Active Imagination Quotes

“Each woman has potential access to Rio Abajo Rio, this river beneath the river. She arrives there through deep meditation, dance, writing, painting, prayermaking, singing, drumming, active imagination, or any activity which requires an intense altered consciousness. A woman arrives in this world-between-worlds through yearning and by seeking something she can see just out of the corner of her eye. She arrives there by deeply creative acts, through intentional solitude, and by practice of any of the arts.”
― Clarissa Pinkola Estés, Women Who Run With the Wolves

“I should advise you to put it all down as beautifully & as carefully as you can—in some beautifully bound book. It will seem as if you were making the visions banal—but then you need to do that—then you are freed from the power of them. . . . Then when these things are in some precious book you can go to the book & turn over the pages & for you it will be your church—your cathedral—the silent places of your spirit where you will find renewal. If anyone tells you that it is morbid or neurotic and you listen to them—then you will lose your soul—for in that book is your soul.”
― C.G. Jung, Visions: Notes of the Seminar Given 1930-1934

“The first thing is to be alone, and as free as possible from being disturbed. Then one must sit down and concentrate on seeing and hearing whatever comes up from the unconscious. When this is accomplished, and often it is far from easy, the image must be prevented from sinking back again into the unconscious, by drawing, painting or writing down whatever has been seen or heard. Sometimes it is possible to express it best by movement or dancing. Some people cannot get into touch with the unconscious directly. An indirect approach that often reveals the unconscious particularly well, is to write stories, apparently about other people. Such stories invariably reveal the parts of the storyteller’s own psyche of which he or she is completely unconscious. ...

In every case, the goal is to get into touch with the unconscious, and that entails giving it an opportunity to express itself in some way or other.”
― Barbara Hannah, Encounters with the Soul: Active Imagination As Developed by C.G. Jung

“In the last year of his life, Regardie came out rather strongly against the efficacy of Jungian practice, calling active imagination 'plain mental masturbation'—a characterization that plainly calls into question his previous statements as to active imagination’s identity with certain magical practices.”
― Christopher A. Plaisance, Correspondences: Journal for the Study of Esotericism

“[W]hether it’s a regular dream or a lucid dream, it may simply be taking place at a psychic level. But what we’re really aiming for is engagement, through active imagination, at the imaginal level.”
― H.M. Forester, The Imaginal Veil