Book Club 1.1 - Inner Work by Robert Johnson (Introductory chapters)

The what and why of inner work

This week’s book club takes us through most of the intro up to “Conflict and Unification (p.36). This coming week we’re finishing the intro and reading the first few chapters of the Dream Work section — up to “Step Two: Dynamics” (p.65)

Right! This was a great place to start our Substack book club. These first chapters have got me excited for what’s to come. I’m quite handy with my dreamwork but I’m looking forward to seeing if I can learn any new tricks from Johnson with dreams and I’m even more excited to learn about Active Imagination more and to get practising.

I liked how he framed these two components:

“[The unconscious] has two natural pathways for bridging the gap and speaking to the conscious mind: One is by dreams the other is through the imagination.” (p.4)

“We may picture two conduits that run from the unconscious to the conscious mind. The first conduit is the faculty of dreaming; the second is the faculty of imagination. Dreaming and imagination have one special quality in common: their power to convert the invisible forms of the unconscious into images that are perceptible to the conscious mind.” (p.21)

I’d never thought of these are two different streams before and I like it as a frame. They both use symbol as a language and so there’s a shared tongue between them. So far so good.

One thought I had while reading about dreams and this symbolical language was the work of Iain McGilchrist. McGilchrist talks about the neuroscientific differences between the two hemispheres of the brain. The left-hemisphere is the hemisphere of spotlight focused attention and speech; The right-hemisphere is more floodlight big picture thinking and it is incapable of speech. But there’s a caveat: the right-hemisphere isn’t unlinguistic. The left-hemisphere can speak but its language is literal. What the right-hemisphere brings to language is allusion and depth. Humour and poetry are only possible with the right-hemisphere. And if I recall correctly it is better with image and symbol (certainly the latter given the impossibility of a symbol without depth).

It seems to me then, that in dreams we are getting a more right-hemispheric leaning experience. Which makes sense if we think of dreams as involved in memory processing (deleting unnecessary details to make it more useful — very right-hemisphere work) and digesting our daily experiences in order to reorient ourselves and to recalibrate our attitude. Just a thought that I also had when reading McGilchrist’s The Master and His Emissary. Perhaps something to follow up a later date.

Inner Work

As for the work at hand, Johnson gave us a list of forms that Inner Work can take:

“inner work: our prayers, meditations, dream work, ceremonies and Active Imagination.” (p.11)

And some clear indicators on the nature of this work:

“Inner work is the effort by which we gain awareness of the deeper layers of consciousness within us and move toward integration of the total self.” (p.13)

“The point of inner work is to build consciousness. By learning to do your own inner work, you gain insight into the conflicts and challenges that your life presents. You are able to search the hidden depths of your own unconscious to find the strengths and resources that wait to be discovered there.” (p.13)

“The techniques of inner work are intended to set in motion the great powers of the unconscious but in a sense this is like taking the cap off a geyser: Things can get out of hand if you are not careful … You need to be particularly careful with Active Imagination … The main point is to have a friend you can call on if you lose your bearings.” (p.17)

This latter quote is also worth keeping in mind for another reason. Like the caution above Hell in Dante’s Inferno, it’s perhaps a caution to us if we are to start an Active Imagination practise after this. Something worthy of more reflection in future I feel. Perhaps a strength of the group itself — a container which can help us as we enter this underworld of the soul?

Aside from that, there’s a lot in there so let’s unpack it a bit. Inner work is about:

• Awareness: of the deeper layers of consciousness

  • Building consciousness

  • Gaining insight into the conflicts and challenges that life deals us

• Individuation: movement towards integrating the entirety of our being

  • Finding our untapped unconscious strengths and resources

• The Other Within: setting in motion the powers of the unconscious

I would see these as two different levels. On the one hand, we have the everyday therapeutic use of these techniques: building consciousness so we can flourish better in our day-to-day lives.

But there’s another level beyond this mundane one and it’s a running theme throughout these chapters we’ve read: the Transcendent level. This is the Jungian unconscious: powerful, ancient, mythic. It is the dragon. Stirring this dragon we may find the riches that it hides but we may also be destroyed by its power. Or in facing that dragon we may discover our strengths — the journey revealing the hero (or perhaps constituting him as Foucault might frame it).

This latter flame is what always attracted me to the Jungian. Beneath the seemingly scientific/philosophical veneer of “the unconscious” we find a whole mystical worldview. I was going to end that sentence with “smuggled in”. I guess I can’t help but look at these things with a critical eye these days.

But this lure of the Transcendental — it still has some hooks in me. I guess I still want to believe and have hope that there is something numinous here. At the very least, from my studies into Multiple Personality Disorder/Dissociation this summer, I believe there’s many subpersonalities in each of us. This fits with the current neuroscientific paradigm (Michael Gazzaniga being the originator though perhaps he was inspired by Marvin Minsky) of consciousness as emerging from conflicting modules in the brain. Mix this with Gazzaniga’s work on split-brain patients and McGilchrist’s meta-study of the hemispheres and I think we’ve got a solid opening for Active Imagination’s value.

This Q2 (external individual to use Wilber’s original Four Quadrants terminology) account of Gazzaniga and McGilchrist dovetails nicely with the Q1 (internal individual) account of Jung. Split brain science and module theory speak of a pluralistic consciousness. So too does Jung’s account.

Disharmony then fits within the old Nietzschean paradigm of drives. Foreshadowing all of this, in 1886’s Beyond Good and Evil Nietzsche wrote: