James Hollis

Outlines an approach to achieving happiness that counsels on ways to overcome fear-based hurdles, explains how to evaluate one's internal beliefs, and reveals the importance of pursuing growth rather than security.

Living a More Considered Life

What Matters Most

Laura Mei

Fear is the enemy. Life is not your enemy; the Other is not your enemy; fear is the enemy, and fear has crowded you into a diminished corridor of that vast mansion of possibility that the gods provide us. Ask yourself of every dilemma, every choice, every relationship, every commitment, or every failure to commit, "Does this choice diminish me, or enlarge me?" Do not ask this question if you are afraid of the answer. You might be afraid of what your own soul will require of you, but at least you then know your marching orders. There is no blame in being fearful; it is our common lot, our common susceptibility. But it may be a crime, an impiety against the gods, when our individual summons, our destiny, is diverted or destroyed by fear.

Soul is the energy that blows through us, that enters us at birth, animates our journey, and then departs, wither we know not, at our passing. As the brain is the organ of thought, and the heart the organ of circulation, so the soul is the organ of 𝘮𝘦𝘢𝘯𝘪𝘯𝘨. When life is lived in accord with psyche's intent, we experience inner harmony, supporting energy, feeling confirmation, and we experience our lives as meaningful. When we, or the world, violate the intent of psyche, we suffer symptoms; we pathologize on personal or collective bases. Healing, satisfaction, and meaning only come when we identify what feeds our soul, and find also the courage and wherewithal to make it happen.

Our maturational process is directly linked to the capacity to progressively handle ambiguity, discomfiting as it may prove. In fact, the test of psychological, political, social and spiritual maturity is found precisely in the capacity of any person to tolerate ambiguity. An ability to tolerate the anxiety generated by ambiguity is what allows us to respect, engage, and grow from our repeated, daily encounters with the essential mysteries of life. But the payoff goes even further. Certainty begets stagnation, but ambiguity pulls us deeper into life. Unchallenged conviction begets rigidity, which begets regression; but ambiguity opens us to discovery, complexity, and therefore growth. The health of our culture, and the magnitude of our personal journeys, require that we learn to tolerate ambiguity, in service to a larger life.

As we all know, life is a series of passages. In every passage there is a death of some sort, the death of naïveté, the death of a dependency, the death of an understanding of self and world. And, after that death, there is often a terrible "in-between," sometimes lasting years. Our ego understandably does not cotton to the idea of anything dying; vested as it is in its own security and maintenance, it will prolong, resist, deny, as long as it can, the dismantling of the old. The good and bad news are the same: we are asked to 𝘥𝘪𝘦. Only through this death can our natural creativity enact its developmental plan. What we may not have considered along the way is that every time we have shunned our summons to creativity, left undeveloped a talent or capacity, we have thereby removed that gift from the world. Our gift to the world is honored by bringing our best self to it; paradoxically, we do that by sacrificing ego comforts to our creative process, which, killing off the old, drives the project that we are forward. 

When people say that they live without myth, then [you] know that they are unaware that most of our lives are in service to those splinter myths we call 𝘤𝘰𝘮𝘱𝘭𝘦𝘹𝘦𝘴. Complexes are fractal forms, charged with energies, compelling scripts, admonitions, and outcomes, which is why so much of our histories reveal patterns even though we righteously presume and proclaim our freedoms. No one lives without myth. Anyone who thinks so is very unconscious. The only question is what mythologems, what fragments, what admonitions, what retreats or flights, what tropic desires have sovereignty in our lives and make our choices for us. 

How does one go home, without going back to an earlier place, a place that cannot be recovered, and whose delusory seduction leads to regression? In using the word 𝘯𝘰𝘴𝘵𝘢𝘭𝘨𝘪𝘢 (which from the Greek means "pain for home"), one risks the seduction of sentimentality, of returning to a safe, familiar psychology, and of staying stuck in someone else's story. "Going home" means paying attention to, respecting, and being the witness to clues — from our bodies, our intuitions; our conscious, patient, sorting reflections; and our compensatory dreams, symptoms, visions. These clues are always there; they always have been, but we learned to distrust them while adapting to and obeying the clamorous claims of the world. "Going home" asks that we risk taking them seriously. It means tracking the clues to see where they wish to take us, which will not necessarily be where we wish to go. Going home means coming back to ourselves after so much estrangement. So long have we been strangers in this world, and so long strangers to ourselves. How scary, how inviting, how necessary it is to come home at last.

I have come to consider most of what passes for "self help" literature today as obscene because it ignores the complexities of life, glosses over the ardor and commitment required for change, and promises panaceas not likely to happen. These banal insults to the depth of our souls will almost always end with disappointment, disillusionment, or further self-castigation, for they ignore the immense power of fate. Add that to the humbling reminder that the unconscious 𝘪𝘴 unconscious, and we are compelled to respect even more the powerful currents that sweep us across a vast, tenebrous sea. What is most deceptive to ego consciousness is that the psyche is a shape-shifter, a protean puzzle outwardly changing appearances, but with an invisible constancy of dynamic patterns underneath.

Those who feel they have taken risks, who, generally speaking, have lived their lives, have a much better time with their dying. None of us is able to jam it all in, or make all the "right" choices; moreover, even the "right" choices might have produced other unforeseen consequences. But it is clear that those who fail to risk being who they are, who shun diving into the journey, are the most fear-ridden, regretful, and recriminating.  With such a compromised purchase on their own history, they blame others, castigate themselves, or live with debilitating regrets. The precondition of joy is to accept the gift of the moment, while knowing that it is only of the moment. Accordingly, we are led reluctantly to understand that the great threat of mortality is also its gift to us, for it not only differentiates the trivial from the lasting, but it summons us to ponder what really does matter to us.

Much of our summons forth into the world involves redeeming a value that has been lost or repudiated through the adaptations required by our environment. Such a value must be revisited, integrated, lived, in order to bring healing or to trigger the next stage in our personal development toward wholeness. Whenever we force ourselves to do what is against our nature's intent, we will suffer anxiety attacks, depressions, or addictions to anesthetize the pain of this inner dislocation. We can run, but we cannot escape the laws of our own nature.

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