Destiny commands... and imposes a sacred obligation to show up in the face of one's desire for a normal, casual life... there are other forces afoot of which consciousness has only the dimmest of understandings.

James Hollis

Categorized in : Desire Understanding Destiny

The only requisite to entry into the Middle Passage is to have discovered that one does not know who one is, that there are no rescuers, no Mommy or Daddy, and that one's fellow travelers will do well to survive themselves.

daddy middle doe

In moments of spiritual crisis we naturally fall back upon what worked for us, or seemed to work, heretofore. Sometimes this shows up through the reassertion of our old values in belligerent, testy ways. Regression of any kind is just such a return to old presumptions, often after they have been shown to be insufficient for the complexity of larger questions. The virtue of the old presumptions is that they once worked, or seemed to work, and therein lies if not certainty, then nostalgia for a previous, presumptive security. In our private lives, we frequently fall back upon our old roles.

spiritual lying fall

As children we listened to the sound of the sea still echoing in the shell we picked up by the shore. That ancestral roar links us to the great sea which surges within us as well.

sea sound children

The act of consciousness is central; otherwise we are overrun by the complexes.

personhood individuation consciousness

Fear of our own depths is the enemy.

depth fear enemy

Anger is generally seen as an unwelcome presence in our midst, however natural it may be. Although each person, and each society, is charged with how anger is to be appropriately channeled, the denial of anger, or its continuous repression, is a deep source of our psychopathology and will invariably seek its expression in a less healthful fashion.

fashion anger expression

Is not our chief neurosis - by which I mean our estrangement from nature - our desire to hold fast to what is forever transforming, to freeze the familiar, to submit motion to stasis, to solicit immortality through rigidity.

desire forever mean

The goal of individuation is wholeness, as much as we can accomplish, not the triumph of the ego.

triumph ego goal

There is some debate in professional circles about whether the so-called “midlife crisis” exists.

midlife debate circles

We should ask if there is another dimension to it (the striking coincidence) that would ask of me, what change of attitude and what insight I might draw from this, is there a task there that is corrective to my way of looking at things?

world

Everybody has stories like that.

world