part0024

It is surprising what a wide range of needs are served by Active Imagination, once you begin to adapt it to your life. At one time it may help you to resolve practical, everyday conflicts, such as which school to send the children to or how to spend your money. At another time you may live out the mythical journey you have stored up within you. At the far end of the spectrum, Active Imagination becomes a mystical, religious experience.

I find that the varieties of Active Imagination fall into three basic levels, depending on the use that is made of it:

Horse-trading, as I call it, is the most practical, personal level. It is the use of imagination when you need to negotiate with your inner personalities, to make those compromises and trade-offs that are sometimes required to keep practical life functioning. If “horse-trading” seems a rather undignified name for this use of Active Imagination, it is because it is a somewhat undignified activity: It is a blatant process of bargaining with the inner parts of oneself so that some agreements can be reached and life can proceed.

Embracing the unconscious is the level at which we actively try to bring up the undiscovered parts of ourselves from the unconscious so that we can integrate them into our conscious functioning. It is the level at which we are trying to become acquainted with the unknown, inner parts of ourselves. Most of the examples we have given so far are from this level. It is the primary function of Active Imagination, and the purpose most people have in mind when they begin.

Experiencing the spiritual dimension is the level at which one is seized by a deep experience of the great archetypes. The Active Imagination is perceived as a vision and gives rise to religious insight. This is a rather uncommon form of Active Imagination, but it is experienced by many individuals, and therefore it is good to be aware of it.

Horse-trading is the most practical, down-to-earth use you can make of Active Imagination. It begins with recognizing that you are made up of many parts, that each part of you has its own needs, its own life to live, and wants to participate in your conscious life. When you truly see this, you also begin to realize that many of the seemingly “insoluble” conflicts that irritate you within your day-to-day life are actually simple arguments between different parts of yourself who don’t happen to see things alike.

Sometimes, when you can’t arrive at a synthesis between the two parts that are arguing inside you, when you can’t transcend the conflict, it becomes a matter of interior negotiations. You have to work out some kind of compromise.

Sometimes people are put off by this approach to Active Imagination. It feels too sordid or mundane to use this high art to work out a compromise between the part of you that wants to get your work done and the part that wants to go to parties every night. But the practical fact is that there are times when the only way you can keep functioning is by doing some good, honest horse-trading. At least it sets up a communication between the different parts of yourself who haven’t been speaking—and eventually that communication leads to a synthesis.

When I first became an analytical psychologist, I often had to work in the evening. Many of my patients worked during the day and could only come in the evening or on weekends. It was not a bad schedule, since I had my days free, but for some reason I resented it bitterly. Some inner part of me was used to having my evenings free for me —for visiting friends, socializing, music, personal life.

This childish part of me was furious. And the unconscious, irrational resentment found its way into my practical life. I was irritable toward my patients. I almost forgot appointments. These are the kinds of things that happen when someone in the unconscious is absolutely opposed to what the ego has set up .

I took this problem to Active Imagination. I looked for that part of me that was angry at my work schedule. The image that came up was a spoiled adolescent. He said: “No! I will not work in the evening. That is feeling time. That is fun time. That is human being time. That is not work time, and that is final!”

So I set up a long conversation with him. I explained and explained: “Look: We have to make a living; we have to earn money, or both of us will be out on the street and hungry—you included. Since we are just starting in the profession, the only patients we have at this time are those who come in the evening or on weekends. That is the practical necessity. It has to be done.”

At first he wouldn’t budge. I said: “Look, we have to pay the rent.”

And he said: “I don’t give a damn about the rent. I just want to have fun. And that’s what I am going to do.”

I said: “But I do care about the rent.”

And he said: “That’s tough. You go worry about that.”

I said: “I can’t work and earn a living if you are going to sabotage everything and make me moody and resentful all the time. It affects the patients. I forget things. I put appointments in the wrong places.” All of this was true. There was general chaos because such a large part of me was in rebellion against my work.

Finally I got this fellow by the throat—in my imagination, of course—and up against the wall, and I said: “You have got to listen, or we are in bad trouble. Now, what kind of a deal can we make?”

So the following horse-trade developed: He agreed that if I would go to a drive-in at 10:00 every night and have a nice meal and take him to a movie a couple of times a week after the patients were gone, then he would keep off my back the rest of the time and let me work in peace with my patients. For many months it worked that way. As long as I gave him his meal out, and an occasional movie, he was happy and he let me work. But if I missed one evening of our meal out, this juvenile would be irritable the next day. He would make me resentful and forgetful in my work. It was incredible to me that this character had so much power over my moods and my functioning. But he did.

I never admitted until many years later that I had been forced to make such a sordid, mercantile, back-room deal with my self- indulgent inner child. I felt like Faust making a pact with the devil. But in retrospect I have come to respect these kinds of dialogues, these negotiations, these compromises between warring factions. In some ways they are more humanly pertinent than the elevated conversations with gods and archangels. They keep the fabric of human life intact. And sometimes they lead to a consciousness that is all the more profound because it is human, earthy, and immediate.

Most of the approaches to Active Imagination are keyed to coming to terms with the unconscious by bringing the images up to the surface, reducing the negative effects of their autonomous power, making them conscious, and making peace with them.

We have already touched on several such approaches. The principle ones are: emptying the ego-mind and dialoguing with the unconscious contents that spontaneously appear; extending dreams by Active Imagination; dialoguing with dream figures in imagination; converting fantasy into imagination; personifying moods, feelings, and belief systems; and living through mythical journeys in Active Imagination.

In this section I will focus on two other excellent purposes that may be served within this second level of Active Imagination. I call the first one “going around the walls of Jericho.” The second is “living the unlived life.”

And you shall compass the city, all your men of war, and go round about the city once. Thus shall you do six days. And seven priests shall bear before the ark seven trumpets of rams’ horns: And the seventh day you shall compass the city seven times and the priests shall blow with the trumpets.

And it shall come to pass, that when they make a long blast with the ram’s horn, and when you hear the sound of the trumpet, all the people shall shout with a great shout; and the wall of the city shall fall down flat, and the people shall ascend up every man straight before him.

This story refers to an event that must have taken place between 1500 and 2000 years before Christ, and was at first handed down by oral tradition. If we look at it on the symbolic level, it contains a wonderful archetypal principle—a way of approaching the seemingly impossible conflicts within ourselves.

In this remarkable legend the people came up against a barrier that was absolutely impregnable. It had walls that could not have been breached or scaled by any technology then available to the tribe. But they had a prescription: They had to do a simple ritual, every day, of marching around the walls of Jericho. They made no direct attack, for none could have been successful. Finally, after an accumulation of these ritual marches, pealings of trumpets, and shoutings, something happened: The walls fell down flat.

Our inner lives often feel like journeys from one Jericho to another. We are continually coming up against obstacles within ourselves that seem like fortresses, defended with impregnable walls. Sometimes we call them autonomous complexes because they are complexes that are completely outside the influence or knowledge of the conscious mind. We only know about them through the havoc they wreak in our lives and emotions. Most of us experience conflicts at some time in life that tear us apart, that seem insoluble. We can’t find a path to proceed on, a place to stand, an approach that might bring a resolution.

An inner problem that looks so difficult that one doesn’t know where to start is an example of an inner Jericho. It is like a walled city within the unconscious, a blank spot where the conscious mind can’t penetrate, something one can’t even understand, much less deal with. It may be that you are hopelessly in love with someone who simply isn’t available to you. Or it may be that you have a habit or a pattern that you can’t break, that keeps sabotaging your health, work, or relationships. The problem is within us, but we can’t understand it, can’t get a handle on it, can’t find any direct way to approach it.

In these situations the story of the walls of Jericho is a symbolic prescription for a psychological process. Identify to yourself as best you can what the conflict is, what the focus of your inquiry is. Then go around that autonomous complex, looking at it from every angle, pouring psychological energy into it by ritual inner work, circling it like the Jericho of the story until finally the walls tumble down.

The walk around Jericho can take any form, so long as you focus your energy on the walled inner city and do your ritual. Personify the conflict by bringing up the images in your mind and talking to them. Invite the people out of the city and find out who they are and why they are opposing you.

Active Imagination is particularly helpful for this technique of circling the walls of Jericho, but the technique is really a synthesis: The idea is to bring every form of inner work, every method in your repertoire, into play. One uses every technique possible that will give some leverage, that will focus energy on the autonomous complex. One keeps it up until finally the barrier between the complex and the conscious mind is penetrated. We pull the fantasies out of the mind to deal with this problem and analyze them as symbols of what is going on deep inside. If a dream pertains, do dream work; then extend the dream into Active Imagination, and see where it leads.

Let us say, for example, that you find yourself in a mood of depression that has beset you for days. You can’t understand it, don’t know where it came from, and find yourself taking it out on innocent people around you. This depression is your inner Jericho.

How do you approach it? First, personify the depression. Go into your imagination, and look for the figure, the image, that will represent your depression. Now begin your march around the walls of Jericho. Talk to your depression. March around your depression, and view it from every side. Talk to the figures who come up in Active Imagination and find out what they can tell you about the depression. What is it? Where did it come from? Usually a depression is balancing an inflation. But what inflation is it balancing? What do they know about it? Perhaps one of them will admit to being the one, inside you, who is depressed and can tell you in some detail what he or she is depressed about.

In addition to doing Active Imagination, we pay attention to fantasies and dreams. We write down every dream image, every fantasy image, every idea that comes into our head that seems to relate to this inner Jericho. Above all, we keep going to the inner characters, day by day, and talking with them. Pour out your feelings; ask for information; ask for guidance. Offer to sacrifice the inflation, pretension, or otherworldly ideal that is compensated by the depression.

Like Joshua in the legend, go around the inner walls every day. One day do Active Imagination. Perhaps nothing dramatic will result that day, but you have done your ritual circumambulation: You have invested your conscious energy in the complex. The next day a strong fantasy may arise on the subject. Write it out and analyze it as you would a dream; use the symbols to try to understand what is going on deep in the unconscious. The next morning you may have a dream. Since you are putting so much energy into the inner Jericho, you can assume that the dream is probably on this subject, so that day your walk around the walls of Jericho consists of dream work. Perhaps the dream will give a startling idea of what this Jericho really is.

Each day, in one form or another, keep going around the walls of this autonomous complex. Eventually, the walls will come down, and you will begin to see what is there and what is to be done about it.

The principle at work here is one of cumulative energy . One keeps investing energy, pouring the energy of consciousness into this inner complex, until finally it has to break. The Gordian knot falls apart; the seemingly impregnable walls fall down. The complex finally becomes penetrable by consciousness. One walks into the walled city and finds out what part of oneself lives there and why it has declared war.

One requirement for this miraculous process is that we not expect instant results. Sometimes results do come amazingly quickly, but remember that you are dealing with parts of yourself that have been sealed off completely, absolutely impervious to consciousness, perhaps for years. We have to give this process time, and stick with it.

In the old biblical story, God instructed Joshua to march around the walls for a full seven days. Seven symbolizes a complete cycle of inner time, the inner time required for a complete evolution of consciousness. Your experience of Jericho will require seven inner units of time—whatever time is required for you to open up genuine consciousness of your Jericho. Outwardly it could be seven days, seven weeks, seven months, or seven years .

One thing is certain: If you make a start, and do your daily march around the walls, you will find a resolution in the end. You don’t have to suffer passively. You can do something. You can enlist the help of your inner strengths, and you can begin to march. Miraculously, all you have to do is march. You just have to invest the energy, do the ritual, and the results come, no matter how stupid you feel, no matter how weak or incompetent you are in the face of this inner complex. You march, and you march, and you march, and then the walls fall.

It usually happens more quickly than you expect. I have seen people begin this highly concentrated technique with heroic courage, determined to struggle for twenty years, if necessary, to overcome this insoluble problem and see it resolved in only three or four days of intense effort!

But other Jerichos may be more difficult. They are the ones imbedded in the very deep places of the unconscious. They are, in a sense, “life problems” that stay with us for many years and are actually necessary for our growth. They make us suffer, but they give us our maturity and our individuality in return.

For these “life problems” the circling of the walls of Jericho is an exact prescription. If you personify the thing in your life that most afflicts you, make it your “Jericho,” and march around that Jericho in your Active Imagination, you will evolve your problem into a source of consciousness and growth. You will learn that some of our problems and obstacles are our truest friends—our wounds turn out to be the source of our healing.

We are all a rich mixture of archetypes, energies, and potentialities. Some of the possibilities within us are never lived out because they look “bad” or inferior to us. Our egos tend to classify anything they don’t understand as “bad,” and, naturally, we avoid looking at the things in us that make us uncomfortable. But if we can find our way around our egos’ prejudices, we are surprised to find that some of these unlived or repressed qualities turn out to be the finest strengths we have.

Probably the main reason that we all have so many “unlived lives” is that there are just not enough years in a human life to experience all the possible personalities, talents, occupations, and relationships that are contained potentially within us.

At some point along the way we all make choices. A man may feel he has the makings of a concert pianist, but he also has a talent for business and he finds himself climbing the corporate ladder, organizing his life around the business world and supporting a family. Still, the artist in him lives on as a potentiality that he hasn’t had time to live externally.

In the same way a woman who chooses to be a business person may wake up one day, years later, and realize that some part of her always longed to stay home with the children and be a housewife. Or she may discover a part of herself that would have chosen a religious life, the life of a nun or a life of reclusive meditation.

In Active Imagination we can go to these unlived parts of ourselves and experience them in a meaningful way. It is possible to live much of life on a symbolic level, and this often satisfies that unlived part of ourselves even more than if we had lived it out externally. It seems that God and nature don’t mind how we live out these potentialities within ourselves. If we live them out externally, that is good, so long as it is a conscious experience. If we live them out inwardly, on the level of symbolic experience, it often goes deeper, is more intense, and produces more consciousness.

Even ten lifetimes would not be enough time to marry all the people one has loved, follow all the occupations and interests that one might have enjoyed, or live out fully all the personalities hidden within. But if we ignore these unlived possibilities, they can go sour. They can assert themselves in clumsy ways. We may sit around feeling nostalgic about “what might have been.” Or we can get bitter and blame bad luck or other people for denying us the chance to be heroic, rich, or famous.

Whatever that other life is, you can still live it, if you will consent to do so as an inner experience. In dream and imagination, you can go to that unlived life; you can discover what it would have felt like to follow that route rather than the ones you chose. You can experience both the negative and the positive sides of it in Active Imagination. Very likely you will discover that it wouldn’t have been so much more wonderful than the life you have lived. But it is important that you experience it, for all the main energies in your total self need to be lived out in some conscious way.

I know a man who has a very strong religious vocation. Although he never became a priest in the church, he lives for all practical purposes like a monk. He has remained a bachelor and leads a life that is reclusive, spending his days in prayer, contemplation, meditation in the inner world. At the same time he serves a very important function among his large, extended Latin family: He carries the religious presence for them, and he is the counselor they turn to when they need wisdom from the inner world.

A few years ago a very startling thing happened to this man. He dreamed one night that he lived in Italy. He had a voluptuous Italian wife and a bunch of children living with him in a village. That in itself is not surprising, but the same dream continued the following night and for every night, day after day, week after week, for several months.

Every night he returned in his dream to that same village, to his wife and family, and lived the complete life of a husband and father. He loved his wife, fought with her, took care of the children, worked hard to support them. He went to work and brought home huge bags of food on his back to feed his hungry brood. He went through all the joys and griefs that a father goes through in living with a woman and rearing children with her. This continued, night after night, for almost a year. Into that one year he squeezed twenty years of family life!

By day this man was a quiet, retired bachelor living in California. By night he lived in his Italian village, spoke Italian, spanked his children, struggled with the bills, planted the garden, made love to his wife, argued with her, fought with the neighbors, went to mass with his family, took them on outings. He woke up every morning exhausted from his difficult life as a family man!

This man grew accustomed to his life as a father, looked forward to seeing his children every night and having a new adventure. Then, suddenly, the life in his Italian village came to an end one night with this dream:

I am working so very hard again, trying to take care of my family. I am clearing away the rubble from an old structure, a house or an ancient wall, that has fallen down after many centuries. It is an old stone and clay structure dating back to ancient times that has collapsed.

As I am working I discover, crushed under the stones, a very old rosebush. It has been crushed under the fallen stones for many years, and it looks dead, even petrified. I somehow know that this is the ancient rose that grew in this land even before this village was here. It carries the life force and the promise of life and the continuity of the generations for my family and my village.

I sense somehow that it is not dead, but still lives. I take it reverently and carry it to my garden. My garden is a perfect square in the courtyard surrounded by the walls of my house, Moorish style. I make a place for the rosebush at the exact center of the garden. All the people, including my wife and children, laugh at me and tell me I am being a visionary Don Quijote again. They say the rose can’t be alive after centuries crushed beneath the rubble. But I am sure it is alive, and I insist on planting it.

I carefully prepare the soil, put the rosebush in its place, pack the soil and water it. It seems that some time passes. Then I see that the rosebush is coming to life before our eyes. It puts out green leaves, and then one perfect red rose appears.

This magnificent conclusion tells us what was at stake all along as this man lived his unlived life in the Italian village. It was the self, it was the wholeness of his being. The rose is a great symbol of the archetypal self, associated in the Latin church with both the Holy Virgin and Christ. The self is the ancient rose that blooms in the center of one’s life. It was this primordial inner unity that this man brought into bloom, within his individual soul, by living in the ancient village, living out the ancient role of the family man, bringing all of the disparate parts of himself together.

As you see, this man had two very strong energies flowing in him. One was his urge to be a hermit, devoted to contemplation of God. The other was to be a lusty, red-blooded man with his wife, his children, and the battles that go with that life. He lived out one side of his nature during the day in the waking world and lived the other side just as completely at night in the land of dreaming. The rose, in his last dream, informed him that his night life as a family man had been revealed as another way of contemplating God, another path to the highest consciousness .

This living of the unlived life can be done just as completely, just as perfectly, through Active Imagination.

I once lived in a house on a cliff overlooking the ocean, with a stairway down to the beach. I put on a coat and tie every morning and drove to my office in San Diego. I had a responsible position—a waiting list of patients, a nice house, good friends. I should have been completely fulfilled—or so I thought.

But somewhere along the way a fantasy started creeping into my mind from the edges of my consciousness. I would be standing outside my house and see one of the “surf bums” walk by: fellows who spend the whole day on the beach with their surfboards and sit by campfires half the night with “surfer girls.” They drank beer and smoked marijuana, and, so far as I could see, never put on a coat and tie and never worked, never had to worry about paying bills or anything else!

A fantasy would suddenly jump into my head, uninvited, from the unconscious: “If I committed some indiscretion in my profession, I could get kicked out of the church, out of my professional status as a psychologist, and could be a happy, irresponsible bum, just like those guys I see on the beach all day down there.”

I shoved the fantasy out of my mind: It seemed too stupid, too silly—and, well, unregenerate—to be taken seriously. But different versions kept coming back into my mind. So finally I decided that some part of my unconscious was trying to get recognition, and I took up the fantasy as part of my Active Imagination. My Active Imagination took two forms: Partly it was dialogue with the “beach bum” inside me, and partly I went there, to the beach, hung around with that crowd of young men and women, joined in at their campfires, joined their parties, their surfing, swimming, their sunlit days with nothing to do but play.

My dialogue with my inner “beach bum” went something like this:

Look, you live a coat-and-tie life. You’ve got it made. You give lectures, you are respected, you’ve got money. You have a nice house on the ocean cliffs. But you aren’t as happy as I am!

Now look at all those guys and girls down on the beach all day. Secretly you envy them. They are suntanned, they lead a completely sensuous, physical life, and they don’t have to balance any checkbooks. They are happy. They are the really happy people!

Now, look, just get yourself busted on a marijuana charge, and default on your mortgage payments, and you’ll get kicked out of your fancy house and you can come down and live on the beach with us and be happy. You can do all-night things on the beach, and sponge off people, and I’ll show you how to make money off drugs; you can be happy like us!

But I like my house on the cliff. I like my guests who come. They wake up in the morning, and there is the surf pounding and it is beautiful. I don’t want to give that up. And I like my work: I love seeing what happens to people who take their analysis seriously and make a true evolution in consciousness. I love seeing the thrill that comes to people when they wake up to the inner world. So although my profession may seem stuffy at times, it is a way of experiencing something very high, very beautiful.

Sometimes. But also there is something real and valuable there, and I shouldn’t destroy it. And I like earning an honest living. I like having some money in the bank, being able to help out a friend in distress, or just knowing that I don’t have to worry every day about where my next meal is coming from. I want to be self-reliant. I don’t want to have to sponge off someone or scrounge for my food or a roof over my head.

I suppose that the historian Toynbee would say that here the two great archetypes of Western Europe were, once again, fighting it out on a primitive level within my individual soul: on the one hand, the settled landowner and townsman, putting down roots, seeking security, making a life in a stable community; on the other hand, the nomad, roaming the beaches of Solana Beach, California, instead of the steppes of Mongolia, but nevertheless roving, living by his campfire, refusing to be pinned down to a place, a job, or responsibility.

I had touched something very deep in myself. A part of me wanted more than my coat-and-tie world. I sweated in the presence of this inner beach bum. I squirmed. I was scared. I felt I really was capable of turning into the “bum” I secretly wanted to be! That is the way it is with true Active Imagination. When you come into contact with a real part of yourself, you feel it as a threat, a menace. Your knees knock. You sweat and tremble. But you are safe, because you do all this within the controlled laboratory of Active Imagination. You can risk what you otherwise would not dare, confront the things that would otherwise be deadly.

The end result of this Active Imagination was that I made peace with that “beach bum” side of myself. I didn’t have to commit a crime and get myself kicked out of respectable society. I didn’t have to insult the “establishment,” cause a foreclosure on my home, or alienate my friends. But I did need to see that there was an unlived “life” hiding within me, waiting to be lived on some appropriate level . The first “appropriate level” was the level of Active Imagination. But since then, I’ve discovered other levels that merge with my external physical life. I’ve learned that the beach bum inside me gets very happy if I take several days off and go out to a friend’s cabin in the Borrego Desert. I like in the sun, wander around among the cacti and coyotes, and find myself in a truer, happier Dionysian realm than I ever could have found among the nomads on the beach.

It is this same Dionysian, sensual, nomadic quality in me that is nourished so joyfully when I go to India. I live in a world there that is physical, made up of sunlight, sights, and sounds and the feeling of tribal connection with the people I love: It is a more evolved, more complete version of the potentiality I touched when I went to my inner “beach bum” years ago in Active Imagination. If you go to your inner “beach bum” or your inner “hobo” and give him or her a chance to live, you find eventually that this bum is really a sunyasin , a wandering mendicant holy man, in disguise. And the nomadic wanderings turn out to be pilgrimages.

Apropos of living the unlived life, I will recount here a legend that comes from Mexico. It is a story of one of the appearances of Our Lady of Guadalupe, the manifestation of the Holy Virgin that is most honored in Mexico. You may find it apocryphal, but if you will take it as allegory, it carries a symbolic message. Here is the story:

Many long years ago a young woman became a nun and lived in a convent. The convent was very small and poor, and perhaps the rules were not quite strict enough: Somehow a handsome young man managed to hang around the gate and catch her attention through the grille. The next evening at vespers as she followed her prayers, she looked through another grille, and there he was again, looking at her with a mixture of desire and adoration. So she stopped praying. She tried, but she couldn’t.

After that, all she could think of was the young man: his face, his hair, his eyes. The next day she accidentally, but on purpose, found herself by the gate, and he slipped a note to her: “Be at your window at midnight. I will come for you.”

She could not resist. For all her sense of sin, for all her horror at what she was doing, for all her terror of the wrath of God, she was totally in love, captivated. So, she waited at the window and went down the ladder, off into the forbidden world.

For a time she lived in a paradise of romance, love, and sensuality. But the dream turned into a nightmare. Her lover was handsome, charming, passionate—but irresponsible. He didn’t support her. He made her pregnant. Finally he abandoned her. As years went by her life became more miserable. She suffered illness. Her child died. She finally became a prostitute. Lonely and miserable, she longed for the days of her innocence in the convent, the life she had lost forever.

After years of this, sick and aging, feeling death approaching, she decided that the one thing she wanted was somehow to spend the last unworthy days of her sinful life in her beloved convent. But how? She could never tell them who she was! Finally she went to the mother superior and asked for a job as a scrubwoman.

She was so ravaged by time and sickness that no one in the convent recognized her. Every day she scrubbed the floors of the cells and the chapel. She was surprised by one thing: For some strange reason, no new nun had been moved into her cell. It was just the same as she had left it years before. Why? she wondered. But she was afraid to ask anyone.

After many days of this hard work, which was for her a penance, she found herself on the floor of the chapel, surveying the wreckage of her life as she scrubbed the tiles. She looked up at the statue of Our Lady of Guadalupe, with her flowing mantle the color of the blue night sky and the stars shining from it. To her amazement and terror, the statue came to life. She saw the Virgin in her living form. The Virgin came down from the altar and stood by the kneeling scrubwoman, who waited to be castigated and damned for eternity.

Then the Lady spoke: “Don’t you know that I have taken your place, here in the convent all these many years, waiting for your return? Every day I have taken your place in the choir stall, every day taken your place at meals, and done your tasks. No one here, other than I, knows that you have been gone. You have never ceased to be a nun, and now you will start your life again where you left it. Now go back and take your place that I have kept for you.”

If we take this legend as symbol, it expresses a wonderful principle. Whatever life we live in our bodies—whether priest or nun, businessman or career woman, husband or wife, mother or father, professional in coat and tie or field-worker in overalls—each of us has many lives that wait inside us, wanting somehow to be lived and consciously honored.

If you are a nun, you can legitimately go in Active Imagination to the inner world and there live through all the unlived potentialities within you. You may go down the ladder, see what that secular world is all about, and honor it for what it is. For however many cycles of inner time you may be there, the Virgin will take your place for you in your stall. When you come back to your cell, no one save she will know that you have been gone. God understands these things perfectly. If you are a priest, and you need to go off, inwardly and secretly, and live in an Italian village with your wife and children, and go through all the joys, sorrows, and responsibilities of that life, then that is open to you through Active Imagination.

On the other hand, if you are one of those people who live a totally secular life, married, rearing children, or caught up in the business world, you may find a priest or a nun secretly living inside you, an important energy that has been hidden away and postponed. You may go to that inner monastery in Active Imagination and find a way to live out that side of your soul. If there is a great hero or heroine living there, who needs to go to a Renaissance kingdom and struggle on behalf of the Queen, you will also find that part of yourself, and that mythic land where it needs to live awhile, in Active Imagination.

Whoever we are, our ego lives are partial systems, with a huge backlog of unlived life hiding within. No matter what you have done, no matter where you have been or what you have experienced, there is always more.

The third level of Active Imagination is very similar to what people have called visions. It is difficult to talk about this level. If we are too psychological and analytical, we miss the true power and meaning of this kind of experience. But when we use the poetic and religious language that we really need to describe it, we get mixed up with our popular assumptions about “visions” and psychic experiences.

Visionary experience is an eruption of what the medieval mystics called the unitive vision into one’s consciousness. An image or a set of events seizes one through the imaginative faculty with such power that one really knows and experiences the unifying truth of the self. One sees, for a brief time, a glimpse of the true unity, beauty, and meaning of life.

When these experiences come, they always have a powerful impact. Within a day or so afterwards, perhaps one has lost the intensity of the revelation. Perhaps one is back to bickering with people and caught up in the petty things of life. But somehow the memory of these visionary experiences works on unconscious attitudes at a very deep level. Sooner or later, it brings a sense of faith that wasn’t there before, a knowledge of the meaningfulness of life that had not been there before.

Such experiences should not be actively sought: If you look on this as something to be pursued as an accomplishment, you are liable to manufacture “spiritual” experiences as an ego aggrandizement. Or you can be pulled off into occultism, which leads away from consciousness and into seeking these kinds of experiences for the thrill or the novelty of it.

It is better just to do your humble inner work. When you have done enough work, invested enough energy into the unconscious, and if it is appropriate, visionary experience will come uninvited. If it doesn’t come, it means that you don’t need it. This is not a competition for the highest “honors.” But since this experience often does seize people who do regular inner work, it is good to be aware of it and be able to deal with it should it occur.

The true form of this level of Active Imagination comes when one least expects it. It is possible to be walking down an ordinary street and suddenly find that the street, the buildings, and the people around you have been transformed into a spontaneous vision. In your vision you may be seeing the “street of life,” the whole human race, the creation of God, revealed as a timeless flow of life. The sidewalks and buildings do not physically change, but the Active Imagination erupts on the level of consciousness and produces a vision that incorporates the physical surroundings. They become representations of something that is transcendent and eternal.

One of my patients was driving on the freeway early in the morning on his way to work, with the morning sun rising in the eastern sky. Suddenly he was seized by one of these experiences. The sun turned into a sun wheel, with spokes radiating out and giving birth to all the myriad forms of life and human concerns and activities. His attention was so riveted by the sun wheel in front of his eyes that he had to pull the car over and stop until the Active Imagination finished and he could get back into the physical world again. He knew, as he looked at the sun wheel, that all the separate elements of his life, and all the jumble of life around him, flowed out of, and back to, one source. In that moment he could see that there was only unity and that there could only be unity in all things.

If you say these things they may sound like meaningless platitudes, sentimentalities, and clichés. But when such a truth comes up spontaneously from the depths of the unconscious, when one sees it as an image produced from within, one feels its truth. One no longer needs to hear it from others or to try to prove it to anyone. From one moment to another, you know from your own experience.

This is perhaps the essence of the meaning of these visionary experiences, as it is really the heart of Active Imagination itself: It is a way of learning from your own experience those profound truths of life that can’t be transferred from one person to another with words but can only be genuinely known through one’s own connection to the collective unconscious. In this sense, we can only learn what we already know at the unconscious level.

Kierkegaard expressed this principle when he said that no one can give faith to another. He meant that no amount of teaching, no words, no matter how sweet the aphorisms or how rational the arguments, can communicate the experience that gives birth to faith. There is a kind of knowledge and a kind of faith that only comes from experience. We have to look deeply within ourselves to find them, because they can’t be experienced secondhand from other people. Each person must go directly to the source.

Misunderstandings can arise when a vision is experienced not as an event in the inner imagination but as though it were a physical event happening outside in the physical world. This was the universal experience of primitive human beings and the traditional understanding of “visions” in centuries gone by. People believed that some spirit or creature appeared to them from the outside. They experienced the images as though they were quasi-physical beings outside themselves.

Actually visionary experience is a form of imaginative experience, another welling up of images from the unconscious. The images are not only projected on the inner mind but become so intense that they are projected outward and appear to be happening physically “out there.”

After you have done Active Imagination for some time, if you should experience this kind of vision, you will see the similarity to your Active Imagination and your dreaming, and you will conclude that it was an experience of Active Imagination in which the images appeared to you in an apparently objective way.

The other form of visionary experience might be called inwardly perceived vision. One goes through the same vivid, powerful experience of images but is aware that it is happening inwardly, on the level of imagination. You are aware that you are seeing it with your “mind’s eye,” looking within yourself. There is no confusion, because you don’t have the apparitional or hallucinatory feeling that you are looking at an external, physical event.

An example of this would be the Active Imagination that I experienced with my interior lion after he appeared in my dream. At the end, the imaginative acts became visionary in their power. Yet I was aware that all this was happening inside me. Still, the immediacy, the sense of the presence of the creature, and the power of the image were so strong that it was almost as though the lion were a physical being.

I want to recount for you a visionary experience that I passed through many years ago when I was a young man, long before I had any understanding of what these experiences are. This is the interior vision that demanded my attention, uninvited, one day when I was occupied with some mundane task long years after leaving the Northwest.

One evening I made a campfire on the side of Mount Saint Helens, where I had spent many happy summers in childhood before the volcano erupted. I squatted on my heels looking into my campfire at dusk. Even today I can remember the vivid colors of that evening and how they thrilled me. The orange of the campfire, the dark blue color of the evening sky, the purple-gray shadows on the mountains. I felt a great sense of joy, beauty, peacefulness—but also expectancy .

A young man, about my own age, came walking up and stood just on the other side of the fire. I was on my heels by the fire; he was standing quietly; and we just looked at each other for a long time. I was still in a sort of ecstasy over the colors of the fire.

Then, to my astonishment, the fire moved and transported itself down into Spirit Lake, way at the bottom, and burned there as a tiny orange speck in the midst of that indigo blue water. Then the fire came back and burned before me. The young man took one step, into the middle of the fire. He absorbed the fire into his bloodsteam so that he had fire circulating in his veins rather than blood. We stood there for some time, I looking in awe at these events, and then he said: “Come, I’m going to show you how the world was made.”

We went off into space, at an enormous distance, until the earth and even the solar system had become only the tiniest speck in the distance. He showed me a spiral nebula spinning. This great mass of inert, formless matter, more energy than matter, slowly spun…spun so slowly, as though there were all of eternity for it to spin through its evolutions. It spun slowly into coherence before my eyes, concentrating, reducing its volume, pulling itself together until the huge nebula was formed into a diamond. The diamond was huge, many-faceted, with its own light source within, emanating light and color that I still remember vividly.

As we watched, the young man directing my gaze, the diamond began to erupt out of its north pole and absorb that flow of energy back through its south pole, so that there was a circulation of light bubbling out of the top and reabsorbing through the bottom pole. That intensified the color and the faceting of light that emanated. Then it did what would be physically impossible: It split itself down the middle, and, as the entire system continued to rotate like a planet, the two halves began to rotate in opposite directions while still touching each other, throwing off sparks of light and color.

At that time, standing somewhere with this spirit man in distant reaches of space, I did something that it embarrasses me to remember. I turned and tugged at his sleeve and said irreverently: “This is fine, but what is it good for?”

I was gazing at an event of the greatest importance, but being a practical American, I had to justify it by finding a way to use it or finding some practicality in it. Again, I tugged at his sleeve—and said: “What is it good for?”

The spirit man looked at me in disgust: “It isn’t good for anything . Just watch!” That silenced me. We watched, and I felt that the colors, the light, the focusing of infinite energy and volume into diamond-like density and brightness were etched forever on my memory and had almost entered into the physical cells of my body.

He took me back then, and I sat again on my heels before the campfire. He stood again in the fire. Then he stepped back, and let the fire flow out of his arteries back into the little campfire on the ground. The fire went back down to the bottom of Spirit Lake and went on burning. Then the fire returned. The young man turned around without a word and walked back out into the twilight from where he had come. The vision ended, and I found myself back in my “normal,” mundane physical world.

It is very difficult to know what to do with such a vision. I think the answer is inherent in the experience itself: Don’t do anything with it. Don’t try to convert it into something “practical,” or something that makes sense to your ego-mind. Just look, experience, be there.

Some part of one wants to ask: “But shouldn’t it change something? Accomplish something? Have some practical application?” There is no need to justify visionary experiences on any practical level. But since all facets of life flow back to one reality, we learn ultimately that they have their practical and human effects. They do change us. They form our character in very deep places. They determine what kind of people we will be in five, ten, or twenty years after the experience, when all of its power has worked its way back to the surface and into our lives. Then this magnificent power is transmuted into small things, day-to-day behavior, attitudes, the choices that we make in the ordinariness of daily human life.

Jung believed that God needs human agencies to assist in the incarnation of his creation. As Thomas Mann observes in Joseph and His Brothers , God needed the ladder in Jacob’s dream as a way to come and go between heaven and earth. The visions of human beings make such a ladder and transmit information into the collective unconscious of humanity. No “practicality” beyond this is required.