finding meaning in the second half of life – james hollis

Plan to read this again for my 50th birthday. This is definitely a book that needs 2-3 readings before the message sinks in. I LOVE how he starts the book:

This book is not a typical “how to” book. My chief desire is to stir thought, trouble sleep, and provide some wider perspective. It will not tell you how to find God, meet the perfect mate, or win friends and influence people. That is your job, not mine.

Here are some excerpts:

“And then the knowledge comes to me that I have space within me for a second, timeless, larger life.”

Sometimes, to our dismay, we find that we have been living someone else’s life, that their values have and are directing our choices. While this life we are leading never quite feels right, it seems to be the only alternative. Even when we win the applause of others, we secretly feel fraudulent.

What do these quite different people have in common? Each of them experienced an insurgency of the soul, an overthrow of the ego’s understanding of self and world, and a rather demanding invitation to live more consciously in the second half of life. But first came the confounding of consciousness, and the sense that each of them had moved, or better, been pulled, from a familiar environment into some darker wood. Each of them experienced an insurgency of the soul, an overthrow of the ego’s understanding of self and world, and a rather demanding invitation to live more consciously in the second half of life. But first came the confounding of consciousness, and the sense that each of them had moved, or better, been pulled, from a familiar environment into some darker wood.

Aeschylus, the first great tragedian, observed that the gods ordained a solemn decree that from suffering alone comes wisdom. Such earned wisdom brings greater dignity and depth to our lives, and we are blessed by the spiritual enlargement that is its byproduct. For those in the midst of such suffering, talk of enlargement seems gratuitous, or insensitive, and yet, much later, they often come to realize that they have acquired a more differentiated consciousness, a more complex understanding of themselves, and, greatest of all, a more interesting life.

For those in the midst of such suffering, talk of enlargement seems gratuitous, or insensitive, and yet, much later, they often come to realize that they have acquired a more differentiated consciousness, a more complex understanding of themselves, and, greatest of all, a more interesting life. Their lives grew spiritually, psychologically richer, and they earned this growth.

When we live without meaning, we suffer the greatest illness of all.

Soul is what makes us most profoundly human, and unceasingly drives us toward more conscious, evolved engagement in the four abiding orders of mystery in which our journey plays out: (1) the immense cosmos through which we are flung at warp velocity, (2) ambient nature, which is our home and our context, (3) each proximate other who brings the challenge of relationship, and (4) our own elusive, insurgent Self, forever asking, insisting, not to be forgotten.

Andre Malraux wrote in The Walnut Trees of Altenburg: The greatest mystery is not that we have been flung at random between the profusion of the earth and the galaxy of the stars, but that in this prison we can fashion images of ourselves sufficiently powerful to deny our nothingness.

A life that constricts meaning wounds the soul.

Jung wrote in his memoir, “Meaninglessness inhibits fullness of life and is therefore equivalent to illness. Meaning makes a great many things endurable—perhaps everything.”

Jung once observed that one can travel no further with another than one has traveled on one’s own.

Pharmacology may conveniently allow one to avoid the larger questions of life, which, if ignored, are the secret source of suffering. This is not a virtue! Indeed, pharmacology, while helping diminish painful symptoms, may sometimes deflect or even derail our appointment with the soul.

The second half of life presents a rich possibility for spiritual enlargement, for we are never going to have greater powers of choice, never have more lessons of history from which to learn, and never possess more emotional resilience, more insight into what works for us and what does not, or a deeper, sometimes more desperate, conviction of the importance of getting our life back.

If we are in service to the Self, we can seldom be in service to the herd as well. And how often do we have to learn that one cannot serve two masters without paying a crucifying cost?

As Jesus is reported to have said in the Gnostic Gospel of Thomas, “If you bring forth what is within you, what you bring forth will save you. If you do not bring forth what is within you, what you do not bring forth will destroy you.” This is the essence of what Jung means by individuation.

Virtually all of us lack a deep sense of permission to lead our own lives. We learned very early that the world exacted conditions that, if not met, could result in punishment or abandonment.

In most lives, permission to live one’s life is not something one is given; it is to be seized, if not in early ego election then later in desperation, for the alternative is so much worse.

Rather than ask, what does my tribe demand of me, what will win me collective approval, what will please my parents, we ask, what do the gods intend through me? It is a quite different question, and the answers will vary with the stage of life, and from one person to another. The necessary choices will never prove easy, but asking this question, and suffering it honestly, leads through the vicissitudes of life to larger places of meaning and purpose. One finds so much richness of experience, so much growth of consciousness, so much enlargement of one’s vision that the work proves well worth it. The false gods of our culture, power, materialism, hedonism, and narcissism, those upon which we have projected our longing for transcendence, only narrow and diminish. Of each critical juncture of choice, one may usefully ask: “Does this path enlarge or diminish me?” Usually, we know the answer to that question. We know it intuitively, instinctively, in the gut. Choosing the path that enlarges is always going to mean choosing the path of individuation. The gods want us to grow up, to step up to that high calling that each soul carries as its destiny.

This book is not a typical “how to” book. My chief desire is to stir thought, trouble sleep, and provide some wider perspective. It will not tell you how to find God, meet the perfect mate, or win friends and influence people. That is your job, not mine. It is a book that respects your powers perhaps more than you do. It knows that you will still need to pass through all the trials of life, that you are surrounded by distractions, and that you are undermined by fear and by powerfully repetitious history. It believes that for you to make your own way you will have to become more responsible than any of us really wishes to be. It recognizes the immense importance of spirituality in this process of reclaiming your life, though it professes no specific belief for you to embrace. Again, that is your job. This book respects you, and asks that you do the same, and, together, we will come through this life with greater integrity and purpose.

Despite the permutations that each of us brings to our unique journey, the story that follows is universal; it is the story of us all. Yet each of us is obliged to find our personal path through the dark wood. In the medieval Grail legend the knights, having seen the Grail, and intuiting that it symbolized their search for meaning, undertook the challenge and began their descent into the dark wood. But the text tells us that each one chose a separate place of entry “where there was no path, for it is a shameful thing to take the path that someone has trod before.” Your journey is your journey, not someone else’s. It is never too late to begin it anew.

“The chief cause of human error is to be found in prejudices picked up in childhood.”

“We drag expensive ghosts through memory’s unmade bed.”

Have you not had the feeling, amid the evening rush hour drive, or while sitting on the beach, or at 3 A.M., the hour of the wolf, that you have no idea who you are, or what this busy business is about? If we have not had such moments of genuine confusion, perplexity, and doubt, chances are we are simply living on automatic pilot.

So, what has brought you to this point in your life? Have you chosen this life you lead, these consequences? What forces shaped you, perhaps diverted you, wounded and distorted you; what forces perhaps supported you, and are still at work within you, whether you acknowledge them or not?

As Shakespeare observed in Twelfth Night, no prisons are more confining than those we know not we are in.

By forty she had reached all her goals and felt miserable.

In the end we will only be transformed when we can recognize and accept the fact that there is a will within each of us, quite outside the range of conscious control, a will which knows what is right for us, which is repeatedly reporting to us via our bodies, emotions, and dreams, and is incessantly encouraging our healing and wholeness. We are all called to keep this appointment with the inner life, and many of us never do. Fortunately, this insistent invitation comes to us again and again.

In ways not possible in the past, we are now able to ask: “Who am I apart from the roles I have been playing—some of them good, productive, and consistent with my inner values, and some not?” Or we may wonder, “Since I have served the expectations of my culture, reproduced my species, become a socially productive citizen and taxpayer, what now?” What, in short, is the second half of life about—the time today between thirty-five and nearly ninety years—if it is not to repeat the script and expectations of the first half of life?

We are obliged to acknowledge that the only person who is consistently present, in every scene of that long-running drama we call our life, is ourselves. It stands to reason, then, that we might bear some responsibility for how this play, or soap opera, is turning out. We are clearly the protagonist of the drama, but is it possible that we are also the author, and if not us, who then, or what?

What role do we play in our own dramas? Are we the protagonist, or a bit character in someone else’s script? And if so, whose script, and what is that story?

What seemed common to all, and brought them to my office, was that their understanding of themselves, and their attendant strategies in the world, was undergoing some sort of sea shift. Whatever “the plan” of their lives was, conscious or unconscious, it progressively seemed not to be working too well. None of them had come to therapy as a first choice. Their initial line of defense against the eruptions of the unconscious into their lives was denial. (This is our most understandable, most primitive defense, which, if continued indefinitely, proves to be the only truly pathological state of being.) Typically, their second strategy was to revivify their efforts in service to the old plan. Their third choice was to strike off toward some new projection—a new job, a better (different) relationship, a seductive ideology, or sometimes to drift into some unconscious “self-treatment plan” such as an addiction or an affair. Their fourth choice, after having tried all of the above, was to admit futility and reluctantly come to therapy, feeling frustrated, sometimes angry and defeated, and always, always humbled. This shaky beginning marked the onset of the deepest inquiry they had ever undertaken, the risky adventure of getting to know who they really were, often quite apart from whomever they had become.

For some the entry is gradual; others are pushed suddenly into deep waters.

Midlife distress, while driven from inner engines, often presents itself first to consciousness in the outer context of intimate relationships, then in career, and then in more personal symptoms such as a depression.

As time goes by, our partners prove flawed and mortal, as we are to them, and we blame them when our projected scripts erode and deteriorate into conflict.

Similarly, we frequently have enormous expectations that careers will provide satisfaction in our life, and, however well or unwell our jobs work for us, in the second half of life we often find ourselves working for them, with decreasing satisfaction even as we accomplish our goals, collect our paychecks, and invest in a 401(k). If the soul could so easily be bought, then our culture would really work. Only the unconscious think it does. Look around you; look within you. Be honest. How well does material affluence work? And what is the price?

The psyche is always speaking, and its urges will manifest first as ennui, then more conscious boredom, then inner resistance to our conscious scripts, and, as we continue to turn deaf ears, finally, an eruption of invasive feelings and behaviors: interrupted sleep or eating habits, the lure of an affair, troubling dreams, self-medicating addictions, and so on.

We find ourselves asking, “I have done the expected things, according to my best understanding of myself and the world, so why does my life not feel right?” These are painful questions, and all of us, all of us, sooner or later, experience this discrepancy between what we sought, served, and accomplished, and what we feel in our private, honest moments.

Yet, though these collisions of external expectation and inner reality frequently reach the surface in chronological midlife, I would suggest that each of us experiences a summons of the soul not once, but many times in the course of our lives. Either way, a substantial crisis of identity occurs whenever we experience the unavoidable conflict between the natural Self and the acquired “sense of self,” with its attendant attitudes, behaviors, and reflexive strategies. Sometimes this conflict occurs when we go through a divorce only to find our problems continuing into the next relationship. Sometimes it rises out of the traumatic loss of a partner, which reveals to us a dependency we did not know lurked beneath our seemingly independent behaviors. Sometimes it manifests in the departure of our children, who have been carrying more of our projections and unlived life than we imagined. Sometimes it emerges in the context of a life-threatening illness or some other brush with death. (All it takes is a lump in the breast or an elevated PSA for the bottom to fall out of our well-planned life.) Or sometimes it simply comes to us as a sudden shock, as an occluded storm front sometimes passes over a sunny field, and we realize that we do not know who we are, or why we are living, or begin to sense that how we spend our now limited, precious time on this planet might really be up for grabs.

Traditional cultures evolved communal rites to support a person’s passage through such times and provided a vibrant set of mythological images that relocated the loss of the old in a larger, transcendent realm of meaning. In our era, however, such support, such rites of passage, are generally missing, or weakened, and these periods leave the individual adrift, disoriented, alone.

In the absence of the tribe, the weekly ritual of analysis becomes the supportive rite of passage for some. Although this transition from the old life and received values may prove frightening and disorienting, it is stunning, and ultimately transforming, to discover that something larger wishes to emerge.

This understandable desire for what is called “the regressive restoration of the persona” merely papers over the growing crevice within, and off we go in search of another palliative treatment, or another less demanding view of our difficulties.

Most of us live our lives backing into our future, making the choices of each new moment from the data and agenda of the old—and then we wonder why repetitive patterns turn up in our lives. Our dilemma was best described in the nineteenth century by the Danish theologian Søren Kierkegaard when he noted in his journal the paradox that life must be remembered backward but lived forward. Is it not self-deluding, then, to keep doing the same thing but expecting different results?

The second half of life is a continuing dialectical encounter with divergent truths, truths that are generally quite difficult to bring to consciousness until we are forced to do so. These truths include the recognition that this is our life, not someone else’s, that after our thirtieth birthday we alone are responsible for how it turns out, that we are here but a fleeting instant in the spinning shuttle of eternity, and that there is a titanic struggle going on within each of us for the sovereignty of the soul. To grasp this reality, live with it, accept its summons, is already to enlarge the frame of reference through which we see our life.

I have frequently seen people become neurotic when they content themselves with inadequate or wrong answers to the questions of life. They seek position, marriage, reputation, outward success or money, and remain unhappy and neurotic even when they have attained what they were seeking. Such people are usually contained within too narrow a spiritual horizon. Their life has not sufficient content, sufficient meaning. If they are enabled to develop into more spacious personalities, the neurosis generally disappears.

… the most pervasive yet seductive delusion of our time, that we can find something “out there”—some person, some social stature, some ideological cause, some external validation—that will make our lives work for us. If this were true, we would see the proof all around us.

Only rarely a person who moves through this life with a sense of transcendent purpose, deep psychic grounding, and a spiritually enlarged life.

The quality of our relationships, the quality of our parenting, the quality of our citizenship, and the quality of our life’s journey can never be higher than the level of personal development we have attained.

The way forward threatens death—at the very least, the death of what has been familiar, the death of whomever we have been.

The daily confrontation with these gremlins of fear and lethargy obliges us to choose between anxiety and depression, for each is aroused by the dilemma of daily choice. Anxiety will be our companion if we risk the next stage of our journey, and depression our companion if we do not. Not to consciously choose a path guarantees that our psyche will choose for us, and depression or illness of one form or another will result. Yet to move into unfamiliar territory activates anxiety as our constant comrade. Clearly, psychological or spiritual development always requires a greater capacity in us for the toleration of anxiety and ambiguity. The capacity to accept this troubled state, abide it, and commit to life, is the moral measure of our maturity. This archetypal drama is renewed every day, in every generation, in every institution, and in every decisive moment of personal life. Faced with such a choice, choose anxiety and ambiguity, for they are developmental, always, while depression is regressive. Anxiety is an elixir, and depression a sedative. The former keeps us on the edge of our life, and the latter in the sleep of childhood.

Prague-born poet Rilke expressed the paradox this way: Occasionally someone rises from evening meal, goes outside, and goes, and goes, and goes. . . Because somewhere in the East a sanctuary stands. And his children lament as though he had died. And another, who dies within his house, Remains there, remains amid dishes and glasses, So that his children must enter the world In search of that sanctuary, which he forgot.

How scary is it that what we don’t do in the surprising adventure of this journey, our children will need to do, for they will be limited by our sad example, or overwhelmed by having to do it for us?

What once was the confidence of youth, albeit often just whistling in the dark, I now see as a combination of hubris, hamartia, and unconsciousness. From this encounter with our limitations the wisdom of humility comes: to know that we do not even know what we do not know, and that what we do not know will often make the choices for us.

“Right relationship with the gods” as a psychological concept means that we harmonize our conscious life with the deepest powers that govern the cosmos and course through our own souls. Such moments of congruence will be felt as a sense of well-being, a reenergized relationship to self and world, and a feeling of “home” in the midst of the journey.

Who ignores this summons will suffer the wrath of the gods, the splitting of the soul we call neurosis.

Our life’s journey begins with a traumatic separation, a shock to the system from which we never wholly recover. And all of us, to varying degrees, experience two categories of existential wounding that affect the rest of our lives.

Magical thinking results from an insufficient ability to differentiate self and world. The child concludes that “The world is an encoded message to me, a statement about me, about how I am valued, and how I am to comport myself.” Another way of putting this is: “I am what happens, or happened, to me.”

Decades later we may begin to differentiate better. We learn that Mother’s anger, or Dad’s aloofness, or the impoverishment of imagination that haunted our tribe, was the limitation of another and not about ourselves at all. But this recognition comes late in life, if at all, and after many painful turns and returns.

Lacking other “readings” of the world, it is natural for a child to conclude: “I am as I am treated.”

The Wound of Overwhelmment – The first category of inevitable existential, childhood wounding we may call overwhelmment, namely, the experience of our essential powerlessness in the face of our environment. First, given the message that the world is larger, more powerful, we may logically try to evade its potential punitive effect upon us by retreating, avoiding, procrastinating, hiding out, denying, dissociating – the avoidant personality. The second logical response to overwhelmment is found in our frequent efforts to seize control of the situation – sociopathic personality. In service to the core message, he or she internalized: “The world is hurtful and invasive. You must hurt or invade it first or be hurt and invaded instead.” Most of us learned other, less extreme, coping mechanisms. We may pursue education as a means to understand, because to understand is to be in control . . . perhaps. At any rate, all of us have endeavored, with greater or lesser success, to get in control of our environment, lest it control us. Many have sought overt power in life, from petty dictators to insecure, bullying spouses. Their urgent desire for power is a measure of their inner powerlessness. Others, giving up on the notion of gaining power overtly, resort to what we commonly identify as passive/aggressive behaviors. Such a person appears to cooperate, even be congenial, but surreptitiously sabotages, turns up late, inserts the chilling, critical remark, fails to carry through, and thereby gains power through apparent powerlessness. Thirdly, with the power of the world inordinately impressed upon us, there is another category of logical response, surely the most common: “Give them what they want!” Accommodation is a learned response,. Notice that there are so many polite words we have learned to accommodate our accommodation. We say someone is “sweet,” “personable,” “amiable,” “easygoing,” and most often, “nice.” When these labels repeatedly apply to someone’s behavior the consequences to the person’s inner life may in fact be ugly. We are conditioned to be nice, yet if we find ourselves repeatedly, reflexively being nice, we have not only lost integrity through reflexive responses, we have lost the power to conduct our own life. In recent years, this adaptive response has become so common as to earn its own pathologizing name, “codependence.” Codependence may or may not be a psychiatric category, but it is certainly an estrangement from our souls.

The wound of insufficiency tells us that we cannot rely upon the world to meet our needs.

It may have been that a parent was repeatedly not there for us, perhaps caught in his or her relationship difficulties, his or her depression, distractions, addictions, or real-world pressures. Even insufficiencies outside parental influence, such as poverty, contribute to this sense of scarcity. At worst, we have the experience of literal abandonment.

Three major categories of response to protect our fragile psyche:

1. …The absence of the supportive other is internalized as “I am not met halfway because I am not worth being met.” Such a person has a tendency to hide out from life, diminish personal possibilities, avoid risk, and even make self-sabotaging choices. One takes the lesser opportunity as a confirmation of one’s apparent worth. One chooses the safe option, be it in work or relationship, rather than one that challenges and opens new possibilities… Sense of dispossession and the lifelong need to “arrive.” He has been climbing this mountain for a long time. His psyche tells him that he is over that hump, and he is then able to effortlessly gambol down the hillside.
2. … Overcompensate and seek power, wealth, the right partner, fame, or some form of sovereignty over others…. What one lacks within one will seek in the outer world … The narcissist. Narcissists work very hard to conceal their inner poverty from recognition by others. They may boast, inflate their reputations, swagger and belittle others, or they may fall apart at the first hint of neglect and criticism, making others feel guilty for the alleged injury done to them. Such adult children typically either run off and marry the person they love and suffer the guilt and loss of their parent’s approval or accede to their parent’s desire and live depressed and angry marriages. Some even fantasize waiting until the parent dies, so great is their inner anxiety.
3. … The anxious, obsessive need to seek the reassurance of others. Every therapist will attest to receiving many clients who complain about their relationships. They think all the good men are gone, or there are no woman without disturbed agendas. They meet and mate with someone and quickly begin to hector them and demand continuous reassurance from them. In time they grow weary of the other person, for the other can never fill the vast void within them. They are quick to find fault and they bitterly blame their partners for being so inadequately present. Even in normal marriages this sort of disappointment arises, for each of us has a lifelong need for fulfillment that no other person can ever meet. For the more mature, this insufficiency is perceived as the nature of life itself, and not the fault of their partner. For those whose history is especially charged with insufficiency, this intractable wound is larger than consciousness, and leads to a familiar, heartbreaking round of repeated disappointment, frustration, anger, disillusionment, and the desire to cast off in a new direction in hope of better results through the “magical other” over the next hill.

The chief motive of any addiction is, of course, to help one not feel what in fact one has already been feeling. Breaking the tyranny of the addiction will require one to feel the pain that the addiction defends against.

No freedom is possible, no authentic choice, where consciousness is lacking. Paradoxically, consciousness usually only comes from the experience of suffering and the flight from suffering is why we often elect to remain in the constrictive yet familiar old shoes. But the psyche is never silent, and suffering is the first clue that something is soliciting our attention and seeking healing.

“He has a terrible fear of dying because he has not yet lived.

Despite what we say to ourselves about wanting to know who we really are, there is a very strong chance that we will steer clear of decisive meetings with ourselves for as long as possible. It is far easier to walk in shoes too small for us than to step into the largeness that the soul expects and demands.

What we initially see in the mirror is what we wish to see, the persona, not the instinctually grounded self. What we are seeing is sometimes called the “provisional personality,” the acquired behaviors, attitudes, and reflexive strategies through which we learned to manage the world the best we could. The provisional personality, an interwoven fabric of adaptations, may be far removed from the inherent Self, but, “for good or ill, it brought us this far,” so we are afraid to let go of it now. However, life has a way of calling this provisional personality into question.

A man, still on the career track, still invested in the notion that burdens most men, that their worth is a function of their performance…

A mystery so profound that none of us really seems to grasp it until it has indisputably grasped us, is that some force transcendent to ordinary consciousness is at work within us to bring about our ego’s overthrow.

The ego wishes comfort, security, satiety; the soul demands meaning, struggle, becoming. The contention of these two voices sometimes tears us apart.

Stronger souls seek therapy; the more damaged seek someone to blame.

Indeed, a close cousin to … depression is boredom, or ennui, which means that the object or the goal that has carried our projections of psychological energy thus far no longer sustains the agenda of the soul.

Sometimes these depressions take us over and leave us prostrate. At the bottom of this well, and there is always a bottom, there is a clear task and a summons. The task is to ask what the psyche wants, not what the parents want, not what the parent complexes want, not what the culture wants, not what the ego wants. The summons is to respond from the depth of one’s being and risk giving the soul what it always wants—a larger journey.

Anxiety is the price of the ticket to life; intrapsychic depression is the by-product of our refusal to climb aboard.

Relationships have a tendency to disappoint because so much— too much—is asked of them. We seldom appreciate how much freight is imposed on us by our partner, or by us upon them.

Freud noted that when a couple goes to bed six people are present, for psychologically the couple brings along their parents as well. One might just as accurately consider fourteen present, for the parents’ internalization of their parents, which came through to the couple in psychological transmission, are present as well. It gets rather crowded in such a small space, and quickly complicated. For relationships to survive this freight one needs luck, grace, patience, and an enormous devotion to personal growth. The conflict and suffering that rises in relationship at midlife is an invitation to examine what agendas, dependencies, expectations, and sabotaging complexes are at work. Rather than accept this very onerous responsibility, it is much easier to blame our partners, or try to reform them, or leave them.

Projections always pass through five identifiable stages.

1. At the onset they feel magical; they literally alter our sense of reality and have a compelling power over us.
2. Disillusionment.
3. We begin to do whatever we can to reinforce the projection, to recover its pristine attraction.
4. To suffer the withdrawal of the projection. (Often, this recognition occurs after the affair, after the job change, after the plastic surgery, or other precipitous choice.)
5. If we reach that point at all, is to become conscious that a projection has occurred.

If I grow depressed after having achieved, or failed to achieve, my goals, what has the ego projected upon the world around me? Where does the soul wish me to go?

Addressing the content and the issue raised by an eroded projection will initially feel defeating, but it is the chief way to become responsible for our issues and for addressing the possibility of a genuine change of course in life.

Being accountable for the content and issues embodied in our eroded projections is probably the chief service we can bring to our jobs, our partners, our children. As we lift the burden of our unconscious traffic off the other, we free them to be whatever or whomever they are meant to be when we are not interfering with them.

Who among us is strong enough, or ethical enough, to say that we are our own problem?

Each of us, from childhood on, engages in magical thinking similar to Job’s, believing we can strike deals with the world and with the divinities. These “deals” are part of how we attempt to protect our vulnerable selves in an omnipotent and often inscrutable universe. But such deals with the universe are our fantasy alone, and have little to no bearing on reality. Just as we try to live in smaller fictions in order to feel more secure, so our “deals” unwittingly diminish the world and those around us by seeking to contain and control their autonomy.

This betrayal by the other—by God, by our lover, by our friend, by the corporation—is a betrayal of our hope that the world might be manageable and predictable.

We can see that the agenda of the first half of life is predominantly a social agenda framed as “How can I enter this world, separate from my parents, create relationships, career, social identity?” Or put another way: “What does the world ask of me, and what resources can I muster to meet its demands?” But in the second half of life, the worm turns, the agenda shifts to reframing our personal experience in the larger order of things, and the questions change. “What does the soul ask of me?” “What does it mean that I am here?” “Who am I apart from my roles, apart from my history?” These questions necessarily raise a different agenda, and oblige us to ask questions of meaning. If the agenda of the first half of life is social, meeting the demands and expectations our milieu asks of us, then the questions of the second half of life are spiritual, addressing the larger issue of meaning.

Psychology of the first half of life is driven by the fantasy of acquisition. But then the second half of life asks of us, and ultimately demands, relinquishment.

Continual “defeats” of the ego may finally, perhaps, bring it to the point where it begins to ask other kinds of questions. When the ego gets conscious enough and strong enough, or battered enough, it will begin to say: “What new thing do I have to learn about myself in the world?” “Since I can no longer manage all this perplexity by my former understanding, what does the soul ask me to do in the face of this overthrow?”

Such collisions occur not only at midlife but repeatedly, throughout the course of our lives. If we can bear to acknowledge this, such collisions indicate that the soul is in charge, doing its work, whether we like it or not, and is always urging us toward a larger life.

“We would rather be ruined than changed. We would rather die in our dread than climb the cross of the present and let our illusions die.” W.H. Auden, The Age of Anxiety

In later life, it is frequently shattering to our ego’s pride to realize that we have been in servitude to these adaptive patterns throughout our presumed adulthood.

We all have a tendency to confuse fate and destiny, between what life presents us and what we are meant to become.

We thought we were in charge of our lives. Wisdom begins when we recognize that there are these split-off parts of the personality that have a life of their own. They rob energy from our conscious life, oblige us to serve historic patterns rather than be in the present with all choices open, and bind us, like the mythic Ixion, to the wheel of repetition.

Consciousness, however, is wrested from the enormous powers of the unconscious only after some considerable pain.

Standing up to our fear is perhaps the most critical decision necessary in the governance of life and the recovery of the soul’s agenda in the second half of life.

As scary as living can be, stop and think how you will feel if, on your deathbed, you look back on your life and conclude that you never really showed up because you were afraid. Isn’t that grim prospect more frightening than facing the fear itself, up front, now?

We recall that the other grinning gremlin at the foot of the bed is lethargy, the torpor of the spirit. It is no accident that this word reminds us of Lethe, the river of forgetfulness in the classical topography of the underworld. Forgetting that we are summoned by each moment to make life-defining choices is rather easy to do. It is always tempting to pull the blanket over our head, fall back asleep, and wait for another day, having successfully avoided the responsibility of conscious life. Lethargy is a part of our nature. It is testimony to the enormous sucking power of the unconscious, which can, without our concerted effort, pull energy for conscious life back down into darkness.

Spiritual lethargy is further abetted by the many distractions of our time,

Perhaps the two greatest addictions in our culture do not include street drugs, which make for easy scapegoating by politicians, but are television and food, both of which are readily available on a twenty-four-hour basis.

We still have to face ourselves in the end.

To flee into our work to avoid our real job,

Of all the ideologies that possess the contemporary soul, perhaps none is more powerful, more seductive, and possibly more delusory than the romantic fantasy that there is someone out there who is right for us, the long-sought soul mate, what I call “the magical other,” the one who will truly understand us, take care of us, meet our needs, repair the wounds, and, with a little luck, spare us the burden of growing up and meeting our own needs. This fantasy is in us all, and is the most virulent ideology of the modern world, even more powerful than its chief rival: the fantasy that material goods will bring us happiness. Perhaps the combination of romance and affluence are surrogates for belief in God.

As a therapist, I have worked with so many broken relationships, so many “soul mates” who were discovered—surprise—to be merely human after all. What is going on here? Why this obsessive fantasy? Why do we, longing for relationship, repeatedly sabotage the few we have? These are questions too important not to ask. And yet, in asking these questions about relationship, I find many who, while agreeing with the logic of the questions, stoutly resist the necessary conclusions and the agenda for personal responsibility that they ask of us. It is far easier to be disappointed in the other than to call ourselves to account.

And we all know the next chapter of this story. Behind our projection is, surprise, surprise, a mere human being like us. Whoever they are, whatever they are, their imperfect reality will inevitably wear through the projection until a different picture emerges. “You’ve changed; you’re different; you are not the person I thought you were,” we hear, and so they are different, as they always were.

If we so barely know ourselves, how can we know the other?

It is virtually impossible to do therapy with a person “in love,” just as one cannot work with a drunk. Often, they suffer more than an intoxication; they are temporarily psychotic and cannot reflect, own, and sort through their lives until enough of the projection has worn away that the ego consciousness resumes its proper function. The fantasy of “love” has everyone in its grip, especially the person who is lacking resolve to look within and to take responsibility for meeting more of his or her own needs. Moreover, and this is seldom noted while in the throes of desire, our projections depersonalize the other whom we profess to love. They become objects, artifacts of our psyche, and in those moments, we are no longer in ethical relationship with them. The secret goal of “falling in love” is fusion with the other, and the obliteration of the individual consciousness is the outcome most desired. (Le petite morte, the French expression for orgasm, is, after all, “the little death).” While the desire for obliteration is an inescapable by-product of the rigor and hardship of our journey, when it prevails, we are infantilized, regressed, and dependent, and secretly wish to be so. But in the light of day, it does not seem so pretty.

Since the other cannot in the end, and should not ever, carry responsibility for the task of our life, the projections inevitably wear away and the relationship has a tendency to deteriorate into a power struggle.

Secretly “we wish to colonize the other,” and like most imperial powers, we are flush with rationalizations to justify our agendas of self-interest.

To have a grown-up relationship, we have to grow up!

We are all recovering children.

There is a telling paradox at work here. The more we wish another person to repair our wounds, meet our needs, and protect us from having to grow up, really grow up, the more dissatisfying the relationship will prove over the long haul. It will swamp in stagnation.

Too many, alas, continue to flounder on the recurring parentification of their partners.

Love requires big persons, not kids.

It is the confusion of romance with love that occasions our problems.

The chief disorders of our time are the fear of loneliness and the fear of growing up.

Growing up means taking psychological responsibility for ourselves, and not just economic and social responsibility—that is the easy part. Growing up means that we take spiritual responsibility for ourselves. No other can define our values, become our authority, or protect us from necessary choices. Until we accept this responsibility for ourselves, we are asking others to be a shelter for our homeless soul.

What passes for conventional love is fusion between two incompletes, both of whom are in service to a regressive agenda. How different this is from the poet Rilke’s notion of a soulful relationship as the sharing of one’s solitude with another.

What the movies, the novels, the soap operas do not tell us is that the constant companion of Eros is pathos; desire and suffering are twins. If we risk loving, we will always open to larger suffering as well.

The cure for loneliness is solitude. Solitude can be defined as learning that we are not alone when we are alone. When we have achieved the stature of solitude, namely achieving a conscious relationship with ourselves, then we are freer to share ourselves with others, freer to receive their gifts in return and not be infantilized by the mutual archaic agenda of childhood, the agenda that covertly uses the other to provide for us.

We physically leave family in the first, easier, departure at the end of adolescence. Leaving family psychologically remains a separate, more critical, sometimes impossible task for the second half of life.

As with the fantasy of romantic love, perhaps the idealized family fails because we ask too much of it.

He asked, “How many of my family can I save?” “One,” I said, “and I am talking to him.”

Of every family we must ask, “How well did the soul flourish here; how much life was lost through the failure of modeling a larger life, granting permission to follow one’s own course, or was constricted by the glass ceiling of familial fears and limitations?”

What would happen to our lives, our world, if the parent could unconditionally affirm the child, saying in so many words: “You are precious to us; you will always have our love and support; you are here to be who you are; try never to hurt another, but never stop trying to become yourself as fully as you can; when you fall and fail, you are still loved by us and welcomed to us, but you are also here to leave us, and to go onward toward your own destiny without having to worry about pleasing us.” How history would change! How each child would be freed by the parent’s courage to sacrifice his or her narcissistic needs in service to that child’s joint but separate journey! How each parent would then be free to address the questions that life brings to him or her, without living through the child! How each child could explore, experiment, falter, and regroup, without shame, without self-derogation, armed always by the experience of love and support, which one may carry as food for the soul in the times of desolation and defeat that come to us all! But few parents are able to give this unconditional love to their children, having not received it themselves.

The greatest burden the child must bear is the unlived life of the parents

My advice to parents is always the same: hold your breath – they will finally grow and leave, no doubt blaming you for everything until they find that their problems have followed them. Try to model the fuller life, and such ethical standards as you wish to affirm; give permission to them to be different, to be, that is, who they are; manifest unconditional love while maintaining standards, boundaries, and reasonable expectations. Despite their protests, your teenagers also need these statements of limit desperately, which they can hardly provide for themselves amid their internal adolescent anarchies. When they do leave, it is quite appropriate both to weep and to breathe a sigh of relief as a part of your life comes back to you.

D.W. Winnicott coined the phrase “the good-enough parent.”  We are not capable of perfection, and if we were, what a terrible burden that would be for our children.

What a terrible dilemma facing a child: “Please my parents and die within or live my separate journey and lose their love.” Such deformation of the child’s unique journey is a kind of spiritual violence. Such demand for compliance cannot, in the end, be called love, for it is a harm of the deepest sort to those whom we profess to love. Yet how many parents do you know who are strong enough to free their child, to love unconditionally, to give ready permission for the child to be who he or she is? How many children have the genuine security to pursue the life they desire to lead? And know they will be supported, even if the parent might prefer other choices?

Parents in the second half of life experience the aging of their own parents, the diminution of their powers, and finally their death. Many a patient I have seen has felt freed, albeit with a sense of guilt, when their parent died, for they no longer had to try to please them.

Sometimes called the sandwich generation, the person in the second half of life who is raising teenagers and caring for parents at the same time, however willing to do so, will find his or her own development needs neglected. The only way in which one can avoid resentment, a resentment that is seldom brought to the surface and therefore festers in the unconscious, is to try to do all the above caregiving more consciously. This means that one exercises caregiving responsibility for children and parents. While also sequestering time for oneself. The long-term neglect of the self will manifest somewhere, perhaps in physical illness, or depression, or more commonly in that crankiness that is the leakage of repressed anger. The difficult task is to balance one’s own need for personal freedom and personal growth with the needs of others. It is never easy to find such a balance, but the failure to try will ensure burnout, resentment and depression which is typically anger turned inward.

If the aging parents never took responsibility for themselves as younger adults, they may prove especially demanding of their adult children.

Rather than mellowing, most people become more of what they already were. Those who whine now will whine more; those dependent now will become children; those in denial will now blame others; Those who neglected growing up and assuming full responsibility for their emotional well-being will expect you to carry it when their powers decline. Double burdened midlife adults, however functional they may be in other parts of their lives, will find it especially difficult to find a healthy balance with these demanding parents. They will either overcompensate by distancing themselves or remain powerless to resist the parents’ expectations and find it virtually impossible to draw self-protective boundary lines. If they say no to their children, or their parents, they are riven with guilt. But of what are they guilty? So frequently what appears as debilitating guilt is really a form of anxiety, the anxiety learned earlier in life as the cost of asserting oneself against the potentially abandoning punitive parent.

I have already told my adult children that I do not expect, nor do I wish, them to take care of me should I become dependent, or even mentally incompetent. I wish to free them for that approaching day, and wish them not to divert their lives, no matter how needful I might be. This freedom may take some courage on both our parts, but courage is always demanded of those who wish to live a life with some integrity. Just as they knew they always had my love, so I know that I always have theirs. We do not have to prove that through some compliant acts.

The healthy family certainly helps mediate and buffer the pathologizing experiences of the world, but the unhealthy family renders the child all the more vulnerable to them.

The ultimate test of the family is not whether it provides safety and predictability, but whether or to what degree each person can leave it, freely, and return, freely, as a larger person.

Freud once noted that two requisites are necessary for sanity: work and love. Surely, he meant the right work, just as much as the right love. By midlife the limits of what intimate relationship can provide are typically evident, as are the evolving roles in the family. For many, next in line as a carrier of projected satisfaction is career. While all of us have to find a way to support our material existence, our work also carries a larger invisible burden, the presumption that it will provide our lives with meaning and energize our spirits. Sometimes it does. By midlife, however, many find that their work drains rather than energizes them. They suffer vague discomfort, find themselves bored, wistful, longing for something else.

Frederick Nietzsche once observed that the teacher is ill served whose student does not surpass him. So, our parenting is less effective if our children do not grow beyond us toward an enlarged vision of life many possibilities for satisfaction of the soul.

Men in particular are conditioned to think of themselves as synonymous with their work. This is why layoffs, downsizing and retirement almost always produce a profound depression in men after the first shock of anxious reckoning. Thus, men cruise towards depression, a systemic loss of meaning, and an earlier death.

We cannot ask a relationship, or the external, consensual word, to meet our deepest needs and give us a sense of personal worth.

Ego identifications alone will not suffice to satisfy the soul over the long run.

If the ambitions of youth, many of which we are able to achieve, truly served the soul, then we would see a lot happier people. We would not have to deal with so much divorce, so much substance abuse, or prescribe so many antidepressants if the ambitions of the first half of life worked for the second half. Nor would we have evolved a culture that depends on ever escalating sensations and daily distractions from its deep unhappiness.

Contrary to Sartre’s bon mot, hell is not other people; it is us, constrained by the world we have constructed for ourselves, or allowed others to construct for us. The sense of ennui, restlessness, sometimes even depression that comes from the achievement of one’s ambitions, or the failure to achieve them, is the generally unwelcome invitation to disidentify with those goals. Legend tells us Alexander wept when he reached the Ganges, for there was no further world to conquer. Apparently it had not occurred to him that there was also a world within of infinite scope and mystery.

One engages in work because it is meaningful, and if it is not, one changes the work. If one has the strength to accept the necessary solitude of the journey, one can appreciate the gifts of friendship and relationship all the more for their precious moments in the face of transience and decay.

The soul has no interest in social adaptation as such. It has as its goal the fulfillment of ends transcendent to the ego.

In the end, the meaning of our life will be judged not by our peers or their collective expectations, but by our experience of it.

We prize something called success yet grow the more miserable for having achieved it. If our life ends in ruin, from collective societal standpoint but has fulfilled the calling intended by the guards, it has been a life well lived.

Meaning is found, over the long haul, through the feeling of rightness within. No one can give that to us, although we may allow others to take it away from us.

Saint Augustine said we were here to love God and enjoy life. Kurt Vonnegut believes we are here to be the eyes and conscious of God. Jung, standing on the silent African veldt at dawn, watching the drifting rivers of animals moving in their timeless way, wrote that we are here to bring consciousness to brute being.

Without more conscious suffering, we can never find depth or meaning, never really grow, and never really change our lives.

“Desire” itself derives from a Latin nautical term which means “of the star”. Do you have desire is to have a vector, an intentionality, or direction. To lose desire to be as adrift as a mariner who has lost the guiding star across otherwise trackless seas.

Add the various eating disorders to the list of cultural neuroses, for they too are inadequate responses to, or materializations of, the source invitation to drink the cup of life to its dregs.  Whether stuffing our spiritual hungers with matter or seeking to control our ingestion of life through various anorexias, we are driven further and further from the soul through our spiritual projections on to food.

As T.S. Eliot once observed, in the world of fugitives, the person who is headed in the right direction will appear to be running away.

Quite likely, the soul will speak to us at least some of the time in ways we do not want to hear.

We are here such a short time period before we depart, it would be nice to think that we reconnected with our journey, that we found our myth again, the one truly worth serving. The emergent myth from amid the psychopathology of daily life is already forming in the dream you will dream tonight, in the intuition that comes to you at the hour of the wolf, and in the mystery that is forever renewing itself through the life of each of us.

What constitutes personal authority? Stated most simply it means, to find what is true for oneself and to live it in the world.

We all, privately, know this imperative summons every day, though we may flee it: find what is true for you; find the courage to live it in the word; and the world will in time come to respect you (though at first you may confuse others and scare them).

And for sure, many of today’s purveyors of spiritual goods are as slippery as soap salesmen.  Their coiffed hair, their televangelist suavity, their oleaginous platitudes infantilize their congregants rather than challenge them to become what they were meant to become. Their messages offer relief from struggle through simple steps and seduced by surreptitious avoidance of life’s summons to depth. Our culture is crowded with such spiritual snake oil.

A mature spirituality will seldom provide us with answers, and necessarily so, but will instead ask ever larger questions of us. Larger questions will lead to a larger life. A mature spirituality is critical for the second-half of life because if we do not address these questions directly, chances are we will be living in subjugation to received values which delude, divert, or diminish us.

Religion is for those afraid to go to hell, and spirituality is for those who have been there.

Perhaps paleontologist Teilhard de Chardin came closest to bridging these worlds when he said that matter is spirit moving slowly enough to be seen.

If I say that I like a certain flavor of ice cream, and that you will too, you may or may not agree with my taste. But if I insist that my taste is right and yours is wrong, then I have offended your humanity by denying the reality of your experience. We do this kind of violence to each other, as individuals, as cultures, as spouses, as parents, all the time.

Anyone who reflects deeply upon our culture and our common condition will discern that the loss of a spiritual life underlies virtually all of our culture’s malaise and our personal psychopathology. Whoever does not feel a participant in a deeper symbolic drama will manifest as a walking collection of symptoms sooner or later.

Daily obeisance to the television set threatens to become the chief soporific of our time, supplanting religious inquiry, intellectual growth, discernment, discrimination of values, as well as enabling avoidance of whatever personal demons we may have.

When the spirit has departed, we cannot will it back. Though we may not understand why, when the spirit is present, we will be moved.

In the poem titled “A Coat,” W.B. Yeats described how he had woven the patchwork of many mythic traditions into a coat to wear in the frost of modern age.

The swamplands of the soul, those dark places where fate, fortune, and our own psyches frequently take us.

Without journey, risk, conflict, we are already spiritually dead and are simply waiting for the body to drop away as well. Then we will have missed the meaning of our being here in the first place.

The only way to avoid loss is to avoid attachment, but to live without commitment is to live in an arid place.

Natural as it is to seek to hang on, the inevitability of loss rather asks that we treasure what we have, appreciate it for its precious momentary presence in our lives, and know that its gift to us is found precisely in its impermanence.  What would be ours in perpetuity is less treasured.  What is fleetingly here is most dear.

The German word for serenity is Gelassenheit, which could be translated more literally as the condition of having let go. The serene countenance of the Buddha is based on his recognition of the folly of seeking control, dominance, and containment. Having triumphed over both fear of loss and desire of sovereignty, he is free, and therefore serene.

The paradox is that the hysterical certainty is propagated by political and religious institutions are in fact an unconscious confession of their own insecurity. Wherever certainty is brandished so vehemently, it is generally in compensation for unconscious doubt, and therefore is dishonest.

But doubting also threatens us by bringing us to our essential loneliness, the place without external validation, the place where we most risk being who we really are and feeling what we really feel. Loneliness is not one of the greatest disorders of the soul, but the fear of loneliness is. We are all lonely even amid crowds and in committed relationships. When we are alone, we are still with someone; we are with ourselves. The question is, how are we with ourselves? Those who manage to find respect for themselves, who learn to dialogue with themselves, who find that their dreams and other such phenomena are communicating with them from some deeper place within them are not really alone.

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.

Some, myself included, have even come in the end to bless their depression, for it obliges them to become more conscious and to change their life.

As we have seen, we live in a culture that breeds addictions, for our psychic roots are severed from a deep mythic ground. This mythological dislocation increases the steady harm of anxiety, always just beneath the surface of even our most mindless forms of escape. No one is free of addictions, for addictions or anxiety management techniques the purpose of which is to lower the level of psychic distress we feel at any given moment, whether we are conscious of the distress or not. In no person’s life are these anxiety reduction patterns absent. For one person stress is relieved by a cigarette, for another food, for another a phone call to a friend, for another work, for another some simple repetitive activity such as cleaning the house, for another compulsive prayer.

Differentiate angst from anxiety from fear. Angst is the German word for anticipatory anxiety or dread that accompanies the human condition because the threat of annihilation is palpable and present from our first to our last breath… the task brought to us is to live our lives fully, in the presence of the threat of annihilation…Anxiety Is free floating, unattached, not unlike the fog that obscures the road that we drive… Fear, however, is specific and if we can convert our anxiety into specific fears, we will have taken a powerful step. To see in the cloud of anxiety the specificity of fear, to confront the fear as an adult, is to break the tyranny of anxiety. But to be free entirely of anxiety is unrealistic and delusory, no matter how energetic ones mental gymnastics or addictive treatment plans. At least one should not add the corrosive power of shame to our common condition of anxiety. If we look hard enough, we will find anxiety or its management, at the roots of so much we do.

The goal of life is not happiness but meaning. Those who seek happiness by trying to avoid or finesse suffering will find life more and more superficial.

Life is not a problem to be solved, finally, but a series of engagements with the cosmos in which we are asked to live as fully as we can manage.

Contrary to the fantasy of the youthful ego, this larger life will quite often be found in the savannas of suffering – not on the lofty peaks of new age transcendence, or in fundamentalisms fearful flight from complexity, but down in what Yates called “the fury and mire of human veins.”

As Jung put it so aptly, “this apparently unendurable conflict is proof of the rightness of your life. A life without inner contradiction is only half a life, or else a life in the Beyond which is destined only for angels.”

Have we not learned the limits of our institutions, and the shadowy agendas hunting even our noblest ideas?

If we do not pause from time to time to slow the rush, to ponder this question of what brought us to this place in the journey, this moment in life, then we may be sure that we have abdicated any responsibility for the journey, forsworn any capacity for choice and concomitant meaning, and relinquished the future as well. We are told that what we do not know will not hurt us, it does, and others as well. If one does not reflect on these various forces, one may be sure that these same forces will continue to work their way toward unconscious replication. Anyone who avoids this question may be intelligent, but not conscious. Consciousness is a task that renews its challenge every morning.

Whose life have I been living? If it is not ours, so to speak, whose life then? Yet we are the only character who is present in each scene, so we must be held accountable in the end. In many cases we are living the unlived life of our parents.

Why, even when things are going well, do things not feel quite right?

While the world is full of clues to us, most of the time we do not see them. As Jesus reportedly protested in the gnostic gospel of Thomas, the Kingdom of God is spread all over the world and we do not see it. Such clues are found not only in our dreams, but in our patterns, in how others relate to us, how our body reacts, however feelings rise as autonomous critiques and expressions of value, how energy is available for some things and not others– clues everywhere. But these clues are so often drowned by the cacophony of messages from the world around us, as well as the committee of complexes within. Their voices say, “please Mom and Dad,” “make money,” “be successful,” “get married,” “raise children,” “make them dutiful so that they will take care of you,” “choose security over truth,” “choose what your peers choose,” “seek authority in the consensus,” and so on. These interfering voices are quite familiar to us, for we have lived with them for a long time. They once came from parents’s mouth, or from one’s tribe, and offered a path to acceptance by others. Who could resist such siren calls? So why is it, then, that so many people, having obeyed these imperatives to the best of their ability, are so unhappy with their lives and with themselves? Why is it that success in achieving these goals so often feels empty? Why, having followed the plan, served the marching orders, does one not feel an inner assent, a lightness which confirms?

Why does so much seem a disappointment, a betrayal, a bankruptcy of expectations?

The simplest answer to these questions is found in the fact that so much we do serves the values of collectivity and violates the essential nature of our individual selves. Even when we accomplish what we set out to accomplish, the achievement seldom feels right because it is seldom about us at all. As Joseph Campbell said on television once, we can spend decades climbing the ladder, only to realize too late that we have placed it against the wrong wall. That wall may be someone else’s wall, but not yours. So much feels a betrayal of expectations because, as we saw in the chapter on relationships, we are imposing the very large agenda of the soul upon finite, fragile things, fragile people, and fragile roles. No person, no role in life, however rewarding, can ever carry the complete aspirations of the soul – only our move two word wholeness can. Wholeness is not found in perfection, which is neither achievable nor desirable – the former because we are too flawed and never live long enough to get it all right, and the latter because it would exclude its opposite and thereby undermine wholeness. As we have seen, the youth needs projections to pull him or her into life. Who would have left home at all if they could not believe that their career would offer emotional satisfaction sufficient to appease the hunger within? Who would have entered a relationship without the fantasy of homecoming, of nurturance and security in large measure? Who would have brought children into the world if they knew the children would become new objects of worry and emotional vulnerability rather than carriers of their parents unlived life? The first half of life feeds on these projections, but so often during the second-half of life, these projections lose their powers in the face of abrasions of daily life, and one suffers ennui, disappointment, or even a sense that the presumed contract has been betrayed. The projected values were intended to win approval, gain love, success, security, and an abiding sense of community. So why then, the ennui, the hum of malaise beneath the surface, the sleepless nights come on the reliance on substances for comfort or anesthesia, the lure of an illicit relationship? Could these so-called symptoms prove precisely the clue for which we seek? Are they not the rejected gods of the underworld, speaking in their symbolic ways? Is what we seek to be found not out there, but beneath our noses? If such projections are necessary for the first half of life, then their erosion, their bankruptcy may be necessary for the second-half of life. For then we are obliged to inquire into them, find what values of the soul they have been carrying, and begin to own those values more directly as our desk, not that of our career, partner, or children. What, indeed, does it profit want to gain the world that the projections have offered, and find that the price is loss of relationship to one soul? It is in the swamplands of disappointment, then, that the task of personal ownership of the soul may be reclaimed. It may be hard to thank the soul for plunging us into swamplands, but there, in those dismal depths of defeat, disappointment, and depression, we may recover the high journey of soul work each of us is meant to undertake.

If we cannot speak the truth, our truth, to ourselves, we will be unable to speak it to the world either. Speaking it to the world requires that one learn to speak it to oneself first, and then to realize that our truth is who we are.

Autumn – R.M. Rilke

And still there is one who in his hands gently

Holds  this falling endlessly.

Why is now the time, if It ever has to happen, for you to answer the summons of the soul, to live the second, larger life?

There is much in our age that is evil, and much that is good, but, worse, there is much, much more that is trivial, distracting, and delusory. Consciousness has brought great gifts, and great horrors, upon us, but consciousness is only part of the story. As Jung  reminds, “consciousness is always only a part of the psyche and therefore never capable of psychic wholeness – for that the definite extension of the unconscious is needed. But the unconscious can neither be caught with clever formulas nor exercised by means of scientific dogmas, for something of destiny clings to it – indeed, it is sometimes destiny itself.”

We live amid politicians and theologians who infantilize us by fear mongering, and scientists and psychologists who trivialize life by addressing only what can be empirically verified. We are so much larger than that. Just as much theology has forgotten the psyche, so much psychology has retreated from the soul – in both cases they are intimidated by the truly large. You may expect little help from your contemporary culture, from your peers, and from your family in this task of reconnecting with the soul. Yet you are not alone, for there are many other people out there who feel as you do, who yearn as you do for a second, deeper life. In fact, there is a hidden community of individuals who are on their own path. At times they will feel quite alone, estranged from all that once gave comfort, but their very solitude is the surest sign that they have been launched upon the journey that, amid suffering and joy, brings the richness of life.

In our time, our sense of homelessness leads us to our common home; our separate journeys provide our community. As Hermann Hesse once wrote, “we have to stumble through so much dirt and humbug before we reach home. And we have no one to guide us. Our only guide is our homesickness.” This spiritual homesickness gives us the journey; the journey gives us our life,  once again.

Even when surrounded by many others, your journey is solitary, for the life you are to choose as your life, not someone else’s. Alone we nonetheless move amid a community of other solitudes; alone, our world is peopled with many companions, both within and without.