The Genesis of Active Imagination in Jungian Psychology and its relation to Eastern Esotericism

Introduction

Understanding the relationship between Carl Jung’s Red Book and the technique of Active Imagination opens a profound exploration into the depths of the human psyche. This journey is not merely academic; it carries significant implications for personal growth, spiritual development, and cultural transformation. Here are three compelling reasons to study this topic:

1. Personal Transformation: Engaging with Active Imagination can foster profound self-awareness and psychological healing.
2. Spiritual Depth: This practice bridges the gap between Western psychological insights and Eastern spiritual practices, offering a holistic approach to inner exploration.
3. Cultural Impact: Understanding and applying these concepts can contribute to the collective psyche, influencing cultural attitudes and societal evolution.

Ars Autem Imaginatio

Active Imagination, a cornerstone of Jungian psychology, did not emerge spontaneously from the pages of Liber Novus (The Red Book). Liber Novus, is the “New Book” that arose from depths of Jung’s personal experiences documented in the Black Books and the Septem Sermones ad Mortuous (Seven Sermons to the Dead). This alchemical journey reflects the stages of Nigredo (blackening), Rubedo (reddening), and Albedo (whitening), symbolizing a transformative process.

Jung’s Black Books are emblematic of the Nigredo, the white pages in between as the Albedo, the Illustrious images of the Red Book, of the Rubedo. By engaging with these inner images, Jung established a connection between the known and unknown aspects of the psyche, a technique that transcends conventional methodologies.  For Jung, the technique of active imagination was first, an active descent into the darkness, his period of Nigredo, where he would come to toil and wrestle with his Soul. He moved from without to go in, focusing on his dark moods, emotions, thoughts, stirrings, and innervations that the psyche prompted and made into images. The aim of this laboring endeavor of dialoging with the images of the soul is to establish a perpetual connection with the known and unknown, which would later become known as developing the Transcendent Function. Liber Novus is Jung’s transcendent function (Jung on Active Imagination pg.5).

When one descends into the depths of their inner landscape (Jung on Active Imagination pg.2) with Active Imagination, as seen through the Mind’s eye, an inner psychic theater appears. One may find, distinct figures of the phenomenal realm like humans, animals, objects, etc. You start to co-mingle with these figures as you engage in your own psychodrama (Jung on Active Imagination pg.16). This practice requires the ego to adopt a “spirit of resignation,” allowing the inner “I” becomes an attentive witness, an abstracted subject, like the Hindu concept of the Purusha/Atman (pure consciousness), that watches the play of the manifold abstracted objects of the psyche, the multiplicity of forms in Prakriti or pure Nature. These figures are Philosophical Matter, they are abstract yet have substance. One of the figures in Jung’s Active Imaginations screams back at him, “We are not symbols! We are real!” Through this philosophical matter, one starts to map their own inner pantheon and mythology. There are figures of light, the Hindus called Devata’s or thought beings, and figures of the dark, Asura’s, the demons that trouble us. With Active Imagination, as Jung did in Liber Novus, we participate, with both figures of light and dark.

Spiritus et Cultura

Active Imagination has a Soteriological function (After Liber Novus pg.367) to save culture by saving one’s self. Historically, spiritual traditions adhered to dogmatic images and prescribed paths. However, Jung’s approach reimagines these dogmas, offering a “New Way” and a “New Spirituality” through individual creative expression.

Liber Novus, or the “New Book,” encourages personal engagement with the soul, diverging from traditional religious dogma. The images in the Red Book (Liber Novus) acts as a kind of “Yantra Yoga,” focusing on self-generated images rather than inherited religious symbols. These images come not from the dogma of a religion, but from the dogma of your Soul. 

With Active Imagination one creates their own spirituality. Chodrow says that Active Imagination is more than meditation or creative expression but gives way to a new inner symbolic attitude (Jung on Active Imagination pg.17). How one engages with the Soul is the participant’s choice. Liber Novus, as the name implies, is the “New Book,” a personal Bible or sacred text of the Individual, that one is to ascribed to but doesn’t follow another’s. One must write, draw, sculpt, dance, and sing their own song. As we enter the Platonic Month of the Aquarian Aion (After Liber Novus pg.371), the spirituality of the Know-Thy-Self and Self- Knowledge becomes more important and accessible with Active Imagination as each person nurtures a new symbolic attitude.

Four kinds of Spirit and the Typology of Dreams

 During times of turmoil, Jung’s inner work anticipated collective events, demonstrating how Active Imagination can capture broader cultural attitudes. Jung’s Liber Novus and the technique of Active Imagination are also a response to culture. Before the advent of the world war, Jung could not distinguish between becoming insane or pre-cognitively anticipating through the collective unconscious the events that transpired.

This technique responds to cultural crises and attitudes. John Beebe (Inspired by Joseph Henderson) identified four Typological Cultural attitudes—religious/spiritual, aesthetic, philosophic/scientific, and social—highlighting the technique’s capacity to resonate with collective unconscious elements. Jung as an INTJ, with his Religious Attitude was able to pluck from the Ethers what was to come. He captured other cultural attitudes with Liber Novus as Chodrow quotes Henderson’s cultural attitudes stating that Jung brought together the four cultural attitudes of the religious/spiritual, aesthetic, philosophic/scientific, and social attitude (Jung on Active Imagination pg.17). You too may capture elements of the psyche that don’t belong to you, but to the collective.

To expand further on culture, Jung also talked about four kinds of spirit, two in Liber Novus which were; “The Spirit of the Times and Depths” and two in the ETH lectures; “The Spirit of Antiquity and Resignation” (ETH Lectures 12/14/1934). In the former, Jung wrestles with the worldview of the culture of the Spirit of the Times, which according to John Beebe, is in relation to and therefore either compatible or incompatible with our Dominant Heroic Function, in Jung’s case Introverted Intuition. To see how the changing of the guard is to manifest, he swoops down into his inferior function to connect with his Extraverted Sensation Anima (Salome) into the Spirit of the Depths. It is the latter where Jung contacts the dead in his Active Imaginations when he meets the Anabaptists, where one can redeem the dead which lives on through DNA and the unlived life of the parents, (Jung’s Demonic/Daimonic Introverted Sensation). The Spirit of Resignation is the Buddhist notion of “being prepared to endure whatever consequences might yet arise” (ETH Lectures 11/25/1938) and Jung is challenged to leave his ego at the door. In Active Imagination, one takes the images seriously without encroaching on them. And through this, we can access not only our own acrhtypes and typology, but also the shifting orientations of the world at large. 

Imago Medicina

In Liber Novus and Active Imagination, Jung discovered the healing power of images. Jung was looking for his soul that had inconveniently wandered off. He sought to find the God within, a quest often projected externally in Western culture. He says, “If we set God outside of ourselves, he tears us loose from the self, since the God is more powerful than we are. Our self falls into privation. “(Liber Novus Reader’s Edition Pg.172).

But one may not necessarily find “God” but the Image of God, the Imago Dei. This can have a therapeutic affect on the individual as the person starts to unite the opposites within himself, just as “God” contains all the opposites within itself. Jung says “But if the God moves into the self, he snatches us from what is outside us. We arrive at singleness in ourselves. So, the God comes communal in reference to what is outside us, but single in relation to us. “(Liber Novus Reader’s Edition Pg.172).

Jung came across images of wholeness, like mandalas and images of squaring of the circle that became mediatory and a structuring/ordering function in the unconscious. One can bring the philosophical matter of thought beings in Active Imagination into the vulgar and making them a real matter through art or some other sort of tangible medium. For Jung, in Liber Novus, the reality of the psyche is concretized by exteriorizing his inferior sensation function and painting these images, and compiling them in Liber Novus. Effectively, in painting these figures, the pantheon of his whole typology starts to shape itself.

Through this exteriorization, Jung is showing us how to differentiate the functions and to disidentify with these contents. He says that through Active Imagination “one’s thinking becomes a separate being…through delegating the functions, I become a whole theatrical company…I am emptied of them and then I find that I am Sunyata, the Void.” (ETH Lectures IX, Vol.3). It is with this sentence that one may understand Jung’s notion of the Pleroma, the fullness of emptiness. By engaging in Active Imagination, we “empty” while simultaneously give shape to the figures within in. While we empty, we at the same time become “full,” that is to say, become full with meaning.

Jung’s essential teaching of Active Imagination and individuation is encapsulated in his assertion: “So it is always only the one God despite his multiplicity. You arrive at him in yourself and only through your self seizing you. It seizes you in the advancement of your life” (Liber Novus Reader’s Edition, pp. 172-173). Through Active Imagination, individuals can complete their inner images, furthering both personal and cultural development.

Personal Story

What would happen if we substituted the word “presences,” of contents and the word “absence” for the unconscious? Jung said that what he was doing with these figures was giving a presence to the absences in our psyche, the holes, the unknown parts, these vague emotions, the stirrings of our psychological heart, our Hridaya. We don’t know what they are or where they are (absence), yet we feel them (as a presence). In dreams or active imaginations, we bring the possibility of giving shape and visualizing them, to make them real and to realize them in the reality of the psyche. 

In a dream share group, after looking at a dream I did an active imagination with, the”Blue Chameleon,” I thought to myself, what is this Chameleon doing when I am not looking at its picture or thinking about it? And then, a Jung-like insight hit me, “It’s thinking me,” or more accurately “It’s instincting me.” It is this instinctual energy that is making me reach for some food like a pop tart, or Nutella spread on my wheat biscuit. Just because I can’t see it, it doesn’t mean it’s not there. It is a presence of an absence.

So often it is the reverse is happening. These invisible images are transforming themselves into emotions. It is uncanny how prospective and futuristic the unconscious is. Once you recognize the image, you are too late! It is has been forming without your knowledge for a long time before it becomes an image or mood. No wonder! That’s why they call it the unconscious! It’s happening and ongoing the whole time, yet we don’t know It.

So how do we catch this psychic finger that is somehow swiping right on our inner slideshow? I suppose it may lie in the consistent practice of dream work and active imagination. I understand now the importance of needing to establish a connection between the two worlds with a transcendent function. Perhaps, if we dialogued with it enough, talked to it, we can negotiate, rather than unconsciously sell ourselves over to a mood and start blaming or projecting our mood onto something from or to the outside.

Perhaps, if we pay the unconscious by giving it our time, and in return, more autonomy, more will, and more consciousness. Not in the sense of hubris that the modern mind displays with willfulness, believing it is all up to us, (our rational choices) and as if we know best. This creates more of a prison, a prison within, and  true freedom (Moksha) comes with a negotiation with the judge that is the unconscious, to whom, we get released, only when we acknowledge it, are honest with it, and accept the truth (Sanatana Dharma) that it brings. But it is yet still debatable whether this Freedom or Moksha is only possible Philosophical Matter, in the Chitta (Psyche) or also in the Phenomonal World of Vulgar Matter. 

Comparative Analysis

Jungian Concepts	Eastern Esoteric Concepts
Active Imagination	Dharana (concentration), Dhyana (meditation)
Nigredo, Rubedo, Albedo	Stages of spiritual transformation
Purusha (pure consciousness)	Atman (self)
Prakriti (nature)	Citta (psyche), Vritti (mental fluctuations)
Mandala	Yantra

Conclusion

Studying the relationship between Jung’s Active Imagination and Eastern esoteric practices offers profound insights into personal, spiritual, and cultural dimensions. This practice fosters personal transformation by integrating disparate aspects of the psyche, enriching spiritual depth through a synthesis of Western and Eastern traditions, and influencing cultural evolution by engaging with collective unconscious elements.

In conclusion, engaging with Active Imagination can lead to self-awareness and psychological healing, bridging Western psychological insights and Eastern spiritual practices, ultimately contributing to a deeper understanding of the human psyche and its potential for transformation.

Resources

Chodorow, J. (1997). Jung on Active Imagination. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Jung, C. G., & Shamdasani, S. (2009). The Red Book: Liber Novus: A Reader’s Edition. New York: W.W. Norton. The Journal of Analytical Psychology XIth International Conference. (2012). After Liber Novus, 57(2), 364-377.