Inner Work: Using Dreams and Active Imagination for Personal Growth

by Robert A. Johnson

Remember Jung’s observation: He said that the ego’s relationship to the huge unconscious is like that of a tiny cork floating in the ocean. We often feel like that. We feel like a cork that is being tossed about in the ocean of life, completely at the mercy of the waves and storms that push and pull us. We seem to have little control or power over anything. Jung continued his analogy with a startling thing: The cork is nevertheless morally equal to the ocean, because it has the power of consciousness! Although the ego is small, it has this peculiar power of awareness that we call consciousness, and that special, concentrated power gives it a position that is as necessary, as strong, and as valuable as the seemingly infinite richness of the unconscious. The little cork can talk back to the ocean, and has a viewpoint to contribute, one without which the evolution of consciousness cannot proceed. The ego can talk back, and this makes the dialogue one between equals. The ego’s capacity for consciousness gives it the power, the right, and even the duty to wrestle with the great unconscious on equal terms and to work out a synthesis of values.