Doubt is a profound and effective spiritual motivation. Without doubt, no truism is transcended, no new knowledge found, no expansion of the imagination possible. Doubt is unsettling to the ego and those who are drawn to ideologies that promise the dispelling of doubt by preferring certainties never grow.

There is some debate in professional circles about whether the so-called “midlife crisis” exists.

Is not our chief neurosis - by which I mean our estrangement from nature - our desire to hold fast to what is forever transforming, to freeze the familiar, to submit motion to stasis, to solicit immortality through rigidity.

We are all meaning-seeking, meaning creating creatures and when we experience the loss of meaning, we suffer.

A neurosis is wherever we are allied against our true nature.

What I refuse to face within myself will meet me in the exterior world through you, not as you are, but as I have so construed you.

We serve the world by finding out what feeds us, and, having been fed, then share our gifts with others.

The world is more magical, less predictable, more autonomous, less controllable, more varied, less simple, more infinite, less knowable, more wonderfully troubling than we could have imagined being able to tolerate when we were young.

The truth about intimate relationships is that they can never be any better than our relationship with ourselves.

Fear of our own depths is the enemy.

Anger is generally seen as an unwelcome presence in our midst, however natural it may be. Although each person, and each society, is charged with how anger is to be appropriately channeled, the denial of anger, or its continuous repression, is a deep source of our psychopathology and will invariably seek its expression in a less healthful fashion.

In the second half of life, the questions become: 'Who, apart from the roles you play, are you? What does the soul ask of you? Do you have the wherewithal to shift course, to deconstruct your painfully achieved identity, risking failure, marginalization and loss of collective approval?' No small task.