Dr. James Hollis

And sooner or later, you know, life will take you to these difficult places.

And what are you going to do then?

Who are you then and how are you going to address that?

And that's where the issue of integrity came in.

And I think Erickson was right on that.

To be a person of integrity means to integrate something, to pull back one's stuff and sense this is who I am and this is where I stand vis-a-vis this dilemma.

That's why I said the practical question is how now am I to live my life in the face of this situation?

That's a task that comes to each of us at some place in our life and that never goes away.

Okay.

Well, I've actually written about it before.

The paradox here is it's mortality that makes this life meaningful.

If we were immortal, we would simply do this for a century, then we'd get bored, and then we'd do something else for a century, and then get bored, and then something else for a century.

Life is short.

As Jung said, that short pause between two great mysteries.

From whence we come, we know not.

Whither we go, we don't know.

The problem is the identification of the ego.

One of the things that's occurred is in many traditional cultures, that ego was subsumed, as I said, into a larger story.

take away that story and what's going to fill that space?

The ego, my own importance, my self-perpetuation.