Another foray into active imagination

I’ve written several times here and on Twitter about my practice of Jungian active imagination. This time I thought I’d share and analyze a transcript.

I wrote the following transcript during a session that lasted perhaps ninety minutes. Each session is a sort of meditation; one locates a particular emotion, brings it into focus, and then expresses whatever comes up mentally using one’s preferred medium. Some people sculpt clay, draw, or even dance; I happen to like writing. Most of the experience is descriptive: I am seeing an image in my mind’s eye that I did not create or choose, and I try to transcribe it as accurately as possible. There are moments where I consciously intervene, or choose actions, but the reactions and voices of characters other than myself, and the setting itself, seem to bubble up from deeper strata of the mind. After the session, ideally, the emotion is transformed, though it may take days or weeks to understand how.

An important feature of the sessions is crying. This is so consistent that I usually decide whether or not the session was successful in transforming the initial emotion by whether or not, and how much, I cried during the session. My record is two and a half hours, but I guess it’s not a competition. I think crying is the physiological process associated with erasing mental structures, and that people mistakenly associate tears with grief, because the process of grieving is the special case where those structures are associated with things that are lost, like people or possibilities. The point of the practice is that, by erasing mental structures and habits, one might discover new, more wonderful ways of relating to familiar experiences.

Here’s the transcript. Read it, and then I’ll share my analysis.

I open a faucet that sticks out of the ground in the desert, and frantically put my mouth under it, only for nothing except a single stale, brown drop to come out. The sun bakes the earth and beats down on me. I lie on my back, stare at the sky, and prepare to die.

I yell at the sky: “I know that you’re not going to save me, but do you mean to say I’m not even worth killing swiftly?”

The scene skips to a few hours later. The man is kneeling over a rock, and carving something furiously. The rock reads: “Here lies a really great guy.” Satisfied, he puts the headstone down, then lies down with his head next to it. There is a strange defiance in his eyes. Something within him is standing upright, unmoved and unbroken in spite of his fate.

He thinks about it, and decides that he is not ready to go yet. He chuckles to himself, and as he kneels and presses a single palm to the ground, he mutters: “Gondor calls for aid.” Nothing happens for an awkward few moments, and then a signal fire lights on the tallest peak of the distant range, an unmistakable dot of orange against the blue.

He sees the fire, and it is small and distant. The familiar despair begins to grow, but suddenly a javelin streaks through the air and pierces the ground in front of him. He sees the clouds of dust before he can discern the white horses and the golden warriors that ride them. He notices now that there is a ring of beacons on the peaks encircling this desert. The white armies converge on his location, and he turns his gaze upwards once more.

He gazes at the sky, but it is unclear what to do. He cannot wage war against the sun, not with these men and their horses, anyway.

He understands now. He directs the men to unload their cargo, and to assemble the pumps. Slowly, the men build huge pumps, which stand thirty feet tall atop pipes thicker than tree trunks. The men begin to move the great levers that actuate the pumps, pulling them back and forth with ropes that take ten men to lift, and the iron machines groan. With each stroke the sense of anticipation grows. The fires continue to burn expectantly on the mountaintops.

The men work all day, and no water appears. The sun is setting now, and all have decided to rest. Spirits are low. The soil is dark in places—there are traces of moisture. But the pumps still run dry.

The man imagines many possibilities. He imagines melting the snow on the mountaintops and flooding this plain. He imagines drilling deep into the earth to find the water table itself, and bringing the precious liquid back to the surface. He imagines praying to the gods and spirits, humbling himself completely. He imagines working the men to death on the pumps. He also imagines a strange dance that he learned as a child. The dance is a sequence of 128 moves, each imitating a particular motion of water. It is not a prayer; it does not ask for anything. It is not a technology, because it does not have a purpose. It is something more like a celebration, or in this case perhaps a requiem.

He draws a circle in the dirt, steps into it, and begins to dance. The men sit where they are and watch. At first, the movements look erratic, but then the dance speeds up, and gains a fluency that seems to surpass the abilities of man. A quick turn of the wrists and some of the men stand up suddenly—for a moment they felt as though they went over the edge of a thousand-foot waterfall, carried by the swift current. The dance continues, and the men see visions. Minute ripples on a still pond grow into the swells of the southern oceans. A river twists and curls, becoming increasingly sinuous. A drop falls onto a perfect surface and the impact causes another drop to rise into the air. The dance eventually ends, with the man’s leg circling his body and then returning to support his weight. Many of the men watching are openly weeping. Some have stood up and begun to work the pumps again, fervently, as if responding to some sort of summons. There is no order or sense to the men’s response; it is as if god had spoken to them.

The pumping continues by torchlight. Around midnight, there is a yell from one team of men. One of the pumps has started to drip. It’s too little to use, but the rhythm of the droplets hitting the ground, three times in two seconds, sounds like the prayer a mother speaks for her child.

I watch the men pumping, their strokes aligned to the frequency of the dripping—a third of the pumps synchronized to each of three phases. A voice speaks, and it is unclear if only I can hear it, or if I am imagining it. “There will come a day when the water roars out of the ground as if impatient to greet you. It is not today, and it may not be tomorrow. But it will come, and it will be my honor to witness it.”

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To understand this session, one must understand the relationship between the ego—in this case, used to mean the conscious “I”—and everything else in the mind. The fundamental posture of the ego is defiance and management. The ego has a tendency to reject conditions, emotions, and inferences that it does not like, and try to reshape them into things it does like. To this end, it places all kinds of things under conscious supervision and control. This is an exhausting and emotionally unpleasant experience, because one is constantly trying to change and shape the way that experience—thoughts, feelings, and the external world—is naturally unfolding.

The alternative is to recognize that other parts of the mind that are not visible to consciousness are capable of handling things on their own, often in vastly superior ways. The signature of ego-control is a kind of fragility and anxiety that appears as the ego attempts to keep circumstances unfolding along a carefully-controlled path. The stronger position is a kind of self-trust, in which the ego believes that some force beyond itself will, when confronted with adverse circumstances, rise bravely to the occasion, and thus careful management is unnecessary. It is impossible to realize that these forces exist when they are not given the chance to act, and the crux of this particular session is in the moments that the ego briefly lets its managerial attitude lapse, permitting the deeper aspects of the psyche to reveal their strength and reliability.

The arc of this session is now straightforward. The ego experiences a condition it does not like—the water has run dry. It briefly experiences despair—lying down to die—then immediately converts it into defiance by yelling at the sky and carving a cheeky epitaph. Then comes the first shift. Instead of acting in its usual way, the ego decides to ask for help. In The Lord of the Rings, the beacons of Gondor are a series of bonfires placed on high mountains so that one kingdom might summon help in times of dire need. The invocation of this reference represents the ego asking for help from an aspect of the mind that it does not control. This is a moment of letting go; the ego briefly stops trying to fix the situation, and asks something else to handle it. This requires trust, and when that trust is repaid with deliverance in the form of the army, the emotional experience is a deep sense of relief. The ego no longer has to fix everything on its own. This is the first point in this session during which I cried, though briefly, which suggests that some sort of habit or fixed attitude dissolved.

The next narrative beat is the realization that, although an army has been summoned, there is no enemy that can reasonably be attacked. This is, again, a moment where a habit is relinquished. The ego has the tendency to be combative, and to look for other entities to blame for its dissatisfaction. The scene denies this move, offering nothing to fight but the sun, which forces attention to refocus on the original issue: the lack of water.

Now the army unloads their cargo, which happens to be a series of iron pumps. This is convenient, which is one of the markers that separates active imagination from storytelling. Developments in active imagination tend to be unrealistically convenient, in a way that would make a story boring, when you have the right attitude.¹

Again the ego slips into its defiant mode. The men assemble tremendous pumps, and begin to work them. Though other aspects of the psyche have been enlisted in the effort, this is still, fundamentally, the ego’s mobilization of resistance against the dryness of the desert. That said, the psyche is not entirely unwilling. Dampness appears in the dirt. It is not a futile effort, but the lack of flowing water—which, I should mention, tends to symbolize eros, the inexplicable pull that guides attention and therefore life—suggests that whatever is happening is not the right way of going about this.

The ego realizes this, and evaluates its options. This was a moment of conscious intervention. I sat and thought about what to do, since the pumps were not drawing water. This may seem silly, but it is important to take the images seriously on their own terms, and to engage with them as one would real life. The possibilities I initially came up with felt sterile, like variants of the same exhausting labor. Even prayer felt like some sort of desperate appeal. Then I had a new idea (it is these “new ideas” that drive the practice) and began to describe it. This was the dance, which led the session to its culmination. I cried for around twenty minutes while I expressed the nature of the dance, which became visible to me very slowly. The essential feature of the dance is that it is not trying to do anything, and the description is very explicit about that: it is not a prayer, and it is not a technology. Even if the water is lost forever, the dance celebrates its memory. When the ego is pushed to the limit, backed into a corner, and completely denied the outcomes it seeks, a new way appears. It goes by many names—play, non-attached action, unconditional love—but the underlying mode is the same.

In the end, it is the dance that reanimates the exhausted men, and their renewed efforts are derived from the new attitude. It is with that attitude that water is for the first time drawn from the pumps. Like the beacons, this is an affirmative response from the deeper psyche that arrives when the correct attitude is established. The final words of the disembodied voice encourage the ego to trust that forces beyond it are in motion, and above all that the water is not lost forever.

1. I take this as a lesson about life as a whole.