What Matters Most: Living a More Considered Life

by James Hollis

We are all exiles, whether we know it or not, for who among us feels truly, vitally linked to the four great orders of mystery: the cosmos, nature, the tribe, and self?

“Astride of a grave,” Samuel Beckett wrote, “with a forceps,” coming or going, it is a rocketing, ratcheting, bracketing birth/death ride.

So it is that we read, misread, the world, transforming the fortuitous “out there” to a perduring “in here.”

we all suffer the fallacy of overgeneralization—what was true then, or apparently true, is repeatedly ratified, reinforced by what is reexperienced—and unwittingly re-created in each new venue.

we all assemble a false “sense of self.” Not false because we have lied, but false because it is not about us, but about “them,” about “it,” about the “other.”

We all seem to have forgotten the truth uttered by Philo of Alexandria millennia ago: “Be kind, for everyone you meet has a really big problem.”

Ask yourself of every dilemma, every choice, every relationship, every commitment, or every failure to commit, “Does this choice diminish me, or enlarge me?”

The dragon shows up every day, no worse for the wear, and ready to scare you back into a corner of your life, to swallow you, and to annihilate the life energy you are supposed to incarnate in this world.

It is 5 A.M. All the worse things come stalking in And stand icily about the bed looking worse and worse and worse.

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

our mantra, summons, and daily discipline becomes: That Life Not Be Governed by Fear.

Protecting our persona, deflecting responsibility for our choices and their consequences, fitting in with collective values—all are means by which we seek to “save the appearances” and avoid the discomfort of ambiguity.

I am lifted out of the ordinary. For the moment I leave this horizontal plane of my taxing, boring life and become extraordinary. For the moment, I transcend.

I fantasize that with money I can transform my life, not just pay off the mortgage, but fill my life with new, distracting objects (which thereby come in time to own me).

Transformation promises that I can finally become . . . become more than I am, more than whatever I achieved on my own, more than what was given me, more than the fates hitherto permitted.

with money I can momentarily feel connected to something larger than me. I can experience awe, excitement, a relationship to the transcendent Other.

Notice these values, these profound desires, agencies, agendas of our insistent soul: transcendence, transformation, connection. Those are “religious” values.

As the brain is the organ of thought, and the heart the organ of circulation, and the stomach the organ of digestion, so the “soul” is the organ of “meaning.”

Those who are readily prepared to tell you what is right for you are not your friends. They are unconsciously seeking validation of their own tenuous choices through your compliance.

Angela walks away from her marriage of twenty years. Safe, secure, valued by all, including her husband, she walks away. Why? When asked, she mumbles, “I wanted to know that I wasn’t dead yet.”

herein the metaphor of the gods is simply meant to suggest immensity, endurance, significance, and our respectful acknowledgment of these large, transcendent energies that course through our histories.

one has more commonly embodied the life force through “diffuse awareness” and the other through “focused awareness.”

When Jung once said that “a neurosis is an offended god,” he meant, metaphorically, that the neglect of a deep, instinctual energy ultimately revenges itself in our somatic discords, compulsions, addictions, or projections onto others.

That Cupid has become a cultural icon for romance and valentines, just as the Devil has become a sports mascot, is suggestive of how these powerful images devolve from symbols, which once pointed beyond themselves toward the mystery, to signs, which, as mere concepts, are encapsulated in the ego’s limitations and ultimately trivialized.

Jung defined neurosis as the choice of inauthentic suffering over authentic suffering.

Old age hath yet his honor and his toil. Death closes all; but something ere the end, Some work of noble note, may yet be done, Not unbecoming men that strove with gods. . . . . Come, my friends, ’Tis not too late to seek a newer world.

Too often the fundamentalist factions of our culture either terrify people into compliance—and I will never forgive them for that spiritual violence—or seduce people into the ratification of their complexes by validating the easy materialism and narcissism in which we all swim.

Why do we have psychologists in the media who conveniently fail to verify the contradictions with which we all daily live, the necessary suffering that is a by-product of real life, rather than suggest that three easy steps will bring us happiness and material affluence?

All of us have to ask this simple but piercing question of our relationships, our affiliations, our professions, our politics, and our theology: “Does this path, this choice, make me larger or smaller?”

(Jung once said that every therapist should ask the question, “What task is this person’s neurosis helping him or her avoid?”)

Our provisional selves, our counterfeit identities, are essentially anxiety-management systems. These systems have so much power, so much autonomy, are so deeply buried in our psyches that we seldom know their presence, understand the delegated authority they carry, and the extent to which they govern our lives.

Stepping into largeness will require that we discern our personal authority—rather than the authority of others or the authority of our internalized admonitions—and live this inner authority with risk and boldness.

Friedrich Nietzsche asserted in one of his oxymoronic aphorisms that we are an abyss, and we are the tightrope across the abyss.

The past is past, and is trailing behind us. The future, with new friends, relationships, and challenges, is rushing toward you, asking that you be ready for it. It will ask much of all of us, and we are summoned to be willing participants in the making of this

if we look carefully at the foot of the bed, we will espy two little critters there—call them gremlins, call them demons. One is called Fear, and the other is called Lethargy.

The former says to us, in a most familiar way: “Hey, the world is too big for you, too scary, too powerful. Don’t go out there, you’ll only get hurt. Don’t show up.” This is the cue for the latter, who whispers, “Hey . . .” (they really talk that way) “Hey . . . chill out, lie back, tomorrow’s another day. Have a chocolate. Turn on the telly, hit the Internet, call Sally, pull the blanket back over your head.” (Our world thoughtfully provides many, many virtual blankets to pull over consciousness and its difficult chores.)

what we have become is frequently the chief obstacle to our journey. 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.

The world is full of people droning on, sitting before the telly or the Internet, waiting to die, living only for small sensations of scandal or vicarious catastrophe that they can witness from afar.

Boredom is the pathology of the depressed, or the unimaginative. Ceasing to grow is a failure of nerve, because it is not what our psyche demands.

What makes Odysseus a hero to us, a prototype of our journey, is that he is willing to face his fears and persist, always persist. In his greatest peril he says, “I will stay with it and endure though suffering hardship, and once the heaving sea has shaken my raft to pieces, then will I swim.”

One man expressed it this way: “I always sought to win whatever the game was, and only now do I realize how much I have been played by the game. I played the game hard and willingly, always thinking I was winning something. But in the end there really was nothing to win, or what I did win really didn’t matter in the end.”

The poet Rainer Maria Rilke said it best when he asserted that our task is to be defeated by ever-larger things.

Every day the decision comes back to us: Choose growth or security—you cannot have both. Steer your frail bark between the clashing Symplegades, die unto the blandishments of fear and lethargy, and sail on, or slip back into harbor, unpack your precious cargo, and die.

You asked what mattered most; you asked how to live your life; and you asked what the answer to all these questions is.” “But what is it?” “I taught you to be more comfortable with your uncertainty

Let us recall for a moment that our ego—which seems to us our center, our core, our identity, our rock of ages—is itself one “complex” among many. It is the central complex of consciousness—who we think we are at any given moment, but in any given moment that “complex,” malleable as it is, may be subsumed by other energies with quite contrary agendas, scripts, and provisional identities, and together they collusively produce unpredictable outcomes. (As anyone knows who looks soberly at his or her accumulated history.)

When an image wanes in its power to point beyond itself, to summon up a compelling affective response to the original, it devolves into a sign. A symbol points toward mystery; a sign denotes a content, an “idea.” As people begin to experience the image as a content, they also suffer a progressive discrepancy between the image and the affect it was once able to evoke. In response to this progressive devolution of any image, humankind has created three forms whose purpose is to retain access to, transmit the meaning of, and bind the community to its original encounter and its communal meaning. These three retentive forms are dogma, rites, and cultic practices.

What happens to community, once organized around a felt encounter with the transcendent, is that it gets institutionalized. Institutions serve many defensible purposes, especially the maintenance and transmission of particular values. Yet, as we know, institutions so often have a peculiar way of ending up violating the principles of their founding. Seemingly, two inherent laws of institutions invariably emerge: first, they preserve the institution at all costs, even at the risk of selectively compromising their founding vision,39 and second, they preserve the status of their priesthood,

Christ is not someone’s name, not a noun, a fixed dogma or practice, but an energy, a current among many currents, which together and separately enact the mystery we call divine. The gods are not nouns, but verbs.

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.

death is only the end of a noun, but whatever energizes that noun we call ourselves transforms into something even more mysterious.