Za Robert A. Johnson
"Inner work using dreams and active imagination for personal growth"
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.
