Today’s Life-Line is:

It is ironic that often our breakthroughs into consciousness of the divine grow out of breakdowns in ordinary consciousness. Contacts with the divine may at the time feel like pure suffering, and I sometimes wonder if all suffering is a vision of God too great to bear. The Buddhist tradition informs us that enlightenment is often perceived as tragedy or total disaster from the ego’s perspective. Very few people have the intelligence to surrender with dignity to forces greater than themselves. Most of us have to be hit in the head, or in my case the leg,* and thereby forced into a realization of the Golden World.

~ Robert A. Johnson

* Robert Johnson, Jungian analyst and best-selling author, died on September 12, 2018 at the age of ninety-seven. His books are well worth your time. When Robert was a boy of ten he was hit by a car while roller skating home pinning his right leg “between brick and chrome” just as he was going into the local drugstore to buy a Coca-Cola. That night while in a hospital bed, his leg in a heavy cast, the sutured artery in his leg broke loose and he slowly began to bleed to death as “he began drifting to another world.” In Balancing Heaven and Earth: A Memoir of Visions, Dreams, and Realizations he writes:

It was pure light, gold, radiant, luminous, ecstatically happy, perfectly beautiful, purely tranquil, joy beyond bound. I wasn’t the least bit interested in anything on the earthly side of the divide; I could only revel at what was before me. We have words for this side of reality but none to describe the other side. It was all that any mystic ever promised of heaven, and I knew then that I was in possession of the greatest treasure known to humankind. Later in life I heard the religious scholar Mircea Eliade refer to this magnificent realm as the Golden World, which is exactly right, and I have called it that ever since.

Johnson’s memoir recounts a lifetime of learning to hold the blessed tensions of life and the suffering, struggle, and wisdom that came as a result of having been “teased with a brief preview of the Golden World,” what he described as “both my curse and my blessing.” Looking back over the years he arrives back at that transforming moment. He writes:

Yes, I was alive but reluctantly so. No one can look upon even the antechamber of heaven without a lifetime of regret at what has been lost. Seeing through this mundane world to the golden, archetypal world was marvelous beyond description, but at the tender age of eleven it was almost too much. I was so blinded by the golden light of the divine world that I was spoiled for regular life. A curtain separating the two realms was for me forever parted. In the morning of that fateful day I was a giddy kid; by midnight I was a very old man in a boy’s body.

We remember ourselves to this wise guide who now rests eternally in the Golden World he caught a glimpse of nearly eighty years ago.