Stories, and Stories within the Story, by James Hollis

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It is no coincidence that the great moral teachers—Socrates, Plato, Jesus, the Rabbis, the Zen masters—taught best through story and parable, for stories bring tangible form to elusive, fugitive truths. What would only be ghostly cerements otherwise, the lingering traces of the passing gods, can, embodied, present themselves to our conscious minds, and thereby become ours.

We all have stories. There are the stories we tell ourselves and others, which we believe to be true. There are stories we tell ourselves and others, which are not true, whatever our belief in them. There are stories that “tell us into the world” on a daily basis, but we do not know them, nor even surmise their presence. The problem with the unconscious is that it is unconscious.

Of these unconscious narratives, we can, by definition, say nothing at all. But we intuit their presence, posit their possibility, through our observations of others, and of ourselves. What, after all, is generating those patterns which characterize our history? What, but the presence of unconscious stories to which our tribe, our ancestors, our culture, are in service?

All of us have heard the word complex before. We have “complexes” because we have histories, for complexes are charged experiences which retain sufficient energy to persist and play a role in the present. (As William Faulkner observed, the past isn’t dead; its not even past). Jung called complexes “splinter personalities” because in the moment of their activation, these histories are embodied in partial form as “identities” which oblige us to enact the roles attending those histories.

I would further consider them “splinter mythologies,” not myth as something untrue, but myth as an interpretation of reality. All myths have at least some fractile purchase on truth, for they reveal some aspect of its significance, some contour of its terrain. Such mythological fragments as complexes are fragmentary interpretations of self and world, generated by the dynamic conditions present at their inception. Accordingly, our lives are governed by provisional scripts, values systems, and generally predictable, generally repetitious outcomes.

As a Jungian analyst, and as a writer who tries to move between the telluric profundities of the unconscious and the limits of our consciousness, it is my task to bridge these two worlds. Accordingly, many of these books tell stories of real people; and sometimes archaic stories of myths, the gods, cultural patterns, for they also dramatize the universal narratives which continue to course through our lives. Bringing these stories into consciousness, asking that we reflect on them, that we additionally endure a discernment process, is the task of the writer, of the analyst, of any of us who wish more consciousness in our lives.

How can we live conscious lives, more considered lives, without a humble engagement with these stories, conscious and otherwise, that generate our accumulating histories? What Matters Most: Living a More Considered Life, is the latest effort to reflect on our stories.

Whether we pay attention to them or not, these stories are living us, and their consequences accumulate as well--not only for us, but for the generations to follow. May it not be a gift to those who follow that we sought to make our stories clearer, so that we might bring greater consciousness to bear on the history that daily life is writing?

James Hollis

What Matters Most

Gotham Books

Penguin Books