Hauntings - Dispelling the Ghosts Who Run Our Lives

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“Individuation is profoundly humbling. It obliges us to stand naked before the gift of life, the summons to personhood, and accede to the demand that we show up and contribute our small part to the big picture. From afar, that sounds reasonable, even doable, but in practice we all are intimidated by what it asks of us. Our well-being once depended on our fitting in, being adaptable, agreeable, accommodating. Individuation asks that we actually serve a separate summons to be different. The difference asked for here is not that of the adolescent who so painfully opposes parents and school authorities and adopts countercultural clichés, but rather that of risking who we are when someone else, perhaps almost everyone else, will not like who we are, feel challenged, even threatened by us, and oppose our very being. Who really wants to risk that?”

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“One may safely say, in a pseudo-scientific theorem: wheresoever ready rationalizations exist, thereunto a complex is being protected. Thus we are all, much of the time, prisoners of history, haunted by the spectral “instructions” that float up from the past to inform, color, dictate our choices in this new present. This moment is always new; it has never existed before, but we reflexively, repetitively bind our days, sometimes in moments of necessary continuity and sometimes in regressive obeisance to the past. Such is the power of complexes.”