Reviews for Balancing Heaven and Earth A Memoir of Visions, Dreams, and Realizations

The average rating for Balancing Heaven and Earth A Memoir of Visions, Dreams, and Realizations based on 2 reviews is 4.5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2008-10-24 00:00:00 ROBERT BANNERMAN There is a LOT in this book. Johnson has lived an odd, yet fascinating life. He lost a leg at the age of 11 and nearly bled to death, during which time he had an experience of what he terms "The Golden World." He has another of these experiences in his late teens and his early life is an attempt to recapture this feeling, without much success. He is drawn to music and finds relationships there which his family of origin failed to give him. He went to Europe and studied with Carl Jung. Life has many paths, which he feels are not coincidences but rather the following of "slender threads." He finds equilibrium in India. Here is a summation on page 171: "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 a truly religious life."

Review # 2 was written on 2010-09-28 00:00:00 Michael Fleiss A Jungian psychotherapist has a near death experience and spends the rest of his life trying to find his balance between heaven, where he wants to be, and earth, where he is bound to life. He deals with eternal problems: how to be close to God but not cut himself off from other people, how to honor his introverted character and also deal with a longing for connection with others, how to make a living and at the same time keep his focus on what's really important in life – being the person God created him to be. I love this book because Johnson is a lot like me in some ways. It reassures me I'm not the only one out there like me.