A Look at What Matters Most by James Hollis PHD Part 2 - CH 4-6 Respect of Eros, Step into Largeness, Risk Growth

CH 4 That We Respect The Power of Eros Hollis claims that Eros, often known of the “god of love”, is a numinous archetypal energy that is significant
on a daily level in our lives.

“In praising the power of Eros, Freud did us all a favour, but he also contributed to its being too
narrowly defined in sexual venues. Yes, he did articulate the powerful idea of sublimation, whereby
the sexual instinct, when blocked from its primary object, may differentiate and distribute into
substitutionary gratification, such as work, art, and higher cultural forms. Jung also recognize the power
of Eros, but rather he thought of its many cultural forms not as secondary elaborations of a primary
agenda, but as intrinsic to our holistic search for meaning.”

“When we lose contact with Eros, we have lost contact with life. Occasionally, all of us lose this contact.
We are distracted, fatigue, satiated, and depressed. We are forgetful of our summons to the gods, and
rather give over to our unforgiving, narrow neuroses.”

Hollis explains how Eros is experienced differently by men and women:

Women experience Eros most often via relationship: be it partner, child, or friend.

Men experience Eros most often via goal-directed behaviours

(“Obviously both genders have many manifestations of the other as well”)

“For men, narrowly focused on their external task, a progressive estrangement from their inner life often
results. They look for satisfaction in their external attainment, be it panting after what William James called
the "bitch goddess success," or public acclaim, or money, or a sense of achievement, and typically expect
their partners provide an emotional nurturance as equilibrium. They are partially driven by their nature,
partly by the messages of their tribe to separate from their ground, whether it be home, or mother, and
partially driven by their cultural imperatives to find their value in the external world.”

The result, Hollis says, is both a severe disconnect from others resulting in loneliness, and an estrangement from the
man’s own internal guidance system (instinct, intuition and feelings).

“because of this self estrangement, men, generally denied access to the feminine within them, and derided
for efforts to connect to her, have conveyed too much psychological power to women and then wind up either
trying to control her, or please her, or avoid her. For this reason, though driven biologically, sexuality occupies
too large a role, psychologically speaking, in the second economy of men...sadly, it not only objectifies women,
creates impossible standards and expectations for men and the real women in their lives, but only deepens the
split men carry from what Jung called their anima.”

“The anima, ... a metaphor for men's inner life, his relationship to the body, to instinct, to feeling, to values, to
spiritual aspiration...hence, his experience of Eros is typically to project his anima upon success, a woman, or
an abstract value, but end by being dispirited, angry, and depressed.”

When the anima is not consciously recognized in the man, they will seek it out externally via either EVE/PROSTITUTE,
MOTHER, MUSE or SOPHIA (wisdom).

For the Woman:

“Jung's term “animus” represents her sense of "empowerment," namely, her sense of personal worth, psychological
gravitas (be taken seriously, have respect), permission for and capacity to do her life in the world. If the anima for
men represents the life sustaining soul, the animus for women represents her spirited energy for achieving life on
her own terms. When a woman's inner animus is supportive, he legitimizes her desires and helps her achieve them.
When the animus is negative, he undermines her confidence, inpunges her worth, and divides her energy into doubt,
desuetude, deflection of Eros, and depression.”

When women cannot consciously recognize the animus within, they seek for it outside themselves in the TARZAN/Domination,
HERO/FATHER, via EXPRESSION/BAD BOY, or SAGE/Spiritual connection.

“Count on the fact that whatever we deny within, we will compulsively seek in the outer World instead.”

“When we address why a depression has fallen upon us, or why we suffer panic attacks, and why we repeatedly
sabotage ourselves, we have to track the logic of our symptom down to what the soul wants from us. Our symptoms are
logical expressions of an inner conflict, an embodiment of the contretemps between oppression and expression.”

Hollis reminds us that honouring the god Eros in our lives involves: taking care of ourselves, maintaining our health and
relationships, staying in touch with the guiding instincts that more adequately lead us through the world and grieving our
losses honestly.

CH 5 - That We Step Into Largeness

Hollis starts this chapter with a disturbing perspective of societal pressures and our fate, but challenges us to step up:

“Our experience of the world is conditional. We are subject to the conditions Fate presents to us: our genetics, our
family of Origins and its core dynamics, and our zeitgeist. All of these social settings embody messages, and
demand a measure of compliance... we are necessarily obliged to adapt, even as we absorb those messages as
"ours", as the apparently irrefutable nature of the world, and the fundamental construct and conditions of reality.
These necessary internalizations of messages, these adaptations to their demands, these scripts, mean that we
progressively lose contact with our instinctual guidance. Thus, for most of us, the issue of submission to be who we
are separate, distinct, individual sojourners with differing goals remains denied within. No matter how much we
have in the world, we are often stunned to realize that we may have lost contact totally with who we are, that is,
whomever the gods intended.”

“Too often the fundamentalist factions of our culture either terrify people into compliance... or seduce people into the
ratification of their complexes by validating the easy materialism and narcissism in which we all swim.”

“Until we grow up and step into the large challenge of living our journey as individuals and as a society, we will get the
demagogue leaders and the infantile eyes and culture we deserve. These external artifacts reflect what we have not
addressed within…”

“All of us have to ask a simple but piercing question of our relationships, our affiliations, our professions, our politics, and our theology:" does this path, this choice, make me larger or smaller?" usually we know the answer
immediately because we always intuitively know, and yet are afraid of what we know, and even more afraid of what
it may ask of us. If we do not sincerely know, but we need to continue asking the question until it reveals itself to us,
as it inevitably will. Then the real task begins. Jung once said that every therapist should ask the question "what task
is this person's neurosis helping him or her to avoid?"

I find myself very much empathizing with Hollis’s words here:

“Coming from a working-class family, where work was synonymous with survival..., and integrity, I have always
found it difficult not to work...I have always needed to be doing something constructive or contributive to the world.
Being lazy was the worst thing I could imagine...

the problem with this formula, however, is that the judgment of lazy is prejudicial and reductive. Doing what the soul
wants rather than what the complexes want is not being lazy. It is serving a larger agenda than our archaic biographies
permit.”

I feel Hollis does a better job of describing what he means by “Stepping into Largeness” so I will let him do it by these
carefully picked quotes:

“Stepping into largeness will require that we discern our personal authority- rather than the authority of others or the
authority of our internalized admonitions -and live this inner authority with risk and boldness.”

“The collapse of the ' false self ' is painful indeed, but it is also how the Self begins to emerge from underneath all the
attitudes and the adaptations required in the past. This death /rebirth and this difficult 'in- between' is how we get
ourselves back again and how we begin to bring out who we really are into this world. The former is in service to fear
management, understandably; the latter is in service to divinity.”

“Fear of largeness begins by fearing the resident largeness that is our own souls. If we can abide that fear of ourselves,
we will not be afraid of others.. ‘When you have faced your own demons, the Demons of others will not frighten you.’ ”

“Every day that we can call out those demons of fear and reductionism and step into the large Journey intended by the soul,
we actually serve the world better by bringing forward the unique gift that each of us represents. How could denying our
gift to the world ever really serve it? Stepping into our largeness is not narcissism it ultimately proves our greatest
contribution to others. All it requires is to resolve to stand humbly but responsibly before our own largeness, and then to
step into it.”

WHAT IS IT that YOU really want out of life? Are you getting it? What do you need to do to get it? What are your hobbies and
interests? Are you engaging them? Do you feel yourself? These are important questions because life is too short to not be yourself and you only have one chance on earth to live. How can you live it to the fullest?

CH 6 That We Risk Growth Over Security

“No wonder we so often choose security over growth, or trying to stay as unconscious of our summons as we can. We have
an entire culture of addictive treatment plans, of sensate distraction, and of jejune impatience that is driven by the preference of
security through unconsciousness as an antidote to growth.”

“In choosing security over growth, we all outrage the soul, and the soul, outraged, manifests in symptoms - depression, anxiety
disorders, envy and jealousy of others, dependencies, and so many more.”

“Our moral, intellectual, and emotional development embody a series of deaths, followed by enlargement of soul, often painfully
acquired.Through analysis I realized the part of me had to die before the rest of me, the larger part, could live... "I didn't begin to
individuate until my God died."

Hollis warns us that so much of our striving in life for what we think will give us a sense of achievement & happiness is often false.
This is now scientifically proven by research published in psychological journals and exemplified in books like “Stumbling on HappinesS”
by Daniel Gilbert, or “Thinking Fast and Slow” by Daniel Kahneman.

“We all set off expecting achievement of our goals to bring lasting satisfaction. It's not that the goals are unworthy, as such, but that
they so often become tempting stopping places for the soul, places where we declined invitation to trade still more mystery for security.”

“We are not here to be comfortable, although that is the banal blandishment offered by modern materialism, pop psychology and theology,
and the sundry seductions of addiction and distraction….”

“In the end, I taught you to be more comfortable in your uncertainty. This acceptance of ambiguity will better lead you to a more
developmental agenda, a more mystery driven Life, then certainty ever would.”

We may need to sacrifice addictions and ways of thinking that are ultimately not serving our greater selves. This is hard and takes a lot of work.
Sometimes life comes along and throws a wrench in your plans and destroys what you valued, but it also gives you a chance to start over and
rebuild a better life for yourself. Embrace life: Don’t ever stop wondering and wandering!