#active imagination

Why is each day so painful?

YOU WANT SOMETHING THE WORLD CANNOT GIVE YOU.

And what is that?

There is a class of human experience that answers to no direct order. You cannot tell yourself to fall asleep. The instruction arrives at a locked door. Sleep refuses the simple transaction of command and execution. Instead, it assembles itself once certain conditions are present, and those conditions include, strangely enough, the act of picturing yourself already inside the state you are trying…

Eldritch came right after Larthen. I didn’t play with him for very long either, but he left a stronger impression. He was my White Box Magic-User — a classic cliché of a wizard. Blue robes covered in silver stars, a long beard, the whole package. His favorite spell was Charm Person. I pictured him as a sort of Svengali figure, using magic to bend others to his will. He even had a young female…

My first D&D character was Larthen — a generic Conan-type Fighting Man. I created him the very afternoon my sister and I opened the White Box set on the living room floor. I knew nothing of Carl Jung at the time. I had never even heard his name. Larthen was simply the adolescent male fantasy handed to me by the culture around me: strong, sword-swinging, straightforward. He wasn’t really mine.…

The Red Book is an extended example of what is described in the Jungian literature as active imagination. According to Jung, active imagination requires a state of reverie, half-way between sleep and waking. Active imagination involves the exploration and elaboration of dream images while awake. In active imagination the conscious mind encourages unconscious fantasies to emerge and then actively engages them. ―Greg Mahr and Christopher L. Drake, from Singing in tune: Carl Jung and The Red Book

It’s an inward passage, a ritual emptied of ornament, enacted in solitude. A subtle loosening of the inner ligatures. The mind, which ordinarily arranges itself into coherence for the sake of survival, begins to dim its surface authority. And then—almost imperceptibly at first—another register emerges: not thought as I recognize it, but something more archaic, more oracular. The voice does not describe me, it speaks through me. I cross that threshold deliberately, as one might step into dark water whose depths remain latent.

The ego does not vanish; it steps aside, becomes porous, allows ingress. One does not “make” the images. One receives them. It is closer to entering into relation with what insists on appearing. It becomes a witness to incursions—images that arrive with the density of symbols, phrases that feel excavated rather than composed. I do not summon them, I allow them.

There is, in this, a paradox I have come to trust: that the psyche, when permitted, is generative beyond anything the conscious mind could architect, yet it requires a witness—someone to remain, to attend, to hold the tension without collapsing it into interpretation too soon.

When I write in this state (automatic writing), I am not composing. I am following.

The first thing is to be alone, and as free as possible from being disturbed. Then one must sit down and concentrate on seeing and hearing whatever comes up from the unconscious. When this is accomplished, and often it is far from easy, the image must be prevented from sinking back again into the unconscious, by drawing, painting or writing down whatever has been seen or heard. Sometimes it is possible to express it best by movement or dancing. Some people cannot get into touch with the unconscious directly. An indirect approach that often reveals the unconscious particularly well, is to write stories, apparently about other people. Such stories invariably reveal the parts of the storyteller’s own psyche of which he or she is completely unconscious. ―Barbara Hannah, from Encounters with the Soul: Active Imagination As Developed by C.G. Jung

A phrase arrives unannounced. An image presses forward with the strange authority of something that does not ask permission. I do not correct it, nor do I refine. I let the syntax distort, the logic fracture, the voice proliferate. It is, in the truest sense, a stream—not of consciousness, but of that which precedes it and exceeds it.

This flow, this yielding, is only the first movement. To remain there, intoxicated by the immediacy of it, is to mistake revelation for integration. What emerges must be returned to, circled, read as one would read a text written in a partially forgotten language. I approach it not as its originator, but as its interlocutor. I ask: What constellation does this image belong to? What affect clings to this phrase? Where have I seen this symbol before—in dream, in myth, in the quiet repetitions of my own life?

It becomes, then, less a diary and more an archive of correspondences.

The unconscious is not just evil by nature, it is also the source of the highest good: not only dark but also light, not only bestial, semihuman, and demonic but superhuman, spiritual, and, in the classical sense of the word, “divine.” ―C.G. Jung, from The Practice of Psychotherapy

Which is to say: what emerges is neither random nor purely chaotic, but structured, meaningful, often more honest than the self we present. Even the early automatists—André Breton among them—recognized something in this current: “Psychic automatism in its pure state, by which one proposes to express―verbally, by means of the written word, or in any other manner―the actual functioning of thought. Dictated by the thought, in the absence of any control exercised by reason, exempt from any aesthetic or moral concern.” However, I find that what is required is not the absence of control, but a more exacting kind of attention. A chosen descent into the psychic substratum where image forgoes explanation, where symbol is structural, where language begins to echo its primordial, incantatory breath. The page becomes both veil and passage, a site where the inward crosses into articulation.

To write in this register is to inhabit a cosmology that feels inward yet not entirely self-derived. The psyche reveals itself as inhabited, articulate in symbol and repetition, leaving behind a lattice of signs that begin, slowly, to arrange themselves. They do not clarify—they recognize. And there is something both beautiful and disquieting in this: that the unconscious has never been silent, only unreceived.

TL;DR: she's hostile and afraid of me af (not surprising).

The Two Secrets to a Blessed Life Many of my close clients are surprised when I share the Shamanic lifestyle. This tradition teaches us to live a life imbued with symbolism. We use imagination as a deliberate tool, integrating it into our daily experience. After some time, the brain adapts, and meaningful insights begin to surface into conscious awareness. IFW stands for “In Free Will,” and…