The Land of Non-Where | Goldenapples

The Land of Non-Where:

Active Imagination and the Mundus Imaginalis

For half a century, C.G. Jung carried a secret. Like his kindred spirit Dante Alighieri, “upon the midpoint of [his] journey of life”, he had visited a third realm. Henry Corbin would term this place the mundus imaginalis, and Jung’s own experiences there would profoundly shape the remainder of his life and his contributions to the still-youthful field of psychology. Jung knew, however, that he lived in a Cartesian world, in a time and a place in which there were only supposed to be two realms: that of mind and matter. The scientific rationalism of his day had no space nor any language for Jung’s experience. Mindful of safeguarding his reputation and his contributions, Jung was aware that if he was overly open and forthright about how he had arrived at his psychological insights, he would be dismissed as a crank, a mystic, or, worst of all, “unscientific”.

Amidst the inner turmoil of a painful rupture with his friend and colleague Sigmund Freud and the tense prelude to the First World War, Jung felt the psychic ground beneath his feet begin to quake. In 1913 and 1914, he experienced recurrent, disturbing visions of the continent of Europe being inundated by a sea of blood (Jung, 1961/1989, p. 175-176). Jung knew a thing or two about psychoses – for ten years, he had worked as a physician at the Burghölzli, Switzerland’s preeminent mental hospital – and was concerned about his psychological health. When his own visions pressed upon him, he tried something radical: to engage with the unbidden images that were insistently emerging from his psyche, lest he be overwhelmed by them.

From 1913 – 1916, Jung experienced what he would later call his “confrontation with the unconscious”. Late at night, he would intentionally invite images and figures from his unconscious, engage and dialogue with them through his ego-consciousness, then scrupulously record the experience in his journals. (1961/1989). These journals were the basis, the prima materia, for Jung’s Liber Novus, commonly known as The Red Book, an elaborately calligraphed and illustrated manuscript he would work on in private over the course of fifteen years that would sit virtually unseen in a vault until its publication in 2009.

This volatile, unsettling time would prove to be the nucleus of his life’s work. Near the end of his prolific life, Jung would state, “All my works, all my creative activity, has come from those initial fantasies and dreams. Everything that I accomplished in later life was already contained in them...in the form of emotions and images.” (1961/1989 p.192) His approach for engaging with such a torrent of fantasy material was necessarily improvisational, and it was only much later that Jung would settle on a name for the technique: active imagination.

Jungian psychology, at its essence, is concerned with the rapprochement between consciousness and the unconscious. In active imagination, Jung stumbled into what would become his most powerful tool in this effort. But the discovery of the third realm, the mundus imaginalis, was in actuality a rediscovery. Corbin, although well-versed in Jungian psychology, was a scholar of Islamic thought and drew his material and inspiration for his work on the realm of the imaginal largely from Persian mystics and philosophers of the 11th through 13th centuries. The Latin mundus imaginalis was Corbin’s best attempt to convey the essence of what Persian scholars of that time termed the Nâ-Kojâ-Abâd, meaning “the land of non-where”. (Corbin, 1972)

"Between (the empirical world and the world of abstract intellect) there is a world that is both intermediary and intermediate… the world of the image, the mundus imaginalis: a world that is ontologically as real as the world of the senses and that of the intellect. This world requires its own faculty of perception, namely, imaginative power." (1972, p. 5)

Corbin suggests that the mundus imaginalis is no less real than the everyday world of sense perception, even in periods of time when its very existence is unrecognized. Corbin was familiar with Jung’s work via their participation in annual Eranos conferences in Switzerland, and he saw a close parallel between Jung’s technique and the work of the medieval Persian scholars he was so familiar with.

Active imagination is the mirror par excellence, the epiphanic place for the Images of the archetypal world. This is why the theory of the mundus imaginalis is closely bound up with a theory of imaginative cognition and of the imaginative function, which is a truly central, mediating function, owing both to the median and the mediating position of the mundus imaginalis. (1972, p. 7)

We might ask, however, even if there is a third realm of imagination, what significance does this have for so-called everyday life? Why is Jung’s confrontation with the unconscious or the Persian mystics “land of non-where” relevant for modernity?

One need look no further than the newspaper headlines to recognize that we live in a world that is deeply troubled. “The world hangs by a thin thread,” Jung once stated, “and that is the psyche of man” (Whitney & Wagner, 1986). Passing through his confrontation with the unconscious gave him some hope that the human psyche could be brought into balance, that the schism between mind and matter could be healed. The imaginal, being the basis of psyche, was the “location” in which psychological therapeia (from the Greek word for healing or curing) could most effectively occur. Brian Dietrich distills the broader implications of the role of active imagination and the mundus imaginalis:

"At their deepest level, Jung’s imaginal discoveries hold the potential of healing modernity’s violent desacralization of the natural world (Tarnas 2006). By suturing together the Cartesian incision cleaving matter from mind, and supplanting the Newtonian image of nature as a lifeless machine with the personified image of the Great Mother, Jungian active imagination restores a collective appreciation and reverence for the Anima Mundi, the living soul of the world." (2016, p. 123)

Jung and Corbin, champions of the imaginal, were heirs to a centuries-long process of rehabilitation of image. From Plato onward, the imagination had been seen as derivative, an inferior reproduction of an ultimate, unseen reality (Kearney, 1988). While the medieval alchemists such as Paracelsus and Renaissance scholars like Giordano Bruno challenged the heterodoxy of this viewpoint, it was not until Emmanuel Kant and the German Romantics that the faculty of human imagination gained headway in Western thought. Richard Kearney explained that Kant sent shockwaves through the field of philosophy:

"by establishing that the image was not just a mediating courier between the divided spheres of the lower ‘body’ and the higher ‘soul’ (the fallacy of dualism), but an inner transcendental unity which resists this very duality. In thus denouncing the traditional interpretations of the image as reproduction, reification and dualism, the modern philosophers hailed imagination as the power of the human subject to create a world of original value and truth." (1988)

By the time Jung had concluded work on The Red Book in 1929, he was unambiguous about the primacy of the imagination in the psyche. Curiously, given the profound impact of his own active imagination practice during his confrontation with the unconscious, Jung said and wrote very little about the details of his technique. With his own clients, Jung did recommend the technique to those whom he felt would derive some benefit, but he encouraged them to do active imagination on their own (i.e. without the real-time guidance of an analyst). While this unguided active imagination hews closer to Jung’s own experience, other psychologists of varying levels of skill and insight would discover widespread receptivity to guided practices, what we would now generally refer to as guided imagery. The early popularizers of active imagination, such as the self-trained French psychologist Robert Desoille, tended more towards formulaic and interventionist approaches in stark contrast to Jung (Dietrich, n.d). Mary Watkins explained that the widespread contemporary lack of familiarity and sophistication with imagery gives this work both promise and peril.

"We must acknowledge, however, that what makes the guide so needed in our culture — our ignorance of the imaginal — also makes the notions of guides and guiding particularly dangerous. A way of moving in imaginal space or being with a threatening image are more eagerly accepted and welcomed as the way. Once this process begins we can all too easily find ourselves dealing with an unknown as if it were a known. We cease to discover or allow ourselves to be open to invention and suggestion." (1976/1998, p. 131)

Contemporary psychotherapists, particularly of the Jungian and archetypal or imaginal schools, have generally arrived at a middle path between Jung’s unguided active imagination and Desoille’s heavy-handed (and arguably manipulative) guided imagery. Specific techniques vary, but each builds upon Jung’s three-part process here elaborated by Dietrich:

"Jung’s active imagination consists of inviting the unconscious to arise and then “coming to terms with the unconscious”. Unconscious activity is encouraged through a suspension or relaxation of the rational mind. In the first stage, the unconscious takes the lead while ego bears witness to arising images. In the second stage, consciousness leads: the ego engages and interacts with images and emotions flowing from the creative unconscious. Jung emphasized the second stage, coming to terms with the unconscious, because it involves integrating the imaginal experience and deriving meaning from it. We then ground the experience by transforming the insights or wisdom gained into committed action in the outer world." (2016, p. 126)

My own active imagination experiences over the past several months, some of which were guided practices and others unguided, offer something of a case study for our exploration of the topic. Each session followed the tripartite structure as described by Dietrich. I compiled artistic renderings of the insights and images gleaned from these rich experiences in what I entitled Liber Imaginalis, with a nod to Jung and Corbin as well as the “book’s” home, the contemporary “land of non-where”, the internet.

In the first several exercises, images often seemed chaotic and unstable. An early image of standing upon a basalt pillar in the midst of the ocean (III, Cathedra Inanis), however, gave me confidence and a sense that – come what may – I was standing upon a solid foundation that descended to the very center of the earth. Upon finally landing in the “beautiful tranquil place” of the Alpine Village (IV Villa Alpinus), continuities of themes and characters began to emerge. In particular, my experiences spoke to the theme of human estrangement from the natural world, the gulf between the domesticated and the wild, and both the possibility and necessity of working to bridge that gulf. In my early experiences in the imaginal realm, I largely maintained my own physical appearance and characteristics. As the sessions progressed, however, I began to literally wrestle and dance with wildness (IX Vitula Elegans, XI Ballo) and eventually transmuted into both animal and seed (XII In Silva). These experiences have deeply influenced both my academic and creative work, informing the content of the short film The Thin Thread (XIV Filum) and a paper entitled East of Eden: Wilderness, Domestication, and the Psyche.

Like mycelium webs of the soil or the interstitial fascia of human body, the mundus imaginalis is an intermediary, a place of communication, connection, and rapprochement, a world between worlds. In rediscovering this realm via the psychological tool of active imagination, C.G. Jung developed a powerful method for mediating the conscious and unconscious aspects of the psyche. He also tapped into a wellspring of imaginal creativity that fueled the remainder of his long and remarkable life. The rifts in the human psyche between nature and culture, conscious and unconscious have only become more pronounced in the decades since Jung’s death, and the consequences of this rift are now unmistakable. The realm of connection and mediation, therefore, is all the more important; active imagination and guided imagery are invaluable guideposts on how we arrive in the mundus imaginalis.

References

Adams, M. V. (2014). For the love of imagination: interdisciplinary applications of Jungian psychoanalysis. New York, NY: Routledge.

Corbin, H. (1972) Mundus imaginalis or the imaginary and the imaginal. Spring 1 – 19.

Dietrich, B. (2016). C.G. Jung, champion of the imagination. In L. Davenport (Ed.), Transformative imagery: cultivating the imagination for healing, change, and growth. London, UK and Philadelphia, PA: Jessica Kingsley Publishers.

Dietrich, B. (n.d.). Honoring the ecology between worlds: depth psychology and relational guided imagery. E-book.

Kearney, R. (1988). Wake of the imagination. New York, NY: Routledge.

Watkins, M. (1976/1998). Waking dreams. Dallas, TX: Spring Publications.

Whitney, M. (Director), and Wagner, S. (Writer). (1986). Matter of heart [Motion Picture].

United States: Kino International.