A Look at What Matters Most by James Hollis PHD Part 4 - CH 9, 10 That We Engage Spiritual Crisis, and Other Bad Days at the Office & That We Write Our Stories, Lest Someone Else Do It For Us.

CHAPTER 9 That We Engage Spiritual Crisis, and Other Bad Days at the Office

“Spiritual crisis occurs when our identity, our roles, our values, or our roadmap are

substantially called into question, prove ineffective, or overwhelmed by experience

that cannot be contained by our understanding of self and world.”

While seemingly worthless, there are often several reasons for crisis. Hollis claims that among them are:

1. Trauma Personal or Cultural

Personal trauma comes in many forms. We may experience a sudden loss, such as a

breakup or a loss of employment. Or we may simply feel a malaise that the goals we were

striving for were not as rewarding as we had hoped they would be, or we are somehow

made to feel small, either way we struggle to find purpose or meaning to gain a foothold and

some sense of control in our lives. Hollis says that:

“Trauma occurs when our defenses and presumptions, whether somatic, emotional,

or intellectual, are overrun. We feel powerless and at the mercy of life. This crisis is in

fact our common condition, for each of us has gotten the same message identified

earlier in this book: "The World is big, and you are not; the world is powerful, and you

are not. Now, figure out a way to survive, managing that!"”

Cultural trauma is more pervasive. It may be that we thought we would be more happy

fulfilling the cultural expectations of being married with children and yet we find we aren’t.

Or, that our Western culture is so far removed from nature, so full of distractions and so

detached from each other that we feel utterly alone, superficial and/or disoriented.

“Cultural distractions urgently seek to mask the demise of tribal mythologies, where

sex, power, money are offered up as connections to replace the linkage to the

transcendent Mystic images once granted. Anyone with a modicum of consciousness

is traumatized by this current world, but it's moved from instinctual guidance,

sympathetic resonance with natural rhythms of seasons and death and rebirth, to

virtual reality such as economics, data processing, and daily distractions no more

evolved than the bread and circuses through which the Roman Emperors distracted

their citizenry from their august, megalomaniacal depredations.”

And so, we struggle to make sense of it:

“In this setting,... One has to find an order of one's own, an order persisting amid the

distractions and disorders of one's time. Some still look up "upward" to find this

transcendent order, and some find it better there; some, by looking "upward", merely

avoid taking on the task of finding meaning for themselves; and some now look

"inward" to find the centering order. Of this latter group, Albert Camus's paradox is

especially applicable. He said that life is meaningful precisely because it is absurd.

What I believe he means is that if it is "meaningful", then it is someone else's

understanding, a received package, and may or may not be confident with one's own

journey. By considering life absurd, we are obliged to make choices, real choices with

real consequences, and thereby are the active agents in creating and affirming our

value system. The more consonant these value selections are with our inner lives,

our souls, the more meaningfully we will experience these choices, and the more we

will feel supported from within.”

2. Swamplands of the Soul

James Hollis has an entire book dedicated to this specific process by which we may suffer

spiritual crises in our life; often subjected to during middle age (the mid-life crisis), or during

a drastic reframing of our worldview. It is an exceptionally deep and symbolic quest simply

to read his book, for those who appreciate this depth psychology, it is a significant read.

"Sooner or later, all of us are ushered by fate,  by the actions of others, by choices

we make, both conscious and unconscious, in two places we do not wish to visit.

Such rooms in our common psychic mansion we label depression, loss, grief,

addiction, anxiety, envy, shame, and the like. Such is our humanity. In these dismal

environs we are flooded by anxiety because the fact of being out of control is no

longer deniable. Accordingly, and typically, we tend to kick into our former

management systems -denial, projection onto others, addiction, frenetic activity - and

we move deeper and deeper into the swamp. In those moments we suffer a spiritual

crisis because we have no place to go, or rather, no means by which to go there, and

we suffer our powerlessness and the failure of our provisional management

systems.”

Swamplands of the Soul are more like a Dark Night, more like a collapse of the will, where

one is bogged down and too heavy to engage in life. These are some of the most

treacherous times for our relationships to others because we have lost our relationship to

ourselves. 

“While we cannot avoid these swamplands, each of them is a critical junction

whereby we must make choices that prove either psychologically enlarging or

diminishing. "

3.  Discrepancies Between Expectations and Outcomes 

In other words; our projections onto lovers/partners, schools, workplaces, or churches, to

take care of us. 

"We expect that by investing sincere energy in a career, a relationship, a set of roles,

that they will return the investment in manifold, satisfying ways... We do not realize

that a projection has occurred, for it is an unconscious mechanism of our energic

unconscious. Only after it has painfully dissolved may we begin to recognize that we

placed such a large agenda on such a frangible place, that we asked too much of the

beloved, of others, of institutions, perhaps of life itself."

4.  Incongruence Between Map and Terrain 

Or, the expectations others have for us.

"Received maps come from parents, religious and educational sources, popular

culture, and from history. Sometimes these maps are helpful and rewarding, and

sometimes they are not. Sometimes we begin to cotton to the fact that we are living

someone else's map, someone else's complexes, or someone else's individuation

task." 

5. Of Dystonic Relations Between the False and the Natural Self

When you lose touch with yourself, the psyche finds creative ways to let you know. These

may come out in various symptoms, many of which our culture will encourage you to

squelch and hide away. Our initial reactions are to avoid, distract, cover-up these symptoms

to keep ‘functioning’ the way we feel we ‘should’. But, as soon as a should comes into it, it is

a red flag that your will isn’t fully engaged with the behaviour. Something will give.

"The bad news is that our psyche frequently beats up on us. The good news is that

our psyche frequently beats up on us. In our infantilized time, suffering seems an

affront, as though we are to have it all figured out, have management systems in

place, or have medications to remove it from us. From The superficial standpoint so

popular in our healing armamentaria, symptoms are to be removed as quickly as

possible. We employ vast engines of ingenuity devoted to this task. However, from

the psychodynamic perspective, we consider symptoms messages, expressions of

psyche's dismay at our lives, our choices, our values. This dismay comes to us via

disturbances in the body, and troubling emotional discord, in our dreams, in our

relationships, and in our history. Reading these symptoms as invitations to reconsider

our relationship to the self, revise our values and plans, and renew our relationship to

mystery as it moves through the world and through us, is a most challenging task.

But it is the means by which we recover relationship to the gods, to the essential

mystery that lies within our individual psyches just as it courses through history.”

“Symptoms invite us to reconsider our maps, revisit the terrain, re-vision our

journeys, and reconsider our purposes. Finding that the map we have been using is

no longer adequate is always disconcerting, even anxiety provoking, but it is the

beginning of a process by which we come to a better map, more interesting terrain, a

more considered life... the psyche has a better plan for our lives than our ego's plan,

or our culture's plan."

The arsenal of options for dealing with these crises are:

1. Collapse

2. Regression

3. Distraction

4. Narcotization

5. Transformation

Of course ideally we ultimately will find transformation, or else we risk suffering our inability

to move. Remember to ask yourself when faced with depression or anxiety: “What am I

resisting?” & our answer may be yet another question: “But, how?”

(By myth Hollis means “an energy-charged image, or idea, that has the power to move and

direct the soul”)

In the face of the exhaustion of the old we may:  

1. Find a higher, more evolved form of the old myth.
2. Move to a more compelling myth.
3. Live without myth, as one's myth. 

"When people say to me that they live without myth, then I know that they are

unaware that most of our lives are in service to those splinter myths we call

complexes"

"Life is what happens when we had other plans" John Lennon

4. Begin one’s journey to a new place.

"My individuation began the day my god died"

"To ask what the soul wants of me is to submit to what "the gods" wish, investing

themselves through the energies of the individual psyche, energies that are

transcendent to ordinary ego-consciousness. To serve the gods, not the ego, not the

tribe, not one's parents, not one's prior picture, is to transform."

“People have misunderstood Jung’s Myth for our time, Individuation, as narcissism or

self-preoccupation. In fact it is a summons to service, of ego submission to values

larger than those previously embraced...the paradox that to serve the transcendent

we are sometimes obliged to sacrifice whatever we've theretofore most valued. There

is little comfort to the ego on such occasions, but one is brought to spiritual

enlargement.”

And it is often by the tension of paradox that we discover a renewed vision towards living: in

meaninglessness we find meaning, in letting go we become more whole, in suffering we find

joy, in taking time for ourselves we become more selfless, in focusing on one strength the

world opens up to possibilities. 

“Many times, against our will, we find that in our crises and other bad days at the

office there is an enlargement of the spirit purchased by suffering and humility, but

enlargement nonetheless. The death of our myth, the experience of

meaninglessness, is the beginning of a new stage, the next stage, of our journey."

CH 10 - That We Write Our Story, Lest Someone Else Do It For Us

"It's disturbing to think that rather than we living our stories, our stories might be living

us."

Wonder:

"Do you not recall in childhood the primal sense of wonder about who you were, who

made the world, what it was all about? We were never more fully human than in

those moments of great, gracious, and enlarging questions.”

“But consider what your operative questions may be today:... Do these questions

enlarge us, or do they diminish us? Do their answers provide sustained satisfaction?

Do our questions infantilize us, or do they ask that we grow up by, paradoxically,

returning to the questions that primal Wonder first occasioned for us as children?"

Many of us are so caught up in complexes, or simply the demands of living we have created

for our lives, that the questions that occupy our minds are not the real desires of our hearts

or minds. It is a challenge to let go of distractions and self-made realities that squelch our

sense of Self to feel free to open up towards something new. But, we can look at what we

are already doing and start with that. We could look at our job and say “What strength do I

have that I could use here?” 

"For the person with a high sensate function - the engineer, systems analyst,

troubleshooter, accountant- the question is "how did the pieces best fit together?" For

the pragmatist, for whom ideas are merely instruments, the question is "how well

does it work, and what are the payoffs?" For the aesthetic sensibility the question

presents as "what is the texture?" "what colour or form appeals to me?" "what would

it look like if I moved something over here instead?" All of these questions are

expressions of primal wonder and represented desire to connect with the invisible

world that informs and drives the visible world."

And, if this is too difficult, at least close your eyes a moment. With no distractions. Think

back to who you were as a child. Alone to yourself. Who were you then? What did you like

to do? What were the things you wondered about? How did you see things?

"So think of those moments in your recollected backyard, in the south field, in the

street, the park. What did you think when alone with your thoughts, then? What did

you imagine? What spectral fears harried you? When you lay in bed at night, what

strange animals growled beneath you, what groaning critters paced in your closet?"

Getting in touch with our inner child can do wonders in helping us to reframe our thinking,

discover a fresh playfulness with our present reality and open us back up to recognizing

simply being present, as well as reconnecting ourselves to our potential. 

Provisional Stories

It’s natural for us to get disconnected from ourselves. Hollis describes how in nature, there

is constant separation and as emotive beings, we feel the pain of this.

"In the womb, the lungs did not breathe, the eyes did not see, we floated timelessly

through inner space. Time, consciousness, identity are the epiphenomena of a

splitting into opposites occasioned by our birth. The prerequisite for consciousness

and identity is suffering, the suffering of radical separation, the splitting of subject and

object, the loss of connection. No wonder all people have their founding myths

expressing loss, separation from a "paradisal state", and no wonder we resist

consciousness so much. When we further find our dependency absolute, vulnerability

total, we learn to adapt our narrative to whatever imperative presents itself as most

insistent. So we grow separated from our story. Later, perhaps reading the story of

others, we learn that there are alternatives."

What people do you look up to? Who are your role models? Who are your mentors? What

do they teach you? How do you live the messages that you believe in? How do you carry

the people who have passed with you forward in your life, cherishing their memory? We can

be inspired by other people’s stories, or even by a character we empathise with in a book.

This is our Hero’s Journey, and by acknowledging the heroes we come across in our lives,

we can realign the way we really want to live.

Going Home

"'Going home' means paying attention to, respecting, the witness of these clues. It

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."

Unlike simply being distracted by the comforting feelings of nostalgia, truly coming home to

ourselves involves rediscovering our passion. It involves listening to our bodies, listening to

our dreams, listening to our minds. Sitting with them until we have a sense of what we really

need, learning to nurture those needs, learning to feel good in our own skin, learning what

we really want for our lives, learning how to move in that direction, and learning to truly see

the world with fresh eyes of hope again.

"Imagine what our story would look like if, rather than succumbing to the insistent

voices of family or culture, we determined that our vocation was to be a better

human."

A Look at What Matters Most by James Hollis PHD Part 3 - CH 7, 8 That We Live Verbs, Not Nouns, That We Find and Follow the Path of Creativity and Delight in Foolish Passions

Chapter 7 - That We Live Verbs, Not Nouns

Quite a thick chapter, Hollis thoroughly sought to expound upon what he felt was a significant concept.
Namely; that our minds tend to desire fixed constructs to live within and through, but that nature often
is not this way.  

“All of us carry fixed, reified assumptions about the nature of reality.” Yet, Hollis challenges us that
once people believed certain things (for example, that the earth was flat), only later, with much resistance
towards forward-thinking men, to change their minds and discover that things were not as they first had
seemed (the earth is round). Over time our thinking has continually evolved thus, ever expanding our
views.

“The ego's agitated agenda is to live in a world of comforting nouns, that is, fixed identities,
counters on the table to be moved at will, predictable entities that can be controlled, maneuvered
and contained. And all the while the ego really swims in a sea of verbs. That is, not things fixed,
but things happening. And ego tripping over this fact from time to time, grows all the more unsettled,
anxious…”

It’s natural for us to fear change. It is much easier to stick with unchangeable nouns that give us a sense
of security or comfort in our lives, but there will always then be a tension, a challenge welling up within us
to open up to possibility. 

“It is our natural tendency -within me as much as the next person- to want to reify, fix, harden,
locate the world, and pin it down, in order to control it. As natural as this need is, it may also
be the chief source of our misunderstanding, our alienation from the world and from the
mysterious energies that inform it..., Nowhere is this tendency to domination greater than in
the Wester world. We have gained great sovereignty over our natural environment but seem
more and more uprooted and unhappy.all the time. The classical Easter view that all is in flux,
that the point is to be present with the present and to ‘go with the flow’, is a tempting but bitter
pill to swallow.”

Fear of change overwhelms our higher selves and professed principles. We would much rather put
meaning into an organized form, instead of mystery. Yet Hollis warns us that:

“When the form is worshipped, the God is "dead," that is, the energic mystery that gave it life
is supplanted by human constructs.”

Hollis iterates that we all find ourselves at ‘comfort way-stations’ along our life journey, but that when
we are compelled towards greater avenues of growth, we may often be met with resistance by others. 

“Spontaneous observation threatens the group, for they are not interested in exploration but in
finding certainty, less concerned about enlargement through personal, original insight than in
the more secure validation of external authority.” 

Let’s not forget Socrates, who In 399 BC, went on trial and was subsequently found guilty of both
corrupting the minds of the youth of Athens and of impiety (asebeia, "not believing in the gods of the
state"), and as a punishment sentenced to death, caused by the drinking of a mixture containing poison
hemlock (en.wikipedia,org)

Thankfully justice has transformed into more true forms of analysis for determining one’s fate, based on
what is truly lawful for the betterment of humankind. Yet Socrates is a prime example of the extreme
hardship that living our true selves could entail. We can’t be dissuaded in our desire for growth, for “we
are nouns in our conscious life but, in our journey through time and space we are all verbs.” There is no
way to hold back the flow of our unconscious needs if they are what are meant to become.

CHAPTER 8 That We Find and Follow the Path of Creativity and Delight in Foolish Passions

Extrapolating upon the previous chapter, Hollis wishes to indulge us in the numinous presence that
various inspirations gift to us. They are the motivating factors that move us towards growth, renewal,
rebirth and creation. When this happens we must appreciate and respect them for what they are. Do
not bury them away in some small place of ourselves.

“If such images in form speak to us, occasion resonance, then they express in outer form some
analogue to what lies within. To those things that do not resonate within us, we are indifferent, no
matter what the endorsement by fashion, popular taste, or vested authority. Such stirring within
must be respected, for it is a movement of soul whose vagaries can never, nor should, be
subsumed by mere practicality.”

In some instances, an experience may be so enlightening that we may be enamored so as to feel
‘possessed’ by it. With his gloriously poetic prose, Hollis reminds us to be careful regarding discerning
between limiting complexes, and those resonant experiences that truly encourage our future benefit.

“It is of profound importance, of course, to know the difference between being possessed by a
God and possessed by a complex. Men who have fallen in love, or acted violently, learned too
late to consider the difference. To be possessed by a complex is to have our ego consciousness
owned by a split-off aspect of ourselves. To be possessed by a God, so to speak, is to be
summoned to an obedience to something higher. Even then, we have to ask which God? What
choices? What circumstances?”

“Of any possession we have to ask, "what does it ask of me?" And "what are the consequences
of this imperative?"... do we not have to attend the distinction between what the gods ask of us
and what our ethical responsibilities are? After all great atrocities have been committed in the
name of various gods, or maniacal enthusiasms.”

“We do not choose our enthusiasms; they choose us. .. We can acquire an enthusiasm, learn it
from someone else, of course, be influenced by those around us, but if it does not occasion
resonance within us, it will be a passing fancy. Resonance means to resound, to set off echoes
within us, to preserverate within, as a tuning fork hums long after it is struck. Whenever we
experience resonance, something continues to hum for us.”

Our souls may be taken with a person, an idea, inspired by a piece of art, song, film or writing. We may
feel it tug at our unconscious; luring resonant emotion and thoughts to the surface, towards realizing
something numinous and purposeful in ourselves. Like a dream coming to reality.

Hollis presents a very relevant example for our modern Western minds in the form of Cynthia, an
investment banker. Cynthia has been having dreams that indicate that, though her mother has been
dead for some time, a “mother complex” has been hindering her decision to change her career, a
career that she emotionally outgrew long ago. There are indications that Cynthia wishes to be more
adventurous and take the risk to author a new biography for her life.

“What stands in the way is not an outer obstacle, but an inner impediment, namely, an
archaic message to please her parents, and to avoid risk… For Cynthia, her
developmental dilemma is whether she will surrender to the creative desire of her own
psyche to end one form of her journey and begin another, or succumb to the admonitions
of the past. Tapping into her emergent enthusiasm will re-energize her and confuse all
her financial colleagues, who will be puzzled why someone would slay the cash cow she
currently milks.. But for many deep inside they will also envy her for what she has
discovered.”

It is far from an easy task to let go of one’s sense of security and risk a creative new endeavor.
It means sacrificing a part of ourselves, letting go and trusting ourselves towards a new future.
If we don’t accept it, plan for and prepare our way forward though, then our unconscious minds
will find a way to insist upon change. This will throw us into a disorienting turmoil where we must
change our thinking. Oftentimes this contains a measure of grief as we are forced to let go of our
previous plans and hopes. 

“As we know, life is a series of passages. In every passage there is a death of some sort,
the death of naivete, 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 it's own security and maintenance, it will prolong, resist, deny, as long as it can, the
dismantling of the old. The terrible in-between is what often brings people into therapy,
for they feel very much alone and ineffective in restoring the former sovereignty of the
ego... The good news and bad news are both the same: we are asked to die. Only
through this death can our natural creativity enact its developmental plan. Sounds easy
in theory, but not so easy to go through. Nonetheless, if one can step back and see that
this is the nature of nature, that our own psyche is directing these deaths in order to bring
us to the next date, we might, from time to time, facilitate rather than resist the creative
process.”

“Tragedy is such a devalued concept in our time. Actually, it is a heroic sensibility, a
summons to consciousness, and admonition to greater reverence for the gods. We are
raised up, serve as playthings to the gods, fall, and then the responsibility for such a
tumble is ours, we are told. Wait a moment, how is that our faults, we who so casually
confuse Fate with Destiny? Fate is what is given to us; Destiny is what we are summoned
to become. In the interplay of the two, human character plays a role. Hubris, or the
fantasy that we know enough to know enough, seduces us towards choices that lead to
unintended consequences. Hamartia, the failure to see clearly enough, to see humbly
enough, is a lens through which we imperfectly envision the world, unavoidably distorting
and reductive, but convincing at the moment nonetheless.”

So, we must accept, we must grieve, we must forgive ourselves, and let go. After this, one may
have no idea how to rebuild. Create though, we must and, we will! Hollis assures us that “When
we are doing what is right for us, the psyche provides enthusiasm that is, the energy, to support
investment in life.”

“THE CREATIVE PROCESS is found in all of us, and also asks so much of us. It comes
to us as symptoms that embody hidden corrective, compensatory dreams, depressions
that tell us that the psyche will no longer cooperate with our faulty choices, and so on.
The creative process always asks for the death of some old attitude, which is why we
resist our growth and development so often that something else has to take over, or our
children have to carry out the unfinished project for us. What we may also have not
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.”

Creativity is all part of the process. It is there whether we are aware or not, but be aware! Be the
author of your vision, direct it the way you want it to go, and have fun with it! This is your life! 

FOOLISH PASSIONS- “They may only be foolish to the world, but they are not foolish
to our souls, or they would not have the power to attract libido, mobilize and guide its
vecters. There's a big difference between wasting time - our pop culture offers a vast
arena of possibilities for doing so - and having a Passion.”

So, be careful: Is this interest increasing you? Do you feel a sense of momentum when you
engage in it? Does it further inspire? Does it energize you? Don’t waste your energies on things
that eat your time, energy and spirit. Instead, What are your strengths? What opens up your
mind, your heart, and broadens your horizons? Who cares what anyone else thinks: this is you!
Your life. Don't think that other's won't appreciate it either. There will always be someone out
there who finds worth in what you do. A kindred spirit who needs to be reminded that this
interest is important too.

“If we do not create our own myth, we will be enslaved to someone else's”.

“The word Passio is the Latin word for "suffering". A passion is something we feel so deeply,
so intensely that it hurts, yet much of worth comes from such a hurt. All of us have passions,
but because they, too, ask much of us, we often dissemble, slip-slide away, and leave them
along the road behind us.”

“Goethe’s personal motto was Dauer im Wechseln - ‘what abides amid change.’ So, what provides continuity amid our sundry discontinuities? Certainly the Self abides our constant deaths. Our cells divide, die, generate at a slowing pace, and we are not the same bodies now as the moment before. Memory helps, but we cannot even answer the simple question “Of what are we unconscious?” Yet there are, from time to time, points of reference, benchmarks, lines drawn from which we get a provisional baseline, a fleeting summons to the next goal, a moment’s thought that this absurd, arbitrary game we call out lives might actually mean something. Sometimes a foolish passion opens a slit into the mystery. And, as Louis Armstrong said of jazz, those who have to have it explained to them will never know.”