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Jungian
Active Imagination & Hypnagogia
"the royal road to
the unconscious"
-C.G. Jung
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What
Is Active Imagination & Hypnagogia?
Active Imagination
is a fairly rare natural process that need not be so
rare. It is highly treasured by those who have mastered
it and it has been used, in one way or another, in seeking
deep inner experience.
"We
may worry about death but what hurts the soul most
is to live without tasting the water of its own essence."
-Rumi
The most
direct way of explaining what Active Imagination is
is this: Active Imagination places us at the threshold
between our everyday sort of awareness and the dream
world. If we can bring a degree of alertness and openness
to the threshold, the dream world will reach out to
meet us. The dream world provides us with its unique
view on the world and we bring our questions, our capacity
for learning, and our ability to be surprised. This
marriage, of inner world and outer world, can provide
our lives with much needed insight, energy, passion,
and meaning.
Active Imagination
is not hypnosis, contemplation, or meditation. Hypnosis
asks us to turn off our alert mind to enter into the
world of unconsciousness. Contemplation seeks to sharpen
the mind's reasoning ability. Meditation asks us to
move away from the dream world and our everyday mind
through focusing on a single word, our breathing, or
our movement.
Elements
of all of these practices are touched upon when practicing
Active Imagination. But, Active Imagination relies upon
an alert mind, the non-rational, and a high level of
inner creative fludity. This is the only sort of environment
that the inner marriage of everyday consciousness and
the dream world can exist.
Sometimes,
Active Imagination occurs naturally, without utilizing
a technique such as was brought to the psychotherapeutic
mainstream by C. G. Jung.
Events that bring a person to relax their everyday awareness
(e.g. listening to stories, watching the flames in a
fireplace, listening to the sea) can move us into Active
Imagination.
To increase
the frequency of these experiences so that we may follow
Rumi's advise, "taste the water of the soul's own
essence," we must use Jung's
technique.
Additional Information:
Robert Johnson on
Active Imagination - Coming
Henri Corbin on Active
Imagination - Coming
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