Hauntings Quotes

“How many of those who are insecure seek power over others as a compensation for inadequacy and wind up bringing consequences down upon their heads and those around them? How many hide out in their lives, resist the summons to show up, or live fugitive lives, jealous, projecting onto others, and then wonder why nothing ever really feels quite right. How many proffer compliance with the other, buying peace at the price of soul, and wind up with neither?”
― James Hollis, Hauntings: Dispelling the Ghosts Who Run Our Lives

“How different the world would be if each parent could say to the child: “Who you are is terrific, all you are meant to be. And who you are, as you are, is loved by all of us. You have a source within, which is the soul, and it will express itself to you through what we call desire. Always respect the well-being of the other, but live your own journey, serve that desire, risk being that which wishes to enter the world through you, and you will always have our love, even if your path takes you away from us.” Such persons would then have a powerful tool to enable them to change their lives when it was not working out for them. Such persons would be able to make difficult decisions, mindful always of the impact on others, but also determined to live the life intended by the gods who brought us here.”
― James Hollis, Hauntings: Dispelling the Ghosts Who Run Our Lives

“This is why Jung observed that the greatest burden the child must bear is the unlived life of the parent.”
― James Hollis, Hauntings: Dispelling the Ghosts Who Run Our Lives

“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.”
― James Hollis, Hauntings: Dispelling the Ghosts Who Run Our Lives

“Jung observed that everyone has a pathological secret, something so scary, so shameful perhaps, so humiliating, that one will protect it nearly any cost.”
― James Hollis, Hauntings: Dispelling the Ghosts Who Run Our Lives

“How scary it might prove to conclude that I am essentially alone in this summons to personal consciousness, that I cannot continue to blame others for what has happened to me, that I am really out there on that tightrope over the abyss, making choices every day, and that I am truly, irrevocably responsible for my life. That I would have to grow up, stand naked before this immense brutal universe, and step in to the largeness of this journey, my journey.”
― James Hollis, Hauntings: Dispelling the Ghosts Who Run Our Lives

“Standing before the awesome majesty and magnitude of the universe is so intimidating that many of us cry out for mediators—the state, gurus, evangelists with coifed hair—all with their own agendas of gain. The purveyors of the marketplace frequently denounce those who learn to respect their own encounter with mystery as "gnostics." Well, gnosis means "knowledge." If I can learn from my direct experience of the universe, and am haunted by them when I ignore them, then why not live my life according what I have learned directly, rather than what is mediated by others, however sincere their motivation may be?”
― James Hollis, Hauntings: Dispelling the Ghosts Who Run Our Lives

“If we are not willing to risk all, again, then we are precluded from intimacy.”
― James Hollis, Hauntings: Dispelling the Ghosts Who Run Our Lives

“Going through means that we have to experience what we not wish to experience, for to flee it is even worse.”
― James Hollis, Hauntings: Dispelling the Ghosts Who Run Our Lives

“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.”
― James Hollis, Hauntings: Dispelling the Ghosts Who Run Our Lives

“… all our stuck places track back to the twin existential threats to our survival and well-being: abandonment and being overwhelmed.”
― James Hollis, Hauntings: Dispelling the Ghosts Who Run Our Lives

“These stories are real, the dreams are real, yet the dilemmas each person faces are founded on the presences that haunt from their past. We see again the twin mechanisms present in all relationships: projection and transference. Each of them, meeting any stranger, reflexively scans the data of history for clues, expectations, possibilities. This scanning mechanism is instantaneous, mostly unconscious, and then the lens of history slips over one's eyes. This refractive lens alters the reality of the other and brings to consciousness a necessarily distorted picture. Attached to that particular lens is a particular history, the dynamics, the script, the outcomes of which are part of the transferred package. Freud once humorously speculated that when a couple goes to bed there are six people jammed together because the spectral presences of the parents are unavoidable. One would have to add to this analogy the reminder that those parents also import their own relational complexes from their parents, so we quickly have fourteen underfoot, not to mention the persistence of even more ancestral influences. How could intimate relationships not be congested arenas? As shopworn as the idea seems, we cannot overemphasize the importance of primal imagoes playing a domineering role in our relational patterns. They may be unconscious, which grants them inordinate power, or we may flee them, but they are always present. Thus, for example, wherever the parent is stuck—such as Damon's mother who only equates sexuality with the perverse and the unappealing, and his father who stands de-potentiated and co-opted—so the child will feel similarly constrained or spend his or her life trying to break away (“anything but that”) and still be defined by someone else's journey. How could Damon not feel depressed, then, at his own stuckness, and how could he not approach intimacy with such debilitating ambivalence?”
― James Hollis, Hauntings: Dispelling the Ghosts Who Run Our Lives

“These four questions that never go away are:

1. Why are we here, in service to what, and toward what end? (the cosmological question)
2. How are we as animal forms, empowered with spirit, to live in harmony with our natural environment? (the ecological question)
3. Who are my people, what is my duty to others, and what are rights and duties, privileges, and expectations of my tribe? (the sociological question)
4. Who am I, how am I different from others, what is my life about, and how am I to find my way through the difficulties of live? (the psychological question)”
― James Hollis, Hauntings: Dispelling the Ghosts Who Run Our Lives

“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”
― James Hollis, Hauntings: Dispelling the Ghosts Who Run Our Lives

“Charles experienced a shamanic visitation …
The haw is in the air and I hear its screech. The hawk flies about me, then I can feel its talons on my scalp. It lets go and faces me. I look into its eyes. The hawk is ancient yet I seem to know who he is. The hawk speaks, "I am the spirits from the past, and I come to you because it is difficult for you to to come to us." [When Charles resists the hawk digs its talons into his face and pecks at him.] I fall on my back and shout out to the hawk that I will follow his commands. The beat of the hawk's wings heal the wounds as if I was never attacked.
I gaze into the hawk's eyes and see unhappy spirits walking among the trees in a single file. they are roped together and walk in silence, gloom, despair. At the front of the line are my parents, and behind them are their parents, and parents going back in time.
The hawk tells me that I must loosen the rope that binds them together. I tell the hawk that I do not know how to do this, but the hawk bestows a feather on me that tells me that I "have one life in which to find these spirits. And do not forget that the spirits need you.”
― James Hollis, Hauntings: Dispelling the Ghosts Who Run Our Lives

“David McKay, 1900. Wolfe, Thomas. Look Homeward, Angel. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1929. Yeats, William Butler. A Vision”
― James Hollis, Hauntings: Dispelling the Ghosts Who Run Our Lives

“If we cannot count on reciprocity with others, on what may we base our decisions, our sense of self, our ground of being? We all tend to treat the vicissitudes of our lives and the anfractuosities of our unfolding natures as insurgencies, usurpers of our control and ego frames, and we stoutly resist growth and change, even though this is the natural order of all things.”
― James Hollis, Hauntings: Dispelling the Ghosts Who Run Our Lives

“Alas, I rather hate myself For hateful deeds committed by myself. —WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE, RICHARD III, ACT 5, SCENE 5”
― James Hollis, Hauntings: Dispelling the Ghosts Who Run Our Lives

“In the book Swamplands of the Soul, I noted that in every swampland visitation we experience, there is always a task, the addressing of which can move us from victimage to active participation in the construction of our journey, and the flight from which invariably leads to the same old, same old. Or, as poet Gerard Manley Hopkins put it, to remain our own “sweating selves.”
― James Hollis, Hauntings: Dispelling the Ghosts Who Run Our Lives

“What task is this person's neurosis helping him or her avoid?”
― James Hollis, Hauntings: Dispelling the Ghosts Who Run Our Lives

“Freud once humorously speculated that when a couple goes to bed there are six people jammed together because the spectral presences of the parents are unavoidable. One would have to add to this analogy the reminder that those parents also import their own relational complexes from their parents, so we quickly have fourteen underfoot, not to mention the persistence of even more ancestral influences. How could intimate relationships not be congested arenas?”
― James Hollis, Hauntings: Dispelling the Ghosts Who Run Our Lives

“The old French proverb that to know all is to forgive all would challenge us to hear the story of the other in his or her faltering journey or, failing that, to at least understand that the other has such a story which would, upon our hearing, melt our icy hearts and fear-driven defenses. Like the conditioned mill horse, it is more familiar to continue in the same fruitless path, each dreary circuit deepening the trough in which we walk, but what a desolate track that is.”
― James Hollis, Hauntings: Dispelling the Ghosts Who Run Our Lives

“Absences are still presences and death, divorce or distances do not end relationships.”
― James Hollis, Hauntings: Dispelling the Ghosts Who Run Our Lives

“The difference between us and the mill horse is our capacity for imagination.”
― James Hollis, Hauntings: Dispelling the Ghosts Who Run Our Lives

“… but she herself embodies their greatest, most therapeutic gift: the message that we are here to be here, to go through it all and to retain our dignity, purpose, and values as best we can.”
― James Hollis, Hauntings: Dispelling the Ghosts Who Run Our Lives

“These four questions that never go away are:

Why are we here, in service to what, and toward what end? (the cosmological question)/li>
How are we as animal forms, empowered with spirit, to live in harmony with our natural environment? (the ecological question)
Who are my people, what is my duty to others, and what are rights and duties, privileges, and expectations of my tribe? (the sociological question)
Who am I, how am I different from others, what is my life about, and how am I to find my way through the difficulties of live? (the psychological question)
106”
― James Hollis, Hauntings: Dispelling the Ghosts Who Run Our Lives

“It is only when we welcome such spirits and give them entrance that they may reveal themselves to us. When we open to ask what comes to us, why it has come, we may grow and be enlarged by the dialogue that emerges. When we deny them entrance, they do not go away. They go underground, persist, perseverate, and prevail.”
― James Hollis, Hauntings: Dispelling the Ghosts Who Run Our Lives