Living Between Worlds Quotes

“If you want to cure a neurosis, you have to risk something.”2”
― James Hollis, Living Between Worlds: Finding Personal Resilience in Changing Times

“There was a rush of expectation with the vast transformation of our society by social media and by the internet itself. To be sure, we have greater access to each other now, we can find each other more easily, but we can also annoy each other more incessantly, intrude more abruptly, and use and abuse each other more profoundly by bombarding folks with unwanted commercial, religious, political, sentimentalized, and trivial chaff. (Wherever the human imprint advances, the Shadow follows apace.) For all the connectivity the modern electronic world offers, and I do appreciate that gift, I also perceive that we are more atomized, more disconnected from each other than ever before.”
― James Hollis, Living Between Worlds: Finding Personal Resilience in Changing Times

“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.”
― James Hollis, Living Between Worlds: Finding Personal Resilience in Changing Times

“All of life is attachment and loss, an unavoidable, rhythmic exchange.”
― James Hollis, Living Between Worlds: Finding Personal Resilience in Changing Times

“Perhaps I can best explain by presenting these three somewhat arcane principles of depth psychology and then go on to unpack them and give you examples.

I. It's not about what it's about.
II. What you see is a compensation for what you don't see.
III. All is metaphor.”
― James Hollis, Living Between Worlds: Finding Personal Resilience in Changing Times

“But to move beyond a posture of outrage at life’s “betrayal,” we are called to ask another question: To what present task is this swampland calling me?”
― James Hollis, Living Between Worlds: Finding Personal Resilience in Changing Times

“As Jung pointed out, our ancestors believed in gods; we believe in vitamins—both invisible.”
― James Hollis, Living Between Worlds: Finding Personal Resilience in Changing Times

“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.”
― James Hollis, Living Between Worlds: Finding Personal Resilience in Changing Times

“Depth psychology understands that the goal of life is not happiness, which is only transiently possible anyhow, but meaning, which abides.”
― James Hollis, Living Between Worlds: Finding Personal Resilience in Changing Times

“Attachment is always attached to loss.”
― James Hollis, Living Between Worlds: Finding Personal Resilience in Changing Times

“Perhaps I can best explain by presenting these three somewhat arcane principles of depth psychology and then go on to unpack them and give you examples.

I. It's not about what it's about.
II. What you see if a compensation for what you don't see.
III. All is metaphor.”
― James Hollis, Living Between Worlds: Finding Personal Resilience in Changing Times

“It is no secret we live in troubled times. People in most areas—and most geographic and spiritual locations—have also thought themselves living in troubled times, and for sure, most individuals come to troubles sooner or later in the course of their own lifetime.”
― James Hollis, Living Between Worlds: Finding Personal Resilience in Changing Times

“even the most devout creationist today will not walk into an emergency room and insist that he or she be given “only the treatment available to Moses, or Jesus, or Mohammed, and of course, don’t bother with that anesthetic stuff. And, while I am here, why not trepan my brain and let those evil spirits out?”
― James Hollis, Living Between Worlds: Finding Personal Resilience in Changing Times