In this tradition, the active imagination serves as an "organ of the soul, thanks to which humanity can establish a cognitive and visionary relationship with an intermediate world".
[2] As developed by Carl Jung between 1913 and 1916,[3] active imagination is a meditation technique wherein the contents of one's unconscious are translated into images, narratives, or personified as separate entities.
The key to active imagination is restraining the conscious waking mind from exerting influence on internal images as they unfold.
[4] Of the origin of active imagination, Jung wrote: It was during Advent of the year 1913 – December 12, to be exact – I resolved upon the decisive step.
[7] Doing active imagination permits the thoughtforms of the unconscious, or inner "self", and of the totality of the psyche, to act out whatever messages they are trying to communicate to the conscious mind.
[8] The post-Jungian Michael Fordham was to go further, suggesting that "active imagination, as a transitional phenomenon ... can be, and often is, both in adults and children put to nefarious purposes and promotes psychopathology.
"[9] In partial answer to this critique, James Hillman and Sonu Shamdasani discuss at length the dangers of viewing active imagination solely as an expression of personal content.
They propose the technique is easily misunderstood and misdirected when applied to the strictly biographical and should never be used to bridge the personal with the dead.
Instead, they suggest, active imagination in Jung's usage was an exposition of the unvoiced influences of the collective unconscious, shedding the terminology of psychology to work directly through mythic images: SS: ...
The resulting imaginal cognition he believed to be an initial step on a path leading from rational consciousness toward ever-deeper spiritual experience.
On the other hand, to manifest the concrete forms of the world, divinity created a range of intermediate beings, the angelic co-creators of the universe.
[14] Henry Corbin considered imaginal cognition to be a "purely spiritual faculty independent of the physical organism and thus surviving it".
Corbin suggested that by developing our imaginal perception, we can go beyond mere symbolic representations of archetypes to the point where "new senses perceive directly the order of [supersensible] reality".
The "public imaginal" was named after the dynamic, symbolic, and complex set of diverse and heterogeneous imaginaries that permeate societies.
An example rarely spoken of is Descartes' three dreams, which led to his ideas of mathematics and philosophy, which influenced much of modern thinking.