Inner Work: Using Dreams and Active Imagination for Personal Growth

by Robert A. Johnson

Even if your intentions are good, the results are simultaneously manipulative and uncontrollable: You can’t predict exactly what the effects will be. The other person may feel a vague, unconscious pressure and begin to behave differently toward you without understanding why.

You become conditioned, through successive repetitions of the fantasy, to think about the other person in a certain way, to react automatically in a certain way.

Therefore, if you have strong inner feelings about an external person, whether they are positive or negative, it is best to begin by doing inner work to discover what is going on subjectively within yourself. Then, if you have anything that needs to be said to the other individual, it is better to say it directly—using common sense and courtesy as your guide.

? What of the meditation school (for example, Thích Nats Hahn zen) that explicitly have one exploring valence with specific people, places, and time?

three basic levels, depending on the use that is made of it: Horse-trading Embracing the unconscious Experiencing the spiritual dimension

This childish part of me was furious. And the unconscious, irrational resentment found its way into my practical life. I

I never admitted until many years later that I had been forced to make such a sordid, mercantile, back-room deal with my self-indulgent inner child. I felt like Faust making a pact with the devil. But

Our inner lives often feel like journeys from one Jericho to another.

The walk around Jericho can take any form, so long as you focus your energy on the walled inner city and do your ritual. Personify the conflict by bringing up the images in your mind and talking to them. Invite the people out of the city and find out who they are and why they are opposing you.

The principle at work here is one of cumulative energy

Your experience of Jericho will require seven inner units of time—whatever time is required for you to open up genuine consciousness of your Jericho. Outwardly it could be seven days, seven weeks, seven months, or seven years.

One of the highest uses of Active Imagination is to find a level on which we may experience the unlived parts of ourselves.

IFS exiles

Even ten lifetimes would not be enough time to marry all the people one has loved, follow all the occupations and interests that one might have enjoyed, or live out fully all the personalities hidden within. But if we ignore these unlived possibilities, they can go sour. They can assert themselves in clumsy ways.

That is the way it is with true Active Imagination. When you come into contact with a real part of yourself, you feel it as a threat, a menace.

Whoever we are, our ego lives are partial systems, with a huge backlog of unlived life hiding within.

occultism, which leads away from consciousness and into seeking these kinds of experiences for the thrill or the novelty of it.

It is very difficult to know what to do with such a vision. I think the answer is inherent in the experience itself: Don’t do anything with it. Don’t try to convert it into something “practical,” or something that makes sense to your ego-mind. Just look, experience, be there.