Toby Johnson: Toby Johnson is the editor of White Crane : A Journal of Gay Men's Spirituality. This review was originally published in White Crane Journal (#38). It is reprinted with permission from www.whitecranejournal.com online.
Balancing Heaven and Earth is “a memoir of visions, dreams, and realizations,” edited by Jerry M. Ruhl from taped conversations with Johnson at age 75.
Johnson led an interesting life. As an eleven year old, he lost a leg following an automobile accident. While in the hospital, he had his first mystical experience of what he calls the “Golden World.” It is this theme of finding and losing and finding again this vision of the Golden World that makes his life story instructive.
Details are interesting just for themselves. For a while Johnson worked in a Forest Service lookout tower spending his days watching for fires. He describes the hermit-like visionary consciousness that created. He was an early student of Jiddu Krishnamurti, the young Indian boy Annie Besant, matriarch of Theosophy, had picked to be the new messiah, but who turned away from such a patently religious role to become a teacher of the notion that people shouldn't seek teachers and messiahs. Later, through an odd series of happenstances, he studied at the Jung Institute in Switzerland, even once being called in by “the Old Man” himself and told he had a special vocation to help further human consciousness. Through the middle of his life, he lived in India most every summer. He recounts many marvelous stories of how different life is there than in the West.
Two themes run through the book. The first is the notion of the Golden World discovered in moments of mystical rapture. Johnson argues that these fleeting experiences reveal the truth of life. The second is that of “slender threads,” by which he means the chance coincidences and “synchronicities” that seem to guide a life. As he recounts his life he's able to observe how the slender threads made all the difference.
“Balancng Heaven and Earth” is an interesting and entertaining book. But there is a curious (if familiar and understandable) omission in Johnson's life story: there's no sex. From Robert Johnson's presentation of his early life as a delicate and introspective boy and handicapped but heroically persistent Church organist, it's obvious he's homosexual.
Someone (an editor, the publisher, the collaborator, maybe Johnson himself, an old man of 75) must have decided that Johnson's reputation as the explicator of sex roles in the Jungian canon wouldn't sustain the revelation he was a homosexual man. That was an unfortunate decision for it robs the world of truth.
How many of the great spiritual teachers have had a couple of lines or a couple of chapters deleted from their biographies so the world wouldn't know the truth about their sexuality? And it's cost the world a proper understanding of what sexuality is really about.
commenting closed for this article