Why do we focus so intensely on our problems? What draws us to them? Why are they so … - James Hillman

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All the universes are bound together by a web, a matrix, which is our perception. And our perception actually has colors; it has bands. We call them bands of attention.

James Hillman

Why do we focus so intensely on our problems? What draws us to them? Why are they so attractive? They have the magnet power of love: somehow we desire our problems; we are in love with them much as we want to get rid of them. . . Problems sustain us -- maybe that's why they don't go away. What would a life be without them? Completely tranquilized and loveless. . . There is a secret love hiding in each problem

Attractive, Completely, Focus, Going Away, Secret Love, Somehow

Same Author Quotes

Open your heart, your gaze, to the visitations of angels, even if the gifts they bring may not be centeredness and balance but eccentricity and a wholly unfamiliar sense of pleasure called joy.

Angel, Balance, Heart, Inspirational, Pleasure

You know, people come to therapy really for a blessing. Not so much to fix what's broken, but to get what's broken blessed.

Blessed, Blessing, Broken, Fix, People

It's very hard in our adversarial society to find a third view. Take journalism, where everything is always presented as one person against another: "Now we're going to hear the opposing view. " There is never a third view.

Everything, Journalism, Presented, Society, Thirds, Views

I just read about John Le Carre, the great spy novelist. He had an absolutely miserable childhood. His mother deserted him when he was young. His father was a playboy and a drunk. He was shifted around to many different homes. He knew he was a writer when he was about nine, but he was dyslexic. So here was a person with an absolutely messed-up childhood and a symptom that prevented him from doing what he wanted to do most. Yet that very symptom was part of the calling. It forced him to go deeper.

Childhood, Father, Home, Miserable, Mother, Novelist

Rather let us imagine the anima mundi as that particular soul-spark, that seminal image, which offers itself through each thing in its visible form. Then anima mundi indicates the animated possibilities presented by each new event as it is, its sensuous presentation as a face bespeaking its interior image - in short, its availability to imagination, its presence as psychic reality. Not only animals and plants ensouled as in the Romantic vision, but soul is given with each thing, God-given things of nature and man-made things of the street.

Animal, Men, Reality, Sensuous, Things