Balancing Heaven and Earth Quotes

“Each age needs its own language for understanding enduring truths…The ancient world didn’t have much of what we call reality; they lived, instead, by the slender threads. We have gained ego reality but have lost the mystical and religious functions that should guide our lives.”
― Robert A. Johnson, Balancing Heaven and Earth: A Memoir of Visions, Dreams, and Realizations

“Dr. Kunkel’s teacher, Dr. Jung, believed that archetypes are blueprints of the basic human qualities we all share. The archetypes themselves are undefinable natural patterns or forces that shape life in all ages and places. They cannot be known directly, but archetypal themes and images appear in myth, fairy tales, dreams, and fantasies. We tend to think of ourselves as unique individuals, and to a great extent we are. But just as there are shared patterns that shape our physical existence, such as having two arms and legs, two eyes, ten fingers and toes, so there are underlying patterns that shape our psychic existence.”
― Robert A. Johnson, Balancing Heaven and Earth: A Memoir of Visions, Dreams, and Realizations

“Children come into the world with that sense of celebration and delight in the awesomeness of life. Then we eat of that wonderful, terrible fruit depicted in the story of the Garden of Eden, and our lives become divided. In childhood we have innocent wholeness, which then is transformed into informed separateness. If one is lucky, a second transformation occurs later in life, a transformation into informed wholeness. A proverb puts it this way: in life our task is to go from unconscious perfection to conscious imperfection and then to conscious perfection.”
― Robert A. Johnson, Balancing Heaven and Earth: A Memoir of Visions, Dreams, and Realizations

“It wounded me enough to ground me, but not so much as to knock all the life out of me.”
― Robert A. Johnson, Balancing Heaven and Earth: A Memoir of Visions, Dreams, and Realizations

“The mystery is this: there is one right thing and only one right thing to do at every moment. We can either follow or resist the slender threads.”
― Robert A. Johnson, Balancing Heaven and Earth: A Memoir of Visions, Dreams, and Realizations

“The term projection is used by Jungians to mean that each of us places some quality of our own being onto something or someone else. Aspects of reality of which we are unconscious are projected onto the outer world, where we see them in terms of events and people outside of ourselves. This psychological process works like a projector in a movie theater: we take something that is within the projector and blow it up onto a screen or backdrop, where we see it more clearly. Since this process is unconscious, we often think it belongs to the outer object when, in fact, it belongs to us. It is not only a person’s negative qualities that are projected outward in this way; in equal measure we project our positive qualities, including our gold. I had projected my gold”
― Robert A. Johnson, Balancing Heaven and Earth: A Memoir of Visions, Dreams, and Realizations

“It sounds ironic to say that the cure for loneliness is aloneness. I don’t mean that you should just make yourself more miserable; I am prescribing instead a form of solitude that is meditative and open to your inner self.”
― Robert A. Johnson, Balancing Heaven and Earth: A Memoir of Visions, Dreams, and Realizations

“Many people use the energy of their nostalgia for paradise trying to get back to a previous state of grace, back to childhood. This is not possible, and people are wiser to use their energy to progress to the Heavenly Jerusalem. Regression is deadly; progression wins one’s soul.”
― Robert A. Johnson, Balancing Heaven and Earth: A Memoir of Visions, Dreams, and Realizations

“When some quality jumps from you onto another person, you have an opportunity; this is one of your best chances for an advance in consciousness. But you must differentiate carefully and not mix the gold with other levels of relationship. Gold is gold and that is enough. The Bible tells us, “Blessed are the pure in heart.” Pure doesn’t mean “good,” it means “unmixed.” Almost all psychological suffering results from a mixing of levels. I believe that everything in us is good; it is the mixture of things that goes wrong and leads to psychological problems. A possible definition of evil would be to say that evil consists of a right thing in a wrong place. It is not the thing that is wrong; only its placement. The process of projecting”
― Robert A. Johnson, Balancing Heaven and Earth: A Memoir of Visions, Dreams, and Realizations

“It was she who first introduced me to a book by Richard Morris Bucke called Cosmic Consciousness. While reading it I realized for the first time that other people, too, had contact with the Golden World. It gave me the first bit of a handhold on what had happened to me. Lessons were at Miss Rand’s home in the late afternoon, and I often stayed for dinner. We would go on talking until 9 P.M., when her dog would courteously insist that it was time for me to go home. In my own home I was accustomed to retiring to my room immediately after dinner, as there was never anything of interest to say to anyone. Although I didn’t know it at the time, I had a great hunger to be parented by someone who understood my inner world. During this period I didn’t know what I wanted or needed, I only felt a great hole in my life. In”
― Robert A. Johnson, Balancing Heaven and Earth: A Memoir of Visions, Dreams, and Realizations

“We create Hollywood and Disneyland to carry our projections of greatness. But as a society we are putting ourselves at risk in this process, for a celebrity may not be a true hero. As the great mythologist Joseph Campbell once pointed out, the celebrity lives only for his or her own ego, while the hero acts to redeem society. We have many celebrities but few true heroes these days. Modern Westerners have evolved psychologically to the point where we are placing our gold on living beings rather than dead bones, as was done in medieval times, but it remains to be seen whether we can learn to carry our own gold and find heaven within instead of without.”
― Robert A. Johnson, Balancing Heaven and Earth: A Memoir of Visions, Dreams, and Realizations

“I continue to grapple to find new terminology for talking about the religious life. Each age needs its own language for understanding enduring truths, and while many people feel uncomfortable talking about religion, our ego-centered, so-called real life is disintegrating at this point in history. The ancient world didn’t have much of what we call reality; they lived, instead, by the slender threads. We have gained ego reality but have lost the mystical and religious functions that should guide our lives.”
― Robert A. Johnson, Balancing Heaven and Earth: A Memoir of Visions, Dreams, and Realizations

“Over the years I discovered that virtually everyone who comes to analysis is in some way facing a religious crisis, a term I prefer to neurosis, and every analysis is in some way a religious dilemma.”
― Robert A. Johnson, Balancing Heaven and Earth: A Memoir of Visions, Dreams, and Realizations

“Perhaps one of the greatest jokes of my life is that I first went to India to be spiritualized, and I came home humanized.”
― Robert A. Johnson, Balancing Heaven and Earth: A Memoir of Visions, Dreams, and Realizations