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" These four questions that never go away are:
1. Why are we here, in service to what, and toward what end? (the cosmological question)
2. How are we as animal forms, empowered with spirit, to live in harmony with our natural environment? (the ecological question)
3. Who are my people, what is my duty to others, and what are rights and duties, privileges, and expectations of my tribe? (the sociological question)
4. Who am I, how am I different from others, what is my life about, and how am I to find my way through the difficulties of live? (the psychological question) "
― James Hollis , Hauntings: Dispelling the Ghosts Who Run Our Lives
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" These four questions that never go away are:
Why are we here, in service to what, and toward what end? (the cosmological question)/li>
How are we as animal forms, empowered with spirit, to live in harmony with our natural environment? (the ecological question)
Who are my people, what is my duty to others, and what are rights and duties, privileges, and expectations of my tribe? (the sociological question)
Who am I, how am I different from others, what is my life about, and how am I to find my way through the difficulties of live? (the psychological question)
106 "
― James Hollis , Hauntings: Dispelling the Ghosts Who Run Our Lives
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" How different the world would be if each parent could say to the child: “Who you are is terrific, all you are meant to be. And who you are, as you are, is loved by all of us. You have a source within, which is the soul, and it will express itself to you through what we call desire. Always respect the well-being of the other, but live your own journey, serve that desire, risk being that which wishes to enter the world through you, and you will always have our love, even if your path takes you away from us.” Such persons would then have a powerful tool to enable them to change their lives when it was not working out for them. Such persons would be able to make difficult decisions, mindful always of the impact on others, but also determined to live the life intended by the gods who brought us here. "
― James Hollis , Hauntings: Dispelling the Ghosts Who Run Our Lives
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" These stories are real, the dreams are real, yet the dilemmas each person faces are founded on the presences that haunt from their past. We see again the twin mechanisms present in all relationships: projection and transference. Each of them, meeting any stranger, reflexively scans the data of history for clues, expectations, possibilities. This scanning mechanism is instantaneous, mostly unconscious, and then the lens of history slips over one's eyes. This refractive lens alters the reality of the other and brings to consciousness a necessarily distorted picture. Attached to that particular lens is a particular history, the dynamics, the script, the outcomes of which are part of the transferred package. Freud once humorously speculated that when a couple goes to bed there are six people jammed together because the spectral presences of the parents are unavoidable. One would have to add to this analogy the reminder that those parents also import their own relational complexes from their parents, so we quickly have fourteen underfoot, not to mention the persistence of even more ancestral influences. How could intimate relationships not be congested arenas? As shopworn as the idea seems, we cannot overemphasize the importance of primal imagoes playing a domineering role in our relational patterns. They may be unconscious, which grants them inordinate power, or we may flee them, but they are always present. Thus, for example, wherever the parent is stuck—such as Damon's mother who only equates sexuality with the perverse and the unappealing, and his father who stands de-potentiated and co-opted—so the child will feel similarly constrained or spend his or her life trying to break away (“anything but that”) and still be defined by someone else's journey. How could Damon not feel depressed, then, at his own stuckness, and how could he not approach intimacy with such debilitating ambivalence? "
― James Hollis , Hauntings: Dispelling the Ghosts Who Run Our Lives
