely his. This yes is the achievement of amor fati, the love of one’s fate.

Is amor fati only a rationalization, a ploy to relieve one of the burden of hopelessness?

In fact, one of the chief signs of the shift into the second half of life is the move from the magical ideas of childhood through the heroic, necessary self-delusion of youth and early adulthood, to the sober experience of limitation and regret in later life.

“The experience of the self is always a defeat for the ego.”

Surely meaning will be found not by the ego’s triumphant conquest of fate, but by its interaction with, enlargement through, and sometimes defeat by, fate.

Loving one’s fate, in the end, means living the life one is summoned to, not the life envisioned by the ego, by one’s parents or by societal expectations.

Whatever one’s fate may have in store, the task, if we are up to it, is to serve the individuation imperative, to become as nearly like ourselves as we can manage.

We fall under the influence of a complex, a psychological “idea,” and as a result of that idea we make bad choices.

What we are seeking to do in our lives, then, is to redeem history, redeem our ancestors, for the work we do not accomplish in our generation will become the chief burden of our children, students, clients and friends.

the invitation of a crisis then is to sift through, to discern what is important, to find what developmental task may be required.

the crisis requires the development of new attitudes, however disdainful the ego may be.

Most of us find ourselves the chief prosecuting attorney at our own trial.

To have a hope of surviving the second half of life, one will have to find a measure of self-forgiveness.

Tillich’s profound definition of “grace” was the capacity to accept oneself despite the fact that one is unacceptable.

We are all worthy, as unworthy as we are, and are redeemed by our capacity to feel unredeemable.

The more we seek diversion the greater the concomitant boredom.

Whatever fear blocks one now, is it not a greater fear not to have been here, not to have mattered, not to have lived one’s life?

Most adults today are uninitiated, in that they have not experienced a death/rebirth, or found purchase in a larger vision vouchsafed by some wise elder who has been there and returned, compassionately, to share what is needed.

What is missing is the discovery, which I believe critical for the worth, integrity and meaning of one’s life, of the guru we all carry inside of us.

If we do not know of the Self, then we know next to nothing of ourselves.

A sage is not a sage because she or he is older, more experienced, more intelligent or articulate. One can be an old fool just as easily as one was a young fool, and all of us were young fools. A sage is a person who has come to know what is true for him or her, one who has been refined by the fires of suffering and achieved a modicum of peace with what he or she knows, believes, lives.

The great teachers are still found in nature, animals, children, and the enlargement which comes through being open to mystery.

Meaning is not something found, or sought; it is something experienced along the way if one is fully flung into the matter.

In the second half of life we are invited to leave ambition behind, as well as a preoccupation with self-esteem.

​Without ambition we would never leave the abode of parental protection and nourishment, never find that of which we might be capable.

The experience involved in reaching for ever higher goals is necessary to strengthen the ego.

Whoever has not attained a self-reflecting ego is at the mercy of complexes and remains in childhood, however powerful in outer

the greatest achievement of ambition will be to attain enough ego-reflectivity to be able to relinquish ambition.