#robertajohnson

[esowteric]

Imagination and Symbols

“The images with whom we interact are symbols, and we encounter them on a symbolic plane of existence. But a magical principle is at work: When we experience the images, we also directly experience the inner parts of ourselves that are clothed in the images. This is the power of symbolic experience in the human psyche when it is entered into consciously: Its intensity and its effect on us is often as concrete as a physical experience would be. Its power to realign our attitudes, teach us and change us at deep levels, is much greater than that of external events that we may pass through without noticing.”

~ Robert A. Johnson, Inner Work: Using Dreams and Active Imagination for Personal Growth.

Image: Greenman mask with eyes.

Artist: Lauren raine.

Image source: Wikimedia Commons.

Image licence: Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported (CC BY-SA 3.0).

[wildstrandsblog]

The place where light and dark begin to touch is where miracles arise.

Robert A. Johnson

[jungiananalysis]

Marion Woodman and Robert A. Johnson: In Conversation

[Johnson] “Tristian and Isolde have the unsolvable problem on their hands because they have drunk the divine wine. They’re mad. They’re divine mad - possessed. And they can’t find any human way of living it out... Finally they decide to run away, they go off to the forest. And you think they would be happy because they have each other, but they can’t stand it, because the divine wine won’t function outside of persecution. The divine wine can’t function on ordinary circumstances.” 

[Woodman] “You mean one has to be persecuted in order to use the divine wine?”

[Johnson] “That’s true, that’s one of the requirements of the divine wine - that it be not of the laws of the earth. Tristian and Isolde find out when they find the ordinariness - they don’t like it.”

[belladagger5]

"Whom Does the Grail Serve?" #collage by Bonnie Currie of Arcane Memory Designs Copyright 2017 "Modern man wants the Grail to serve him. We ask the great outpouring of femininity/ nature to serve us. However the Grail truly serves the Grail King, that which Jung called the Self and we call by many other names to indicate that which is greater than ourselves." -Robert A. Johnson

[sonomaoak]

Repost from @jaytmulligan Sometimes, when the light strikes at odd angles ⁣ and pulls you back into childhood ⁣ ⁣ and you are passing a crumbling mansion ⁣ completely hidden behind old willows ⁣ ⁣ or an empty convent guarded by hemlocks ⁣ and giant firs standing hip to hip, ⁣ ⁣ you know again that behind that wall, ⁣ under the uncut hair of the willows⁣ ⁣ something secret is going on,⁣ so marvelous and dangerous ⁣ ⁣ that if you crawled through and saw,⁣ You would die, or be happy forever. ⁣ ⁣ —Lisel Mueller, “Sometimes, When the Light”⁣ #lightworkers #shadowwork #billplotkin #robertajohnson https://www.instagram.com/p/CBpQKwcFO_-/?igshid=8xwimnpdkwbp

[arcanememory5]

"Whom Does the Grail Serve?" #collage by Bonnie Currie of Arcane Memory Designs Copyright 2017 "Modern man wants the Grail to serve him. We ask the great outpouring of femininity/ nature to serve us. However the Grail truly serves the Grail King, that which Jung called the Self and we call by many other names to indicate that which is greater than ourselves." -Robert A. Johnson #unconscious #grail #grailking #divinemasculine #divinefeminine #risetogether #romanticism #innerworld #psyche #conciousness #robertajohnson #analogcollage #contemporaryart #collageart #archetype #cutandpaste #psychology #jungian #symbolism #contemporarycollage #mystic #mystical #otherworldly #cosmic

[twosidestarot]

Tub reading #robertajohnson #jung #shadow #subconscious #books #bathtime

[jongleurprofane]

“What a strange tree! Whenever we pluck the fruit of creativity from the golden tree our other hand plucks the fruit of destruction. Our resistance to this insight is very high! I We would love to have creativity without destruction, but that is not possible. [...]

Does this mean that I have to be as destructive as I am creative, as dark as I am light? Yes, but I have some control over how or where I will pay the dark price.[...]

We need to connect with this dark side for our own development, and we have no business flinging it at others, trying to palm off these awkward and unwanted feelings. [...] William Blake spoke about the need to reconcile these two parts of the self. He said we should go to heaven for form and to hell for energy - and marry the two.”

Owning Your Own Shadow

[jungiananalysis]

Much of traditional religion consists of protecting people from that numinous experience which would be too big for them. A person who is touched by a vision of God too soon or in a deeper sense than he has the capacity to survive it will be a severely wounded person. Really, that’s the Fisher King wounded experience: he touches God, he eats the salmon too illegitimately and suffers a terrible run from it. 

I think probably half of the suffering of modern people could be cancelled out or alleviated in just one stroke by understanding the nature of that suffering. If people understand that we’re Fisher Kings and that we have bitten off the salmon and that this is a noble task and that it is going to yield a wonderful cultural product, then one doesn’t have to be guilty over it anymore. And that’s half of the suffering cancelled out right there. One needn’t be frightened or guilty any longer but half of the suffering is alleviated the moment one understands the true meaning of it. The one unforgivable or unbearable form of suffering is meaninglessness to us.  

[jungiananalysis]

Slender Threads: A Conversation with Jungian Analyst and author Robert A. Johnson

The logical thing to do would be to put it back in the church. But people don’t seem to be able to do that. It’s one’s religious function. And all the mechanisms in the church for receiving it but it’s not a language that seems tenable for modern people. (1:15:15)

Jung also said that Christianity is the best road map of the western psyche that exists. (1:24:08)

By turning [the Christian myth] into idolatry it exteriorizes it and depotentiates it. (1:29:14)

Religion, to take the word apart, means to put things back together again... That’s the job of the religious life. I think still in my life, if I found a good honest monastery or ashram, I would go. I’ve given up trying. (1:31:52)

[JPM] Psychologically speaking, the religious nature of psyche is those things that are disparate they come together, that’s the religious function of the psyche. [RAJ] The Garden of Eden split us apart and it’s the job of the church to put us back together again, simple as that. (1:34:00)

[RAJ] Asylums are full of people who got a glimpse of something bigger than they can stand. [JPM] ...The difference between a religious experience and a psychotic event? [RAJ] One’s capacity to stand it. Jung liked to point out: Nietzsche failed it, Nietzsche went psychotic and William Blake stood it. What is the difference between a psychotic experience and a religious experience - it depends entirely on one’s ability to stand or handle the experience. Such things happen frequently to people, much more frequently than our society would like to acknowledge. Some people side step it and evade the disaster of it, but that loses its beauty too. Or some people go fanatical with it, have to go out on a sandwich board and proclaim the second coming of Christ. But if one has the psychic strength to take it, it can be a religious experience of tremendous power. Jung liked to point out that Nietzsche failed it, he identified with it. Jung liked to point out the point in Thus Spake Zarathustra where Jung thought Nietzsche lost the battle. At one point Zarathustra comes to Nietzsche and insisted he take a frog and swallow it. The frog being the uninspiring reality. And Nietzsche tried, but he choked on it nd spat it out ...Jung felt he lost the battle at that moment because he wouldn’t take the earthiness of life. He wouldn’t take the just stuff, the boredom and mundane world. Jung liked to point out that William Blake having been offered much the same strength or power of revelation painted it and wrote it and related intelligently to it without identifying with it and thus became a great artist. Jung once said  that William Blake went farther into the collective unconscious and lived to tell the tale than anybody else that he knew. Jung pointed out on the same subject that William Blake kept a very humble and ordinary and human life he married and he earned his life as an engraver, earned his living as an engraver and wouldn’t live in London, lived in a little village. Jung said William Blake saved his sanity in that manner. So the answer is: who can take it. (1:44:10 - 1:48:50)

I consider an analyst as a guide in the sense that he carries some tools and he’s trodden this path before, but he keeps two steps back of his patient. (1:54:50)

One’s dreaming one’s own mythology, and it’s extremely important to know one’s myth. One’s psychological myth is unique to one as one’s own genetic structure is. The latter is scientific fact, one’s DNA is unique as one’s fingerprint or the iris of one’s eye. One’s myth is unique and it’s important to know who one is, and that can be described in mythological terms. (1:58:01)

[JPM] Guilt means you’ve taken sides. [RAJ] Yes. I used to tease my Baptist grandmother, tell her that guilt was a sin. Well she’d get furious, because it was her chief comfort, if she wasn’t wringing her hands she wasn’t happy. (2:18:03)

[JPM] I don’t know when we will understand the simple admonition that certain things that we get from our myth, or sacred stories, fairy tales... When turned to the outer world it is superstition, when turned to the inner world it’s wisdom. [RAJ] Do I believe in the virgin birth of Christ? Outwardly, it’s foolish, superstitious. Inwardly, it’s the only possible explanation for the birth of the redemptive figure within one’s own, it has to be a virgin birth. That means of one parent, that means it’s a totally introverted process and it’s not the interaction of two things in the usual sense of the word. So the whole subject of incest which is taboo to the point where one can scarcely discuss it even is touching upon that experience which does not come from opposites. But our language can’t cope with that. But if they dream it they have to. [JPM] Jung said incest as an archetype is about wholeness but acted out in the outer world is horrified.   (2:19:01-2:21:12)

There’s an alchemical saying: I mated with myself, I impregnated myself, I gestated myself, I gave birth to myself, I am myself. ... The psychological equivalent of incest is introversion. If you want to generate a new center of gravity of yourself, go off and be quiet. It’s that kind of generation which will create the Self in Jungian language. (2:21:14)

Incarnation of God (2:35:01)