James Hollis teaches at the Jung Center of Houston and is a distinguished faculty member of the Saybrook Graduate School in San Francisco. A graduate of the Jung Institute in Zurich, Switzerland, he maintains a private analytic practice and is the author of more than a dozen books. Hollis takes on a big theme in this book: discerning what matters most in life. His compass is not reason but the imagination. That is why he quotes poets and novelists and analyzes dreams. At the outset, he states:
"We are here to be eccentric, different, perhaps strange, perhaps merely to add our small piece, our little clunky, chunky selves, to the great mosaic of being."
Hollis is concerned with the drive to look within, to cherish personal reflection, to recover personal authority, and to express our creativity. Another challenge is to keep at bay two categories of existential vulnerability: the fear of overwhelmment and the fear of abandonment.
In the march of successive chapters, the author climbs the mountain of meaning and reaches new resting places along the way with insights on learning to tolerate ambiguity, feeding the soul, respecting the power of eros, stepping into largeness. risking growth over security, living verbs not nouns, following the path of creativity and delight in foolish passions, engaging spiritual crisis and other bad days at the office, writing our own story, fighting fate and loving it too, living more fully in the shadow of mortality, and accepting at last that our home is our journey and our journey is our home.
Hollis has some important things to say about the process of individuation, the stages of developmental growth, the second half of life, the importance of soul, the value of a mystery-driven life, the role of wonder, suffering as a requisite for consciousness and recovery, and the futility of religious fundamentalism and other forms of escape.
This is a thorough book well worth your time and effort. Living a more considered life is a laudable goal.
