A man’s journey to find the Answer of Why and How
Searching for answers is a journey with many dead ends, paths to frustration, bridges requiring time to build, and occasionally finding an accurate map/guide who points you truthfully through the fog of life. That “accurate guide”, for me was James Hollis’ book The Middle Passage, published by Inner City Books. I had recently completed two books on the topic of Meaning and began searching Carl Jung as a result. I stumbled across The Middle Passage in a book search on Amazon.com and ordered Hollis’ book. The first page of his Preface declared what my thoughts had been screaming as a direct result of frustration with life, now in my late 50s:
“…the capacity for growth depends on one’s ability to internalize and to take personal responsibility…In a 1945 letter, speaking of the work of personal growth, Jung wrote: The opus consists of three parts: insight, endurance, and action…”
In this reading of the first pages I gained clarity from the fog of frustration – responsibility to act, a choice which was mine only. This was illumination in a dark room of my last decade of living. Could Hollis’ writings give me tools to build my life on rock-bed instead of beach-sand? Intently I continued reading hoping for continued guidance.
“Our lives are tragic only to the degree that we remain unconscious of both the role of the autonomous complexes and the growing divergence between our nature and our choices”
Incredible words of clarity. I saw what I was blind to today as well as when looking back. The pain of my past was requiring, no forcing me to consciously acknowledge my nature and my choices. There are reasons and now questions about those “reasons” are being answered. Continued reading brought words to my conscious requiring me to act: authenticity, obligation to view, projections, the possible path, etc. And then what I desperately yearned to acquire appeared in Hollis’ pages – Hope.
“One of the most powerful shocks of the Middle Passage is the collapse of our tacit contract with the universe – the assumption that if we act correctly, if we are of good heart and good intentions, things will work out. We assume a reciprocity with the universe. If we do our part, the universe will comply…there is no such contract, and everyone who goes through the Middle Passage is made aware of it”
Now I understand, now I get it. Not only that I am not alone – I am comforted in my pain. My pain of the First P
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