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" We need to be able to differentiate for a moment fear, anxiety and angst. Angst is existential anxiety, it comes with the condition: we are born, we are consious, we are aware of our fragility and mortality and that contributes to the sense of the peril in which daily life occurs. That’s existantial anxiety, it’s not pathological...it’s part of the suffering, of the human condition. Fear is something specific, something related to a specific threat, real or perceived, to our wellbeing. Anxiety is a free floating anticipatory emotion, anxiety is always in some way bound to the future, like something could happen here, something might happen. Paradoxicallly guilt binds us to the past and we always stuck in the past with guilt. And anxiety binds us to a possible future, a so improbable one, but a possible one. So in differentiating for a moment between fear and anxiety we realize that there can be therapeutic move from anxiety to fear, and you could say: oh, yea, i feel so much better already! I am not anxious anymore, i am just fearfiul. In many cases our fears are non existents or manageable, in many cases our fears are based on powerless past...most of our fears.. if you look at them as an adult, they are not going to happen, but if they were to happen, we can bear them, because we’ve also become adults, we have most of all we have psychological tensil strength, we have resiliance that child did not have, we have modes of behavious and other choices available to us, we have a capacity for toleration, we have a capacity for freedom of motion, that we didn’t have as a child... And so many times the effort to define a fear is to say it’s not going to happen, but if it were to happen, i can handle it, i can manage that. Fear in a sense is specific always, anxiety is like a fog that blows across the highway.,i t can keep us from driving as we can’t see clearly what is happening, but underneath all that we know that anxiety has power to cripple life. "
― James Hollis PhD, , Finding Meaning in the Second Half of Life: How to Finally, Really Grow Up
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" Jung has so eloquently written of this biblical admonition: Acceptance of oneself is the essence of the moral problem and the acid test of one’s whole outlook on life. That I feed the beggar, that I forgive an insult, that I love my enemy in the name of Christ—all these are undoubtedly great virtues. What I do unto the least of my brethren, that I do unto Christ. But what if I should discover that the least amongst them all, the poorest of all beggars, the most impudent of all offenders, yea the very fiend himself—that these are within me, and that I myself stand in need of the alms of my own kindness, that I myself am the enemy who must be loved—what then?48 "
― James Hollis , Finding Meaning in the Second Half of Life: How to Finally, Really Grow Up
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" (Jung disturbingly observed that what we have ignored or denied inwardly will then more likely come to us as outer fate.) “So, where did this outcome, this event, come from within me?” is a most critical, and potentially liberating, question. To ask it consistently requires a daily discipline, increased personal responsibility, and no little amount of courage. It means that no matter how nervous we may be, we have to step toward center stage in that play we call our life, the only one we get. "
― James Hollis , Finding Meaning in the Second Half of Life: How to Finally, Really Grow Up
