Finding Meaning in the Second Half of Life Quotes

“As Jung notes: Individuation cuts one off from personal conformity and hence from collectivity. That is the guilt which the individual leaves behind him for the world, that is the guilt he must endeavor to redeem. He must offer a ransom in place of himself that is, he must bring forth values which are an equivalent substitute for his absence in the collective personal sphere.6 In calling individuation a myth, we mean that such an image, charged with affect, rich with possibility, and related to transcendent purpose, is a psychologically grounding force field for the conduct of a conscious life. Most culturally charged alternatives of our time have noticeably failed because in the end they are not effective, do not satisfy the soul; only the myth of individuation deepens and ennobles our journey. Rather than ask, what does my tribe demand of me, what will win me collective approval, what will please my parents, we ask, what do the gods intend through me? It is a quite different question, and the answers will vary with the stage of life, and from one person to another. The necessary choices will never prove easy, but asking this question, and suffering it honestly, leads through the vicissitudes of life to larger places of meaning and purpose. One finds so much richness of experience, so much growth of consciousness, so much enlargement of one’s vision that the work proves well worth it. The false gods of our culture, power, materialism, hedonism, and narcissism, those upon which we have projected our longing for transcendence, only narrow and diminish. Of each critical juncture of choice, one may usefully ask: “Does this path enlarge or diminish me?” Usually, we know the answer to that 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. Choosing the path that enlarges rather than diminishes will serve us well in navigating through our idol-ridden, clamorous, but sterile time and move us further toward meeting the person we are meant to be.”
― James Hollis, Finding Meaning in the Second Half of Life: How to Finally, Really Grow Up

“As T. S. Eliot once observed, in a world of fugitives, the person who is headed in the right direction will appear to be running away.”
― James Hollis, Finding Meaning in the Second Half of Life: How to Finally, Really Grow Up

“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.”
― James Hollis, Finding Meaning in the Second Half of Life: How to Finally, Really Grow Up

“What usually has the strongest psychic effect on the child is the life which the parents . . . have not lived.” Carl Jung”
― James Hollis, Finding Meaning in the Second Half of Life: How to Finally, Really Grow Up

“The immature psyche needs confirmation to be secure, a cloning of interests and sensibilities, and there is no surer path to staying immature and undeveloped than seeking agreement in all things.”
― James Hollis, Finding Meaning in the Second Half of Life: How to Finally, Really Grow Up

“An analytic colleague, Alden Josey, once employed the telling metaphor that secretly “we wish to colonize the other,” and like most imperial powers, we are flush with rationalizations to justify our agendas of self-interest.”
― James Hollis, Finding Meaning in the Second Half of Life: How to Finally, Really Grow Up

“since the other cannot in the end, and should not ever, carry responsibility for the task of our life, the projections inevitably wear away and the relationship has a tendency to deteriorate into a power struggle. When the other does not conform to our relationship agenda, we often seek to control them through admonishment, withdrawal, passive/aggressive sabotage, and sometimes overtly controlling behaviors.”
― James Hollis, Finding Meaning in the Second Half of Life: How to Finally, Really Grow Up

“Being psychological means that one will need to find the new, the personal myth from within. It will not be found in an external ideology or institution, however benignly intended it may be, for those sources which may have served the past have too often grown self-perpetuating, preserving their own priesthood or corporate leadership, and rigidifying an original primal experience into dogma and formal principles. One will find, sooner or later, that the pneuma, or spirit, has long departed those ideas and places. Nor will right thinking or rational principles of conduct and behavior satisfy the soul. We will not be spared our anxieties, moments of deep despair, and appointments with the fellow with the scythe at the door. No amount of ritual prayer, healthful practices, or salutary motives will plumb the soul’s depths. Quite likely, the soul will speak to us at least some of the time in ways we do not want to hear. But it is speaking, always, and tells of us of that invisible world, which informs, moves, and shapes the visible world.”
― James Hollis, Finding Meaning in the Second Half of Life: How to Finally, Really Grow Up

“I have suggested that women look at men this way: if they took away their own network of intimate friends, those with whom they share their personal journey, removed their sense of instinctual guidance, concluded that they were almost wholly alone in the world, and understood that they would be defined only by standards of productivity external to them, they would then know the inner state of the average man. They are horrified at this notion. Having confused the wielding of outer power roles with identity and freedom, women assume that men have a better life. Certainly, they seem to have more outer choices. But most women do not recognize that men have fewer inner choices. And it is with the inner choices that we most define our lives, as almost all women know.”
― James Hollis, Finding Meaning in the Second Half of Life: How to Finally, Really Grow Up

“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.”
― James Hollis, Finding Meaning in the Second Half of Life: How to Finally, Really Grow Up

“Acceptance of oneself is the essence of the moral problem and the acid test of one’s whole outlook on life. That I feed the beggar, that I forgive an insult, that I love my enemy in the name of Christ—all these are undoubtedly great virtues. What I do unto the least of my brethren, that I do unto Christ. But what if I should discover that the least amongst them all, the poorest of all beggars, the most impudent of all offenders, yea the very fiend himself—that these are within me, and that I myself stand in need of the alms of my own kindness, that I myself am the enemy who must be loved—what then?48”
― James Hollis, Finding Meaning in the Second Half of Life: How to Finally, Really Grow Up

“Büyümek ve evden ayrılmak için iki şey yapabilmemiz gerekir. Birincisi, kendi sorumluluğumuzu almak ve başkalarını suçlamayı bırakmaktadır (toplum, ebeveynler, partner, kötücül tanrılar) İkincisi, tekrarlayan temel fikirleri, kompleksleri ve gerçek düşmanı, yani geçmişe ait etkileri görmek için içimize bakmaktır.”
― James Hollis, Finding Meaning in the Second Half of Life: How to Finally, Really Grow Up

“Büyümek, kendi psikolojik sorumluluğumuzu almamız anlamına gelir”
― James Hollis, Finding Meaning in the Second Half of Life: How to Finally, Really Grow Up

“Ebeveynler çocuklarını şu sözlerle koşulsuz olarak onaylayabilseydi, hayatlarımız ve dünyamız acaba nasıl olurdu: 'Sen bizim için değerlisin; seni daima seveceğiz ve destekleyeceğiz, sen kendin olmak için buradasın; başkalarını incitmemeye çalış ama kendin olmak için sonuna kadar çabala; düştüğünde ve başarısız olduğunda da seni sevmeye devam edeceğiz ama bir gün yanımızdan ayrılacağını biliyoruz; kendi kaderine doğru ilerlerlen bizi memnun etmek için endişe duymana gerek yok.' Tarih nasıl da değişirdi!”
― James Hollis, Finding Meaning in the Second Half of Life: How to Finally, Really Grow Up

“Çocuk üzerinde en güçlü psişik etkiye sahip olan şey ebeveynlerin yaşamadığı hayattır”
― James Hollis, Finding Meaning in the Second Half of Life: How to Finally, Really Grow Up

“Bir zamanlar kendi ebeveynlerimin yapmasını istediğim gibi, ben kendi çocuklarımın sırtından yaşanmamış hayatımın yükünü kaldırıp onları özgür bırakabilir miyim?”
― James Hollis, Finding Meaning in the Second Half of Life: How to Finally, Really Grow Up

“Seçim yapmamızı gerektiren her kritik kavşakta kişi kendine şu faydalı soruyu yönetmelidir : "Bu yol beni büyütüyor mu, yoksa eksiltiyor mu?"Genellikle, bu sorunun cevabını biliriz. Sezgisel olarak, iç güdüsel olarak, içimizden biliriz. Bizi büyütecek yolu seçmek her zaman bireyleşme yolunu seçmek anlamına gelir.”
― James Hollis, Finding Meaning in the Second Half of Life: How to Finally, Really Grow Up

“None of us can help the things life has done to us. They’re done before you realize it. And once they’re done, they make you do other things until at last everything comes between you and what you’d like to be, and you’ve lost your true self forever.12”
― James Hollis, Finding Meaning in the Second Half of Life: How to Finally, Really Grow Up

“Finding what supports you from within will link you to transcendence, reframe the perspectives received from your history, and provide the agenda of growth, purpose, and meaning that we all are meant to carry into the world and to share with others.”
― James Hollis, Finding Meaning in the Second Half of Life: How to Finally, Really Grow Up

“This circuitry activates the old message that this fear, this issue, is larger than you, and so you ignore the conscious, empowered adult you have become since then.”
― James Hollis, Finding Meaning in the Second Half of Life: How to Finally, Really Grow Up

“Is the life you are living too small for your soul’s desire?”
― James Hollis, Finding Meaning in the Second Half of Life: How to Finally, Really Grow Up

“When the moment is ripe for us to hear, then the word is spoken.”
― James Hollis, Finding Meaning in the Second Half of Life: How to Finally, Really Grow Up

“We all had that sense of who we were for a short time in childhood, and then it got lost. It is possible to get it back and to live a larger life if we are humble enough to confess that what we have been doing with our lives has not proved sufficient.”
― James Hollis, Finding Meaning in the Second Half of Life: How to Finally, Really Grow Up

“Why does life seem a script written elsewhere,
and you barely consulted, if at all?”
― James Hollis, Finding Meaning in the Second Half of Life: How to Finally, Really Grow Up

“we are brought here to add our small portion of the truth to the world,”
― James Hollis, Finding Meaning in the Second Half of Life: How to Finally, Really Grow Up

“to shout, or even speak loudly, or to bring his needs to the table in any way resulted in her hysterical outbursts or withdrawal from him. Accordingly, he learned to manage his mother at an early age. He devoted himself to her needs and stifled his own.”
― James Hollis, Finding Meaning in the Second Half of Life: How to Finally, Really Grow Up

“permission will not be given; the adult must seize it. What once passed for amiability, for a cooperative spirit, for “niceness,” becomes, in the second half of life, an unacceptable liability.”
― James Hollis, Finding Meaning in the Second Half of Life: How to Finally, Really Grow Up

“sometimes children lose touch with their needs altogether and spend a life of chameleon-like adaptation to the demands of those around them.”
― James Hollis, Finding Meaning in the Second Half of Life: How to Finally, Really Grow Up

“Who among us did not learn to conceal, having first learned that to reveal is to be at risk?”
― James Hollis, Finding Meaning in the Second Half of Life: How to Finally, Really Grow Up

“we can spend decades climbing the ladder, only to realize too late that we have placed it against the wrong wall.”
― James Hollis, Finding Meaning in the Second Half of Life: How to Finally, Really Grow Up