Why You Feel Lost: James Hollis on Ego, Purpose & Finding Your True Self

James, a lot of people that have hit play on this episode today, they've got the house, they've got the car, they've got the family, the two kids, they've got everything perfectly going on on paper, but still something inside them is not feeling great.

Why is that so common?

Well, first of all, there's a discrepancy between what we acquire in the outer world and what is needed in the inner world.

And every time we forget or lose connection with what's going on inside of us, there's going to be some discord show up.

We call them symptoms.

And, you know, I'm a psychoanalyst, a Jungian analyst, and so people don't drop in to talk to me because they just happen to be the neighborhood and thought they could drop in and talk to a total stranger.

Quite the contrary, it's because something is hurting inside.

And rather than say, well, how quickly do we get rid of whatever that discord is that you're feeling, we ask the question, why has it come to you? What's going on inside of you? What is this really about? And those are perhaps obvious questions in the abstract, but they're usually not necessarily questions that have come up to that person.

So I would say that we have a nature that has needs, and our needs are often, frankly, spiritual or psychological.

I tend to use those words interchangeably here, and are not going to be satisfied simply by mere material accomplishments, which is relatively easy in our culture.

But that discrepancy tells us we have an autonomy to our own psyche.

And When we don't pay attention, it's going to ratchet up its protest, the knocking on the door that ultimately gets our attention.

So

how can we pay attention? You know, when we have this feeling, how do we pay attention to it? What do we need to do to get...

closer to it

well first of all in terms of the autonomy of the human psyche we have a feeling function you and i don't create feelings feelings are autonomous qualitative analyses of how our experience is going as experienced inwardly all right so if i've prepared for this career and i find it flat or if i've achieved all of these material forms that you've just mentioned and there's no sense of being at home with it, or there's no sense that it's ultimately supportive of what's going on inside, again, it's going to show up in the feeling function.

Energy systems is another way to pay attention.

When I'm doing what's right for me, the energy's there.

We talk about the flow.

We know it feels right inside.

and there's something that carries us, we can mobilize our energy, which is necessary for life's tasks.

You get up at 3 in the morning to feed the baby, for example.

But if you keep mobilizing your life in terms of goals that are contrary to your own internal reality, then it's going to lead to exhaustion and burnout.

We have the presence of symptoms, as you've mentioned.

We also have corrective dreams.