a passage

 

Investigating the awareness and acknowledgement of

the partiality of the lens we were given by family and culture,

and through which we have made our choices

and suffered their consequences,

the following thoughts appear:

If we had been born of another time and place, to different parents

who held different values, we would have had an entirely different lens.

The lens we received generated a conditional life, which represents

not who we are but how we were conditioned to see life and make choices…

We succumb to the belief that the way we have grown to see the world

is the only way to see it, the right way to see it,

and we seldom suspect the conditioned nature

of our perception.

We all live out, unconsciously,

reflexes assembled from the past.

The disparity between the inner sense of self and the acquired personality

can become so great that the suffering can no longer be suppressed or compensated…

As the person continues to operate out of the old attitudes and strategies,

a grounded self underneath the acquired personality becomes a powerful

imperative for renewal…

The first, (the acquired sense of self) must die… Such death

and rebirth is not an end in itself; it is a passage...

a second shot at what was left behind

in the pristine moments of childhood.

~ James Hollis

edited and summerized from The Middle Passage:

A Jungian Field Guide to Finding Meaning

and Transformation in Midlife

with thanks to The Marginalian

by Maria Popova