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In order to trust your own instinctive depths and honor your own true rhythm, you must adopt an attitude of openness and receptivity to the unconscious. Like a curious explorer, you can wander and meander in your underground world, playing and dreaming. You can explore the rich treasure house of the unconscious.
One of the most important cycles for humans is the mysterious cycle flowing between conscious and unconscious life. The psyche is dynamically alive, able to move and develop because it flows in a cycle between waking consciousness, with its clarity and enlightenment, and another kind of consciousness that dips into other realms like sleep, dream, fantasy and myth. Whatever the means of traveling there, the unconscious is one of the psyche’s inevitable destinations, and brings replenishment to your whole being.
As long as you are alive, you will dip down into the unconscious to get some riches and return again to the world above to gain clarity. You must learn to descend into the unknown parts of yourself with open curiosity. In this way you are listening for opportunities to descend into the unconscious and retrieve the riches there.
Watch what happens in your dream or fantasy times when you cross over into the unconscious awareness. Stay open to your dream life and be curious about the rich images that emerge. Remain open to fleeting fantasies and daydreams and follow their thread in your imagination as far as you can. You must be receptive to your wild feelings and crazy ideas and – rather than pushing them aside – take them seriously, give them room to breathe.
When confronted with images, symbols and nonlinear reality, allow yourself to play with them. You don’t have to “make sense” of them. In order to play, it is important to not categorize images according to this theory or that, but play with them by free-associating. It is important to make connections to whatever comes to mind. You can taste and smell the image, touch it and turn it over, look at the symbol or the dream material or the fantasy from different angles.
If you are caught in the grip of collective conscious images only, you only ingest what your culture is feeding you. So if you do not want to be spoon-fed all your images, you need to turn off your television, go on a media fast, and start paying attention to your own dreams and fantasies. If you do this, you will be amazed at the creativity that you can generate yourself, and at the wisdom that springs forth from your own depths.
