Dr. James Hollis

A lot of people, what it usually produces is either depression and torpor of some kind or frenetic activity.

So the inability of a person to relativize the ego in the context of the idea of the soul, and does that soul perpetuate?

I don't know.

If I knew, I would tell you.

I wouldn't want to keep that a secret.

I don't know.

It's a mystery.

Maybe I'll be conscious enough to experience it.

Maybe I'll just be annihilated.

Either way, as I said, my present speculations are just that, speculations and ultimately irrelevant.

And again, the thing we have to recognize, it's mortality that makes this life mean something because your choices matter.

You're here a short time.

What are you going to do with that precious gift you call your life?

What are you going to do with it?

Thank you, Andrew.

May I just add as a footnote here, there's a wonderful letter of the poet Rilke to a young man in which he said,

You want the answers.

The key is to find the right questions and live the questions.

You're not yet ready to live the answers, but you ask the right questions in time.

If you live them honestly, with as much integrity as you can manage, someday you'll live your way into their answers for you.