Finding Meaning in the Second Half of Life Quotes

“Together, we have been humbled by our joint encounters with the Self, Carl Jung’s metaphor for that inherent, unique, knowing, directive, intelligence that lies so wholly beyond our ordinary ego consciousness.”
― James Hollis, Finding Meaning in the Second Half of Life: How to Finally, Really Grow Up

“The poet Dante began his famous, fabulous descent into the underworld with the recognition that midway in life he found himself in a dark wood, having lost his way. Despite our best intentions, we, too, frequently find ourselves in a dark wood. No amount of good intentions, conscientious intelligence, forethought, planning, prayer, or guidance from others can spare us these periodic encounters with confusion, disorientation, boredom, depression, disappointment in ourselves and others, and dissolution of the plans and stratagems that seemed to work before. What”
― James Hollis, Finding Meaning in the Second Half of Life: How to Finally, Really Grow Up

“Our ego tendency to seize upon the image and hold it captive to our agenda for security leads to the oldest of religious sins, the sin of idolatry. The”
― James Hollis, Finding Meaning in the Second Half of Life: How to Finally, Really Grow Up

“The task for each of us will be found in an increasing capacity to bear our lives without diversion and to suffer the soul’s distress until we are led where it wishes to take us.”
― James Hollis, Finding Meaning in the Second Half of Life: How to Finally, Really Grow Up

“Whatever theory speaks to the reader, surely we are called to become more fully what we are, in simple service to the richness of the universe of possibilities.”
― James Hollis, Finding Meaning in the Second Half of Life: How to Finally, Really Grow Up

“And when we live without meaning, we suffer the greatest illness of all.”
― James Hollis, Finding Meaning in the Second Half of Life: How to Finally, Really Grow Up

“A King sent you to a country to curry out one special, specific task. You go to the country and you perform a hundred other tasks, but if you have not performed the task you were sent for, it is as if you have performed nothing at all. So man has come into the world for a particular task and that is his purpose. If he doesn’t perform it, he will have done nothing.14 Chapter Five The Dynamics of Intimate Relationship “Sometimes I forget completely”
― James Hollis, Finding Meaning in the Second Half of Life: How to Finally, Really Grow Up

“We have to stumble through so much dirt and humbug before we reach home. And we have no one to guide us. Our only guide is our homesickness.”
― James Hollis, Finding Meaning in the Second Half of Life: How to Finally, Really Grow Up

“that his children must enter the world In search of that sanctuary, which he forgot.11”
― James Hollis, Finding Meaning in the Second Half of Life: How to Finally, Really Grow Up

“Occasionally someone rises from evening meal, Goes outside, and goes, and goes, and goes. . . Because somewhere in the East a sanctuary stands. And his children lament as though he had died. And another, who dies within his house, Remains there, remains amid dishes and glasses, So”
― James Hollis, Finding Meaning in the Second Half of Life: How to Finally, Really Grow Up

“It is of paramount importance that our spirituality be validated or confirmed by fidelity to our personal experience. A spiritual tradition that is only received from history or from family makes no real difference in a person’s life, for he or she is living by conditioned reflexive response. Only what is experientially true is worthy of a mature spirituality.”
― James Hollis, Finding Meaning in the Second Half of Life: How to Finally, Really Grow Up

“democracy flourishes when we express our doubts over a policy, over the motives of our leaders. Compare this with those who flee troubling ambiguity by wrapping themselves and their vehicles in flags, drown honest debate with chauvinistic clamor, and encourage a pseudo-patriotism that ill serves its nation by silencing serious dialogue that might lead to more refined judgment.”
― James Hollis, Finding Meaning in the Second Half of Life: How to Finally, Really Grow Up

“The new myth will not come from above. Only totalitarian ideologies, or ego-crafted appeals to our complexes, will appear in such fashion.”
― James Hollis, Finding Meaning in the Second Half of Life: How to Finally, Really Grow Up

“What is this touching in me?” “Where does this come from in my history?” “Where have I felt this kind of energy before?” “Can I see the pattern beneath the surface?” “What is the hidden idea, or complex, that is creating this pattern?” “Is there something promising magic, Easy Street, seduction, ‘solution’ here, when, as we know, life will always remain raggedy and incomplete?” And, always; “Am I made larger, or smaller, by this path, this relationship, this decision?”
― 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

“Solitude can be defined as learning that we are not alone when we are alone. When we have achieved the stature of solitude, namely achieving a conscious relationship with ourselves, then we are freer to share ourselves with others, freer to receive their gifts in return and not be infantilized by the mutual archaic agenda of childhood, the agenda that covertly uses the other to provide for us.”
― James Hollis, Finding Meaning in the Second Half of Life: How to Finally, Really Grow Up

“And thus fourthly, it only stands to reason, that the best thing we can do for ourselves and for the other is to assume more of the developmental agenda for ourselves.”
― James Hollis, Finding Meaning in the Second Half of Life: How to Finally, Really Grow Up

“Even when surrounded by many others, your journey is solitary, for the life you are to choose is your life, not someone else’s. Alone, we nonetheless move amid a community of other solitudes; alone, our world is peopled with many companions, both within and without. Thus, this paradox stands before each of us, and challenges: We “must be alone if [we] are to find out what it is that supports [us] when we can no longer support [ourselves]. Only this experience can give [us] an indestructible foundation.”63 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. The soul asks each of us that we live a larger life. Each day this summons is renewed and leaves you, unspeakably, to sort out your life, with its fearsome immensities, so that, now boundaried, now limitless, it transforms itself as stone in you and star.”
― James Hollis, Finding Meaning in the Second Half of Life: How to Finally, Really Grow Up

“So, here you are, in this mysterious now. With your history receding like the sound of a hunter’s horn along the wind, with your future rushing toward you like the next season, now is the moment, the only moment that exists, in which becoming can be and in which consciousness can make a difference. Perhaps the highest achievement of consciousness is not the self-serving reiteration of its own glories, its agenda of regressive reinforcement in the face of the large, intimidating cosmos that is our home, but rather its capacity to acknowledge that it has been called to witness, and to serve, to serve something much larger. There is in you room for a second, timeless, and larger life. For, as the poet Walt Whitman wrote in “A Clear Midnight”: This is the hour O Soul, thy free flight into the wordless Away from books, away from art, the day erased, the lesson done, Thee fully forth emerging, silent, gazing, pondering the themes thou lovest best, Night, sleep, death and the stars.”
― James Hollis, Finding Meaning in the Second Half of Life: How to Finally, Really Grow Up

“Psychiatry today is less a psychotherapeutic enterprise than a pharmacological crapshoot,”
― James Hollis, Finding Meaning in the Second Half of Life: How to Finally, Really Grow Up

“Thus, soul solicits us even as we seek it. The German poet Friedrich Hölderlin expressed the paradox this way: “That which thou seekst is near, and already coming to meet thee.”
― James Hollis, Finding Meaning in the Second Half of Life: How to Finally, Really Grow Up

“As Jung observed decades ago: Once metaphysical ideas have lost their capacity to recall and evoke the original experience they have not only become useless but prove to be actual impediments on the road to wider development. One clings to possessions that have once meant wealth; and the more ineffective, incomprehensible, and lifeless they become the more obstinately people cling to them. . . . This end result is. . . a false spirit of arrogance, hysteria, wooly-mindedness, criminal amorality, and doctrinaire fanaticism, a purveyor of shoddy spiritual goods, spurious art, philosophical stutterings, and Utopian humbug, fit only to be fed wholesale to the mass man of today.”
― James Hollis, Finding Meaning in the Second Half of Life: How to Finally, Really Grow Up

“So much of life is on automatic pilot, and we pay for this loss of consciousness over and over in the sabotage of relationships, in our self-stultifying attitudes, and in the shameful power we routinely bequeath to others in managing our values.”
― James Hollis, Finding Meaning in the Second Half of Life: How to Finally, Really Grow Up

“Folk wisdom observes that lovers are fools, lovers are blind; we also speak of a folie a deux because in this mutually projective state, the person is acting not out of a conscious relationship to reality, but out of the archaic and often overwhelming power of personal history.”
― James Hollis, Finding Meaning in the Second Half of Life: How to Finally, Really Grow Up

“This search, this fantasy, is the chief fuel for our culture—the fantasy of romantic love, the fantasy that there is this other who will make our life work for us, heal us, protect us, nurture us, and spare us the world’s trauma.”
― James Hollis, Finding Meaning in the Second Half of Life: How to Finally, Really Grow Up

“This archetypal drama is renewed every day, in every generation, in every institution, and in every decisive moment of personal life. Faced with such a choice, choose anxiety and ambiguity, for they are developmental, always, while depression is regressive. Anxiety is an elixir, and depression a sedative. The former keeps us on the edge of our life, and the latter in the sleep of childhood.”
― James Hollis, Finding Meaning in the Second Half of Life: How to Finally, Really Grow Up

“the Sage of Koenigsburg, Immanuel Kant, ended traditional metaphysics and made modern psychology necessary by discerning that we never know reality directly;”
― James Hollis, Finding Meaning in the Second Half of Life: How to Finally, Really Grow Up

“He was not saying that external reality does not exist; rather, that we can only know it subjectively.”
― James Hollis, Finding Meaning in the Second Half of Life: How to Finally, Really Grow Up

“We need to be able to differentiate for a moment fear, anxiety and angst. Angst is existential anxiety, it comes with the condition: we are born, we are consious, we are aware of our fragility and mortality and that contributes to the sense of the peril in which daily life occurs. That’s existantial anxiety, it’s not pathological...it’s part of the suffering, of the human condition. Fear is something specific, something related to a specific threat, real or perceived, to our wellbeing. Anxiety is a free floating anticipatory emotion, anxiety is always in some way bound to the future, like something could happen here, something might happen. Paradoxicallly guilt binds us to the past and we always stuck in the past with guilt. And anxiety binds us to a possible future, a so improbable one, but a possible one. So in differentiating for a moment between fear and anxiety we realize that there can be therapeutic move from anxiety to fear, and you could say: oh, yea, i feel so much better already! I am not anxious anymore, i am just fearfiul. In many cases our fears are non existents or manageable, in many cases our fears are based on powerless past...most of our fears.. if you look at them as an adult, they are not going to happen, but if they were to happen, we can bear them, because we’ve also become adults, we have most of all we have psychological tensil strength, we have resiliance that child did not have, we have modes of behavious and other choices available to us, we have a capacity for toleration, we have a capacity for freedom of motion, that we didn’t have as a child... And so many times the effort to define a fear is to say it’s not going to happen, but if it were to happen, i can handle it, i can manage that. Fear in a sense is specific always, anxiety is like a fog that blows across the highway.,i t can keep us from driving as we can’t see clearly what is happening, but underneath all that we know that anxiety has power to cripple life.”
― James Hollis PhD, Finding Meaning in the Second Half of Life: How to Finally, Really Grow Up

“triumphed over both fear of loss and desire of sovereignty, he is free, and therefore serene. How far such serenity is from the frenzies of our market-fueled fantasies of acquisition, control, and ownership, and therefore how constant is our terror of loss and our flight from the honesty of grief. Again, only through relinquishment, which is a deliberate act of letting go of the false hope of permanent purchase on life’s treasures, can one experience serenity, and at the same time savor the plenitude that has so richly come to each of us.”
― James Hollis, Finding Meaning in the Second Half of Life: How to Finally, Really Grow Up