Active Imagination – from ‘Inner Work’, by Robert Johnson.

The method, as expounded by Johnson, is based on Von Franz’s four stages:

1. empty the ego-mind
2. let the unconscious flow into the vacuum
3. add the ethical element
4. integrate the imagination back into daily life

Learning to listen to your sense of inferiority can be awesome and frightening. The
unconscious has something valuable to contribute; it has its own wisdom, its own
viewpoints, and it is often as balanced and realistic as those of the ego-mind.

Method

1. Invite the Unconscious

- Take our minds off the external world

- Focus inwardly, on the imagination
- Direct our inner eye to a place inside us, and wait to see who will show up,
waiting on alert (von Franz called it emptying the ego mind).
- Have patience for someone or something to emerge. The ego may want to
discard it but continue to attend to anything that emerges.
- Once it arrives, choose an invitation: who are you; what do you want; what do
you have to say?

If still blank use one of these techniques:

- Harnessing fantasy can help to get going.
- Visit symbolic places, personally significant.
- Use personifications. If an affect or some mood can’t be shaken off, try to
personify it and begin dialoguing. “Please take some form I can see and come
up and talk with me. I want to know who you are and what you want”.
- Dialogue with dream figures. Good for extending unresolved dreams, or
working with recurring dreams.

Dante practised active imagination. He once fell through a hole in the ground. He
came to the threshold of Hades, and met Virgil, sent to him by the beautiful
Beatrice. Virgil guided him and talked with him, as they hiked through the various
levels of hell. Beatrice then later led him out of purgatory into Paradise – a great
Anima figure.

2. Dialogue and Experience

- We give over to the imagination and let it flow.

- Ask questions first, it shows a willingness to listen.
- You may express feelings to get going and this invariably speeds things up.
- Often the inner person will show you something, do something, lead you
somewhere.
- If it feels right then do it. If it feels wrong then don’t.
- After each thought, comment, stop.
- Ask: what do I think? Give yourself weight to the situation.
- Learn to reply. The ego does not give way. Jung said the ego is like a cork on
the ocean (unconscious). But the cork is nevertheless morally equal to the
ocean because it has the power of consciousness.
- Hopefully a dialogue will follow. Remain interested in their point of view.

3. Add the Ethical Element

- Consciousness always involves ethical confrontations: we become aware of

conflicting values, attitudes, and paths of behaviour that are open to us and
find we must make moral choices.
- Jung had the audacious view that humanity’s role is to contribute to the act of
consciousness and the view of morality, in its highest sense.
- Ethics, from the Greek meaning ‘proper conduct’. This in turn derived from
the Greek meaning ‘essential character or spirit’. It is us being consistent with
who we actually are.
- Pure archetype, a powerful, amoral natural force, must be honoured and
considered but not allowed to dominate. Many of the archetypes that make up
the total human character manifest as pure, raw, instincts of hunting,
aggression, survival, and territorial dominion. If they are qualified by human
values, by a sense of love and moral responsibility, they are wonderful
strengths. But if they dominate us without those human feelings, they reduce
us to mere brutes.
- The ego-mind must avoid going into extremes, being destructive, or
inhumane. Therefore, if any inner voices do so, it must not be indulged. There
can be strong forces encountered and we must not give into them.

4. Make it Concrete with Physical Ritual

- It is not sufficient for the active imagination to remain in the abstract. If it

stays as imagination it doesn’t cause a transformation of consciousness. Needs
to hit us in a “gut” experience.
- Ritual is the channel our instincts provide for us to express this new
consciousness and gratitude for it. A sense of reverence is necessary for
psychological health. An absence of this in someone indicates an ego inflation.
- This is why people without ritual feel a chronic sense of emptiness. They are
denied the great archetypes that nourish our soul-life.
- From a psychological standpoint, ritual is symbolic behaviour, consciously
performed.
- Ceremony, in its original form, means “awe”. It’s the behaviour we do when
we are in the midst of something awesome.
- Be careful, however, as to the method. Do not involve others, act out, or
continue the fantasy with someone you know.
- Make it a concrete experience. Incarnate it through drawing, painting, finding
a meaningful symbol.
Levels of Use

Horse Trading
- This is the most basic form. We’re made up of many parts and each has its
own needs, wants, and each want to participate in our conscious life. They
may be dream figures, or people we encounter in active imagination.
- Many seemingly ‘insoluble’ conflicts that irritate turn out to be different parts
of self seeing things differently.
- It is human, earthy, and immediate. May seem sordid or mundane but it’s real.

Embracing the Unconscious

- The Walls of Jericho parable contains a wonderful archetypal principle – a
way of approaching the seemingly impossible conflicts within ourselves, in
which Joshua who is offered Jericho, is instructed to march around the
impregnable walls for seven days and then a miracle happens.
- Some autonomous complexes, can feel like such, a walled city within the
unconscious.
- Bring every form of inner work to it. It is a synthesis of methods to put
psychological energy towards, with focus and ritual.
- The principle is one of cumulative energy.
- It turns out that as we set out on this journey the problem tumbles sooner
rather than later when we had been prepared for years.
- Other Jerichos may be more difficult. They are the ones deeply embedded in
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.
- If you personify the thing in your life that afflicts you most, 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.

Living the Unlived Life

- Some possibilities in life are never lived out because they look “bad” or are
inferior to us.
- It is possible to live much of life on the symbolic level, and this often satisfies
that unlived part of ourselves even more than if we had lived it out externally.
It seems that nature and God doesn’t mind how we live out these potentialities
within ourselves.
- We cannot literally be all that we can, but to ignore them causes them to go
sour, they can assert themselves in clumsy ways, and we may feel nostalgic
about what might have been. Or we can get bitter.
- When you come across something true and deep within yourself, you may feel
it as a threat, a menace. Your knees knock, you sweat and tremble.
- One can make peace with that part of you that would otherwise be too
threatening to your current conscious existence.
 - Your “beach bum” or inner “hobo” may turn out to be a sunyasin, a wandering
medicant holy man, in disguise, if given a chance to live, and the wanderings
turn out to be pilgrimages.

Experiencing the Spiritual Dimension

- Similar to what people called visions.
- Poetic and religious language is needed but also can fall short or clichéd.
- One may really know and experience the unifying truth of the Self. One sees,
for a brief time, a glimpse of the true unity, beauty, and meaning of life.
- These come uninvited, and should not be actively pursued (as an occultism).
- Such ‘truths’ can only come up from the depths of the unconscious, from what
one has done to develop a connection to the collective unconscious.
- Kierkegaard said that no one can give faith to another.
- There is a kind of knowledge and faith that only comes from experience.
- When one has such an experience, such a vision, then nothing needs to be
done with it. Remember it and it will filter back into your conscious life one
day, maybe many years to come.