| Quotes from Balancing Heaven and Earth the autobiography of Robert Johnson, Jungian therapist & author Heresy……. pp. 48-49 “The word heresy was laughable to me for many years; I thought it was just a term for anything that the Church Fathers in Rome didn’t like. But then I found out that in the Christian tradition all heresy is a misunderstanding of the nature of Christ. The famous heresies in medieval Christianity invariably were arguments about whether Christ was more human or divine. If you said he was more human than divine, you were wrong. If you said he was more divine than human, again you were wrong. Christ was fully divine and fully human, both of heaven and of earth. Anything that departs from that exact balance is a heresy. The power of the word heresy came when I began to apply it in my own life. You don’t have to be a Christian to understand when a heresy is taking place in your psyche. When my life becomes more doing than being, then I am in heresy. Alternatively, if my life becomes more being than doing, then again I am in heresy. Now the word heresy is very useful to me. Heresy is a dislocation of the center of gravity of the personality. We often fall into heresy, and it is a wonderful term to describe when we lean too far to one side or the other, the divine side or the earthly side. It is one of the best concepts I have found to describe the paradoxical nature of human life. Spirituality… p.49 I have thrown the word spirituality out of my vocabulary because it seems to imply abandoning the earthly dimension. I have little patience with people who say they are on the spiritual path, because almost invariably they are trying to advance the vertical (lofty, unearthly) part of their lives at the expense of the horizontal (earthy, human) dimensions of their being. As such, it is a heresy. Spirituality as something other than that midpoint is a heresy. Anything that has an opposite is inadequate and quickly throws you into heresy. The Alchemical Gold ……… p. 62- 63 Alchemical gold is another term for the soul. Soul work, or inner work, takes place when something moves from the unconscious, where it began, into conscious awareness. The path is never straight and neat inside oneself, as if you could go to a library and do all your inner work there. Instead, when something is ready to move from the unconscious to the conscious, it needs a host or intermediary. Generally this intermediary is some person or thing. Suddenly, it seems as though you must possess a certain person. If it’s your gold—your soul—that is coming to consciousness, your first inkling of such a deep internal change will likely be that someone else begins to glow for you. It is your gold, but you see it in someone else; you are putting the alchemical gold on that person. Some people think that the alchemist of the Middle Ages were somehow greedy, obsessed with making gold from lead so they could be materially rich, but the best and most insightful alchemists were very careful to differentiate in their language, and they made it clear they were not after vulgar gold, that is, the stuff of the marketplace. In their alchemy, they were talking about the creation of soul. In the twentieth century, more and more people are concerned with this interior alchemical gold, the art of meaning. No other hunger is so great in our age. The Religious Life … pp. 100 – 101 Humankind has struggled with the dilemma of how to balance fate versus free will since time began. There have been many rules of thumb for how to achieve such a balance. My personal approach is that the big events of my life follow a slender thread while the details are my business. Nobody but me will balance my checkbook or shave me or keep my house tidy. Those are the appropriate tasks for the ego. The little decisions belong to us, while the great things are like the weather sweeping us along. Yet most modern people spend a majority of their waking hours worrying about larger issues that the ego cannot really control. The small and limited ego is not the proper human faculty for such issues. The ego does not belong in the driver’s seat. In fact, the ego often gets in the way of being attentive to the slender threads. We must learn to humble and quiet our egos so that we may follow the slender threads. After many years of struggling with this, I feel that the ego is properly used as the organ of awareness, not the organ of decision. Almost everyone in our society tries to use the ego as an organ of decision. For example, we may say to ourselves, “I am going to Europe …” The ego is useful for collecting information about ticket fares and accommodations and things to see and do when you arrive. But the ego does not determine the experience you will have on your trip. People get so preoccupied with trying to control things that are not in the ego’s province that they neglect what is the ego’s business – heightened awareness. The ego should be collecting data and watching. The ego serves as the eyes and ears of God. It gathers the facts, but it does not make the ultimate decisions. The decisions come from the Self, Dr. Jung’s term for a center of intelligence that is not limited to the ego but contains all of the faculties -- conscious and unconscious -- of the personality. Obviously, this is but a new attempt to describe the old concept of a personal relationship with God. How do we know if we are truly following the will of God? One knows instinctively; there is a sense of peace, balance, and fullness, an unhurriedness. One of my favorite authors, the French philosopher Hubert Benoit, writes that there is one, and only one, appropriate action in any given moment of time. If you are in that action, then you are happy and peaceful. I am still trying to grow up to this notion of Benoit’s. He suggests that if you think you have a choice, you are not seeing the reality of things correctly. The will of God is always singular. I believe this, but I can’t always stand the truth of this statement. Certainly, it runs counter to our sense of free will and self-determination. We want the maximum number of choices and the freedom to choose among them. Madison Avenue is the purveyor of discontent; virtually all advertising is designed to create discontent so as to create a market for a product. When you are following the will of God, there is no choice whatsoever. Here I am not talking about following scripture to the letter. That is one way of being happy, but for most modern people this is not a viable solution. Looking for a manual to tell you what to do, whether that manual is the Bible or the latest psychological theory, is not useful. Listening to the will of God as it manifests within your own psyche, hearing what has been called the still, small voice within—this is the religious life. This cannot be reduced to a tidy formula, but one general guideline is to ask yourself what is needed for wholeness in any situation. Instead of asking what is good or what coincides with our personal interest, ask what is whole-making. Sainthood is the result of wholeness, not goodness. What is required for more wholeness will be different for each person, and it changes moment by moment. This requires realigning yourself each day, each hour, and each moment. When one can live in this fashion, aligning the ego with the inner Self, it has a profound effect on the quality of our lives. Abiding by the will of God gives life—including it misfortunes – meaning, purpose and dignity. It also removes a great deal of the anxiety of modern life. The Return of the Hero (p. 130 - 131) “The return of the hero/savior is not just a historical, outer event; it is even more true as an inner experience, an experience that each of us must go through in our life’s journey. First comes the simple and happy stage of innocent childhood. Then we lose our naiveté and happiness and fall into a difficult second stage in which we worry and become anxious; life becomes a difficult process. Finally, if all goes well, we may enter a third stage in which we regain happiness and simplicity. “In a modern psychological sense, these three stages can be seen as three steps of consciousness: (1) simple consciousness, (2) complex consciousness, and (3) divine or illumined consciousness. [In many cultures there is this proverb. Here’s the Danish from Kierkegaard] “ … the simple man on his way home after work is wondering what’s for dinner. The complex man on his way home is debating the complexities and the imponderables of life. The enlightened man on his way home from work is wondering what’s for dinner.” The Internal Christ Mystery Story (pp. 131-132) “After getting angry in my early twenties with many of the contradictions of Christianity as I saw it practiced, the powers of the symbols in that tradition were restored to me through Jungian psychology. I began to see that the story of Christ could be understood as a process that takes place within each and every one of us – an inner journey. Read in this way, we can see that Christ is constantly being immaculately conceived and born, is confounding the elders, teaching, being betrayed, being crucified, dying, resurrecting, and is making an ascension. All of these are occurring in every moment; they are mystical facts that exist outside of time. When I began to understand this, Christianity became possible for me again.” The 2 Problems of Psychotherapy (pp. 142-143) “Dr. Jung once said that, in essence, there are two problems in therapy: the problem of the twenty-one-year-old and the problem of the forty-five-year-old, regardless of the actual chronological age of the patient. The twenty-one-year-old’s problem has to do with getting into life, while the forty-five-year-old’s problem has to do with how to get back out of life. Most young people struggle with problems of getting fully into life, such as how to gain an education, earn a living, conduct relationships, and raise children and maintain a family. These are all problems relating to social requirements and the earthly realm. After an individual reaches midlife, however, he or she is faced with preparing for old age, the death of one’s parents, and the realities of one’s own mortality. A Truly Religious Life, cont. (p. 171) “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. “This is the essence of what I learned from Dr. Jung: listen to your interior intelligence, take it seriously, stay true to it, and – most important – approach it with a religious attitude. His psychological term for this is individuation – discovering the uniqueness of yourself, finding out what you are not and finding out what you are. Individuation relates to wholeness, but it is not some indiscriminate wholeness but rather your particular relationship to everything else. You get to the whole only by working with the particularity of your life, not by trying to evade or rise above the specificity of your life. This is the blending of heaven and earth. This is the truly religious life. Sacrifice, pp. 282-283 “One of the finest ceremonies I have observed came from a young friend of mine. This fellow had a dream that he was at a Saturday night party where everything was going wrong. The food was inedible, no one would talk to him, and he was feeling absolutely miserable. We talked this dream over, and he went home and worked on it. He came back the next week and said he realized that Saturday night consciousness had died for him, by which he meant the American ideal of Saturday night as the time to party, get drunk, and have mindless fun with the gang. Usually this Saturday night syndrome is not as much fun as it is said to be, but I watch most young people trying to wring some personal satisfaction out of it anyway. People know they have a God-given right to some feelings of ecstasy, so they are driven to more and more excessive behaviors to get that Saturday night high. The very word Saturday comes to us from the Latin saturnalia, which means an occasion of unrestrained or orgiastic revelry, and the festival of the god Saturn, a Dionysian deity, was celebrated with feasting in ancient Rome. “My friend researched all of this and decided that a sacrifice was called for; he decided to sacrifice the Saturday night syndrome. He hunted around his house for something that would represent this syndrome and decided to go out and by a Big Mac hamburger. He then took a shovel, went out to the backyard, and buried this symbol of the ‘fast life’ and instant gratification. He did this ceremony with great seriousness to mark a change in his lifestyle. Saturday night was never quite the same for this young man again. He was able to reinvest the energy that had been tied up in the old pattern and thereby move on to the next level of consciousness. This was a wonderfully creative, meaningful, tailor-made ritual not found in any book. “It is in a similar fashion that we should approach those unlived aspects of our life before death. That which is unlived should be examined, made conscious, and then transformed.” God is out of the box …. p. 294 “I often wonder about what the remainder of this desperate century will bring, and I have come to the conclusion that God is out of the box. That sounds like a joke, but I mean it in all seriousness. Long ago God lived in the tabernacle, and only a priest had the key. Not only were we locked out, but God was locked in. There was safety in this arrangement. Then, somehow, the box became broken in the twentieth century, and God got out. Very few of us seem to know what to do with this desperate fact: God is loose! God is out and is now appearing everywhere. I would love to read a history book written a hundred years in the future to see what we will do with this new power. It has wonderful possibilities and dreadful consequences if it goes wrong.” A couple of quotes: A proverb from a Hindu saint: “The highest form of worship is simply to be happy.” Indian greeting: “Will you honor my humble abode with the dust from your noble feet.” |