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Studies in Jungian Psychology by Jungian Analysts #92
Creating a Life: Finding Your Individual Path
Ask yourself, 'When do I feel most real?' What comes up on the screen? All of us have had moments in our lives when we felt whole or wholly present, or experienced a sense of well-being, an intuition of a higher order of reality. Such moments are transitory, alas, and cannot be summoned up by will or mind or right conduct, just as the person who seeks humility finds more and more that pride and one-sidedness push the goal further and further away. - excerpt from Creating A Life
160 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 2000
71 people are currently reading
1572 people want to read
About the author
James Hollis
55 books904 followersJames Hollis, Ph. D., was born in Springfield, Illinois, and graduated from Manchester University in 1962 and Drew University in 1967. He taught Humanities 26 years in various colleges and universities before retraining as a Jungian analyst at the Jung Institute of Zurich, Switzerland (1977-82). He is presently a licensed Jungian analyst in private practice in Washington, D.C. He served as Executive Director of the Jung Educational Center in Houston, Texas for many years and now was Executive Director of the Jung Society of Washington until 2019, and now serves on the JSW Board of Directors. He is a retired Senior Training Analyst for the Inter-Regional Society of Jungian Analysts, was first Director of Training of the Philadelphia Jung Institute, and is Vice-President Emeritus of the Philemon Foundation. Additionally he is a Professor of Jungian Studies for Saybrook University of San Francisco/Houston.
He lives with his wife Jill, an artist and retired therapist, in Washington, DC. Together they have three living children and eight grand-children.
He has written a total of seventeen books, which have been translated into Swedish, Russian, German, Spanish, French, Hungarian, Portuguese, Turkish, Italian, Korean, Finnish, Romanian, Bulgarian, Farsi, Japanese, Greek, Chinese, Serbian, Latvian, Ukranian and Czech.
He lives with his wife Jill, an artist and retired therapist, in Washington, DC. Together they have three living children and eight grand-children.
He has written a total of seventeen books, which have been translated into Swedish, Russian, German, Spanish, French, Hungarian, Portuguese, Turkish, Italian, Korean, Finnish, Romanian, Bulgarian, Farsi, Japanese, Greek, Chinese, Serbian, Latvian, Ukranian and Czech.
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Displaying 1 - 22 of 22 reviews
March 30, 2014
I'm sure you've had at some point the situation where someone gives you instruction or advice that made things clearer than you even thought possible. Maybe it was directions to an address or how to poach an egg and they said it to you in a concise and unassuming way. It's like suddenly there is this well adjusted and responsible un-intrusive adult in the room and because of this you know you are safe and your needs will be met. It's the closest thing I've experienced to the words I heard in my sleep the night before I was to be expelled from high school that were spoken in a clear calm benevolent voice "Everything is going to be alright".
I've mentioned that the message in this book is clear and concise, but Hollis does quite frequently use words beyond my familiar vocabulary. I keep my smart phone with the Merriam Webster dictionary app next to me and use it often like a book of translations when traveling in a country with a different language. You know you are going to see and hear unfamiliar things but that's the fun of traveling, to broaden your horizons. I now relish the unfamiliar words, even enjoying putting the book aside to learn them knowing I may be lead off on a tangent, like some side street in a little villa in Jungiandia.
I've mentioned that the message in this book is clear and concise, but Hollis does quite frequently use words beyond my familiar vocabulary. I keep my smart phone with the Merriam Webster dictionary app next to me and use it often like a book of translations when traveling in a country with a different language. You know you are going to see and hear unfamiliar things but that's the fun of traveling, to broaden your horizons. I now relish the unfamiliar words, even enjoying putting the book aside to learn them knowing I may be lead off on a tangent, like some side street in a little villa in Jungiandia.
August 5, 2011
I love James Hollis. Seriously, I LOVE James Hollis. He has so much to say that conveys the "depth" in depth psychology. I can't imagine what it would be like to go through life and never think about what he writes about. (Of course, most people do go through life that way. Which basically explains why the world is the way it is.)
December 27, 2020
Every child wants to be somebody when they grow up, or hears someone else tell them who they should be when they grow up. But what does it really mean to assume the personal responsibility to “be somebody when you grow up”? How can we know when we’re not living up to this responsibility? Those are some of the questions Dr. Hollis meditates on in this book with relentless lucidity. My own review of this book takes the form of an interactive narrative therapy exercise inspired by the book itself.
From the perspective of Analytical Psychology, we’re never without a personal myth in life, even if we remain unconscious of it. What this particular psychological vision means by making this assertion is that we’re always embedded within some emotionally-charged, image-centered narrative that animates the soul and channels the energy of our life in service to some value, to the pursuit of some ideal future state contrasted with our present situation — even if this ideal future state is the bitter longing for the extinction of existence itself.
Seen from this angle, some personal myths are much more agreeable to the limited view of the ego; others are much more harmonized with the Self; the purposive pattern of wholeness that Analytical Psychology posits as governing the totality of an individual’s psyche, apart from the all too often wounded and blinded ego.
When we serve a myth that’s deeply inauthentic to our own souls, we can consciously or unconsciously suffer serious consequences; fakeness can be forced unconsciously, but still produce pain that can be “internalized as depression, externalized as violence, somaticized as illness, or anesthetized by substances.”
As children, each of us was forced or steered by the circumstances of life to establish certain attitudes towards ourselves and others, particular patterns of action and behavior, and unique reflexive responses, all called for by whatever developmental environment we had to adapt to.
These attitudes, behaviors, and reflexes can be very distorting, and can influence and shape our ego in deeply problematic ways over time. After all, they’re committed to their own twisted history; they’re all too often lovingly wrapped around the space, time, and emotional environments in which they emerged — they’re “sub-personalities”, complexes, who can be constantly caught up in incest with their own pasts.
The distorted commitment of these attitudes, patterns, and reflexes — these sub-personalities — to certain values generates the personal myth that we live out during the first part of our lives, with one degree of consciousness or another.
Dr. Hollis writes that it’s sort of unavoidable for the first part of life to be anything but a series of mistakes. What he means by this isn’t that we necessarily make mistakes deliberately, but that we actually can’t avoid acting out the “provisional personality” that we develop into as a result of the attitudes, behaviors, and reflexes that were formed in us by the demands of the unique adaptive environments of our childhoods.
This “provisional personality” is often defined by forced fakeness; we all act out its quirks with one degree of consciousness or another, in any given situation.
As we grow and our personalities develop, there come times in every person’s life where old attitudes, patterns, and reflexes are authoritatively challenged by the psyche’s call for more of our potential to be realized in ways that our current personal myth is neglecting.
Maybe something unexpected erupts in our life and our former perspective of ourselves is shattered, or we mysteriously lose our ability to function in everyday situations; we obsessively try to revert to the strategies of the past, but even as we do we recognize they’re now useless, perhaps even harmful.
Maybe we hit a wall we just can’t get around, and come to a place where we have to face our fears, or finally begin to radically question the direction of our lives.
Maybe we realize we’re nothing but a three-legged workhorse, wearing ourselves down to the bone for things that glitter but sap our soul.
Maybe our old life is swallowed up, and we’re given the simultaneously terrifying and promising chance to create a new one.
We’re usually not happy to have the rug pulled out from under us like that, for our old values to die so that new ones can take their place; it’s natural to be afraid in those situations. Yet it’s often where we feel the most fear that the richest meaning is to be found.
Many times people wander between worlds, lost, isolated, and alone, their story having collapsed into a nightmare, before they find a way back to life. Sometimes they never find that way back.
This type of developmental call is partly what drove Carl Jung deep into his studies of the history and psychology of alchemy in the second half of his life; he longed to understand what myth he was living in, and what myth was living in him, as a 20th century human embedded in a modern industrial, materialist, and scientific society that had partially surfaced out of the focused fantasy of alchemy.
These are questions you have to ask yourself as well.
What myth are you living in? What myth is living in you?
Are you living out the story of your parents’ unlived lives? How much of their unlived lives do you want to live out?
Is your life on autopilot at the hands of unchallenged, maybe even unconscious patterns of action that you’ve come to identify with over the course of time?
The answers to these kinds of questions are the raw material from which you create a life.
You can bring intentionality to the process of weaving a personal myth out of the emotionally-charged and image-centered impulses that arise within you.
You can actively focus your imagination, and use it to help you purposefully create a life. By attending to and amplifying the images and impulses that are spontaneously expressed by your psyche in dreams and waking life, you can harmonize your conscious choices with the indications of the unconscious.
You can grow more competent to choose from within, to realize your personal potential with more intentionality and virtuosity.
This is something that you couldn’t do as a dependent child, but as a courageous and capable adult, this has changed.
In the end, all this comes down to whether or not you’ll submit to who you’re being summoned to become by your own soul. To follow that call is to walk the way of individuation. Creative writing can be an exploratory practice that connects you with your own ability to follow that call, and to care for and nurture yourself in ways that also serve and enrich the lives of others.
It can generate models of personal possibility beyond what you’ve been exposed to in your family, or the culture or environment in which you’ve grown up. By itself, or paired with research and reading, it can be a way of traveling, of learning and incorporating the experiences of others. It can be a powerful way to deepen and broaden the often-narrow possibilities that you conceive of for your life.
There’s a fateful sense in which your choices become your own measurement of the worth of your life. Writing expands the range of your imaginative possibilities, which can help encourage you to make more holistically authentic choices concerning the life that you’re creating.
Creative writing can be a way of getting in touch with the unconscious, of stimulating the spontaneous expression of emotionally-charged and visionary images that call for a conscious developmental response from you. Living out this developmental response, incarnating the meaning behind these images, is one way of creating a life; you’re capable of imaging the life you can imagine.
But how do you focus your imagination? How can you use writing to build a solid foundation of support under your visions of possibility?
I’ll provide an example from my own life, not as a generic formula, but simply as an image of the possibilities that might inspire you to dedicate yourself to the kind of evocative writing that will create your life over time.
The Partition that created India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh is a massively complex, non-linear reason why I exist, and (partly) why I am who I am. It’s a story I’m living in, and a story that’s living in me.
One of my grandfathers and one of my uncles disappeared in it. No one knows anything about what happened to them.
A creative writing project that I’ve been engaged in lately is to try to tell the story of what might have happened to them through a series of episodes/vignettes, each basically self-contained but also occupying a place in the larger story.
My dad’s childhood was deeply impacted by the Partition in general, and by his family’s specific relationship to it.
There are many developmental paths that my dad chose not to take, and some he was forced to take, as a direct result of the Partition. Some of those paths he didn’t take are now confronting me in life; some of the ways I’ve adapted to the paths he was forced to take are no longer viable ways for me to live. They were provisional patterns of action and behavior; it’s time to grow on, grow up, grow out.
His adaptive history has personally impacted me in more ways than I’ll ever really be able to know, but through research and writing I can more thoroughly discriminate, and come to a greater understanding of, some of the cosmic circumstances that have shaped my family and I, and indwell those circumstances with more intentionality and virtuosity.
This writing is already helping me order parts of my world that I haven’t paid as much attention to. Learning more about the Partition through researching and writing about it will help give me more context to shape some of my own memories into a story that will make sense out of certain events and aspects of my life that seem meaningless.
By researching and exploring the brutality that occurred during the Partition I can integratively dialogue with my own capacity for malevolence, and also come to a deeper understanding of how people acted to transcend the temptation to enter into a creative union with evil in those apocalyptic circumstances.
It will be a spontaneous way of evoking emotionally-charged images of the kind of bravery and heroism possible in that situation. This process could reveal how noble character traits could actually increase in their capability to thrive in people as a result of the kinds of stressors, shocks, volatility, mistakes, attacks, and failures that the Partition gave birth to.
It will teach me many things that are beyond me, but that I may be able to later assimilate into myself; things that may end up being especially relevant if I get caught up in a mass human migration or refugee crisis at some point in my life, which are legitimately plausible possibilities.
This writing is growing a deep personal myth which is the reflection and product of my family’s history, but also of my own soul; one that I am emotionally and intuitively assenting to from within; a story that is feeding me with meaning and helping to organically organize and channel the energy of my life.
A story that I can truly dedicate myself to living.
You can use the wisdom Dr. Hollis shares in this book to explore your family’s past and the large-scale historical events that have shaped you if you want.
Your own writing can be much more complex than this, or take a totally different form. Maybe you love a particular cinematic or literary world, or past (or future) civilization, and someone or something from those domains is calling to you. Don’t narrow the possibilities you can imagine based on what I shared about my own writing.
What’s important is to engage in creative writing as a way of getting in touch with your own soul and stimulating the spontaneous expression of emotionally-charged and visionary images that call for a conscious developmental response. Living out this developmental response, incarnating the meaning behind those images, is one way you can create a life.
You’re capable of actively focusing your imagination. You can use writing to build a solid foundation of support under your visions of possibility. You’re capable of imaging the life you can imagine.
You pay attention.
You follow the call.
You’re the only character present in every scene of your story.
No one can create your life but you.
https://abettik.medium.com/creating-a...
From the perspective of Analytical Psychology, we’re never without a personal myth in life, even if we remain unconscious of it. What this particular psychological vision means by making this assertion is that we’re always embedded within some emotionally-charged, image-centered narrative that animates the soul and channels the energy of our life in service to some value, to the pursuit of some ideal future state contrasted with our present situation — even if this ideal future state is the bitter longing for the extinction of existence itself.
Seen from this angle, some personal myths are much more agreeable to the limited view of the ego; others are much more harmonized with the Self; the purposive pattern of wholeness that Analytical Psychology posits as governing the totality of an individual’s psyche, apart from the all too often wounded and blinded ego.
When we serve a myth that’s deeply inauthentic to our own souls, we can consciously or unconsciously suffer serious consequences; fakeness can be forced unconsciously, but still produce pain that can be “internalized as depression, externalized as violence, somaticized as illness, or anesthetized by substances.”
As children, each of us was forced or steered by the circumstances of life to establish certain attitudes towards ourselves and others, particular patterns of action and behavior, and unique reflexive responses, all called for by whatever developmental environment we had to adapt to.
These attitudes, behaviors, and reflexes can be very distorting, and can influence and shape our ego in deeply problematic ways over time. After all, they’re committed to their own twisted history; they’re all too often lovingly wrapped around the space, time, and emotional environments in which they emerged — they’re “sub-personalities”, complexes, who can be constantly caught up in incest with their own pasts.
The distorted commitment of these attitudes, patterns, and reflexes — these sub-personalities — to certain values generates the personal myth that we live out during the first part of our lives, with one degree of consciousness or another.
Dr. Hollis writes that it’s sort of unavoidable for the first part of life to be anything but a series of mistakes. What he means by this isn’t that we necessarily make mistakes deliberately, but that we actually can’t avoid acting out the “provisional personality” that we develop into as a result of the attitudes, behaviors, and reflexes that were formed in us by the demands of the unique adaptive environments of our childhoods.
This “provisional personality” is often defined by forced fakeness; we all act out its quirks with one degree of consciousness or another, in any given situation.
As we grow and our personalities develop, there come times in every person’s life where old attitudes, patterns, and reflexes are authoritatively challenged by the psyche’s call for more of our potential to be realized in ways that our current personal myth is neglecting.
Maybe something unexpected erupts in our life and our former perspective of ourselves is shattered, or we mysteriously lose our ability to function in everyday situations; we obsessively try to revert to the strategies of the past, but even as we do we recognize they’re now useless, perhaps even harmful.
Maybe we hit a wall we just can’t get around, and come to a place where we have to face our fears, or finally begin to radically question the direction of our lives.
Maybe we realize we’re nothing but a three-legged workhorse, wearing ourselves down to the bone for things that glitter but sap our soul.
Maybe our old life is swallowed up, and we’re given the simultaneously terrifying and promising chance to create a new one.
We’re usually not happy to have the rug pulled out from under us like that, for our old values to die so that new ones can take their place; it’s natural to be afraid in those situations. Yet it’s often where we feel the most fear that the richest meaning is to be found.
Many times people wander between worlds, lost, isolated, and alone, their story having collapsed into a nightmare, before they find a way back to life. Sometimes they never find that way back.
This type of developmental call is partly what drove Carl Jung deep into his studies of the history and psychology of alchemy in the second half of his life; he longed to understand what myth he was living in, and what myth was living in him, as a 20th century human embedded in a modern industrial, materialist, and scientific society that had partially surfaced out of the focused fantasy of alchemy.
These are questions you have to ask yourself as well.
What myth are you living in? What myth is living in you?
Are you living out the story of your parents’ unlived lives? How much of their unlived lives do you want to live out?
Is your life on autopilot at the hands of unchallenged, maybe even unconscious patterns of action that you’ve come to identify with over the course of time?
The answers to these kinds of questions are the raw material from which you create a life.
You can bring intentionality to the process of weaving a personal myth out of the emotionally-charged and image-centered impulses that arise within you.
You can actively focus your imagination, and use it to help you purposefully create a life. By attending to and amplifying the images and impulses that are spontaneously expressed by your psyche in dreams and waking life, you can harmonize your conscious choices with the indications of the unconscious.
You can grow more competent to choose from within, to realize your personal potential with more intentionality and virtuosity.
This is something that you couldn’t do as a dependent child, but as a courageous and capable adult, this has changed.
In the end, all this comes down to whether or not you’ll submit to who you’re being summoned to become by your own soul. To follow that call is to walk the way of individuation. Creative writing can be an exploratory practice that connects you with your own ability to follow that call, and to care for and nurture yourself in ways that also serve and enrich the lives of others.
It can generate models of personal possibility beyond what you’ve been exposed to in your family, or the culture or environment in which you’ve grown up. By itself, or paired with research and reading, it can be a way of traveling, of learning and incorporating the experiences of others. It can be a powerful way to deepen and broaden the often-narrow possibilities that you conceive of for your life.
There’s a fateful sense in which your choices become your own measurement of the worth of your life. Writing expands the range of your imaginative possibilities, which can help encourage you to make more holistically authentic choices concerning the life that you’re creating.
Creative writing can be a way of getting in touch with the unconscious, of stimulating the spontaneous expression of emotionally-charged and visionary images that call for a conscious developmental response from you. Living out this developmental response, incarnating the meaning behind these images, is one way of creating a life; you’re capable of imaging the life you can imagine.
But how do you focus your imagination? How can you use writing to build a solid foundation of support under your visions of possibility?
I’ll provide an example from my own life, not as a generic formula, but simply as an image of the possibilities that might inspire you to dedicate yourself to the kind of evocative writing that will create your life over time.
The Partition that created India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh is a massively complex, non-linear reason why I exist, and (partly) why I am who I am. It’s a story I’m living in, and a story that’s living in me.
One of my grandfathers and one of my uncles disappeared in it. No one knows anything about what happened to them.
A creative writing project that I’ve been engaged in lately is to try to tell the story of what might have happened to them through a series of episodes/vignettes, each basically self-contained but also occupying a place in the larger story.
My dad’s childhood was deeply impacted by the Partition in general, and by his family’s specific relationship to it.
There are many developmental paths that my dad chose not to take, and some he was forced to take, as a direct result of the Partition. Some of those paths he didn’t take are now confronting me in life; some of the ways I’ve adapted to the paths he was forced to take are no longer viable ways for me to live. They were provisional patterns of action and behavior; it’s time to grow on, grow up, grow out.
His adaptive history has personally impacted me in more ways than I’ll ever really be able to know, but through research and writing I can more thoroughly discriminate, and come to a greater understanding of, some of the cosmic circumstances that have shaped my family and I, and indwell those circumstances with more intentionality and virtuosity.
This writing is already helping me order parts of my world that I haven’t paid as much attention to. Learning more about the Partition through researching and writing about it will help give me more context to shape some of my own memories into a story that will make sense out of certain events and aspects of my life that seem meaningless.
By researching and exploring the brutality that occurred during the Partition I can integratively dialogue with my own capacity for malevolence, and also come to a deeper understanding of how people acted to transcend the temptation to enter into a creative union with evil in those apocalyptic circumstances.
It will be a spontaneous way of evoking emotionally-charged images of the kind of bravery and heroism possible in that situation. This process could reveal how noble character traits could actually increase in their capability to thrive in people as a result of the kinds of stressors, shocks, volatility, mistakes, attacks, and failures that the Partition gave birth to.
It will teach me many things that are beyond me, but that I may be able to later assimilate into myself; things that may end up being especially relevant if I get caught up in a mass human migration or refugee crisis at some point in my life, which are legitimately plausible possibilities.
This writing is growing a deep personal myth which is the reflection and product of my family’s history, but also of my own soul; one that I am emotionally and intuitively assenting to from within; a story that is feeding me with meaning and helping to organically organize and channel the energy of my life.
A story that I can truly dedicate myself to living.
You can use the wisdom Dr. Hollis shares in this book to explore your family’s past and the large-scale historical events that have shaped you if you want.
Your own writing can be much more complex than this, or take a totally different form. Maybe you love a particular cinematic or literary world, or past (or future) civilization, and someone or something from those domains is calling to you. Don’t narrow the possibilities you can imagine based on what I shared about my own writing.
What’s important is to engage in creative writing as a way of getting in touch with your own soul and stimulating the spontaneous expression of emotionally-charged and visionary images that call for a conscious developmental response. Living out this developmental response, incarnating the meaning behind those images, is one way you can create a life.
You’re capable of actively focusing your imagination. You can use writing to build a solid foundation of support under your visions of possibility. You’re capable of imaging the life you can imagine.
You pay attention.
You follow the call.
You’re the only character present in every scene of your story.
No one can create your life but you.
https://abettik.medium.com/creating-a...
April 3, 2018
As usual, Hollis clarifies what is universally felt but generally muddled upon explication. Each essay leads to the next seamlessly. Jung is quoted deftly. What more could I ask?
March 28, 2021
Deeply helpful. A highlight on nearly every page. I will return to this frequently (if I know what's good for me....). This book is about "Growing Up" -- passing from the first half of your life to the second in a way that is as awake and integrated as possible.
On the necessary fictions of a "self" (we tell ourselves stories in order to live vibes):
"What is to be remembered here is not that we have to make our fictions conscious, but that we have to learn to live with and respect the mysteries anew, knowing that our fictions are fictions. Such courage before the abyss of possibility is the only way in which the mystery can be honored. There may be no Self, but the Self is a useful fiction which helps us find an Archimedean point, a stance outside that of the ego from which to question all other points. Making fictions consciously is sanity and pragmatism; making fictions unconsciously, and being captivated by them, is madness. Such madness is common to literalism, scientism, fundamentalism, and most ego psychologies ... When the distant shore is beyond the physical grasp, or the imaginative capacity, of the mariner, it does not mean that it is not there, exercising its summons to discovery. The fiction which caries one forward through turbulence and spindrift alike, will nonetheless prove a useful vessel."
On surviving our contemporary secular, atomized state of affairs without grasping for a false guru in fundamentalism, shallow atheism/empiricism, etc:
"If myth is the invisible plane which supports the visible plane of life, what happens when the invisible plane is no longer phenomenologically experienced? Invariably, such severance of our grounding in transcendent reality occasions existential angst. While it is true that some folks manage to get through life quite nicely as happy carrots, or Alpine cows well-belled and udderly productive, and some folks still feel connected to that which is larger than they through historically charged, institutionally sanctioned images, most people feel this whiff of angst and react to it in profound, often regressive ways....The test of a psychologically mature person, and therefore spiritually mature, will be found in his or her capacity to handle what one might call the Triple A's: anxiety, ambiguity, and ambivalence. While all of us suffer these onslaughts and react reflexively, the immature psyche especially suffers a tension and seeks to resolve it quickly by a shift right or left to a one-sided solution. The more mature psyche is able to sustain the tension of opposites and contain conflict longer, thereby allowing the developmental and revelatory potential of the issue to emerge. Anxiety arises in the face of uncertainty, open-endedness. Ambiguity confounds the ego's lust for security, to fix the world in a permanently knowable place. Ambivalence, the fact that opposites are always present, visible or not, obliges one to deal with the capacity for dialogue with the other. This experience often obliges a confrontation with the shadow, where the values rejected by the ego are not unlike exiles plotting to return home surreptitiously."
On the cold comforts of "logic":
"What pretends to be logic is in fact the rationalized defense against anxiety. Reason can be used to justify any crime, and usually is. Reason can create self-referential systems which, because contained, not open, can only reproduce themselves. Ego is very clever in seeking its own reinforcement, and in service to the reduction of angst becomes a closed system which is forever justifying itself rather than changing itself."
On not shying away from depth + attendant suffering:
"Resonance is the deep resounding of our truth, when we find it, or it finds us. To hear it, one must be attentive, faithful, courageous enough to break from the power of the other cacophonous sounds and hear the resounding of our soul's intent. The temptation to live on the surface of life is clear enough. When we are pulled deeply into something, even love, it hurts and opens us up to great suffering. But the willingness to open to depth is the chief way in which dignity and purpose return to life. We cease being small when we stand in the presence of the large. The chief symptom of our culture is banality. The chief antidote of banality is the willingness to accept the transformative suffering of depth."
Amor fati. Not just a Washed Out song!
"Whatever one's fate may have in store, the task, if we are up to it, is to serve the individuation imperative, to become as nearly like ourselves as we can manage. Amor fati is, after all, even amid defeat and confusion, a form of love. To love one's fate is to embrace the loathsome frog, kiss the suppurating wound, accept the ignominy of defeat, and yet find that somehow one has been blessed."
On awareness of one's limitations:
"I have come to believe that a person worthy of being taken seriously by others, at least by the time of midlife, will have dutifully, and responsibly, gathered a list of shortcomings, repeated failures in the presence of grand challenges, and frequent sojourns in the savannas of selfishness and cowardice."
On the folly of "self-esteem":
"Personally, I do not have high self-esteem and I do not know a single person who does. Perhaps this self-esteem business is overrated. A person with high self-esteem is often one with a narcissistic personality disorder whose whole persona is devoted to hiding from others his or her secret emptiness. Anyone with a modicum of consciousness and a mild dollop of integrity will be able to enumerate a very long list of screw-ups, short-comings, betrayals, moments of cowardice and generalized incompetence. Anything less than a very long list suggests either an undeveloped awareness or an act of great self-deception."
On the way in which the second half of life should bring with it the end of ambition:
"Turning away from the delusion of ambition opens a free space wherein things may be done for the sake of doing them, where value is found by value created, where meaning is the byproduct of service to vocation, not service to ego. While it takes a developed ego to be able to relinquish infantile needs, such an ego is further called to relinquish itself in service to the terrible beauty of this world. Beyond ambition lies the freedom of play, sacrifice and participation in the mystery."
Put this on an Online Ceramics shirt:
"I once found solace in an easy atheism, then an uneasy agnosticism, and today fall back on the oldest cliche of them all. I really do not have any idea what runs the universe, but I do know that compassion for others is the only thing which makes the bloody trip worth it."
Watts' if you meet the buddha kill the buddha type thing:
"The more I identify with a value, the more one-sided becomes my orientation to reality...Thus homophobia, for example, is a denial of one's hold on one's own sexual identity. Single-minded evangelism is a privileging of one's personal complexes lest they be overthrown by the truth embodied in opposing values. The fundamental morality of the psyche suggests that the moment one is convinced something is true, then the opposite is already at work in oneself. Holding this unsettling thought at bay by rationalized defensiveness of the conscious position only reinforces the surreptitious work of the shadow. The psyche is forever presenting us with compensatory energies. As Freud was wont to say, people denied his theories by day and dreamt them at night. It may be disconcerting to the fundamentalist in each of us, but such a natural morality is the truly fundamental one. The wise move, then, would be to always look for the opposite in ourselves, in others, in our culture."
On the real goal of therapy:
"As individuals, we are not meant to be well-balanced, sober servants of collective values. We are not meant to be sane, safe, or similar. We are, each of us, meant to be different. A proper course of therapy does not make us better adjusted; it makes us more eccentric, a unique individual who serves a larger project than that of the ego or collective norms."
Summing up:
"I have sought here to honestly represent the immense difficulty of creating a life. The naivete of youth must be replaced with a rich appreciation of the challenge. The tendency of the so-called New Age folks is to finesse this difficulty and look to external gurus and magical thinking for help. It is not that simple, as most of us know. The difficulties of creating a life are compounded by the power of the unconscious, early conditioning, and the fragility of our consciousness and will. Yet, the whole purpose and dignity of our lives is directly proportionate to the degree that one takes on this great labyrinthine puzzle in the second half of life. The first half of life is usually a gigantic, unavoidable mistake. But the second half gives us another shot at it, after all the wounds from which we learn, after the buffeting of the ego which strengthens consciousness, after all the hard-learned lessons which prove to be invaluable."
Now I'm off to do some concentrated shadow work....
On the necessary fictions of a "self" (we tell ourselves stories in order to live vibes):
"What is to be remembered here is not that we have to make our fictions conscious, but that we have to learn to live with and respect the mysteries anew, knowing that our fictions are fictions. Such courage before the abyss of possibility is the only way in which the mystery can be honored. There may be no Self, but the Self is a useful fiction which helps us find an Archimedean point, a stance outside that of the ego from which to question all other points. Making fictions consciously is sanity and pragmatism; making fictions unconsciously, and being captivated by them, is madness. Such madness is common to literalism, scientism, fundamentalism, and most ego psychologies ... When the distant shore is beyond the physical grasp, or the imaginative capacity, of the mariner, it does not mean that it is not there, exercising its summons to discovery. The fiction which caries one forward through turbulence and spindrift alike, will nonetheless prove a useful vessel."
On surviving our contemporary secular, atomized state of affairs without grasping for a false guru in fundamentalism, shallow atheism/empiricism, etc:
"If myth is the invisible plane which supports the visible plane of life, what happens when the invisible plane is no longer phenomenologically experienced? Invariably, such severance of our grounding in transcendent reality occasions existential angst. While it is true that some folks manage to get through life quite nicely as happy carrots, or Alpine cows well-belled and udderly productive, and some folks still feel connected to that which is larger than they through historically charged, institutionally sanctioned images, most people feel this whiff of angst and react to it in profound, often regressive ways....The test of a psychologically mature person, and therefore spiritually mature, will be found in his or her capacity to handle what one might call the Triple A's: anxiety, ambiguity, and ambivalence. While all of us suffer these onslaughts and react reflexively, the immature psyche especially suffers a tension and seeks to resolve it quickly by a shift right or left to a one-sided solution. The more mature psyche is able to sustain the tension of opposites and contain conflict longer, thereby allowing the developmental and revelatory potential of the issue to emerge. Anxiety arises in the face of uncertainty, open-endedness. Ambiguity confounds the ego's lust for security, to fix the world in a permanently knowable place. Ambivalence, the fact that opposites are always present, visible or not, obliges one to deal with the capacity for dialogue with the other. This experience often obliges a confrontation with the shadow, where the values rejected by the ego are not unlike exiles plotting to return home surreptitiously."
On the cold comforts of "logic":
"What pretends to be logic is in fact the rationalized defense against anxiety. Reason can be used to justify any crime, and usually is. Reason can create self-referential systems which, because contained, not open, can only reproduce themselves. Ego is very clever in seeking its own reinforcement, and in service to the reduction of angst becomes a closed system which is forever justifying itself rather than changing itself."
On not shying away from depth + attendant suffering:
"Resonance is the deep resounding of our truth, when we find it, or it finds us. To hear it, one must be attentive, faithful, courageous enough to break from the power of the other cacophonous sounds and hear the resounding of our soul's intent. The temptation to live on the surface of life is clear enough. When we are pulled deeply into something, even love, it hurts and opens us up to great suffering. But the willingness to open to depth is the chief way in which dignity and purpose return to life. We cease being small when we stand in the presence of the large. The chief symptom of our culture is banality. The chief antidote of banality is the willingness to accept the transformative suffering of depth."
Amor fati. Not just a Washed Out song!
"Whatever one's fate may have in store, the task, if we are up to it, is to serve the individuation imperative, to become as nearly like ourselves as we can manage. Amor fati is, after all, even amid defeat and confusion, a form of love. To love one's fate is to embrace the loathsome frog, kiss the suppurating wound, accept the ignominy of defeat, and yet find that somehow one has been blessed."
On awareness of one's limitations:
"I have come to believe that a person worthy of being taken seriously by others, at least by the time of midlife, will have dutifully, and responsibly, gathered a list of shortcomings, repeated failures in the presence of grand challenges, and frequent sojourns in the savannas of selfishness and cowardice."
On the folly of "self-esteem":
"Personally, I do not have high self-esteem and I do not know a single person who does. Perhaps this self-esteem business is overrated. A person with high self-esteem is often one with a narcissistic personality disorder whose whole persona is devoted to hiding from others his or her secret emptiness. Anyone with a modicum of consciousness and a mild dollop of integrity will be able to enumerate a very long list of screw-ups, short-comings, betrayals, moments of cowardice and generalized incompetence. Anything less than a very long list suggests either an undeveloped awareness or an act of great self-deception."
On the way in which the second half of life should bring with it the end of ambition:
"Turning away from the delusion of ambition opens a free space wherein things may be done for the sake of doing them, where value is found by value created, where meaning is the byproduct of service to vocation, not service to ego. While it takes a developed ego to be able to relinquish infantile needs, such an ego is further called to relinquish itself in service to the terrible beauty of this world. Beyond ambition lies the freedom of play, sacrifice and participation in the mystery."
Put this on an Online Ceramics shirt:
"I once found solace in an easy atheism, then an uneasy agnosticism, and today fall back on the oldest cliche of them all. I really do not have any idea what runs the universe, but I do know that compassion for others is the only thing which makes the bloody trip worth it."
Watts' if you meet the buddha kill the buddha type thing:
"The more I identify with a value, the more one-sided becomes my orientation to reality...Thus homophobia, for example, is a denial of one's hold on one's own sexual identity. Single-minded evangelism is a privileging of one's personal complexes lest they be overthrown by the truth embodied in opposing values. The fundamental morality of the psyche suggests that the moment one is convinced something is true, then the opposite is already at work in oneself. Holding this unsettling thought at bay by rationalized defensiveness of the conscious position only reinforces the surreptitious work of the shadow. The psyche is forever presenting us with compensatory energies. As Freud was wont to say, people denied his theories by day and dreamt them at night. It may be disconcerting to the fundamentalist in each of us, but such a natural morality is the truly fundamental one. The wise move, then, would be to always look for the opposite in ourselves, in others, in our culture."
On the real goal of therapy:
"As individuals, we are not meant to be well-balanced, sober servants of collective values. We are not meant to be sane, safe, or similar. We are, each of us, meant to be different. A proper course of therapy does not make us better adjusted; it makes us more eccentric, a unique individual who serves a larger project than that of the ego or collective norms."
Summing up:
"I have sought here to honestly represent the immense difficulty of creating a life. The naivete of youth must be replaced with a rich appreciation of the challenge. The tendency of the so-called New Age folks is to finesse this difficulty and look to external gurus and magical thinking for help. It is not that simple, as most of us know. The difficulties of creating a life are compounded by the power of the unconscious, early conditioning, and the fragility of our consciousness and will. Yet, the whole purpose and dignity of our lives is directly proportionate to the degree that one takes on this great labyrinthine puzzle in the second half of life. The first half of life is usually a gigantic, unavoidable mistake. But the second half gives us another shot at it, after all the wounds from which we learn, after the buffeting of the ego which strengthens consciousness, after all the hard-learned lessons which prove to be invaluable."
Now I'm off to do some concentrated shadow work....
May 6, 2021
Felt like I had to read each chapter at least twice to understand what is being explained. Not that the explanations weren't reasonable but that trying to be conscious of the unconscious is difficult and a little unnerving for me: like tracking a wild animal's footprints but never seeing it. At least I have resumed recording my dreams again.
February 15, 2020
Dynamite comes in small packages, and this short, philosophical book about creating meaning in the second half of life is 100% explosive.
At times brutally honest about how small and puny our human lives are (Chapter 14, "Being Small, Being Large"), it's nonetheless comforting to understand there is meaning and purpose in the mere act of self-reflection and doubt about what has been, and what is yet to come in the short span of years we can call "my life".
Although at times appearing nihilistic, the paradox of Hollis's words is that that nihilism springs from his sense of something much greater than us - an unknowable universe, an unknowable G-d, a Divine so much bigger than us it remains forever a mystery. This apparent cynicism is balanced, though, by his deep understanding of, and compassion for, the complexities of the darkest shadows that lie within us all and which can be overcome by following the light of our soul's true vocation, found in the inner voice that we too often repress to accommodate external circumstances.
Using poetry, myths and classical allusions to add incredible insight and imagery to his words, Hollis encourages one to let go of the ego-attachments of youth and eagerly begin creating higher meaning and soul purpose in the second half of our ordinary lives.
While this book is written for older people, it also holds much guidance for people of any age. Not a book to be read quickly, "CREATING A LIFE: Finding Your Individual Path" should be read slowly, so that each chapter can be absorbed and processed for a full appreciation of how much wisdom is contained in so few pages.
Highly recommended.
At times brutally honest about how small and puny our human lives are (Chapter 14, "Being Small, Being Large"), it's nonetheless comforting to understand there is meaning and purpose in the mere act of self-reflection and doubt about what has been, and what is yet to come in the short span of years we can call "my life".
Although at times appearing nihilistic, the paradox of Hollis's words is that that nihilism springs from his sense of something much greater than us - an unknowable universe, an unknowable G-d, a Divine so much bigger than us it remains forever a mystery. This apparent cynicism is balanced, though, by his deep understanding of, and compassion for, the complexities of the darkest shadows that lie within us all and which can be overcome by following the light of our soul's true vocation, found in the inner voice that we too often repress to accommodate external circumstances.
Using poetry, myths and classical allusions to add incredible insight and imagery to his words, Hollis encourages one to let go of the ego-attachments of youth and eagerly begin creating higher meaning and soul purpose in the second half of our ordinary lives.
While this book is written for older people, it also holds much guidance for people of any age. Not a book to be read quickly, "CREATING A LIFE: Finding Your Individual Path" should be read slowly, so that each chapter can be absorbed and processed for a full appreciation of how much wisdom is contained in so few pages.
Highly recommended.
December 3, 2018
In a nutshell, a book which sets out to "explore the attitudes and practises necessary for the second half of life".
Using excerpts from the works of various writers (some of whom were familiar, most of whom weren't) the author, a graduate of the Jung Institute in Zurich, takes you on a scintillating journey albeit it one that as he says "will not solve all your problems or heal your pain."
At times uncomfortably challenging. Sometimes a tad wordy and academic; many of the metaphors going over my head, I admit I was on occasion seen to throw my hands up in the air and shout 'what?' BUT oh my goodness! Thought provoking, astonishingly insightful, a real eyeopener; how it spoke to and of me.
Copyright ... Tracy Terry @ Pen and Paper
Using excerpts from the works of various writers (some of whom were familiar, most of whom weren't) the author, a graduate of the Jung Institute in Zurich, takes you on a scintillating journey albeit it one that as he says "will not solve all your problems or heal your pain."
At times uncomfortably challenging. Sometimes a tad wordy and academic; many of the metaphors going over my head, I admit I was on occasion seen to throw my hands up in the air and shout 'what?' BUT oh my goodness! Thought provoking, astonishingly insightful, a real eyeopener; how it spoke to and of me.
Copyright ... Tracy Terry @ Pen and Paper
September 5, 2020
BEST BOOK EVER!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
-indep for a good rel- what parental repressed fantasies are you living out? how can you grow to accept others' differences/become more comfy with ambiguity and ambivalence? how to take resp for your life and meaning
-tragedy and comedy are diff attitudes to the same idea- the human fall
-truth/love- tension in holding opposites
-risk it and listen to the summons- it'll be painful either way
-go back to the hundreds of post it notes
-genes + family + environment + fate
-consciousness/awareness expands your freedom/reduces fate
-indep for a good rel- what parental repressed fantasies are you living out? how can you grow to accept others' differences/become more comfy with ambiguity and ambivalence? how to take resp for your life and meaning
-tragedy and comedy are diff attitudes to the same idea- the human fall
-truth/love- tension in holding opposites
-risk it and listen to the summons- it'll be painful either way
-go back to the hundreds of post it notes
-genes + family + environment + fate
-consciousness/awareness expands your freedom/reduces fate
July 20, 2021
Thoughtful and dense. Would like to reread in the near future as a reminder of many of the concepts, especially ones concerning personal myth-making. Reading this feels like a “behind the music” manual for the cool, wise, serene older people I’ve met in my life — here are some of the secrets and attitudes that they may have picked up, hope I can do the same.
August 14, 2024
"The more you are like the others, the more secure you will feel, yet the more your heart will ache, the more dreams will be troubled and the more your soul will slip off into silences"
A book about path, being authentic, following visions and the comedic tragic experience that is life.
A whole lot more goes on in this book, it feels small, it makes you think. I wanna go again.
A book about path, being authentic, following visions and the comedic tragic experience that is life.
A whole lot more goes on in this book, it feels small, it makes you think. I wanna go again.
May 8, 2025
I really enjoyed this book. He offers many nuggets of wisdom, and it seems like the sort of book I will go back and refer to in times of crisis/when I’m feeling a lack of direction.
Some really insightful stuff, I’d probably give it a 4.5/5 if I could. Also really made me want to read some Kierkegaard - the quotes used in the book were insightful and, often, funny.
Some really insightful stuff, I’d probably give it a 4.5/5 if I could. Also really made me want to read some Kierkegaard - the quotes used in the book were insightful and, often, funny.
October 21, 2018
series of essays about aging and life, some profound
September 14, 2023
when i start calling things “jungian” just know it’s julie’s fault for getting me this for my bday
January 2, 2025
A wonderful if heavy evaluation of transition through life. The last few chapters were really poignant for me. Give it a try if you have a sneaky suspicion you are wandering aimlessly through "life".
June 8, 2025
Would give it more stars if I could
June 10, 2025
A must read.
January 21, 2025
The book compares in reading difficulty with reading essays and papers during my master studies. However, every chapter hits home and I am planning to reread this later because it will be worth it.
March 13, 2010
Great book to help us understand and find our unique "individuality" and move towards a happy future by feeling comfortable within ourselves. There is some great insightful wisdom in this book.
January 31, 2011
This is one of those books I often revisit. Hollis is a bit cranky, but I find his crankiness endearing and a bit comforting, actually.
November 14, 2012
His best book yet for the practitioner - humble, wise and spiritual stories for the seeker.
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