The door to the deeper level 3
The door to the deeper level sometimes comes through other people and sometimes comes through events. One of the accounts I like best is by Robert Johnson the Jungian analyst who writes of his experience as a child. It is in his autobiography called Balancing Heaven and Earth.
He writes about a state that he calls the golden world and which is an experienced awareness of the numinous. For Robert Johnson this is the truest reality that a human ever has access to, and he has described his lifelong searching to understand what this is. In the account of his life he writes about the early experience that brought to conscious awareness the existence of this heavenly or golden world. Over time he understood that what was required in life was to inhabit a middle place where both the heavenly and the earthly are honoured. He understood that in this middle place lay a certain amount of safety but where too lay holiness. In balancing the two, the visible and the invisible world, it became clear to him that the two worlds are in fact one.
His realization of the heavenly or golden world came in strange circumstances following a car crash which pinned him, then aged eleven, between a car and a wall. He was taken to hospital where he was operated on and left that night to recover. In the middle of the night Johnson awoke feeling terribly unwell, not knowing that an artery in his damaged leg had opened loose and he was in fact bleeding to death. Johnson writes that he knew what was happening at a psychic dimension and initially was determined not to die until he found himself in a glorious world,
‘…it was pure light, gold, radiant, luminous, ecstatically happy, perfectly beautiful, purely tranquil, joy beyond bound … I could only revel at what was before me. We have words for this side of reality but none to describe the other side.’
Johnson did not die but this glimpse of the golden world figured profoundly throughout his life returning again on occasions, and so as he writes, ‘a curtain separating the two realms was for me was forever parted’, and it deeply affected his way of living and choice of career.