Nauka słuchania

Za Robert A. Johnson

"Inner work using dreams and active imagination for personal growth"

LEARNING TO LISTEN

Active Imagination is, more than anything, a process of listening. Not all dialogue or interaction with your

inner persons will be through words. There are sessions of Active

Imagination in which the entire experience takes place through

actions, through seeing and doing. It is still a dialogue, but a

dialogue without words. More often than not, however, there will be

spoken dialogue. In either case, we have to learn to listen.

Often we have only experienced these parts of

ourselves who now come up as images in our imagination as

enemies—as carriers of slothful resistance, neuros That is how they look to the ego. But now, if we

are going to set up an exchange in place of the ​habitual, lifelong war

we have fought, we have to begin to listen.

After so many years of ignoring these parts of

ourselves, seeing them as the inferior characteristics in our

personalities, we find that they have some very unpleasant things

to tell us when we finally listen. It is no surprise that some

inner person tells me what a tyrant I have been over the years, how

I have shoved my ego’s attitudes down the throat of the

unconscious.

One must be willing to say: “Who are you? What do

you have to say? I will listen to you. You may have the floor for

this entire hour if you want; you may use any language you want. I

am here to listen.”

This requires a formidable realignment of attitude

for most of us. If there is something in yourself that you see as a

weakness, a defect, a terrible obstruction to a productive life,

you nevertheless have to stop approaching that part of yourself as

“the badguy.” For once, during Active Imagination, you must try to

listen to that “inferior” being as though he or she were the voice

of wisdom. If our depressions or weaknesses come to us in

personified form, we need to honor those characteristics as part of

the total self.

It is awesome and frightening to take your sense of

inferiority, guilt, or remorse, put that part of you in the witness

box, and say: “You have every privilege. You are the one who bears

witness to that which I neither know nor understand. You may say

whatever you wish, at whatever length. You will be respected and

honored. And what you say will be recorded.” But it is from this

that the true power of Active Imagination rises: We learn to listen

to the ones whom we have kept mute. We learn to honor those whom we

have dishonored.