The regressive draw of the unconscious is a powerful reality. Call it the devouring mother. Call it entropy… I call it the quicksand.
The value of standing amidst the reality that our own psychic system has a tendency toward devouring gets portrayed quite literally in the gospel story of Jesus walking on the water. In the end, stripped of logic and confidence amidst the swirling forces greater than the ego’s ability to control, two simple words become the mantra of perseverance: just believe.
That our conscious lives mirror the unconscious is a fertile idea, if also an elusive one. I gain some insight into the implications when I consider how different people handle similar situations.
For example…the train is late. One person, after an annoyed glance at his watch, gets on his iPhone and begins getting things done. Another woman looks to a fellow commuter and busts out laughing. Down the platform, one guy is so torqued off, that between curses he’s just kicked a steel beam.
While we might attribute the variety of these reactions to styles of consciousness, we might also see in these an indication of the way the unconscious rides each of them. The unconscious is like an unseen partner in the unfolding of our lives. Much of the coloring in the stream of attitudes we live is but a reflection of how the unconscious participates through the prism of our attention.
The Sufi Ibn ‘Arabi developed an extended ocular analogy. The eye absorbs and transmits a mirror image of the world just as the soul relates to the divine. The poet Charles Olson picks up on this theme when he lauds the “eye view” – that particularly human scale of processing reality. While the projective tends to encompass unconscious factors which extend beyond the human frame, the preciousness of consciousness brings a wide variety of psychic factors to our door, all wanting to be known.
The word imaginal was coined by the French philosopher and theologian Henry Corbin last century. It continues to find currency in Jungian as well as poetic circles. While the implications of the world view that admit an imaginal are wide ranging, for the individual it always comes down to the issue of encounter. How do we get in touch with the imaginal?
The biggest impediment seems to be living from a perspective that discredits the existence of the imaginal. Indeed, the current educational system has done a pretty good job removing the imaginal from our world view. While we exercise the faculty of imagination, it remains solely a tool of the ego to posit possibilities.
Encountering the Imaginal
The encounter with the imaginal on the other hand is like stepping into a mythic landscape, walking into a dream, stepping across a spiritual threshold. It relates to the experience of the shaman, each taste fulfilling a deep longing in the human soul for the “Other.”
A wonderful text, both because it’s easy to comprehend and it’s full of useful suggestions is Robert Johnson’s Inner Work: Using dreams and active imagination for personal growth. In it Johnson writes:
“The unconscious is a marvelous universe of unseen energies, forces, forms of intelligence – even distinct personalities – that live within us. It is a much larger realm than most of us realize,one that has a complete life of its own running parallel to the ordinary life we live day to day. The unconscious is the secret source of much of our thought, feeling and behavior. It influences us in ways that are all the more powerful because unexpected.” Robert Johnson, Inner Work, pg. 3
The Unconscious will have its way with us if we do not pay attention to it. Compulsion, fears, a host of destructive behaviors from the instincts run amuck, these are but a few of the tools the Unconscious seems quite content to unleash in the inattentive, or unexamined life, it’s reckless fury. So the challenge is building the bridge, finding ways to build relationship to those parts of ourselves that are not personal, but are powerful.
Active imagination is a technique that Jung taught which could take many shapes. Writing, drawing, movement, sand play all could be vehicles to engage and improvise with these forces which inhabit us.
The task is simple to define, but it can be difficult to encounter: to engage the dream while awake. Jung provides this simple task as a path of entry:
“He should occupy himself intensively with his mood in an uncritical frame of mind, becoming absorbed in it, and noting down on paper a description of the mood and all the fantasies that emerge. In doing so the fantasies will be allowed the widest free-play. Out of this occupation there emerges a more or less complete expression of the mood, which reproduces the contents of the depression as extensively and faithfully as possible. Since the depression was not made by consciousness, but represents an unwelcome intrusion on the part of the unconscious, then the expression of the mood so produced is a picture of the tendencies of the unconscious as a whole, which are contained in the depression.” Carl Jung The Transcendent Function, Pg. 17
Rendering the image of the mood, even depression…give it a try. You might be surprised where this type of play leads you.
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