“There was an old tradition in the Christian Church that one had not prayed unless one’s lips had moved. This idea expresses a psychological truth: Something physical has to happen. This is why it is so important that you write your examples down on paper. When you physically write those examples, the connections with your dream become clear and definite.”
Robert A. Johnson, Inner Work (Page 66)
Quotes from Inner Work
“How the shadow appears in a dream depends on the ego’s attitude. For example, if a man’s attitude is friendly toward his inner shadow, and he is willing to grow and change, the shadow will often appear as a helpful friend, a ‘buddy,’ a tribal brother who helps him in his adventures, backs him up, and teaches him skills. If he is trying to repress his shadow, it will usually appear as a hateful enemy, a brute or monster who attacks him in his dreams. The same principles apply to a woman. Depending on her relationship to her shadow, she may appear as a loving sister or as a frightful witch.”
Robert A. Johnson, Inner Work (Page 50)
“Even a short, seemingly insignificant dream tries to tell us something that we need to know Dreams never waste our time. If we take the trouble to listen to the ‘little’ dreams, we find that they carry important messages.”
Robert A. Johnson, Inner Work (Page 44)
“None of us is just one thing. We are not monodimensional creatures; we are rich combinations of the infinitely varied archetypes. Each of us is part heroine or hero and part coward, part parent and part child, part saint and part thief. It is in learning to identify these great archetypal motifs within ourselves, learning to honor each one as a legitimate human trait, learning to live out the energy of each in a constructive way, that we make inner work a great odyssey of the spirit.”
Robert A. Johnson, Inner Work (Page 34)
“It is in [the] exchange between the ego and the various characters who rise up from the unconscious and appear in my imagination that I begin to bind the fragmented pieces of myself into a unity. I begin to know, and learn from, the parts of myself I had never known before.”
Robert A. Johnson, Inner Work (Page 26)
“Our English word fantasy derives from the Greek word phantasía. The original meaning of this word is instructive: It meant: ‘a making-visible.’ It derived from the verb that means ‘to make visible, to reveal.’ The correlation is clear: The psychological function of our capacity for fantasy is to make visible the otherwise invisible dynamics of the unconscious psyche.”
Robert A. Johnson, Inner Work (Page 23)
“Our culture in the twentieth century has a tremendous collective prejudice against the imagination. It is reflected in the things people say: ‘You are only imagining things,’ or, ‘That is only your fantasy, not reality.’ In fact, no one ‘makes up’ anything in the imagination. The material that appears in the imagination has to originate in the unconscious. Imagination, properly understood, is a channel through which this material flows to the conscious mind. To be even more accurate, imagination is a transformer that converts the invisible material into images the conscious mind can perceive.”
Robert A. Johnson, Inner Work (Page 22)
“Since dream images make no sense in ordinary terms, people dismiss them as ‘weird’ or meaningless, but actually, dreams are completely coherent. If we take the time to learn their language, we discover that every dream is a masterpiece of symbolic communication. The unconscious speaks in symbols, not to confuse us, but simply because that is its native idiom.”
Robert A. Johnson, Inner Work (Page 20)
“Just as a burning fire inherently exudes heat, the unconscious inherently generates symbols. It is simply the nature of the unconscious to do so. As we learn to read those symbols we gain the ability to perceive the workings of the unconscious within us. This ability to produce symbols affects more than just our dreams: All of human life is nourished by the flow of symbolic imagery from the wellsprings of the unconscious.”
Robert A. Johnson, Inner Work (Page 20)
“The world of dreaming, if we only realized it, has more practical and concrete effect on our lives than outer events do. For it is in the world of dreaming that the unconscious is working out its powerful dynamics. It is there that the great forces do battle or combine to produce the attitudes, ideals, beliefs, and compulsions that motivate most of our behavior.”
Robert A. Johnson, Inner Work (Page 19)
“Each dream communicates information that isn’t know consciously by the dreamer. It therefore takes some real effort, some stretching of our capacities, to get a hold on what the dream is saying. If the interpretation comes too easily, it is not likely to be as accurate or as deep.”
Robert A. Johnson, Inner Work (Page 15)
“Jung observed that the aboriginal people of Australia spend two-thirds of their waking lives in some form of inner work. They do religious ceremony, discuss and interpret their dreams, make spirit quests, ‘go walkabout.’ All this consistent effort is devoted to the inner life, to the realm of dreams, totems, and spirits—that is, to making contact with the unconscious. We modern people can scarcely get a few hours free in an entire week to devote to the inner world. This is why, for all our technology, we may know less of our souls and less of God than seemingly primitive people do.”
Robert A. Johnson, Inner Work (Page 14)
“It isn’t necessary to struggle to be like someone else, for by being one’s own self one stands on the surest ground. We realize that to know ourselves completely and to develop all the strengths that are built into us is a lifetime task. We don’t need to make an imitation of someone else’s life. There is no further need for pretensions, for what is already ours is riches enough, and far more than we ever expected.”
Robert A. Johnson, Inner Work (Page 12)
“The more one faces the unconscious and makes a synthesis between its contents and what is in the conscious mind, the more one derives a sense of one’s unique individuality.”
Robert A. Johnson, Inner Work (Page 11)
“Every person must live the inner life in one form or another. Consciously or unconsciously, voluntarily or involuntarily, the inner world will claim us and exact its dues. If we go to that realm consciously, it is by our inner work: our prayers, meditations, dream work, ceremonies, and Active Imagination. If we try to ignore the inner world, as most of us do, the unconscious will find its way into our lives through pathology: our psychosomatic symptoms, compulsions, depressions, and neuroses.”
Robert A. Johnson, Inner Work (Page 10)
“If we don’t go to the spirit, the spirit comes to us as neurosis.”
Robert A. Johnson, Inner Work (Page 10)
“In modern Western society we have reached a point at which we try to get by without acknowledging the inner life at all. We act as though there were no unconscious, no realm of the soul, as though we could live full lives by fixating ourselves completely on the external, material world. We try to deal with all the issues of life by external means—making more money, getting more power, starting a love affair, or ‘accomplishing something’ in the material world. But we discover to our surprise that the inner world is a reality that we ultimately have to face.”
Robert A. Johnson, Inner Work (Page 10)
“The disaster that has overtaken the modern world is the complete splitting off of the conscious mind from its roots in the unconscious. All the forms of interaction with the unconscious that nourished our ancestors—dreams, vision, ritual, and religious experience—are largely lost to us, dismissed by the modern mind as primitive or superstitious. Thus in our pride and hubris, our faith in our unassailable reason, we cut ourselves off from our origins in the unconscious and form the from the deepest parts of ourselves.”
Robert A. Johnson, Inner Work (Page 10)
“The purpose of learning to work with the unconscious is not just to resolve our conflicts or deal with our neuroses. We find there a deep source of renewal, growth, strength, and wisdom. We connect with the source of our evolving character; we cooperate with the process whereby we bring the total self together; we learn to tap that rich lode of energy and intelligence that waits within.”
Robert A. Johnson, Inner Work (Page 9)
“Each of us is building a life, building an edifice. Within each person the plan and the basic structure are established in a deep place in the unconscious. But we need to consult the unconscious and cooperate with it in order to realize the full potential that is built into us. And we have to face the challenges and painful changes that the process of inner growth always brings.”
Robert A. Johnson, Inner Work (Page 7)