Hi I am just wondering if any of you have tried Carl Jung’s active imagination process, I tried this myself when I meant on a spiritual awakening journey, I focused on my dentians first before the chakras, and I really did start to see visions during my meditation, they were an amazing experience, I just decided one day that I want to find myself my inner self, and after going through this I started painting again and even wrote a book, something I enjoyed as a child and never did again. But I can say it works.
Active imagination
- Thread starter Fudgee
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@Nakeichio I have tried Jung's active imagination technique in the past, and it can be quite remarkable. I haven't tried combining it with a second framework of spiritual and psychological insight such as you describe though. The basic idea is to take one of your remembered dreams, and then to walk around and explore its images and narrative while fully awake. A good way to do this is to start a dialogue with some of the images and characters from the dream. Jung describes it as a sort of perambulation around the dream images, exploring them from every angle. It doesn't have to be a dream, but could be a waking fantasy, though I suspect that starting with a dream is best.
The problems are that that we find it very hard to let our ego take backstage in this psychologically while at the same time controlling it in terms of process, and our dreams often throw up insights from our deep inner selves that our ego's find hard to accept and integrate. These can come out in the process, and we have to accept and integrate the discomfort and the pain of them if active imagination is to be of any value to us. At it's deepest, it's a kind of hero-quest into our souls in all their darkness and light.
The problems are that that we find it very hard to let our ego take backstage in this psychologically while at the same time controlling it in terms of process, and our dreams often throw up insights from our deep inner selves that our ego's find hard to accept and integrate. These can come out in the process, and we have to accept and integrate the discomfort and the pain of them if active imagination is to be of any value to us. At it's deepest, it's a kind of hero-quest into our souls in all their darkness and light.