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Copyright 2002 The Imaginal World Cognate experiences There are certainly people who have begun – as Jung himself claimed to have done – active imagination spontaneously, on their own, without instruction, and without acquaintance with Jungian psychology. No research appears to have been done on such people. How did they begin? What do they do? Most important, what meaning do they give to their own experiences? I have no way of knowing whether my own experience is typical or not. For many years I had imaginal dialogues with what I termed animal spirits, first in the context of long and tiring runs, then in a state of relaxation, and finally during the course of ayahuasca ceremonies in South America. It was with some surprise that I learned, during a later Harner seminar, that such imaginal dialogues were at the heart of Harner's practice of neoshamanism, and with even greater surprise that I began to read James Hillman and found that he was talking about me. Surely there are others out there like me. Are they having imaginal dialogues, not with animal spirits, but with, say, angels of God? Moreover, it is worth asking in what other cultures of the world active imagination has been practiced. For example, it is possible to trace the development and spread of eidetic visualization as a meditative practice in both Hinduism and Buddhism (Beyer, 1977). Where else than in post-Jungian industrialized societies can active imagination be found? One such place that has much been discussed is in the writings of certain Muslim mystics of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, especially the Persian Suhrawardi and the Arabic Avicenna and Ibn al-'Arabi (Corbin, 1969, 1972/2000, 1977; Chittick, 1994). Here imaginal dialogues between men and their angels form the central experience around which a cosmology of levels and worlds revolves (Watkins, 2000, p. 75). Another candidate is in the complex of practices commonly called shamanism. Daniel Noel (1997) has explicitly connected active imagination – especially as taught by James Hillman – with what Harner (1990) calls the shamanic state of consciousness. It is intriguing to think that the shaman's journeys take place in the imaginal world. There is, however, considerable question about the extent to which this identification extends beyond the cultural boundaries of the modern urban neoshamanism taught by Harner, and the extent to which the shamanic state – whatever it is – can be abstracted from specific cultural contexts. Still, one anthropologist has described the development of shamanic training in two stages – first, the enhancing of internal imagery until it provides an experiential alternative to the external world; and, second, developing increased control over the internal images (Noll, 1985, p. 445) – in a way that seems to parallel and mirror the stages of active imagination. What is interesting is that, in shamanism, the control remains closer to that of active imagination or lucid dreaming than to that of eidetic visualization; while the shaman can control his own actions in this imaginal realm, this shamanic state of consciousness, the shaman has no direct control over the actions of the various spirits or other imaginal entities he or she encounters there. As in active imagination, the shaman can ask a question, ask for help, demand compliance, but cannot compel a particular response (see, e.g., Jakobsen, 1999). There are hints of pockets of active imagination even in our own culture. It is difficult to say whether there was any great Jungian influence on the surrealists; they traced their lineage through Freud and Bergson rather than Jung. Yet there may be some reason to believe that the surrealists were independently plunging into the imaginal world, and that in fact their term surreal is a synonym for imaginal. "The imaginary," says André Breton, "is what tends to become real" (quoted in Alquié, 1969, p. 126). And, in his Surrealist Manifesto (1971a, p. 66), he wrote, "Perhaps the imagination is on the verge of recovering its rights. If the depths of our minds conceal strange forces capable of augmenting or conquering those on the surface, it is in our greatest interest to capture them." Similarly, in his Second Surrealist Manifesto (1971b, p. 89), Breton called the imagination the "vital and highest faculty of the mind," the illuminator and not the falsifier of reality, the unveiler of hidden zones. Guillaume Appollinaire, in his Calligrammes, writes of "kingdoms vast and strange," where "there are new fires of colors never seen, a thousand mysterious phantoms, which we must say are real" (quoted in Balakian, 1947, p. 106; my translation; emphasis added). "Reality, then," says Breton's biographer Anna Balakian, "in its dynamic sense proceeding from an interior state, nurtured by what we call imagination, and brought to an exterior existence … is what Breton calls the 'surreal,' in a sense that it has no connection with the unreal" (1971a, p. 89). Paul Eluard says, "Images are, images live, everything becomes image. They were long mistaken for illusions because they were restricted, were made to undergo the test of reality, an insensitive and dead reality" (Eluard, 1932, quoted in Ray, 1971, p. 126). References Alquié, A. (1969). The philosophy of Surrealism. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press. Balakian, A. (1947). The literary origins of Surrealism. New York, NY: New York University Press. Beyer, S. (1977). Notes on the vision quest in early Mahayana. In Gomez, L., & Lancaster, L. (Eds.), Prajñaparamita and related systems: Studies in honor of Edward Conze (pp. 329-340). Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Breton, A. (1971a). Le manifeste du Surréalisme. In Waldberg, P. (Ed.), Surrealism. New York, NY: McGraw-Hill. Breton, A. (1971b). Le second manifeste du Surréalisme. In Balakian, A. (Ed.), Andre Breton: Magus of surrealism. New York, NY: Oxford University Press. Chittick, W. (1994). Imaginal worlds: Ibn al-'Arabi and the problem of religious diversity. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press. Corbin, H. (1969). Creative imagination in the Sufism of Ibn 'Arabi (Mannheim, R., Trans.). Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Corbin, H. (1977). Spiritual body and celestial earth (Pearson, N., Trans.). Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Corbin, H. (2000). Mundus imaginalis: or the imaginary and the imaginal. In Sells, B. (Ed.), Working with images (pp. 71-89). Woodstock, CT: Spring Publications. (Original work published 1972) Eluard, P. (1932). Poetry's evidence (Beckett, S., Trans.). This Quarter, 5(1). Harner, M. (1990). The way of the shaman (3d ed.). New York, NY: Harper Collins. Jakobsen, M. (1999). Shamanism: Traditional and contemporary approaches to the mastery of spirits and healing. New York, NY: Berghahn Books. Noel, D. (1997). The soul of shamanism: Western fantasies, imaginal realities. New York, NY: Continuum. Noll, R. (1985). Mental imagery cultivation as a cultural phenomenon: The role of visions in shamanism. Current Anthropology, 26, 443-451. Ray, P. (1971). The Surrealist Movement in England. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Watkins, M. (2000). Invisible guests: The development of imaginal dialogues. Woodstock, CT: Spring Publications. | |||
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