Shelves filled with glass jars filled with pigments. A reflection of me reflects on her studio, a reflection of an overhead light reflects on her heart. Both Beatrice Wood and Robert Johnson lived in Ojai for a time and were students of Krishnamurti. I wonder if they knew each other? They both led long and amazing lives filled with curiosity, creativity, being broken and becoming whole, and following slender threads to a whole new way of understanding.
I am still in awe of how we grow psychologically. At first we admire a hero, never realizing that he or she only represents what needs to be realized in ourselves. Then, one or five years later, if we are reasonably intelligent about working with our projections, we wake up to find that we have become someone very much like that hero. We affix our own possibilities by projecting them onto someone else, and then we gradually assimilate them. A fourteen-year-old sees his future in a sixteen-year-old and in two years those admired qualities have been assimilated. A sixteen year old youth admires the qualities of a twenty-year old, and if things go well she incorporates those qualities into her own personality by the time she is twenty.
This process continues throughout our lives. Our projections of the hero onto others always represents where we are headed. The process generally slows down as we get older and our personality becomes a bit more formed, but the basic mechanism is always at work. Modern people, as I have said, can no longer house their souls in another person or thing; we must learn to house them ourselves and find the highest value within.
-Robert Johnson
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