Quotes from Robert A. Johnson

If you wish to give your children the best possible gift, the best possible entree into life, remove your shadow from them. To give them a clean heritage, psychologically speaking is the greatest legacy. And, incidentally, you will go far in your own development by taking your shadow back into our private psychological structure— where it first originated and where it is required for your own wholeness.

We could give our children the most wonderful blessing if only we would stop passing the buck to them.

William Blake said we should go to heaven for form and to hell for energy — and marry the two. When we can face our inner heaven and our inner hell, this is the highest form of creativity.

If i can stay with my conflicting impulses long enough, the two opposing forces will teach each other something and produce an insight that serves them both. This is not a compromise but a depth of understanding that puts my life in perspective and allows me to know with certainty what I should do. That certainty is one of the most precious qualities known to human kind.

Most psychotherapies are designed to patch up wounded people and then throw them back into the battle of oppositions. They guide people in how to become better adapted socially: more adept at making money, more highly disciplined, more dutiful, more economically productive. Even when such therapy is successful and gets an individual back out into the rat race again, you can watch them wither over time under the weight of it all. In

It is not that the light element alone does the healing; the place where light and dark begin to touch is where miracles arise. This middle place is a mandorla.

Romantic love has always been inextricably tied to spiritual aspiration.

To reconcile so great a span as heaven and earth is beyond our ordinary way of seeing; generally, two irreconcilable opposites (guilty and need) make neurotic structure in us. It takes a poet — or the poet in us — to overlap such a pair and make a sublime whole of them.

If a wise man abides in his room his thoughts are heard for more than a thousand miles." if one makes a mandorla in the privacy of his interior life, it is heard for more than a thousand miles — I Ching, hexagram #61

If you want to affect your environment, don't get lost in your activism. Stop for a moment and make a mandorla. Don't just do — be something.

Marriage is a very different experience for a man than for a woman. The man is adding to his stature; his world is getting stronger, and he has risen in stature and position. He generally does not understand that he is killing the Psyche in his new wife, and that he

The philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche explored the burden of the unlived that is not reclaimed: Zarathustra goes to the grave with the unfulfilled dreams of his youth. He speaks to them as if they were ghosts who have betrayed him bitterly. They struck up a dance and then spoiled the music. Did the past make his path so weighty? Did his unlived life impede him and consign him to a life that seems not to pass?

Guilt creates nothing; conscious work constructs a mandorla and is healing. The mandorla has no place for remorse. it asks conscious work of us, not self-indulgence. Guilt is also a cheap substitute for paradox. The energy consumed by guilty would be far better invested in the courage act of looking at two sets of truths that have collided in our personality. Guilty is also arrogant because it means we have taken sides in an issue and are sure that we are right.

must do this. If she behaves strangely, or if something goes dreadfully wrong, or there are many tears, he usually doesn't understand that marriage is a totally different experience for her than for him.

Contribute less to the general darkness of the world and do not add to the collective shadow that fuels war and strife.

The persona is what we would like to be and how we wish to be seen by the world it is our psychological clothing and it mediates between our true selves and our environment just as our physical clothing presents an image to those we meet. The ego is what we are and know about consciously. The shadow is that part of us we fail to see or know.

Since he has grasped the white-hot stuff of freedom, modern man must have an equally powerful grasp of consciousness if he is to avoid the pitfalls that are so common in our relationships today.

this surely is the worst deprivation of all: to be barred from the essence of beauty and holiness when just those qualities are right in front of you is the cruelest of all suffering

Only awareness of your shadow qualities can help you to find an appropriate place for your unredeemed darkness and thereby create a more satisfying experience. To not do this work is to remain trapped in the tedium, loneliness, agitations, and disappointments of a circumscribed life rather than awakening to your higher calling.

mythology describes the hero's battle with his internal self as the encounter with the dragon, and modern man has no fewer dragon battles than did his medieval counterpart

Being overwhelmed by something other than one's true self. This is weakness and incompetence in a man.

the urge toward suicide signals an edge of a new level of consciousness. If you can kill the right thing—the old way of adaptation—and not injure yourself, a new energy-filled era will begin.

When a woman is touched by an archetypal experience, she often collapses before it. It is in this collapse that she quickly recovers her archetypal connection and restores her inner being.

When it is time for growth, the old ways and the old habits must welcome the new. The old way seems to hinder the new growth at every point, but if you persevere, this way will bring a new consciousness to birth.