The technique of Active Imagination enables you to dialogue with the unconscious archetypal elements in the psyche. I recommend adding this meditative discipline to your toolbox as a discipline to encourage your spiritual transformation.
It is a great opportunity to get help from your inner counselor by way of translating fear, negative emotions and bad moods into imagery and symbols. On this symbolic level you are then able to communicate with the figures and personifications that appear on the inner landscape.
How to proceed? You turn your full attention within and concentrate on the first picture that shows up. The most important rule to always keep in mind is that you stay aware of who you are while you dialogue with what appears, i.e., trees, plants or weird figures. You yourself don’t become superman or a wizard who can fly through the air.
However, when real people you know, family members, spouses or relatives appear, you know that these persons do not belong to your unconscious and you tell them goodbye. You are about to dialogue with the unconscious. That’s your devotion right now.
It might be helpful to distinguish the practice of active imagination from passive imagery in behavior therapy, daydreaming, fantasizing or the katathyme picture creating therapy.
In the active imagination you are fully concentrated and alert and your ego stays intact.
People with a low developed ego competence may have difficulties to exercise the active imagination.
C. G. Jung recognized our human ability to create images. And he knew that the unconscious speaks to us in symbols and imagery. The most powerful of these symbols he called archetypes. They reside in the collective unconscious, the deepest level we can reach. And these archetypes belong to all mankind. Myths, fairy tales and sagas speak of them. When you come in touch with an archetype you will recognize immediately its nature because of the enormous influx of energy which it transmits.
C. G Jung had the insight to use the human ability to create images actively as an effective tool to accelerate the psychic process of maturing, of individuation, as he called it.
He said he did not invent the technique, but discovered it in his longtime study of alchemical texts as a symbolic and imaginal language that expressed many of his own insights into psychological processes.
In C. G. Jung, Letters, Volume 2, Jung gave a description of the active imagination. “You start with whatever picture shows up, observe it attentively how it unfolds and changes. Do not try to influence it in any way. Just watch how it changes spontaneously. Each psychic picture you observe in this manner will change its form soon or later. This happens because of a spontaneous association which will lead to a slight change of the image. Do not jump from one picture or theme to the other. Stay with the first picture that appeared before your inner screen and wait how it changes by itself. Stay focused and observe carefully. In the end you must enter the picture yourself as the actual person you are. If someone appears who speaks to you, listen and you might also want to reply something. Hereby you not only could analyze your unconscious but vice versa your unconscious gets a chance to analyze you, too. And thus you create with time to come a union between consciousness and unconscious.”
Without this unification there is no individuation process possible as Jung understood it, when he speaks of the psychological and spiritual transformation of the individual. By this he refers to the outgrow of the individual of all the ingrained collective standards and values that have shaped him so far. This process, however, happens not in opposition to the collective standards but in confrontation with them. The goal of the individuation process – which Jung saw as a natural evolutionary process – is that we become during our life the person who we truly are; more and more coherent, more and more transforming into Self, the ideal of the ego, as Jung termed it.
The individuation process is therefore a consequent questioning of “who am I truly?” or the admonition: “Know Thy Self!”
Who am I in relation to my unconscious, other people and my environment?
This is the riddle of the Sphinx as told in the Ödipus-Saga in Greek mythology. In the saga Ödipus solved the riddle of the Sphinx, with his answer that it was the human being. But he was unable to solve the riddle of his own existence. Ödipus didn’t know who he himself was.
Can we solve the riddle of knowing who we are? And the answer is for each one of us as unique, as individual as the process of individuation itself is. Beware of people who want to tell you they know the answer. Don’t listen to answers others have found. Find your own answer!
Active Imagination can help you with this. There are 4 rules to follow to make the technique effective. See part 2.