There was a method to Jung's madness: active imagination. It, along with the transcendent function, are the two most important discoveries Jung made in the years leading up to World War One........ As with his public and private opinions about spirits and the occult, Jung seems to have kept quiet about things that could threaten his persona as a scientist.
What, then, is active imagination? In practice it's exactly what Jung did in his visions and conversations with inner figures ......: entering a fantasy and talking with one's ‘self' -- at least a part of oneself ‘normally' left unconscious -- asking questions and receiving knowledge that one -- ‘you' -- did not know. In many ways, its
something we engage in often already, but in a shallow, fleeting way, when we ‘ask ourselves' what we think or will do about a situation.
More abstractly, it's a method of consciously entering into a dialogue with the unconscious, which triggers the transcendent function, a vital shift in consciousness, brought about through the union of the conscious and unconscious minds. Unexpected insights and self-renewal are some of the results of the transcendent function. It achieves what I call that elusive ‘Goldilocks' condition, the ‘just right' of having the conscious and unconscious minds work together, rather than being at odds. In the process it produces a third state more vivid and ‘real' than either; in it we recognize what consciousness should be like and see our ‘normal' state as at best a muddling-through. Previously, the transcendent function had helped Jung when faced with the dilemma of having to choose between science or the humanities. Then it operated through a dream, producing the mandala-like symbol of the giant radiolarian. In the simplest sense, the transcendent function is our in-built means of growth, psychological and spiritual -- it's ‘transcendent' only in the sense that it ‘transcends' the frequent deadlock between the conscious and unconscious minds -- and is a development of what Jung earlier recognized as the "prospective tendencies in man."
https://realitysandwich.com/56857/ju...e_imagination/