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The Gigantic Mistake
One might characterize the whole first half of life as a gigantic mistake, as necessary as it is unavoidable. The task of the second half of life is to recover from that mistake, to move from the adapted self to the authentic self.
— James Hollis, Tracking the Gods: The Place of Myth in Modern Life
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When the psychological self — the adult imago — is constituted and fully realized in the second half of life, a person acquires with it the freedom to expand and deploy the expression of psychic energy in a distinctive and highly creative way. The imago opens new vistas, while it also defines the individual’s psychological style. It brings this capacity to the personality because it draws together the most important opposites in the individual psyche — the high and the low, the sacred and the profane, the conscious and the unconscious — into a singular pattern. The formation of the imago is the precondition for full adult freedom to be oneself.
— Murray Stein, Transformation: Emergence of the Self
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Whenever I see a photograph of some sportsman grinning over his kill, I am always impressed by the striking moral and esthetic superiority of the dead animal to the live one.
— Edward Abbey
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