hireMedical | Balancing Heaven and Earth: A Memoir of Visions, Dreams, and Realizations

Balancing Heaven and Earth: A Memoir of Visions, Dreams, and Realizations by Robert A. Johnson, Jerry M. Ruhl
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Publisher: HarperOne (2/11/1998) ISBN: 0062515063 Edition: 1st Hardcover: 320 pages Dimensions: 8.4 x 5.8 x 1.1 inches Average Customer Review: based on 19 reviews.
One of this century's most popular psychology scholars, Robert A.Johnson was among the first to present Carl Jung's rich but complex theories with simple elegance and grace,opening them to an entirely new and hungry audience. His masterful works--including the best selling He, She, Inner Work, and Owning Your Own Shadow-are known and loved as much for their beautiful retellings of timeless myths and folktales as for their deep wisdom and profound insight. Balancing Heaven and Earth reveals, for the first time, Johnson's own fascinating and mystical life-from his near-death experience at the age of eleven to the lifelong soul journey that has informed his writing and taught him how to live a spiritual life in the endlessly challenging modern world. Full of compelling, humorous, and surprising stories of encounters with an assortment of "sages, saints, and sinners," it lays bare Johnson's own inner world and its dazzeling landscape of powerful dreams, mystical visions, and synchronistic events. Beginnning with a vivid retelling of the childhood accident that claimed the lower part of his right leg, Johnson describes the life-defining moment when he was transported by a mystical vision to a realm that exists just beyond ordinary consciousness-a realm he calls the "Golden World." With this experience, described as "both my curse and my blessing," Johnson is launched on a spiritual quest that leads him in search of Eastern wisdom, to encounters with such wise men as J. Krishnamurti and D.T. Suzuki, and finally to Carl Jung, who shows him his destiny revealed in a dream. Johnson's experiences lead him to a unique understanding and acceptance of the slender connecting threads at work in all our lives, guiding us and shaping who we are-"call it fate, destiny, or the hand of God." As much a personal guide as a memoir, Balancing Heaven and Earth teaches us to follow , as Johnson has, the subtle influences of dreams, visions, and even our deepest sufferings in order to live attuned to our spiritual selves. A pure delight for Johnson's many fans and a splendid example of his trademark blend of illustrative myth and psychological insight, this is a work of incomparable beauty and inspiration showcasing the wisdom of a lifetime.

Customer Reviews
The Quest of the Golden World Robert Johnson has been a great teacher, mentor, and inspiration for many in the exploration of the inner world, and ultimately the discovery for what he has known as 'the golden world'.It is a homecoming and a place of bliss and repose. I had the privilege to study and share time with Robert in the U.S. and India. He provided for me a taste of that world and a living inspiration in the very real possibility of developing a sacred and blissful rapport between the inner and outer worlds we inhabit. I was delighted to find in this book my own tiny contribution in suggesting to Robert that he take a polaroid camera to India. The realm of Enlightenment is the destiny of all humanity, and here is the humble story of one man who is pointing for us the way to follow... if we are willing to find the courage to do so.

Another desert island book for me... Sometimes I think if I was being scurried away to a desert island I would only bring Robert Johnson, Robert Bly, and James Hollis books because these three are such amazing writers and thinkers. This autobiography is so heartfelt and real and just a total gem all around, Don't miss it- or any of his other books, especially He, She, We, and Ecstacy.

An Enlightening Memoir I learned a great deal from this book. It gave me a basic understanding of Jungian analysis, in particular how dreams are used to tap into the sub-conscious mind and help identify one's personal "destiny" or "thread" as Johnson describes it. I appreciated his several visions of the "Golden World" and how he sought, throughout his life, to re-experience this heightened state of awareness. He also describes how we project our desires onto others in order to experience this sense of connection. I loved Mr. Johnson's experiences in India, and the way he immersed himself in the culture and learned so much about their distinct way of viewing the world. I hope to read another of his books.

A Life Well Developed Beginning in his youth, Robert Johnson shares a frank history of his spiritual development through his entire life, through the lens of a master of Jungian theories and concepts. He describes his early experiences and wounding, his early adult years following the "slender threads" that guide him to finding God's will for him. He describes his sensitive personality type and its close connection to a world both present and just beyond our grasp. His life demonstrates a beautiful rendition of following the spiritual path and its relationship to development from a Jungian perspective. He is as humble and unassuming in his writing as I suspect he was in life. This biography is a beautiful portait of a man's life lived well in the pursuit of following God's will. It demonstrates the unique understanding that can be developed by pursuing life from a Jungian perspective spiritually. I would recommend this book to people who have some sense of the breadth of Jungian psychology and some sense of their own "type", as well as some general concept of type dynamics and the concept of the shadow or inferior function. It is thoroughly engrossing and enjoyable. I would recommend it especially to middle to older age adults, seminarians, or others pursuing their personal spiritual development.

An Indispensable Guide When I'm asked for the most influential books in my life, this is the one that tops my list. As someone who reads 50-200 books a year, that's a big list. I've given it as gifts, quoted it in sermons, referred to it as a spiritual counselor, used it for my own growth and have come back to it over and over since it was first published. I happened upon these reviews while ordering Johnson's latest CD, Golden World, which I'm thrilled to know has been produced. I've read all his books and agree with other reviewers that this is the best, or at any rate, the one that has provided a helpful road map for my life and experiences, and hence, for the many whom I also touch. For those of us, and there are numerous souls, who have had extraordinary tastes of the Golden World (and its inhabitants), "balancing heaven and earth" for the rest of one's life is a daily task; sometimes grace, often a struggle. His words in this memoir (my paraphrase): "there have always been those whose job it is to tend the borders between the worlds" gave me context when I first needed it. His book "We," while it didn't save me from romantic errors (and he writes: "the genie"--e.g. romantic love--"can't be put back in the bottle,") did, again, provide a context for healing and future lessons ("the depression is always in direct proportion to the inflation that preceded it.)His experiences with Krishnamurthi, recounted in this book, gave me important lessons as a teacher, e.g."don't try to give an old man's wisdom to a young person," and his lessons on sainthood have been extremely important as well. If you are living the inner journey, have any sort of spiritual life, and especially, if like Parsifal, Johnson's oft-referred to mythic model, have suffered the agony and the ecstasy of a visit to the Grail Castle and then "lost" it, this book is for you.