The descent into the unconscious is always dangerous. It can be visualized as being devoured by the whale-dragon, as going down into a dark cave or into the castle of the evil magician. We go there to get something. As a rule, it is a valuable treasure or a precious stone.~Jung

When Jung once said that “a neurosis is an offended god,” he meant, metaphorically, that the neglect of a deep, instinctual energy ultimately revenges itself in our somatic discords, compulsions, addictions, or projections onto others.~James Hollis, What Matters Most

I always feel gratified when someone reads and comments on my novels! Thank you @peacenotwar2024.bsky.social

Peacenotwar@peacenotwar2024.bsky.social · yesterday

Thank you for repost. I am three chapters into Bea Gonzalez book, Invocation, and it is literally bridging mythos and logos. What a fun and expansive read!

All societies are evil, sorrowful, inequitable & will always be. If you really want to help this world, you will have to teach how to live in it. No one can do that who has not learned how to live in joyful sorrow & sorrowful joy of the knowledge of life as it is.~Joseph Campbell

Our anxieties lead us to grasp at certainties. Certainties lead to dogma; dogma leads to rigidity; rigidity leads to idolatry; idolatry always banishes the mystery and thus leads to spiritual narrowing.~James Hollis, Finding Meaning in the Second Half of Life

The more we are enmeshed with others, the less differentiated, the less individuated we are; the less individuated, the less we serve the greater purposes of the cosmos for which we were so mysteriously generated.~James Hollis, 𝘚𝘸𝘢𝘮𝘱𝘭𝘢𝘯𝘥𝘴 𝘰𝘧 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘚𝘰𝘶𝘭

The Jungian analyst Elizabeth Osterman, a great teacher, once told an analytic training seminar that I attended, “Watch what you hate—it’s pure gold.”~John Beebe

If we cannot bear being with ourselves, how is it that we ask another to do that for us? In fact, the capacity to be with ourselves, as we really are, finite, imperfect and deeply flawed, will prove not only to be the cure for loneliness but our secret gift to others as well.~James Hollis

The creative process has a feminine quality, and the creative work arises from unconscious depths—we might truly say from the realm of the Mothers.~C. G. Jung, The Collected Works of C.G. Jung: Volume 15: The Spirit in Man, Art, and Literature

[E]golessness is a flexible identity. It manifests as inquisitiveness, as adaptability, as humor, as playfulness. It is our capacity to relax with not knowing, not figuring everything out, with not being at all sure about who we are, or who anyone else is, either.~Pema Chodron

We spend our life until we're twenty deciding what parts of ourself to put into the bag, and we spend the rest of our lives trying to get them out again. Sometimes retrieving them feels impossible, as if the bag were sealed. Suppose the bag remains sealed —what happens then?~Robert Bly

"Love becomes a diamond because it had the chance to become ashes."~ Roque Dalton [in: The Other Within, Daniel Deardorff]

One day, you will be old enough to start reading fairytales again. —C.S. Lewis, 𝘛𝘩𝘦 𝘊𝘩𝘳𝘰𝘯𝘪𝘤𝘭𝘦𝘴 𝘰𝘧 𝘕𝘢𝘳𝘯𝘪𝘢

An 80-year old Swedish Engineer just sent my brother-in-law a message saying he had read my latest novel, Invocation, and that he was now doing a serious investigation into his shadow issues and this is, hands down, the review that has made me happiest for any of my novels! Back to quoting others...

I very much agree with Carl Jung, who said that transformation at the deeper levels happens in the presence of images much more than through concepts.~Richard Rohr, 𝘛𝘩𝘪𝘯𝘨𝘴 𝘏𝘪𝘥𝘥𝘦𝘯

This is the secret of dreams--that we do not dream, but rather we are dreamt. We are the object of the dream, not its maker. The dream is dreamed to us. We are the objects. We simply find ourselves put into a situation.~CG Jung, 𝘊𝘩𝘪𝘭𝘥𝘳𝘦𝘯’𝘴 𝘋𝘳𝘦𝘢𝘮𝘴

Without journey, risk, conflict we are already spiritually dead and are simply waiting for the body to drop away as well."~James Hollis, 𝘍𝘪𝘯𝘥𝘪𝘯𝘨 𝘔𝘦𝘢𝘯𝘪𝘯𝘨 𝘪𝘯 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘚𝘦𝘤𝘰𝘯𝘥 𝘏𝘢𝘭𝘧 𝘰𝘧 𝘓𝘪𝘧𝘦

Over time, Jung concluded that there was within each of us a deep resilience guided by some locus of knowing, independent of ego consciousness; a center that produces our dreams to correct us, symptoms to challenge us, and visions to inspire us~James Hollis, Living Between Worlds

If you evade suffering you also evade the chance of joy. Pleasure you may get, or pleasures, but you will not be fulfilled. You will not know what it is to come home.~ Ursula K. Le Guin, The Dispossessed: An Ambiguous Utopia

Being listened to, and being with somebody who takes genuine pleasure in listening, is really powerful. It really has an effect…. [I]f it was a “cure”– it’s a listening cure, not a talking cure. And it’s amazing what people will say if they think they’re being listened to." ~Rod Tweedy

There is almost a sensual longing for communion with others who have a large vision. The immense fulfillment of the friendship between those engaged in furthering the evolution of consciousness has a quality impossible to describe.~Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

Jung has demonstrated that the religious function resides in the psyche and is an integral part of human psychology...The ego, in order to be healthy, needs to have a living connection to a transpersonal center.~Edward Edinger

If you get rid of qualities you don't like by denying them, you become more and more unaware of what you are, you declare yourself more and more non-existent, and your devils will grow fatter and fatter. ~CG Jung

The sea is the favorite symbol for the unconscious, the mother of all that lives.~CG Jung, Psyche and Symbol

Plato described the two different ways of approaching truth as mythos and logos. Mythos is a more silent, intuitive way of looking at reality and logos is more of a scientific, discursive, logical way, and we need both. ~Karen Armstrong

Jung suffered a prophetic burden, by which I mean he was frequently misunderstood, often willfully so, sometimes viciously attacked, and experienced intellectual loneliness and isolation.~David Tacey, 𝘛𝘩𝘦 𝘋𝘢𝘳𝘬𝘦𝘯𝘪𝘯𝘨 𝘚𝘱𝘪𝘳𝘪𝘵

"I don't "believe" Jung or "believe in" his ideas. His ideas are valuable because they are so good to work with and against. Good ideas, like Jung's, allow the widest play for thought."~James Hillman, Inter-Views

"The central demand is to surrender our exclusivity: everything that defines us as against each other.”~Joseph Campbell, Reflections on the Art of Living

"It’s almost as if whenever there’s a telephone call in a dream, you know there’s a complex on the other end calling you away from this moment to an old place, an old value." ~James Hollis, A Life of Meaning

The problem with the word patience,” said Zen master Suzuki Roshi, “is that it implies we are waiting for something to get better... A more accurate word for this quality is constancy, a capacity to be with what is true moment after moment". ~Frank Ostaseski