We dull our lives by the way we conceive them.
We have stopped imagining them with any sort of romance, any fictional flair.
... today's main paradigm for understanding a human life, the interplay of genetics and environment, omits something essential - the particularity you feel to be you. By accepting the idea that I am the effect of a subtle buffeting between heredity and societal forces, I reduce myself to a result.
The more my life is accounted for by what already occurred in my chromosomes, by what my parents did or didn't do, and by my early years now long past, the more my biography is the story of a victim.
I am living a plot written by my genetic code, ancestral heredity, traumatic occasions, parental unconsciousness, societal accidents.
... we are victims of academic, scientistic, and even therapeutic psychology, whose paradigms do not sufficiently account for or engage with, and therefore ignore, the sense of calling, that essential mystery at the heart of each human life.
[James Hillman]
The Soul's Code: In Search of Character and Calling, p.5, 6
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