Stew

“So, here you are, in this mysterious now. With your history receding like the sound of a hunter’s horn along the wind, with your future rushing toward you like the next season, now is the moment, the only moment that exists, in which becoming can be and in which consciousness can make a difference. Perhaps the highest achievement of consciousness is not the self-serving reiteration of its own glories, its agenda of regressive reinforcement in the face of the large, intimidating cosmos that is our home, but rather its capacity to acknowledge that it has been called to witness, and to serve, to serve something much larger. There is in you room for a second, timeless, and larger life. For, as the poet Walt Whitman wrote in “A Clear Midnight”: This is the hour O Soul, thy free flight into the wordless Away from books, away from art, the day erased, the lesson done, Thee fully forth emerging, silent, gazing, pondering the themes thou lovest best, Night, sleep, death and the stars.”
― James Hollis, Finding Meaning in the Second Half of Life: How to Finally, Really Grow Up

“As we have so often seen, the task of ego consciousness in the second half of life is to step out of the way and embrace a larger spiritual agenda. Contrary to the fantasy of the youthful ego, this larger life will quite often be found in the savannahs of suffering—not on the lofty peaks of New Age transcendence, or in fundamentalism’s fearful flight from complexity, but down in what Yeats called “the fury and mire of human veins.” Only in this way do we grow, and do we find, amid suffering and defeat, the possibility of meaning so rich we can scarcely bear it. For this embrace of suffering, this acceptance of paradox, we deserve to be valued. As Jung put it so aptly, “This apparently unendurable conflict is proof of the rightness of your life. A life without inner contradiction is only half a life, or else a life in the Beyond which is destined only for angels. But God loves human beings more than the angels.”
― James Hollis, Finding Meaning in the Second Half of Life: How to Finally, Really Grow Up

“Psychiatry today is less a psychotherapeutic enterprise than a pharmacological crapshoot,”
― James Hollis, Finding Meaning in the Second Half of Life: How to Finally, Really Grow Up

“Buy a piece of art. Find one that speaks to you and make the purchase. If it is a genuine artistic production, it will invade your life and change it. A real piece of art is a window into the transcendent, and you need that in your life, because you are finite and limited and bounded by your ignorance. Unless you can make a connection to the transcendent, you will not have the strength to prevail when the challenges of life become daunting. You need to establish a link with what is beyond you, like a man overboard in high seas requires a life preserver, and the invitation of beauty into your life is one means by which that may be accomplished.”
― Jordan B. Peterson, Beyond Order: 12 More Rules for Life