Inner Work: Using Dreams and Active Imagination for Personal Growth

by Robert A. Johnson

The disaster that has overtaken the modern world is the complete splitting off of the conscious mind from its roots in the unconscious. All the forms of interaction with the unconscious that nourished our ancestors—dream, vision, ritual, and religious experience—are largely lost to us, dismissed by the modern mind as primitive or superstitious. Thus, in our pride and hubris, our faith in our unassailable reason, we cut ourselves off from our origins in the unconscious and from the deepest parts of ourselves.

You must understand that when you approach the unconscious you are dealing with one of the most powerful and autonomous forces in human experience.

Our culture in the twentieth century has a tremendous collective prejudice against the imagination.

Yet, it is by this path that Nature becomes aware of its own existence by giving birth to its one witness: human consciousness.

Nature, God, needs to become aware. revisit thi thought later

The feminine side of the psyche is also rational, but it uses feeling-logic, the rational processes that are based on feeling, on sensing fine differentiations of values.