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Copyright 2002 The Imaginal World Conclusion It is remarkable that a state of consciousness so widely inculcated should be so little studied outside of Jungian circles. It is hard to understand why this is so, except to shrug and say that other similar experiences, such as lucid dreaming, were similarly ignored until fairly recently. Clearly much work needs to be done – not only basic scientific work, such as EEG studies, but also a cross-cultural search to find similar techniques in other, non-Jungian contexts. Even where an author such as James Hillman has reached a more general audience, it is probably fair to say that many readers are unable to place him properly in his Jungian context. I must confess that there is a lot to dislike about Hillman – his willful obscurantism, his romantic posturing, his quasi-racist admiration for "the South," his peculiar assumptions about the place of obscure Greek myths, and obscure Renaissance writers like Ficino, in the consciousness of people generally. I dislike the fact that, despite his avowal of paganism and polytheism, he ignores as irrelevant most of the world's pagan and polytheist peoples. But much of what he says about the phenomenology of active imagination, and the way in which that imagination can metaphorize and deliteralize the world, also seems to me to be quite true. Here again, there is work to be done. < Previous Next > | |||
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