When a storm comes up, where do you find shelter? How safe is this harbor? How much of life is on a mirror-calm sea with a clear-blue sky overhead? These questions are important to observe closely. Unless we wake up & intentionally remain awake, we'll squander our precious time, energy & immense potential by living the life of the most primitive single-cell organisms: pulling away from unpleasant stimuli, and pulling towards the pleasant stimuli. We can live infinitely more meaningful lives.
“In the first half of life, our summons is to build an ego strong enough to enter the world, deal with it, meet its demands, and create a living space for ourselves in it. This is seemingly what growing up requires and all life apparently expects. But if we are privileged to live longer than that, we often find other, insistent demands beginning to wash up on our shores from the vast sea within. … I think the meaning of the entire second half of life, (second half used more metaphorically than chronologically) is about finding, or submitting to, something larger than our ego needs, something larger than our complexes with their insistent chatter. If the first half of life is about ‘what does the world want from me, and how do I meet its demands,’ the second ‘half’ is about ‘what wants to enter the world through me?’ … I further believe that we all swim in mystery, and that that mystery – what some call the voice of God, some the Daimon, some ‘destiny’ – seeks its expression through us. We are the humble vehicles of that expression. It little matters if we wish that summons – it happens. And the more we submit, the richer our live becomes because we are flush with some kind of energy, and we experience our lives, however conflictual and traumatic, as meaningful. The experience of enduring meaning is not found in the precincts of pleasure, affluence, or achievement, as we once thought evident, but in surrendering to something developmental, redeeming, and enlarging, something coursing through us, something wishing embodiment through us." James Hollis. “Prisms. Reflections on This Journey We Call Life.” Chiron, 2021.
“Because the volume of the world is so loud, it’s drowning out the whisper from the heart.” Muhammad Iqbal
“That whisper in your heart may not have wings, but it has the power to fly.”Muhammad Iqbal
“In the final analysis we do not solve our problems, for life is not a problem to be solved but an experiment to be lived. It is enough to have suffered through into deeper and deeper meaning. Such meaning enriches and is its own reward. We cannot avoid the swamplands of the soul, but we may come to value them for what they can bring us.” James Hollis. “Swamplands of the Soul: New Life in Dismal Places.” Inner City Books, 1966.
“We are equipped for the journey. We possess the resilience of our ancestors who clung to this spinning orb, tumbling through measureless space, and we survive … rich for all that has accumulated on our journey.” James Hollis. “Living Between Worlds. Finding Personal Resilience in Changing Times.” Sounds True, 2020.
“The whole path of mindfulness is this: Whatever you are doing, be aware of it.”
“Am I living my life, or not showing up at all? Is my journey diminished by fear, and by my collusion with that fear? In the presence of intimidation do I learn from time to time to stand up, and risk being who I am regardless of the cost, regardless of the voices calling me back to a fugitive life? Where do I need to stand up now? Show up now? Do I remember to love and serve those around me? Do I learn that I, too, am equipped for this journey, provided the same tools, same resilience, and same tenacity that pulled my ancestors through?” James Hollis “Doubt is a profound and effectivespiritual motivator. Without doubt, no truism is transcended, no new knowledge found, no expansion of the imagination possible. Doubt is unsettling to the ego and those who are drawn to ideologies that promise the dispelling of doubt by preferring certainties will never grow.” James Hollis Below, an excerpt from a recent James Hollis interview: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i7z_PCrQYoM "My latest book - 'Living with Borrowed Dust: Reflections on Life, Love, and Other Grievances' 2025 - is really addressing two things. First, the word ‘philosophic’ is not a term people use very often, but it means loving what is true or loving wisdom quite literally. We should start worrying about that when we’re children I think. I did as a child. I remember asking large questions about life – Why am I here? Who’s the other? What’s this all about? What happens if I die? Etc. And the big questions persist. And I think addressing them at the different stages of our understanding, having sort of been forged in the fire of life experience so to speak, we owe ourselves an ongoing dialogue with those questions. As Socrates said, ‘An unexamined life is not worth living’ because a reflexive life [in which we merely react unconsciously, on autopilot] is living someone else’s life. It’s living to pressures etc.
Secondly, this particular book comes out of the fires of some real health crises. I mention at the beginning of the book that I’d had two cancers and then, possibly as a sequela of the cancer surgery, radiation and so forth, my spine started dissolving, so I was in excruciating pain and I had two major spinal surgeries and live with chronic pain. There was a real question about two years ago whether I was going to live or not. So that gets your attention also. And I’m grateful that I’m still here, grateful to be in conversation with you. So there’s not a single motivation. … Ultimately, I think this work [our soul'scalling] provides two things. It’s not so much the answers, which I would have thought was the goal of life when I was young, it’s that the good questions get you an interesting life and that’s one of the things that I think is unexamined. The good life meaning not material abundancenor even good health, because I didn’t have it during that time. It’s more that your life really takes on a sharp edge that matters to you. And secondly, it gives you a larger life - it means you’re growing, you’re developing. ‘We are the sum of our questions.’ And also to suggest some tools in there about how we can go about addressing what is wanting expression in the world through us, which is a different questions than what dominates the first half of life, which is what does the world, my parents, my school teacher, the partner, the society, want from me. Now the question is, what is the soul wanting of me. And that’s a different agenda altogether. If happiness were a thing, then we’d have to say, let’s all go on a search for it. Is it buried in South Dakota? Let’s move there and look. It’s like that diamond mine in Arkansas. Probably only one person in a 100,000 finds a diamond, but they do have diamonds there you know. So maybe happiness is something objective, and we can find it and so forth. But we all know happiness is not [an object, a thing]. Happiness is contextual. It depends on what’s happening, the circumstances, and of course it’s of short duration. And even to be in a state of constant happiness would mean I’d probably be oblivious to the needs of people around me, to the needs and suffering of people, and injustices around me. So I think happiness occurswhenwe arein right relationshipwith our own souls. In other words, I would never as a young person have thought that I would become a psychoanalyst. To sit and listen with people about their life suffering, hour after hour, hardly makes one happy. And yet I’m happy to be invited into a conversation of that depth. I’m honored to be part of their journey. My work makes me happy, but it’s not about happiness. It’s aboutmeaning. What is it that really touches you in a deep way that you know isreal for you. And that’s such a subjective experience that we can’ttransfer that to another person. So I would say I’m a person carrying a great deal of sorrow about the losses and injustices of life. I am a person who carries anger about those who are abusive and wield power mindlessly. But I’m also full of happiness too. We’re not a single thing. We’re complex beings. And the way happiness has pervaded as if it’s a commodity is truly delusional. I’ve known people for example get unhappy watching Facebook, or some other social medium, because they think all their friends have achieved that state of happiness – their children adore them, their grandchildren worship them, etc, etc, and they’re unhappy about being unhappy. Rather than say, ‘Is my life engaged? Is it addressing something that really matters? And why have I deferredaccountability for the well-being of my soulto other peoples’ descriptions out there?’
These are things people don’t think about very much. So I think that word ‘philosophical’ is an appropriate word. It’s not abstract. It has to do with how you conduct your life, what your values are, what matters most to you, and how you deal with aconflict in your life, and how you deal with contradictions. Those are the things that really define the human condition. It’s not going to make you happy, but from time to time, you’ll be flushed with happiness for a moment, and those moments are of course to be treasured. As long as we’ve construed happiness as our culture has, we’re all failures at it. So you have to have a better definition of happiness at a different level of expectation.
... you touched on a memory about 25, 30 years ago, I woke up around 5 in the morning, and I had these sentences rolling out of the unconscious. And it was essentially, ‘We all like to imagine we could someday walk into a sunlit meadow free of all conflict & suffering.’ And it was the beginning of the book, ‘Swamplands of the Soul.’ In that book, places like anxiety and loss and so forth, in every one of them, there is atask, the addressing of which moves us from victimage & passivity into an ongoing journeyinto an enlargementthat comes from those terrible experiences. One of the gifts of loss, for example, is that it helps us really treasure the preciousness of this moment when we’re still connected, but alsoto tend to find the value of that which we lost – the loss of a child for example, as I’ve experienced, or the loss of people you love. Then you realize you honor that relationship because none of us is here forever. You honor that relationship by carrying on the values that rose out of that friendship or parenting experience and so forth.
That’s what provides the richness of life, because sooner or later, no matter how thoughtfully we conduct our life, we’re going to find ourselves in some difficult places. And then we have to address these. Where is the resilience within you, and how do you honor that which was of such value to you? And that again, as I mentioned, moves you from this passive position of being a victim, to anactive engagement. You take that in and you grow through it, and you render itmeaningful in your life.” James Hollis PhDhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i7z_PCrQYoM
"If I ventured in the slipstream Between the viaducts of your dream Where immobile steel rims crack And the ditch in the back roads stop Could you find me? Would you kiss-a my eyes? To lay me down In silence easy To be born again To be born again"
I'm sure I'm not alone wanting a wise, big-picture overview of life, so I canlive my best life. Mystics of all wisdom traditions, passed & living, are connected to & sharethis wisdom.
One of the wisest quotes I've come across: "The most important question to ask ourselves, according to Einstein: 'Is the universea friendly placeor not?' ... If we believe that the universe is unfriendly ... peace will be elusive at best." Joan Borysenko. “Fire in the Soul. A New Psychology of Spiritual Optimism.” Warner Books, 1993.
Even intelligent, educated people seem overwhelmed bymysticism for many reasons. First and foremost, our culture is by and large ignorant about mystics&mysticism. Our "consumer society" trains us to buy as much as possible as fast as possible, "greed is good," even after 9/11 George W. told Americans to show the world what they're made of, "Go shopping!" We're starving on a restricted diet of junk food (shallow materialistic concerns), and don't even know the vocabulary of nutrition (metaphysics, spirituality). We fear what we don't know, and procrastinate & otherwise avoid learning about it.
"Nothing in life is to be feared,
it is only to be understood. Now is the time to understand more, so that
we may fearless." Marie Curie, Nobel Prizes in Physics, & Chemistry
"... relax, allow life to be as it is, &open yourheart to yourself. It’s
easier than you might think, and it could change your life.” KristinNeff. “Self-Compassion. The Proven Power of Being Kind to Yourself.” HarperCollins, 2011.
"I was born when all I once feared I could love.”Rabia Basri
"Once we are willing
to be directly intimate with our life as it arises, joy emerges out of
the simplest of life experiences."Roshi Pat Enkyo O'Hara
During meditation “you are not escaping the world; you are getting ready to fully embrace it.” Christine Skarda
"To be enlightened is to be intimate with all things."Zen Master Dogen
SO, what CAN we do?Not should, not must - although our time as individual mortal beings, as well as a species is running out - but absolutely CAN do, because wisdom that is IN ALL of US, the wisdom that is in fact who/what we actually are, is amazingly what we mostly, and in some almost entirely, have forgotten. Here's some of what I've understood from the many imho wise elders I've been reading about, listening to on the web, occasionally meeting, and more recently, blogging about:
Don't Judge. Every day we see outrageous, disgusting behavior on the news. It's disorienting to see how almost half of the US population fervently supports behavior, that in a few years (as Germans did after WWII) they will categorically deny having even known anything about it. So it's hard not tojudge terrible behavior. Butfrom a much higher, non-dual perspective,what if we're each born to play a certain role, with a certain set of talents, a certain set of limitations & no matter how wonderful or horrible it appeared, we all did our best. And what if most of our ridiculous behavior was because most (but mercifully not all) of us completely forgot that we took on our role freely, including the fact that we are actually producers & executive directors of the entire play - almost identical to the Jesus being fully human andfully Divine story, except the he had almost complete recall of who he actually was, where he came from, and where he would return to. Bewildered? This blog & its video might help: http://www.johnlovas.com/2023/01/the-nearly-unforgivables.html
Be Discerning. Many of us spend a great deal of time watching / listening to the news & comments about the news. While it's important to perhaps watch / listen to the CBC or BBC news for 30 minutes a day, much more than that is probably masochistic or even an addiction. Doing more & more of what makes you feel sick is not a recipe for optimal healthy. Instead of a steady diet of psychopathic politicians, billionaires, "influencers", and other nightmare visions, for the sake of sanity - how about reading about and listening to wise elders? My blogs are all about inspiring, mature, healthy, wise role models, like:
and MANY MORE wise elders to learn from & be inspired by.
It'sOUR CHOICE - our free will - whether we immerse ourselves inwisdom - OR - indarkness. "Too busy", yet doomscrolling for hours each day?; is this wisdom stuff "too deep" or "too confusing", and again, "just too busy" to get into it and learn? You can procrastinate and aim at bestfor feeling superficially OK, "ordinary unhappiness" - OR - discover what life isreallyabout.
Learn & Do Spiritual Practices. Theory is important BUT not enough. We need to intentionally PRACTICE shiftingfrom beingfearful consumer robotstobecoming wise elder human beings. Our culture is not big on "practices." Some of us might admire the dedication it takes to become world class athletes, dancers, surgeons etc, but most of us just don't have the dedication to put in the time & effort. The ONE area where ALL of us would massively benefit is putting in dedicated time & effort into spiritual practice: http://www.johnlovas.com/search?q=spiritual+practice
Be a Nurturing Presence. Only by waking up to who/what we truly are, can we help instead of hinder others to wake up and help others. “… we have to allow our higher nature to show before we can do anything real, before we can be truly responsible people.” Jiyu-Kennett. “The Wild, White Goose. The Diary of a Female Zen Priest.” ed 2. Shasta Abbey Press. 2002.
Be Humble. The ego is a tricky, sticky, persistent trickster. We must regularly check our own BS-meter. A common problem is assuming a massive group ego - thinking one can do even horrible things because "I'm doing God's work." But such "crazy wisdom" is just crazy. To paraphrase Forest Gump, "Crazy is as crazy does." Humility, gentleness, empathy, wisdom & kindness are rarely promoted or even recognized in our consumer culture & partisan religions.
Learn Self-compassion. The tough, aggressively self-reliant, workaholic individual is venerated these days, while a decent, nurturing, humble person would be branded "a loser" by today's dictators & billionaire CEOs. So decent human beings need to intentionally practice self-compassion, in order to survive & be effective in today's crass, superficial, heartless environment.
Practice Self-awareness. With self-awareness practice, your talk & your walk are kept aligned. Again, humility is crucial. "Self-inquiry" is a specialized, key, self-awareness practice: http://www.johnlovas.com/search?q=Self-inquiry
Become More Discerning, More Self-compassionate. The more neuroses & "story of me" burdens we shed, the more clearly we see ourselves & what's going on around us. The more clearly we see, the more magnified our remaining (though diminishing) neuroses & other burdens appear to us, so it can seem like we're regressing instead of "getting ahead." So we need more self-compassion & patience with ourself. “Felt reality is invariably wept reality, and wept reality is soon compassion and kindness. Decisive and harsh judgmentsslip away in the tracks of tears. And when we cry, we are revealing our truest, most loving self.” Richard Rohr. “The Tears of Things: Prophetic Wisdom for an Age of Outrage” Convergent Books, 2025.
Live in Joy. Gradually, you will be progressively more peaceful & joyful, regardless of the many challenges & sorrows in your own & loved ones' life, as well as that of the human race. The major, even crippling burdenthat you will shed is your identification with & constant rehashing of your own 'story of me' AS WELL AS its twin, the constant anxiety of 'what will happen to me?' and of course, vividly imagining the worst possibilities. As this HEAVY PSYCHOLOGIC BURDENstarts to lift, you start to experience 'the peace that surpasses all understanding' ie it must be experienced to be understood. Even this has, if you will, a 'dark side': while you'll see as your own past, no matter how miserable, as just a story, your empathy towards others (even actors playing a sad role in a movie) becomes progressively more powerful. Your job now is embodyingpeace & joymodelingequanimityeven in the midst of chaos, when it's the most essential.
"This is actually instruction from the Buddha, where he says, ‘Live in joy, in love, even among those who hate. Live in joy, in health,even among the afflicted. Live in joy and peace, even among the troubled. Look within. Be still, freefrom fears and attachments. Know the sweet joy of living in the way things are in the Way, the Dharma.' And so this is also a challenge. He doesn’t say, let’s get rid of disease and all these problems, butto find a joyfulway to be aliveamidst it all.” Jack Kornfield - Finding Your Self on the Spiritual Path - Point of Relation with Thomas Hüblhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Fjz7WaTyX4WONDERFUL MATURE WISDOM - Jack Kornfield at his best
And some 500 years later, in another incarnation of the Divine, Jesus said, "the poor will always be with us." Fixating on quickly eliminating age-old problems is in itselfproblematic, akin to "seeing a splinter in another's eye," again from Jesus, advising that we should first address our own significant flaws (‘the beam’ in our own eye) before attempting tocorrect / "save"others.
“The teachings on Buddha Nature do not mean that there is some nucleus of Buddhhood enclosed in sentient beings behind the temporary obscuring stains. Rather, our whole existence as sentient beings is in itself the sum of temporary stains that float like cloudsin the infinite, bright sky of Buddha Nature, the luminous, open expanse of our mind that has no limits or boundaries. Once theseclouds dissolve from the warm rays of the sun of wisdom shining in this space, nothing within sentient beings has been freed or developed, but there is just thisradiant expanse without any reference points of cloud-like sentient beings or cloud-free Buddhas." Sthiramati, 6th century Indian Buddhist scholar-monk
Watching David Ditchfield's 40-minute BBC interview about his Near-Death Experience (NDE) is imho wise use of your precious time: https://www.shineonthestory.com/
Our health & quality of life depends on our becoming consciously aware of who we truly are, as well as what influences our behavior. Both of these require deep self-reflection & meditation. The former is profoundly helped by advanced meditation & self-inquiry practices; the latter by Jungian analysis (depth psychology), Internal Family Systems (IFS), Transpersonal Psychology etc. Sadly, our current society, is not only ignorant about, but actively & passively discourages self-reflection, serious meditation, & sustained attention to anything of substance.
“For what is not available in our culture we are now obliged to find for ourselves.” James Hollis
“The mother complex, that is, the affectively (emotionally) charged idea of mother, is in us all. It is experienced as the longing for warmth, connection and nurturance. When one’s initial experienceof lifemet these needs, or largely so, one feels that one belongs in life, that here is a place where one will be nurtured and protected. … the child will feel
more grounded in his or her own reality and more trusting of the world
around. As Freud once observed, the child who has the mother’s devotion
will feel invincible.
Where the primal experience of the feminine was conditional or painful, one feels deracinated (uprooted from one's natural geographical, social, or cultural environment), disconnected. Such an ontological wound is felt in the body, burdens the soul and is frequently projected onto the world at large. One’s entire Weltanschauung (philosophy, view of life, worldview) can derive from this largely unconscious, phenomenological ‘reading’ of the world.
I have seen a considerable number of men in therapy whose need for mothering is so extensive that they are doomed to be dissatisfied with their wives. While it is clear that women do not want to be mothers to their husbands, it is also clear that many men seek in their wives the sort of unconditional acceptance and nourishment associated with positive mothers. Indeed, I have seen many men stuck in marriages that were dreadful for various reasons but they were unable to countenance the idea of leaving. Departure held all the terrors of the child leaving home for the unknown. Sexuality, in particular, is freighted with the infantile need for bodily contact and nurturance. As women grow weary of taking care of little boys, so little boys find it harder and harder to leave home and grow up, since neither father nor the fathers are available to show the way. When men feel the push-pull of the mother complex they are apt to confuse that power with the outer woman in their life. Just as they often regress in intimate relationships, making a mother of their partner, unconsciously demanding she be ‘the good breast,’ so they fear and oppress women, as if by controlling them they might master the fear of their own undertow. The sorry history of men’s treatment of women is stark testimony to this. One oppresses what one fears. Fear is responsible for the oppression of women and for gay bashing, the latter most notably by young men insecure in their on psychological reality. The resistance President Clinton encountered in proposing to end the ban on homosexuals in the American military was not because there were no homosexuals already serving bravely and honorably, nor because regulations regarding sexual harassment were not already in place, but because of the macho man’s fear of his own feminine side. Machoism is in direct proportion to man’s fear, and the banding together of fearful men is the breeding ground of violence and the tacit admission of the power of the feminine in their lives. Vast bastions of macho mentality remain in contemporary society, perhaps none more regressive than the military. Possibly, in order to do the work of killing, a man has to override every principle of relatedness within him; he can ill afford to pay attention to doubt or to the eros principle. In his frightened heart he knows what the Greeks made clear long ago, that in the end Ares (Mars) was no match for Aphrodite (Venus). But he will fight her power because, sadly, he has not yet learned that to be a man is to feel comfortable with his feminine side as well. Because his fear is only partly conscious, it is projected onto women and gays, among others. In his unreasoning fear, the macho man remains a little boy just as much as the man who expects all women to mother him. Both of them have unwittingly succumbed to the power of the mother experience and denied that same large power within themselves. Surely the greatest tragedy for men in regard to the feminine principle is that their fear alienates them from their own anima, the principle of relatedness, feeling and connection to the life force. This alienation from self obliges alienation from other men as well. Often their only connection with each other comes through superficial talk about outer events, such as sports and politics.” James Hollis. “Under Saturn’s Shadow: The Wounding and Healing of Men.” Inner City Books, 1994. HIGHLY RECOMMENDED
Our task then is to become fully conscious of all the mostly unconscious material that so profoundly affects our life. Actively investigating all of this, mostly subconscious material, is best accomplished with the assistance of a trained Jungian analyst. The excerpt from Hollis' book points out how all of us need to balanceassertiveness, competency & empowermentwithrelatedness, feeling & connection to the life force.Skillfully investigating & integrating this material allows us to become BALANCED enough to prioritize realizing howwe are INFINITELY MORE than these neuroses, complexes & habits. SEE: http://healthyhealers.blogspot.com/2021/07/learning-to-rest-in-silence.html
Our survival instincts - a conglomerate of life lessons (conditioning), reflexes & genetics - is our 'self-centered survivalist' operating system that runs our mostly autopilot existence. Rarely do we stop to consider, 'Wait a minute, I always respond to situations like this - why?What ifI consciously decide on the most appropriatetailor-made response to each new situation to optimize results for myself & others affected?' Now, each situationis new, as it can't ever be exactly the same, and we change from one moment to the next, so each moment is always a brand new ballgame. Intentionally considering how others are affected requires our fear-based survival instinct to abate temporarily, so our wiser, more spaciouslove-based 'tend & befriend' operating system can come online.
When an individual or group is criticized, especially if the criticism is valid, instead ofusing the criticism constructively & making necessary corrections, the usual tendency is to automatically double-down in 'self-centered survivalist' mode, and rationalize past behaviors - 'intellectual bypassing' - like lawyers using legal loopholes to keep guilty clients out of prison. Such self-centeredblindness to values is how a small friendly business that starts by selling nutritious whole foods, degenerates into a multinational corporation, pushing addictive salt, fat & sugar-laden snacks, and viciously defending its market share. Anything tends to similarlydegenerate, even our great mystics' direct experience of the Divine.
“Perhaps all the dragons in our lives are princesses who are only waiting to see us act, just once, with beauty and courage. Perhaps everything that frightens us is, in its deepest essence, something helpless that wants ourlove.” Rainer Maria Rilke
There are many reasons why the above will sound counter-intuitive, counter-cultural, even nonsensical to our usual way of thinking & being. Of course this "usual way" - the separate self or left-hemisphere-dominant operating system - is narrowly specialized to control the external environment to optimize survival & procreation.Deeper values, wisdom, spirituality & meaning, and ideas like beauty, truth & goodness are foreign, irritatinglyirrelevant, abstract,impractical concepts to this pragmatic level of thinking & being, and indeed to many in our current society.
Unlike the troubled characters we see daily in the news, we actually do have some wisdom-keeper eldersactually worth listening to. But they're rather modest & quiet, and so we must take time out to search them out, listen deeply to what they say, and read slowly & carefully the things they write. Among the wisest of these imho is James Hollis PhD, an 84 year-old psychologist & Jungian analyst, who's written 20 wonderful books, all while working full time and doing many excellent interviews:
“In an age of great material excess, we suffer dislocations fromenergies of our deepest being and, in return, suffer emptiness, anomie, aimlessness – all sicknesses of the soul.
On a collective level, our culture’s treatment plans for the absence ofa personal, intimate relationship with the (Divine) are materialism, hedonism, narcissism & nationalism, as well as a coursing nostalgia for a world that never really existed.” James Hollis. “Living Between Worlds. Finding Personal Resilience in Changing Times.” Sounds True, 2020.
