My inner journey started in the Summer of 1967, just before I entered college. On one otherwise forgettable day that summer, a religious missionary found her way into our sleepy barrio and gifted my mother with a slim blue-covered pamphlet entitled “Why Are You Here?”
That question has bothered me ever since. I still am today, after years of disappointing on and off research and self-study on a subject that I know now has no precise answers. This book by James Hillman, which I acquired in July 1999, helped a lot in my soul-search. The marked sentences and passages in my copy of this book which are shown below are the lessons I learned which I would like to share:
On the “Acorn Theory”:
“…the ‘acorn theory’ …holds that each person bears a uniqueness that asks to be lived and that is already present before it can be lived.”
On “Calling”:
“Each person enters the world called.”
* * *
“A calling may be postponed, avoided, intermittently missed. It may possess you completely. Whatever; eventually it will out. It makes its claim.”
* * *
“…calling seems closest during the years through eight and then again during adolescence…”
On “Character”:
“You are born with a character; it is given; a gift, as the old stories say, from the guardians before your birth.”
On “Soul”:
“The soul of each of us is given a unique daimon before we are born, and it has selected an image or pattern that we live on earth.”
On “Childhood”:
“…we must attend very carefully to childhood to catch early glimpses of the daimon in action, to grasp its intentions and not block its way.”
On “Image”:
“…you and I and every single person is born with a defining image.”
On “Compensation Theory”:
“…the roots of later superiorities are buried in early inferiorities.”
On “Vision”:
“…as almost every extraordinary life shows, there is a vision, an ideal that calls. To what precise actuality it calls usually stays vague if not altogether unknown.”
On “Biographies”:
“They give our lives an imaginary dimension.”
On “Fate”:
“How curious that life can be foreordained and yet not foretold.”
* * *
“Catching the sly winks of fate is a reflective act. It is an act of thought…”
On “Accidents”:
“The world is run as much by folly as by wisdom, as much as order as by chaos, but—and this ‘but’ is huge—these accidents may still intend something interesting.”
On “Success”:
“…the source of success appears to lie in a mother’s doting—or in her neglectful selfishness, which forces an offspring out on its own.”
On “Love Maps”:
“The theory of love maps suggests that environmental conditioning determines the object of your desire.”
* * *
“…long before your true love walks past you in a classroom, at a shopping mall, or in the office, you have already constructed some basic elements of your ideal sweetheart.”
On “Platonic Myth”:
“…a person is born with an innate paradigm that is not identical with genetic endowment..”
On “Code of the Soul”:
“…’in late adulthood’, when calling, character, and fate have become more inescapable, then, too, one’s intelligence, and all that it serves, belongs more to the code of the soul than to that of the genes.”
On “Intuition”:
“Intuitions occur; we do not make them. They come to us as a sudden idea, a definite judgment, a grasped meaning.”
-James Hillman
“…the ‘acorn theory’ …holds that each person bears a uniqueness that asks to be lived and that is already present before it can be lived.”
On “Calling”:
“Each person enters the world called.”
* * *
“A calling may be postponed, avoided, intermittently missed. It may possess you completely. Whatever; eventually it will out. It makes its claim.”
* * *
“…calling seems closest during the years through eight and then again during adolescence…”
On “Character”:
“You are born with a character; it is given; a gift, as the old stories say, from the guardians before your birth.”
On “Soul”:
“The soul of each of us is given a unique daimon before we are born, and it has selected an image or pattern that we live on earth.”
On “Childhood”:
“…we must attend very carefully to childhood to catch early glimpses of the daimon in action, to grasp its intentions and not block its way.”
On “Image”:
“…you and I and every single person is born with a defining image.”
On “Compensation Theory”:
“…the roots of later superiorities are buried in early inferiorities.”
On “Vision”:
“…as almost every extraordinary life shows, there is a vision, an ideal that calls. To what precise actuality it calls usually stays vague if not altogether unknown.”
On “Biographies”:
“They give our lives an imaginary dimension.”
On “Fate”:
“How curious that life can be foreordained and yet not foretold.”
* * *
“Catching the sly winks of fate is a reflective act. It is an act of thought…”
On “Accidents”:
“The world is run as much by folly as by wisdom, as much as order as by chaos, but—and this ‘but’ is huge—these accidents may still intend something interesting.”
On “Success”:
“…the source of success appears to lie in a mother’s doting—or in her neglectful selfishness, which forces an offspring out on its own.”
On “Love Maps”:
“The theory of love maps suggests that environmental conditioning determines the object of your desire.”
* * *
“…long before your true love walks past you in a classroom, at a shopping mall, or in the office, you have already constructed some basic elements of your ideal sweetheart.”
On “Platonic Myth”:
“…a person is born with an innate paradigm that is not identical with genetic endowment..”
On “Code of the Soul”:
“…’in late adulthood’, when calling, character, and fate have become more inescapable, then, too, one’s intelligence, and all that it serves, belongs more to the code of the soul than to that of the genes.”
On “Intuition”:
“Intuitions occur; we do not make them. They come to us as a sudden idea, a definite judgment, a grasped meaning.”
-James Hillman
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