UNEDITED TRANSCRIPT: The following transcript may contain typographical errors or other mistakes due to inconsistencies in audio quality, background noise, or other factors. We cannot guarantee its precision or completeness. We encourage you to use this as a supplement to your own notes and recollection of the session.
Tami Simon: Hello friends. My name is Tami Simon and I’m the founder of Sounds True. And I want to welcome you to the Sounds True podcast, Insights at the Edge. I also want to take a moment to introduce you to Sounds True’s new membership community and digital platform. It’s called Sounds True One. Sounds True One features original premium transformational docuseries, community events, classes to start your day and relax in the evening, special weekly live shows including a video version of Insights at the Edge with an after-show community question-and-answer session with featured guests. I hope you’ll come join us, explore, come have fun with us and connect with others. You can learn more at join.soundstrue.com.
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In this episode of Insights at the Edge, my guest is James Hollis: Jungian, analyst, writer, educator, someone whom I deeply respect and admire. He’s the author of 20 books, including with Sounds True, A Life of Meaning, Living an Examined Life, and a book called Living Between Worlds. He’s also created two full-length audio programs, an audio series on finding meaning in the second half of life called Through the Dark Wood and a program on exploring our deepest questions and motivations. It’s called A Life of Meaning. James Hollis is also the author of a new book, it’s called Living with Borrowed Dust: Reflections on Life, Love, and Other Grievances. And that’s the focus of our conversation. Jim, welcome.
James Hollis: Thank you Tami, and it’s a privilege to be with you once again.
TS: Where did the title Living with Borrowed Dust come from?
JH: Well, it’s a line from the poet Stanley Kunitz who wrote a birthday poem for himself when he was about 80, and he ends the poem by saying, “I only borrow this dust.” And of course what you borrow, you have to return. So that was one of the themes running through this work, because I had passed through some very perilous medical circumstances and I’m still here obviously, so I was particularly aware of the evanescence of this journey, and so that sentence appealed. It could have been a title of one of the other essays because there are about 11 or 12 essays in there on different subjects. But that’s a recurrent theme of my work, which is again, if I may go on for a moment, this is not about being morbid in any way. It’s our mortality that makes meaning possible. If we were to stay here in perpetuity, we would just start to have to reinvent ourselves and we’d be doing the same thing for a few centuries and then doing something else for a few centuries.
And it is that great American philosopher, psychologist Paris Hilton said once, I sure hope there’s an afterlife because if there isn’t, it’s going to be really boring. If you stop and analyze that sentence. It’s a pretty peculiar thought, but I think it’s because life is short, it makes it precious, and because our choices do matter, we don’t get to always repeat them. If we change our mind, we have to live with our consequences that the theme is not morbid. It’s something that arouses awareness and I hope a certain vigilance in one’s life as to what really matters in our life and what is really trivial. So somewhat long response, Tami, but I’m sure other people will ask that question too, and I hope I make it clear in the book
TS: Mortality and meaning, this is a theme obviously that’s very important to you and to me and I think to our reflective listeners and you write, we recognize that we’re involved in a short pause between the mysteries of being here and after being here, and our task is to make that pause as luminous as we can. And I wanted to know more, first of all about this notion of making our life luminous, what that means to you.
JH: Well, a couple of things. First of all, when we were children, we asked large questions because we were trying to figure things out like who am I? Who are you? What’s the nature of the transactions between us? Why am I here? And then we get the notion of, well, but what happens after this? Is there a life after death? Is this the end of it? Large questions, but then we have to start adapting to the world around us and over time we lose contact with those large questions. And it’s been my experience and observation that over time if you ask large questions, you’ll have an interesting life because you’ll be devoting yourself to something that truly matters to you. Secondly, I think it’s important to say this is not so much about ego gratification. That’s the agenda of the first half of life. How do I leave my parents?
How do I step into the world? How do I create relationships, a career, maybe become a parent or certainly be a citizen? But then in time you have to say, but why am I here? Really? And it’s at that point, one has to say, now, what kind of story am I living? And Jung said that we all walk in shoes too small for us. And I think what he was trying to get at by that metaphor is the idea that we have to be adaptive as children or we wouldn’t fit into the world. We wouldn’t survive in some cases. But those very adaptations over time began to separate us from our particular journey. The Greeks made much of the distinction between fate and destiny. Fate is what happens to you, what century you’re born into, what zeitgeist, what family of origin and dynamics that you’re exposed to.
Destiny is what is potential, what is possible in this organism, this mystery that we are. And right there in the middle is the human ego that’s sort of batted back and forth between these at times. But there comes a point where the ego has to say, I have to keep asking these large questions, come back to them because at the end of the journey, if we’re conscious, we don’t want to have lived a diminished life. It doesn’t have to be important in terms of the world. We don’t have to build our resumes or our careers. That’s first half of life stuff. Second half is what is meaningful, what should I give my energies to and what matters to me in the long run? And it’s that kind of thing that leads us to our task and potentially our wisdom. That’s what Yung meant by that term.
Individuation. It didn’t mean individualism in the adolescent sense or narcissism or self-absorption. It’s about finding something worthy of your service, what matters so much that you can give yourself to it. Now, obviously sometimes relationships and job and so forth and children are things that we care enough about to devote ourselves to. At the same time, you have to also realize each one of us is living a different journey, a different trajectory through time and space. And what is the value system that I am in service to? Because if I don’t ask that, I’ll be in service to whatever’s the noisiest voice in my environment or I’ll be in service to the complexes that are roaring within me. We all have them voices that say, this is what you need to do, this is what you can’t do, all sort of acquired historically in our lives, but there’s a place here for an enlarged consciousness. It says, this matters to me enough. I’m willing to address it, to perhaps suffer for it if need be, and to carry through on something so that the psyche with its autonomy is going to respond, is going to support us on that journey. So I think that’s the reason why mortality and meaning are so important. I think they’re, again, markers of the qualitative dimension of our journey. It’s not so much how we live, or excuse me, how long we live, but how we lived and in service to what values.
TS: I’m still going to go back to this word luminous, which is this quality of light and why you use that word to describe this very meaningful life you’ve just unpacked for us.
JH: Yes, well, luminous in the sense of by what lights do you live your journey? If we were living in ancient cultures, reportedly, and I’m sure this wasn’t true for everyone, but for great bodies of people, their story was their tribal myth that linked them to the gods, that linked them to nature, that linked them to their tribal community and also gave them a sense of individual journey and purpose and tasks and so forth. But a lot of that’s eroded through the years. And as Jung said, we fall back into the abyss of the self and we have to examine what is this about you see? And to ask the question, what fires your imagination? What stirs your curiosity? What asks of you something that is so deep within you that perhaps it hurts, but you can’t let go of it because it won’t let go of you.
And when you ask those questions, then I think life takes on luminosity. It has a sense of purpose. Again, it’s supported by your feeling function, by your dreams, by your energy systems, all of these things. And when we forget our journey, and again, it’s not grandiose by world standards, it’s what I call to serve, which is actually humbly number one. And number two, it’s demanding. It asks that we show up repeatedly and we overcome our fears and step into that journey. What is it that gives that luminosity to your light, to your life rather? And for me, apart from key relationships in life, it’s always been teaching. So that’s why we’re doing this podcast together. That’s why I practice that in therapy and I do books and so forth because for me, teaching is a way of keeping the questions alive before you and being accountable for them and keeping those juices stirred within. And when you do that, your life gets more luminous in my view. There is more insight and more revelation that comes out of that process
TS: In terms of mortality and meaning. You’re very clear in the book that you don’t know what happens when we die. And that if you did, you said friend, I would tell you. So I appreciate that. Jim, you do say though that the psyche of those in the final phases of life dream not of endings, but of crossings and of journeys, and this is what you’ve observed in hearing dreams from people who are in the final phases facing their death. And I’m wondering what you make of that, this notion of our death being a crossing or a journey.
JH: Well, I think it’s something that we can all speculate upon. Clearly. The psyche is not thinking of terms of termination. I have a significant percentage of people in my practice right now who are 60 to 80 and a lot of their dreams are reviewing their life. I think it’s partly how the psyche saying now, what was this journey about? Where are the present stuck places? What is it that you may still need to address in your life? Maybe repair some relationships. And I think that beyond that, the question then is in what way do I step into that mystery? Because if the psyche, which doesn’t care about time or space, I mean you can have a dream tonight of someone you haven’t seen since second grade of primary school, but they’re not gone. They’re alive intra psychically. So the independence of the psyche suggests that it’s serving the life force somehow.
It’s the ego that is to say our conscious sense of self that is going to be tortured by its own fears of loss of control and death is the single biggest loss of control. I’m not saying I’m indifferent to death, that would be foolish. But what I am saying is I don’t find myself worrying about any outcomes there because either I’m annihilated, in which case my present theories and anxieties are just rendered mood or I’m transformed in some way which my limited powers can’t imagine. So we’ll leave that question for the moment and be sure that I’m fully present in this moment as long as I am allowed to do so.
TS: Now, many of us are extraordinarily uncomfortable when it comes to situations where we’re not in control. And one of the things you write in situations where we have no control, what is the task that’s facing me in this context over which I seem to have no control? And I think this is interesting, Jim, because often you come back to this notion of our task, the task at hand, living a luminous life, what task, even as we’re facing death, we have no control over, but there’s still a task in that period of our life that we can engage with. And I thought he’s a very task oriented person, Jim Hollis. So I wonder what your thoughts are about that.
JH: Well, I think it’s a generic accountability to being itself. We don’t know why we’re here. I think Young’s concept of individuation, as I said, it’s not about ego aggrandizement, it’s about becoming that little chip that we can be in the large mosaic of life, the large mosaic of history, the time that we’re on this planet is infinitesimal given the length of the planet, not to mention the length of the cosmos. So I think our task is to again ask what is worthy of my giving my energies to what is it that keeps me from that? I’ve often said to individuals, when you face a choice of some kind, try to ask the question, does this path enlarge me or does it diminish me? Or does this one enlarge me or diminish me? And usually you’ll know the answer to that question pretty quickly. And if you don’t keep asking it and it’ll come to you three days from now or come to you in a dream next week, your psyche always will get back to you.
That I’ve experienced and I’ve seen it in my clients, the psyche always gets back. We have to remember this. There’s something inside of each of us. It’s mysterious in character that knows us better than we know ourselves that’s running all of the complex systems of digestion, of mentation, of cells being born and dying and so forth and so on. You’re not running them from the standpoint of the ego. The ego is necessary. It’s the central complex of consciousness that Yung said, and it’s tasked with functioning in the world. So you look both ways where you cross the street, but the ego is a tiny wafer floating on a large iridescent ocean and it irrigates to itself a power it never has. So when it’s threatened by the magnitude of the mystery as it is, it tends to shut down or form stories that get it off the hook or whatever.
But we always have an accountability for how we live this journey. I’m not asking for any moral perfection. We’re not capable of that. It’s rather in this situation, and it can be arena of defeat and suffering by the way, in circumstances where I’m not ostensibly able to fix the matter or be in charge, what is my task here? And we have evidence that the human psyche continues to bring up these images for people throughout the length of their journey. And as long as they’re still conscious, they can report them. If they’re not conscious, those dream images are still occurring. Recently I came across a fascinating statistic. I’m shortly to be 85, and the statistic was, if you live to 86 years of your life will be spent dreaming, which is extraordinary, not sleeping. That’s up to a third of those years, six years. Nature does not waste energy.
So it’s a purposeful activity and it’s a self-healing system. When physicians don’t heal us, they can promote the conditions which healing occurs, but it’s nature that does the healing. So dreams seem to be correctives, they seem to be support systems. They seem to times to challenge us. I could give you tons of examples of dreams that would sort of blow your socks off because you’d say, holy cow, who would make up this stuff? But these are real people’s real dreams that come to them. And what I’ve noticed in analysis is the thing really takes hold when a person has finally experienced that terrific numinosity that comes from a dream. And I will say something like, well, did you make that dream up? And they’ll react like I was accusing him of plagiarism or something like that. And they say, no, and I didn’t plan it in your psyche.
So it’s your dream. Where does it come from in you? There has to be something there, some agency, some energy independent because you don’t create the dreams. It’s independent of your conscious intentions and it’s trying to communicate with you. Wouldn’t it make sense to pay attention to how that deep, deep nature, that timeless nature is somehow seeking your healing and your development? And I must add, it’s not here necessarily to make us comfortable either from an ego standpoint, most of the people that we would admire in history had very troubled lives and very difficult lives suffering to go through, but we admire them because they somehow embodied a deep truth within them, maybe a vision or a task or an illumination of some kind or a talent that they shared. All of those were people who showed up for their appointment. And I think that’s a metaphor we have to remember, am I showing up for my appointment in life? And when we do, again, that’s humbling, but there’s a depth and a dignity that rises out of the willingness to do that.
TS: You referenced this autonomous psyche as the other within you call it the other. And I noticed that really got my attention because it’s one thing to talk about your marriage partner, and I know you’ve written about this as the other and how valuable it is when you understand another person as the other and you take their perspective and you bring that into your own experience. But that we have an other within us, I think a lot of people would say, oh, that’s my deeper self, that’s another part of me. It’s not other. But yet that otherness seems like something that is important for you to emphasize. And I wonder if you can share more about that. I noticed I feel a little uncomfortable, like there’s the ego me, but there’s an other, isn’t it part of me, not other than me.
JH: Well, yes. This is a linguistic confusion at the moment to which maybe I’m contributing, but I was speaking on behalf of the ego since to give the example, you don’t make up your dreams, but they’re your dreams. So there’s some other energy that is responding to your life in a way that is far more expansive and goes deeper than your consciousness is capable. So you’d have to acknowledge that that is a part of you. Let’s call it your natural wisdom if you wish, but it’s other from the standpoint of the ego in the same way that symptoms are. And from an analytic perspective, we don’t say as most modern psychology says, and for understandable reasons, how quickly can we get rid of your symptoms? How quickly do we lift the depression here? How quickly can we get you back on the road here? Forget for the moment, you might be on the wrong road, but that’s another matter.
We rather ask the question why has that other? That is to say something in your psyche has produced this symptomatology, which is nature expressing its disfavor in the executive decisions that you’re making. And when that happens, we will resist it of course, because ego fancies, its capacity for management. I know who I am, I’m making conscious choices, I’m doing the right thing, et cetera, et cetera. But something inside of us reacts in a way and says, but you should look at it from this angle. And again, we speak about it as it’s a part of us of course, but just as my heart’s part of me or my toenails are a part of me, and yet they have otherness, I can’t just say to the heart, well keep on pumping because I want you to in perpetuity or toenails stop growing. They have a life of their own, their vitality of their own.
And it’s not to be mysterious about this, it’s to say it’s the wisdom of nature. So just as we violate nature externally as a culture because we think we’re the boss, we’re in charge. It’s our right to do that. So nature begins, its protest, and the symptoms are all around us in global warming as we know, and I won’t belabor what you already know, but the point is their human ego consciousness is challenged by the otherness of the other that is in service to the life force as it appears in the form of nature. And it behooves us to respect that conversation, to seek that bridge between worlds, if you will.
TS: This notion that there’s so much that we’re not in control of and clearly we’re not in control of our death, the time of our death, et cetera. For many people finding that they’re not in control of this or that in the midst of their life is extremely disconcerting, not in control of what’s happening in this part of the world. Global warming, the political situation. We could go on and on, not in control of the job I just lost of my partner who’s treating me X, Y, Z. And I wonder what you think we can learn from these experiences in our life. Not death, the big loss of control, but just these other moments where we don’t feel we have control and we’re quite upset about it.
JH: Well, of course, the ego is a very conservative agency. Once predictability, it wants the status quo, it wants control, and life is constantly interrupting that fantasy, and it is a fantasy. So we can have steam coming out of our ears and frustration, and I’ve certainly experienced that reaction. We can feel depressed or sad, but in the end, it’s part of the wisdom to realize that our powers are limited and that what we need to have is a relationship to that which provides continuity and gives us a sense of purpose and communicates with us. And it has our healing and our spiritual enlargement as its agenda far as we can tell. And that allows us to get through so many of these savannas of suffering, so many of these disappointments in life. Sooner or later, as you know, life breaks your heart sooner or later, life knocks you down.
And we all get physical injuries, we get psychological injuries, we have disappointments in life. And yet the question is, what is this situation asking of me now? And I think it asks us to maybe revise our expectations, revise our plannings, yes. But on the other hand to say there are things that don’t get healed all the time. There’s a chapter on the book on the meaning of trauma and trauma is inevitable in our lives. Life itself is traumatic. We’re thrown into this world at birth in a world over which we are essentially powerless. And the world says, well have a nice day now. And life hurts at times. And at the same time, that’s not the real damage of trauma out of that experience, we all form a story, our interpretation, our effort to make sense of it, and then we get attached to our story.
And our story is often a limitation later in our life journey. And so part of what analysis tries to do is what kind of stories have I been carrying out of my hurts in life, my disappointments, the necessary adaptations, and to bring them to the surface to consciously address them with the capacities and resilience of the adult. For example, you wouldn’t dream of having your child drive your automobile. You would say, well, this child’s an 8-year-old, they can’t drive an automobile well, but you just made a choice out of the eight-year-old story, the eight year old’s interpretation, good faith inspiration to make sense of the world as that child saw it. So unless we begin to see the autonomy of those floating stories, which is in another way of talking about complexes and a complex, it’s just a cluster of energy in them as we have ’em, because there are life experiences that have energy attached to them.
When they’re triggered, they have the power to come up and usurp the ego and take it over in any given moment, we can’t really think we’re fully in charge of the reality or even perceiving the reality. I’ve often said that one of the few times you’re conscious during the day is when you get up in the morning, if you go in the shower and the water’s too cold, you make adjustments or you look both ways and you see the car coming so you stop. So those are appropriate executive decisions by the ego. But from that point on, much of the ego is under the illusion of or seeing through the lenses of whatever complex is triggered at that moment, which is one reason why we can get separated from ourselves or make decisions that are not helpful to us or others in the long run, or why at times life repeats things.
Why would I repeat the patterns in my life that have not been so helpful? Well, because I haven’t sufficiently become aware of some of the stories that are operating within me and challenged their autonomy in my life. If the message of our early experience was, you don’t matter because other people are so preoccupied with their issues or problems in life, and I walk away with that as my story, my interpretation, then I’m going to make choices in life that either try to compensate by grandiosity, trying to achieve power and wealth and status and so forth, or I will be spending a life sabotaging my potential, sabotaging my possibilities. And of those are logical strategies for dealing with something that’s really provisional, and that’s our earliest story of what it was about. And therefore we could recognize, well, people have the cliche that you lie on a couch and complain about mom and dad.
It’s not really about that. But one of the healing moments in therapy often comes when a person realizes, yes, my parent let me down in a substantial and hurtful way, but they were stuck in their stories. They didn’t have access to the information and the possibilities that I have through books such as Sound true publishes and other sources. And to be able to accept that and to realize this is what happened to me, but it’s not who I am. And the worst damage of trauma is that we tend to identify who we are with what happened to us. And that in itself is a provisional story and it needs to be challenged.
TS: You’re talking here about the insight function and you write about that and then you add to that in addition to insight, we need courage and perseverance and adding those other two elements with insight I think is so important. So I wonder if you can speak to that.
JH: Sure. In the movies, they usually have somebody lying on a couch. It’s usually a Friday, and analyst and person has an insight. Well, when I was four years old, this happened and suddenly everything changes and everybody, the movie ends with everybody living happily thereafter. It doesn’t work that way because those stories will always be with you. We are historic creatures. We carry everything in our neurology, in our psychic storehouse. That’s why Yung said, we can’t solve these problems, but we can outgrow them. And many a time a person has said, oh, I’m so angry at myself or disappointed because I thought I got beyond that, and then last week I wound up doing the same destructive thing in my life, maybe to others or to myself. And you just have to say, well, now you know the power of history, but there’s a power of consciousness too that says, all right, here’s another occasion, a learning moment from which to say I need to be more mindful now of how that works, when it shows up what the triggers are for me and perhaps something I can do at the time to step out of that little whirlpool of historic energy and pull back into my more thoughtful self.
So again, this work and it is work is humbling, but it is about growing by being accountable for our intrapsychic stories. It’s easy to blame the world, and there may be many occasions where the world is to blame, but it’s how we internalize that. Again, that makes all the difference.
TS: The courage and perseverance piece, especially this perseverance part is something that it really impresses me about you and how you approach life. And I know having gone through a difficult spell myself that at a certain point it was simply the endurance to keep going through it. That was such an important element of the crossing. And so that’s what I want to hear more about. What kind of courage are we talking about? What kind of endurance or perseverance are we talking about?
JH: Thank you for calling me back to, I got so caught up in trauma there that I forgot your question, so I apologize. Courage means you have to face whatever the reality is and to know that nobody’s going to solve it for you. People can be helpful, but it’s your issue and you have to show up in life. Life is difficult and dangerous and the biggest enemies that we ever have to face our intrapsychic, it’s our fears of the magnitude of the task and our lethargy, which is the tendency to push it off till tomorrow, kick the can down the street, turn on the television, have some chocolate, anything that distracts and courage means these problems don’t go away. They show up in different ways, perhaps in our children, perhaps in our unlived life. You have to decide, is my life going to matter for me?
You don’t have to prove it to somebody else. Does this journey means something to me? In which case, courage in some way becomes the obvious step. Well then I have to deal with this, don’t I? It’s kind of like paying your taxes. I don’t want to pay taxes and go through all that nightmare of figuring out all those columns, but guess what? It’s the real world. So we have to sit down, buckle our helmet straps and dig into it and to keep doing it over time. That’s how change occurs. That’s the endurance part or the persistence or the perseveration, because it’s, that actually changes if you’re on an ocean liner or a jet plane. They can’t just turn on a corner. It takes a long time to make that thing move around in a different direction. So it is because so much of our personality functioning is a reflexive response to life’s stimulus, to the stimulus response mechanism.
And to break a habit is very difficult. You don’t have to repeat it as much as the formation of the habit required because many times it was day in and day out, but you do have to be able to stick to the task. So insight is a huge step, and that’s one reason we pay attention to symptoms and dreams and so forth, or someone gets in your face and says, this is hurtful to me and this may not be your intention, but this is how it’s happening, how I experience you. Those are moments of accountability, whether we’re going to show up as a conscious and accountable person, but then to say, where’s this coming from in me? What does that touch in me in my history? And then to say, this is what I have to do in the face of, and I have to keep doing that as long as I can.
Do people change? Yes, they do. It’s like the old joke. How many union analysts does it take to change the light bulb? Well, only one, but the bulb has to want to change. Well, something in us going back to that voice within for a moment wishes our own fullness of expression, not in service to the ego, but in service to its agenda, to nature itself, seeking fuller expression. Well, there are many forces within us, including our fears, including our easily distraction and endurance means every day we have to stand up in the face of that. Our whole popular culture is designed for two goals. One is to sell a lot of goods if they’re good or not, it’s another matter. And secondly, to distract us from reflecting upon the depths of our own soul, that’s not new. It’s simply escalated. That’s one reason why people have so much addictive behavior around shopping or whatever the latest fad is or what’s popping on the news or something like that. It’s all taking you out of yourself into that external world. And if it lasted in any durable way, well, I’ll join you. But the truth is it wears out quickly. That’s why we have to repeat it, and that’s why I called it an addiction
TS: In Living with Borrowed Dust. You say that this culture of distraction is actually a manifestation of our anxiety around death, and I wonder if you can say more about that.
JH: Well, that’s not all it is, but it is certainly a factor there, and that’s not an idea original with me. I know Irving Allam talks about that, his book on mortality called Facing the Sun, and part of what we do in terms of distracting ourselves is we leave behind large questions. Now, I certainly could understand why the ego wouldn’t want to consider its own dissolution. On the other hand, is the ego always going to be the boss in the sense of its anxiety complex? If that’s the case, then I’ll wind living a fugitive life. Many of the things that were most difficult for us were also the most developmental. There’s a time when you have to sort of take your courage in your hand and step into it, whether it’s starting a relationship or ending a relationship or go to a place that you’ve never lived before or you don’t know if you have the capacity to do it, but it continues to gnaw at you from inside. Those are meetings with the soul. Nobody can guarantee the outcome, but your willingness to step into the challenge of it, I think is what often leads to our greatest achievements. Psycho spiritually, again, not as measured by the world, but by your sense of the immediacy and authenticity of the life you’re living. It’s not a fugitive life, it’s not a distracted life. It’s an engaged life.
TS: I mentioned in the introduction, Jim, how much I admire and respect you. And in this conversation about mortality and meaning, I have to bring forward some things I know about you that our listeners might not know that you’ve been treated for two cancers through a very aggressive protocol, and you write about this in Living with Borrowed Dust, that the bones of your spine became fractured in such a way that led to risky surgeries that you’ve spent many hours in pain being in pain. I also know that you lost a son and how unbelievably heartbreaking that experience and that loss has been in your life. You’ve gone through so much, and yet you have this unstoppable assignment with life here in your mid eighties. Not only are you on television doing podcasts, you’re seeing clients, you tell me you’re writing a 21st book. This is part of why I have this just deep bow to you, and I want to learn from you when you think of your being on purpose and what those of us who are listening can glean from that.
JH: Well, thank you Tami, but doesn’t feel courageous at the time. Yeah, there was so much pain that I found myself weeping in the mornings knowing I just had to face it. Getting out of a bed was an adventure. I still have chronic pain. It’s not what it was. I walk a mile a day apart from domestic walking, but I mean specifically going out and walking when it’s too cold out. I walk in the basement and I’m grateful for these extra years. And as a result of the perilous state I was in, my wife and I moved into a retirement co-op 23 months ago, so just under two years. And that was the reason for that was there’d be a structure here for her, including some medical facility and so forth as she ages as well. And we were just talking yesterday about what a bonus this has been.
However, it is all very tentative. And again, if you have a passion that matters to you, and remember, the word passion comes from the Latin passio, which is the word for suffering, in other words, well, the first chapter in the book is unhappiness, and it has a very peculiar title that I stole from a poet who said, find what you love and let it kill you, which seems to be a paradox. But what he was saying was find something that matters so much to you that it consumes you, devours you, not in an addictive way, but in a way that you’re rewarded by the encounter. With that, I mean, I don’t sit down and enjoy writing a book at the end of a long workday. That’s the time I have to write books and something inside of me, seconds and sours when I’m not following those promptings.
There are certain times in my life where I certainly would avoid that challenge, but I, I’ve realized that in some way, and I don’t want to sound grandiose here, why does my ego think it’s the boss? There is something wanting expression through me. I don’t need to write another book. I don’t necessarily look forward to the labor. I hate proofreading the good parts. Writing it. The rest of it is not my forte, but that’s what you do. It’s part of that teaching function. That’s how they get there to the public. So it’s like what is it that matters enough to you that you’re willing to suffer it, but in the doing of it, you feel the richness of it, the emotional reward that comes from it. And so what if it’s difficult? So what if you’re frightened? So is everybody else, right? But will you get through that in order to do what wants expression through you?
Thomas Mon said once writing is a difficult task, especially difficult for those who are writers. People think, oh, well, here’s a talent or something that you can do easily. That’s not true. Talk to a writer. That’s not their experience. They agonize or the painter, Chuck Close who found his spine disintegrating and he could no longer paint in the old style, so he had to create a whole new painting technique. He has paintings down at the National Portrait Gallery in various museums of the world, and he’s now deceased, but he said, inspiration is for amateurs. He said, the rest of us show up early at the studio and get to work. And I think about that all the time. Of course, he was serving his daon. Daon is not a demon. The daon to the Greeks was this intermediary spirit between us and the transcendent powers.
It’s like the muse is an example of that. And you can’t sit around and wait for the muse. All great writers will tell you that there comes a time when you have to sit down and bang it out. And if it’s no good, throw it away. But you’re there faithfully you, you’re opening yourself to it. The ego’s comfort is not the agenda. It’s about what is going to pass through you on route and the experience of that. It’s like birthing a baby or it’s like any act of creation. Something new comes into the world through your labor and no one said it was going to be easy. We all live on the backs of people before us, immigrants, pioneers, inventors, people who suffered a great deal in their lives, but gave us something to make our life as commodious and as comfortable as it is for most people. So we need to remember it wasn’t easy. Somebody had to earn it.
TS: Find what you love and let it kill you. That’s a very powerful phrase. I was reflecting on that when I was reading Living with Borrowed Dust, and the chapter that got my attention the most in terms of what I love had to do with staring into the abyss, believe it or not, maybe a strange thing to love. But you go on to say that one way we can think of the abyss, and you offer how it was defined by Heidegger as the openness of being, and that’s really what I love. And I wanted you to talk somehow how you understand this sense of infinity, if you will, openness of being is not having any end to it. How you understand that in your life.
JH: Well, I think the abyss opens every time we ask a radical question, a truly radical question. And remember, radical comes from the word rad, which means root going to the heart of the mystery. Why am I hear that’s a lifelong question? That’s a lifelong project rather than having it as we all did when we were young, myself included, planned, I’m going to do this, I’m going to do that, I’m going to do that. And then somewhere life happens and it all gets pushed to the side. Not irrelevant, not unproductive, but it gets pushed to the side when fc. But really, why am I here? And it was revelatory to me too when I came across that quote in Heider, because you think of the abyss, that’s what’s going to swallow you. And certainly there are abyss that can swallow us, at least swallow up the ego.
But when he said it’s the openness of being, I certainly realized how many times our structures, our habits, our addictive patterns, patterns are really ego protections against uncertainty and the fact that we fear mortality. There’s no uncertainty about it. The statistics are pretty obvious. It’s virtually a hundred percent. The question then is what does that make you do with your life or what does that keep you from doing in your life When you address that, the opening occurs. You might be threatened by that. A person say, I always wanted to do this or I want to do that. Well, what’s keeping you well, the fear of the magnitude of it. Life is intimidating. One message we all got in childhood and it’s factual, and that is the world is big and you’re not. The world is powerful and you’re not. So how are you going to function for a number of years with that?
And I talked about that in the previous book on meaning Tami, and that was well, we developed patterns of avoidance, patterns of trying to get power over smaller situations to give us the illusion that we’re in charge of larger questions or we just sort of give the world what it wants and try to stay out of harm’s way. Or we often get caught in narcissistic inflation or thinking that we’re somehow really important in the big scheme of things or that we need constant reassurance from people or situations. So that’s understandable. It’s a human coping mechanism. I’m not judging that. I’m simply saying all of that is a way of avoiding the complete unknown of this journey. And that can be intimidating. It can certainly be something that humbles us, but it’s also an invention, adventure. And the question is now how are you going to live your life in the face of that?
That’s the question we touched on it before. How are you going to live your life in the face of that over which you have no outer control? And that’s a task inside here. So when I was in a hospital and there were questions about whether I was going to live and I was in a lot of pain, I knew that I was devoted to my wife and children and other people on this planet, and I knew that I loved this work, and I would do that in whatever fashion I could, not knowing how long it would last or how impaired it would be. And I also knew at some point I would have to give up this work if the body has its final argument, which it always does. And yet I don’t think I was ever in despair. I think my feeling was, and I don’t want to sound grandiose here, but it was also an adventure.
This is all very curious. I was just working with someone who was having her first surgery, which turned out better than anybody expected, but she didn’t know that going in there. And I said, among other things, this is an incredible learning experience. Watch what they’re doing around you. Watch why they do this. Ask ’em why they’re doing that and learn something. And the good news is that attitude. She said, when I went into the er, or rather she said, I felt actually calm. I was curious about what everybody was doing. I said, exactly. I asked them what anesthetic you’re using and what do you expect on this and that, and what do you plan here? And I may sound like a nosy person, but hey, my body, so why not? You’re entitled to a question or two. So I don’t want to sound untethered from reality here. Fear is normal and natural. We all have it. Anxiety can be crippling and pervasive. We all have that. But again, what keeps us from being drowned in that is the determination to take the next step forward in a direction that makes most sense to you at this point in your life is Churchill said once when you find yourself in a dark wood, keep walking, keep walking.
If you’re in the middle of the forest, you’re halfway through. The only point is we don’t always know where it’s halfway, but you keep walking, keep going forward. I had enormous desire to return to my relationship and to return to this good work, and I know that pulled me through. But otherwise, I said to the surgeon quite literally, because I had two serious spinal surgeries and the second one going in, and I thanked him as we were going into the operating room, I thanked him and I said, all he asked is, you do your best. I’ll do my best. I want you to know I’m grateful for your good efforts because he warned me there could be some serious consequences that was, I don’t think he’d ever heard that from anybody before, but it was totally sincere. I was flushed with gratitude that he and his whole team were going to do the best they could for me.
And the fact that I’m here is that they did a pretty good job. On the other hand, sooner or later, it’s the end of the journey at list journey at least. But underneath all of that, it’s like what fires the imagination again? What are the big questions? How are you to live your life with as much courage as you can mobilize? And sometimes life breaks us down. I understand that. And live it with as much dignity as you can. I’m not talking about pride or arrogance. I’m talking about know that you’re the master of your own soul and just remember that nobody can take that away from you unless you give it away.
TS: Just a couple more questions, Jim. I’m imagining a listener who when they look inside, their ego self takes up let’s say 75% of the space and then that other, that mysterious openness of being is just a small part of the periphery, and you described it as this little island of an ego and this huge, vast mystery. What would you say to someone who wants to shift the proportions inside?
JH: Well, someone asked me a very sincere question once. Do you think the conscious world is 50% and the unconscious 50%? And I said, no. I think it was more is this tiny wafer on this large ocean, which I think was very shocking to this person. It’s a necessary portion. We’re not conscious at the moment. Consciousness is birthed out of the pain and trauma of separation where the infant first begins to realize, I’m not where I was. I’m using current language to describe this, but it’s a traumatic experience. I’m not there in the womb where all my needs are met. There’s no pain, there’s no suffering, there’s no hunger. Everything’s taken care of. And now what’s this about? And it’s huge and intimidating, and yet it ignores the fact we all came the same way. And there’s something in this organism that is built for the journey.
Yes, I know there are people born with serious birth defects, children with cancer, et cetera. I know the genetic spin of the dice is seldom democratic. It happens to people. It, it’s rather that within each of our capacities, there is the will of nature to survive. Sometimes even apart from our conscious intentions in the sense of it wishes us to live in a way that’s not comfortable to the ego. That’s why I said while ago when I was in the hospital at the worst and when I came home, it was pretty bad. I didn’t know what I’d be able to do, but I also knew that I would keep trying to do it because it mattered to me. That’s as simple as that. It mattered to me. And death will show up soon enough. What I have right now are these precious moments. So I have to take advantage of them, use them as best I can.
And underneath this, somehow life is seeking its own expression through us. But I have to presume too, so is mortality because programmed into our DNA is a termination at some point. So we are creatures who at least in this corporeal way, are programmed to die and to age and be infirm and so forth. But underneath always there is something that we have generically through the years called the spirit. And the spirit is the energy to take life on. You see, the soul has to do with purpose and meaning. That spirit is the energy given by nature, and we can summon it up. We can have it inspired by others, but we also have to recognize this autonomy. When a person’s profoundly depressed or despairing, we could say they are dispirited. The spirit energy doesn’t seem available, but then that’s where we have to dig in and hold on, which was my experience of healing in immense pain was dig in and hold on each day didn’t seem to feel better than the day before, but enough of those days. And after a while I could walk and et cetera, et cetera. So the spirit is something also independent of the ego, and yet it’s an energy that we need to serve and sometimes we can summon up because we need to. That’s why that phrase from Charles Bukowski the poet, find what you love and let it kill you. In other words, if you really love it, it’s going to drain you. But what better purpose, what better way to spend your life’s energy than that which really matters to you?
TS: Okay, there’s one final thing I really want to ask you about, which is you’ve mentioned a couple times the power of large questions to help make our life luminous. And in Living with Borrowed Dust, you offer this question for us to reflect on from young, what supports you when nothing supports you? This is a big, big question, and I wonder what your own inquiry into this question has shown you.
JH: Well, one thing always with you, Tami, you ask good questions. So you hold me accountable to these statements, which I appreciate. It’s not a question that I can particularly answer. For many people, it would be a belief in God for other people, a respect for the powers of nature. For me, even as a child, I don’t even know if I knew the word meaning, but I remember thinking along these lines. And when I was a young child, it was during World War ii, so I was aware of immense suffering and grief all around, even though I was physically safe, I remember thinking, it’s going to be part of my journey to find out about that. What was that about? What is that about? What can I do about that? And I was very touched by suffering. And I even then was asking the meaning of it.
My mother was mortified because once she took me in for a shot of some kind, and I was around two or three apparently, and I looked up the doctor who had just given me a shot, and I said to him, darn you, that was almost a dirty word in my childhood. Darn you. Why do you hurt little babies? My mother was mortified because she respected white coats, and he laughed at that. He thought that was quite humorous, but I don’t remember it. I was too young. But her report tells me I was really not so much concerned about, I had the shot and I was concerned about that, but I was more important about why do we suffer? What is that about? What is that in service to?
I’m just reporting what is true for me. I think this is in everybody, but I feel for many people, they lost track of it. My feeling is it’s still there. That thread that is the thread of the life spirit that is not only seeking its expression through you in the world rather than what my ego wants, but secondly is inquiring about the mysteries. Why am I here in service to what matters? And those questions, if you serve them as best you can, will lead you to a very interesting life, I think a larger life than you could have imagined for my poor parents that basically their life was circumscribed by geography and by poverty. And I have enormous sympathy for that, enormous. And I also knew because I was privileged to be able to learn to read that there were things out there called the ocean, and I saw those things called airplanes, and I thought, somehow I have to go out there and find out why I wasn’t just curious about geography and urban life.
It was more importantly why. And of course, when I was a young person, I didn’t think I could survive not knowing why. Today I can handle ambiguity easily because I understand if you don’t realize everything ultimately is ambiguous, you just haven’t understood the other side of the issues here at that point. But they’re always there in some way. So learning to live with ambiguity is one of the signs of a mature personality where you can tolerate the idea of wanting to know but not necessarily knowing, but the matter matters to you. Socrates said that what came to him by way of his D on or Tutelary spirit was the question about immortality. And Socrates said, I don’t know if we’re immortal or not, but this question matters to me so much that I’m willing to devote my life to ferreting out some answer to that.
I would say for me, the question probably was more from childhood on to the present. Why is there suffering? What can I do about it? If anything, and what do I need to do to recognize the limitations of my powers listed? Drive me crazy too. So as Dali said, what’s the difference between me and a crazy person is I’m not crazy? So the question if it’s large enough, doesn’t have a definitive answer, and you should be prepared to embrace the journey. It’s not the arrival because whatever I think today is an arrival is going to be undermined by better instruments, better stories, better observations or new life experience tomorrow or the day after tomorrow, sooner or later.
TS: So if I understand you correctly, this question for Jung was what supports me when there isn’t anything to support me, but for you, your question that was burning for you, haunting you throughout your life is why is there suffering? And that part of the task for people is to find the question that is actually really alive in them. The largest question, the most important question, the question that they love so much, it will kill them, if you will. And then to work with that question, am I understanding correctly?
JH: Well, I think that’s a significant part of it. I really do, and I should add, and I thought I’d implied this before, but it needs reinforcing here again, there’s something inside of us that supports us. We can have experiences that are life shattering, and that’s true of so many people that you would admire in history, as I’ve already mentioned. They had shattering experiences, but they found a thread through that that came out of their experience that hanging onto led them into the richness of their journey as well. So I don’t want to say that this is simply asking a question. I think that’s a vital element to it. It’s also trusting that somehow that resilience, that capacity for synthesizing that occurs in our own being is there to assist us, and it’s monitoring our life and commenting and so forth. And whether that is strictly personal or whether it’s universal, I don’t profess to know, but I think each of us, hey, you have to in some way achieve a measure of trust that something in you knows what’s right for you. So if you’re humble enough or desperate enough to listen for that and pay attention to that, then it will be there to help you through the dark hours.
TS: I’ve been speaking with James Hollis. We’ve been talking about his new book, Living with Borrowed Dust: Reflections on Life, Love, and Other Grievances. Your commitment to your assignment and being on task inspires me and, I think, inspires so many of our listeners. So a huge thank you, Jim. Thank you.
JH: Thank you, Tami.
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