part0021

Making a dialogue is mostly a matter of giving yourself over to the imagination and letting it flow. There are various principles we can follow, but moving the experience ahead consists, more than anything else, in letting the inner figures have a life of their own.

As a practical matter you say or do whatever comes into your mind that feels appropriate and ethical. If a figure appears in the imagination and seems to have nothing to say at first, one may get the conversation going by asking who he or she is. Ask what the person wants, what the person would like to talk about, would like to do. It is better to ask questions than to lecture or start making pronouncements, because the basic attitude you want to show is a willingness to listen .

If an inner figure does something, write it down; then do or say whatever your reaction is in response. Often an inner person will try to draw you into some activity, take you somewhere, lead you off on a path or a journey. If it seems right to you, then do it, and record what happens along the way. If you feel that it is wrong to follow the person, or you don’t like the activity or involvement that the inner person suggests, you have the right to say so. You have the right to refuse and to state your reasons. That, in turn, will often lead to a heated discussion of the conflict between this inner person and what you think you want—or don’t want, or don’t approve of, or are afraid of. All this is excellent material for the Active Imagination: The dialogue has begun, and the different parts of the self are learning from each other.

If you find that an inner character won’t speak, it is legitimate to “prime the pump.” You can initiate an exchange just as you might if you were stuck with a guest who was shy and uncommunicative. Ask questions, express your feelings. If you are afraid of the person who has come up, say so. If the person reminds you of an experience you had, or a dream, or someone in the outer world that you know, tell the person about it.

Probably nothing gets the dialogue going as quickly or on as deep a level as does an expression of feelings. When you let your feelings out and invite your inner person to do the same, it usually constellates the exchange very directly. This is because feelings are mostly concerned with values : who or what we love and appreciate, what we are afraid of, what we feel is dishonest or illegitimate, what we desire for ourselves and others. And values, we find, are the mainsprings of our human lives.

It is extremely important to write down everything as it happens and everything that is said. Writing protects you from wandering off into passive fantasies that creep in from the edges of the mind. It helps you to concentrate more and experience more deeply. The physical writing etches the experience more vividly in the conscious mind.

In order to do a true act of imagination, it is necessary to stick with the image that we start with, stay with the situation until there is some kind of resolution. Once one has encountered a particular image or started a dialogue with it, it is important to continue from there and not allow oneself to be distracted by other images or fantasy material that may jump into the mind and compete with the Active Imagination.

If you allow your mind to flit from image to image and situation to situation, you will only put yourself through a meaningless series of starts and stops, none of which will lead anywhere. If your ego is genuinely going to the inner figures and interacting with them, then there will be a continuous, coherent experience with the original figures. Don’t sit passively while your mind flits from one image to another, from one film clip to another.

Active Imagination is a complete experience, one that has a beginning, a middle, and an end. Like a dream, it usually produces a statement of a problem, a period of interaction with the problem and the different viewpoints on the subject, and finally a resolution of the conflict or the issue. This may take place in one session, or it may require a series of sessions that continue for days or even years .

You can get a perspective on this by remembering the examples we have already given. The first was the dialogue between a woman and her inner Japanese artist. In that dialogue one can easily identify the point where the problem was raised, right at the beginning. There followed a long conversation in which the alternatives were spelled out that might be solutions to the problem. Finally, at the end of the dialogue, there was a resolution. This was not the last conversation with the Japanese artist. But already within this one session, we find a resolution of the basic issue.

By contrast, consider the example of the man who was led off on his mythical journey to help the Queen who was in distress. In this session of Active Imagination the problem has been stated: There are evil forces at work in the land, people being hurt. All this is being blamed on the innocent queen. As the man sets off on his journey with his guide, he does what he can to begin to heal the land by healing the little girl. But his adventure has only begun, there is more work to do. In fact, this particular Active Imagination has gone on for years, and still continues.

Full participation is the essence of Active Imagination. All the things we have said about the distinction between Active Imagination and passive fantasy are particularly important at this stage. It is vital to join in as a complete partner in the exchange. One may make suggestions, initiate, ask questions, argue, object—everything one would do in any exchange between equals.

The most important aspect of this is to be present in your feelings and participate with your feelings. One must sense that it is real, that it is actually happening —even though it is inside rather than outside. If you are detached from it, or just feel that it is nothing but a fantasy you are watching from a safe distance, there is no real experience. If one is not really participating with the feeling side, it is not true Active Imagination.

A good example of being present in your feelings is the woman in the example who dreamed that two male figures, who resembled her husband and her brother, were ignoring her. What kind of feelings did she have when she went to them in Active Imagination? She was furious, she was hurt, she was indignant—and she actually felt all that. Her feelings and her emotions were there in the exchange with these two inner persons, and it was her feelings, finally, that they responded to.

One can usually tell whether a person is doing real Active Imagination by the feeling responses that come out. If the normal human reaction to the situation in the imagination would be anger, fear, or intense joy, but none of these feelings are present, then I know the person is detached from the proceedings, just watching from a distance, not really participating, not taking it seriously.

We must participate completely. There is, however, one line that should not be crossed. We must not stray from the zone of participation into the zone of control . In Active Imagination we cannot exert control over the inner persons or over what is happening. We have to let the imagination flow where it will, let the experience develop, without trying to determine in advance what is going to happen, what is going to be said, what is going to be done.

Sometimes it is hard to see the difference between fully participating and trying to control. You can draw a good analogy from your dialogues with external people. When you are in a conversation with someone, courtesy and respect lead you to give the other person “equal time.” We try not to dominate the conversation; we don’t flood the other person with a stream of opinions so as to cut off his or her chance to express a viewpoint. The same rules of courtesy, restraint, and respect apply when we dialogue with the citizens of the inner world.

Sometimes what your inner person is saying sounds stupid, primitive, or nonsensical. Or it rubs you so completely against the grain that you get angry. Still, you must let it be said. Try dropping control for once; stop trying to make the inner figures sound intelligent or sensible according to your ego’s standards, and let them be whoever or whatever they are.

To give up control means to relinquish your preconceptions about what should happen, what should be said, what message or meaning ought to come out of all this. In fact, you should not be thinking about what it means at all, at this stage, because that would lead you into trying to stage-manage the experience to come out with the right “messages.” We need to forbear imposing the ego’s expectations on the proceedings. We need to give up the ought-to mentality and, instead, let flow what is —the feelings, conflicts, and personalities that truly live in us below the surface.

Not all dialogue or interaction with your inner persons will be through words. There are sessions of Active Imagination in which the entire experience takes place through actions, through seeing and doing. It is still a dialogue, but a dialogue without words. More often than not, however, there will be spoken dialogue. In either case, we have to learn to listen.

Often we have only experienced these parts of ourselves who now come up as images in our imagination as enemies—as carriers of slothful resistance, neurosis, unproductive vices, immaturity. That is how they look to the ego. But now, if we are going to set up an exchange in place of the habitual, lifelong war we have fought, we have to begin to listen.

After so many years of ignoring these parts of ourselves, seeing them as the inferior characteristics in our personalities, we find that they have some very unpleasant things to tell us when we finally listen. It is no surprise that some inner person tells me what a tyrant I have been over the years, how I have shoved my ego’s attitudes down the throat of the unconscious.

One must be willing to say: “Who are you? What do you have to say? I will listen to you. You may have the floor for this entire hour if you want; you may use any language you want. I am here to listen.”

This requires a formidable realignment of attitude for most of us. If there is something in yourself that you see as a weakness, a defect, a terrible obstruction to a productive life, you nevertheless have to stop approaching that part of yourself as “the bad guy.” For once, during Active Imagination, you must try to listen to that “inferior” being as though he or she were the voice of wisdom. If our depressions or weaknesses come to us in personified form, we need to honor those characteristics as part of the total self.

It is awesome and frightening to take your sense of inferiority, guilt, or remorse, put that part of you in the witness box, and say: “You have every privilege. You are the one who bears witness to that which I neither know nor understand. You may say whatever you wish, at whatever length. You will be respected and honored. And what you say will be recorded.” But it is from this that the true power of Active Imagination rises: We learn to listen to the ones whom we have kept mute. We learn to honor those whom we have dishonored.

When people first learn to honor the voice of the unconscious and to take it seriously, there is often a tendency to go overboard and decide that “this ego knows nothing.” There is a tendency to take everything the inner figures say as final authority. This would be just as foolish and one-sided as our previous ego-centered approach. Just as the ego needs to balance its viewpoints by going to the unconscious, so also does the unconscious need to be balanced by the attitudes of the conscious mind.

Remember Jung’s observation: He said that the ego’s relationship to the huge unconscious is like that of a tiny cork floating in the ocean. We often feel like that. We feel like a cork that is being tossed about in the ocean of life, completely at the mercy of the waves and storms that push and pull us. We seem to have little control or power over anything.

Jung continued his analogy with a startling thing: The cork is nevertheless morally equal to the ocean, because it has the power of consciousness! Although the ego is small, it has this peculiar power of awareness that we call consciousness, and that special, concentrated power gives it a position that is as necessary, as strong, and as valuable as the seemingly infinite richness of the unconscious. The little cork can talk back to the ocean, and has a viewpoint to contribute, one without which the evolution of consciousness cannot proceed. The ego can talk back, and this makes the dialogue one between equals.

The ego’s capacity for consciousness gives it the power, the right, and even the duty to wrestle with the great unconscious on equal terms and to work out a synthesis of values.

One of the most important laws of this second step in Active Imagination is that you never work with a prepared script. You don’t know what is going to happen until it happens.

You may know how you feel about something; you may know what you have to say to the inner person; you may know who you are looking for when you go into your imagination. But you don’t know what the other person is going to say until he or she says it. You don’t know what the inner people are going to do until they do it. You have the right to call out your anima, your animus, or your shadow figures, but you don’t have the right to plan what they are going to say, and you don’t have the right to dominate them once they appear.

At its best, Active Imagination is a life of surprises, a life that is given over to the unexpected. We make no plan or script. We simply begin, and then let come what will. Whatever flows spontaneously out of the unconscious, without manipulation, without guidance or control, is the stuff of Active Imagination.

We need to grasp this clearly because there are now so many systems around that can be confused with Active Imagination but are completely distinct from it. The main difference is that they work with a prepared script; everything is determined in advance.

These systems are sometimes called “guided imagery,” “creative imagery,” or by something else. What they all have in common is that everything is predetermined . You decide in advance what is going to happen in your imagination. The ego decides what it is trying to get out of the unconscious and prepares a script. The idea is to “program” the unconscious so that it will do what the ego wants it to do.

In one system, the whole avowed purpose of using the imagery is to get what you want . You close your eyes and visualize the new car or the new job or the house in the country that you want, and you use the power of visualization to get these things. In another system, you attempt to have a better attitude about yourself by using self-imagery. You visualize yourself as you would like to be—slender, attractive, effective, efficient, or whatever. By the use of self-imagery one attempts to become the idealized person that the ego has decided it would like one to be.

The problem with these approaches to imagery is that it is the ego that does all the deciding. The unconscious is seen as a sort of stupid animal that has no viewpoint of its own, no wisdom to contribute. The whole point of the exchange is to train the unconscious to do what the ego wants. The ego’s decisions may seem to be good ones; the problem is that the unconscious is not consulted in making them.

Active Imagination starts out from a completely different idea about the unconscious. We affirm that the unconscious has its own wisdom, its own viewpoints, and that they are often as balanced, as realistic, as those of the ego-mind. The purpose of Active Imagination is not to “program” the unconscious, but to listen to the unconscious. And, if you do listen, the unconscious, in turn, will listen to you.

If you have decided that you want to accomplish some big project, and you find that the unconscious is setting up resistance against it, you should not react by trying to “program” the unconscious to agree with your ideas. Instead, you should go to the unconscious and find the one who is causing the paralysis, the resistance, or the depression, and find out why . If you do this, you are often surprised to find out that the unconscious has very good reasons for disagreeing with your project or your goals.

Perhaps you are about to go off on a big inflation or obsession, trying to achieve something that is actually impossible. Your unconscious is likely to resist and try to bring you to your senses so that you scale down your project to something that is within your resources and capacities. Or your plans may mean doing permanent damage to your family life, your marriage, relationships, or friendships; the unconscious may send you physical symptoms, a feeling of depression or paralysis, in order to prevent you from going off on a tangent that would destroy something vital in your life.

Active Imagination begins with the principle that you must respect the unconscious and realize that it has something valuable to contribute; therefore, the dialogue must be one between two intelligent equals who respect each other. It can’t be a case of one trying to “program” the other.

This is why, in Active Imagination, there is no script. You don’t follow a planned course. You don’t put words in the mouths of those you meet. You don’t decide in advance what the goal is. You don’t set up a purpose and then try to manipulate the unconscious into going along with it.

Historically there are some legitimate and fine uses that have been made of guided imagery. One example is the Greater Exercises of Saint Ignatius of Loyola . This is a series of meditations on the life of Christ that uses a prescribed guided visualization each day. Jung gave a series of lectures years ago in Switzerland in which he used the Greater Exercises to show the differences between Active Imagination and guided imagery at its best.

In this guided imagery you go, for example, to the Via Dolorosa. It is the day of the Crucifixion, and you are there, present in your imagination. You smell the dust, sweat, and blood. You hear the jeering of the crowd. You see the crown of thorns, the cross, the blood flowing. You feel the sharp stones beneath your feet, the sun beating down on you as you move with the crowd toward Golgotha.

In this way, for those who adopted Loyola’s meditations, the events of the life of Christ were made so vivid—smelling, feeling, touching, hurting—that they became actual, immediate experience. This sort of guided imagery is good if it truly serves your religious purposes. It was geared mainly to the medieval mentality, but much of that mentality still lives on in us and we can honor it.

But Jung said it would be better for us if we could go in Active Imagination, walk on our own Via Dolorosa, and find out what is there within our own individual selves. It would not be predetermined by anyone or anything except the reality of what lives inside us. It would not be prescribed by authority or tradition. You might find yourself walking on the stones of an ancient way, as did Loyola, or you might find yourself walking the deck of a yacht, if that is where your inner path leads. Of one thing you can be sure: Ultimately every road is a Via Dolorosa, for it leads us into the issues and conflicts that every person must pass through, sometimes painfully and with heroic spirit, sometimes with sacrifice, in order to be initiated into the realm of consciousness.

If you have a modern mentality, you must find your own path. Go your own way , which is both terrifying and exhilarating. No one can tell you any longer the way, because there is no longer one prescribed way, but only a way—your way, which is as valid as any other as long as you live it honestly.

Much of the artificial loneliness of your life will evaporate if you realize that your way is merely a way—one way among many, yet unique and distinct from all others, springing from your own nature, a way that is inborn, not made, and waits to be discovered.

For each of us, that path is a solitary one, for ultimately we must walk it alone. No one else can tell us which final direction it should take, and no one else can walk it for us.