3 Ways to Use Your Imagination for Personal Growth

Debra Maldonado  04:21

Like AI almost.

Robert Maldonado  04:24

It’s the ability to self-reflect, it’s going to ask, “What kind of structure am I in and what can I develop as far as software for myself in order to evolve to the next level?” Imagination is much more powerful than information. Guess who said that?

Debra Maldonado  04:47

Einstein. He said imagination is everything.

Robert Maldonado  04:51

If we look at his work, what he was doing was running what are called thought experiments. A thought experiment, you don’t have to go to the lab and set up your experiments to understand what the results would be. You can run it in your imagination. What is our imagination? It’s our ability to think of the world like a video that we can run forward and backward, we can freeze-frame it, then run alternative futures like alternative endings to the movie. We can look at those things as thought experiments without actually living through them.

Debra Maldonado  05:51

By default, the mind is designed this way because we needed to foresee the future to prevent us from harm. There’s a survival mechanism that the imagination has. Say, you got hurt going really fast or tripping down the stairs. Every time you go down the stairs, your imagination kicks in, I hope I don’t fall down the stairs again. It starts picturing it. If you flub on stage, your mind is going to hold on to that and go, “Be careful, you don’t want to flub on stage again.” It creates the worst-case scenario to protect you. That’s basically the default that we use our imagination for. We imagine our worst-case scenario all the time as a survival mechanism. We rarely use our imagination for the best-case scenario.

Robert Maldonado  06:49

There is a negativity bias installed in our software.

Debra Maldonado  06:56

It’s like a risk management system, make sure everything’s checked off.

Robert Maldonado  07:02

But if we let it go on autopilot, on default mode, which most people, most of us do, because we’re never taught how to change that pattern in the brain or in the mind, then we’re stuck with it. Our mind will go to the default, which is a negativity bias. We’re always going to be looking for problems, focusing on the wrong thing, which is the worst-case scenario, instead of the possibilities.

Debra Maldonado  07:36

There’s a funny story a friend of mine told me when I was single a long time ago. It was a story of a woman who was riding in the car with her partner she was dating. She said to him, “Can you believe it, we’ve been dating three months already.” He was really quiet the whole time. She couldn’t figure out, her imagination went “I’m pushing him. He’s having fears about a relationship.” Later on, she calls him and says “If you’re not ready for a commitment, I think we should just break up.” Meanwhile, his side of the story is, while he was sitting there, he was thinking, “Three months? Did I change the oil? Has it been three months? What’s gonna happen to my car?” He drops her off and forgets all about it, it didn’t even matter to him. He had pizza, had a beer, and then she breaks up with him. It’s a funny thing where we make up what other people are thinking of us. We read other people’s minds, that mind reading that our brain does. There’s a lot of cognitive distortions. We start reading the world and our imagination blows it up to this big thing. Have you ever had a misunderstanding with someone where you thought they meant something and you meant something, then when you talk about it, it’s like “Oh!” but in the middle your imagination just looks for the worse. It never says, “She must have meant well” it’s like, “This is a terrible person.” It really does drive our life if we aren’t conscious of it. It’s like a runaway train, our imagination. My friend used to call it the crazy train. We’d go on a train of obsessive thinking, our imagination just takes us for a ride, then we feel so upset and spend so much of our energy worried about something that’s not even something to worry about. That’s the downside of imagination.

Robert Maldonado  09:35

That’s the whole idea. If we don’t know how to work with our mind, it’s like having a supercomputer delivered to our home without instructions. We’re misusing it, we use it to play very simple video games or make phone calls and things like that. We want to understand what the mind is, what imagination is, why Einstein thought it is so important. Carl Jung discovered this power of the imagination. He was studying the mind, the brain, psychopathology, all these incredible things early on. He was out to develop a psychology that would allow us to master the mind and imagination. Just like Einstein, he found it was incredibly powerful. It’s like one of the superpowers we’re given. But we have to understand how to use it. If we don’t understand how to use it, we end up using it in the wrong way to create the worst possible scenarios for ourselves. Instead of creating possibility and opportunity.

Debra Maldonado  10:55

Mark Twain had a famous quote. “A lot of terrible things happened in my life, most of them didn’t happen.” That’s really the default mind. It gets in there. Now active imagination is actually different from guided imagination or guided visualization. It’s part of your bringing in imagination there. But active imagination is a little different. Can you talk about what the difference is?

Robert Maldonado  11:26

Around 1913, Jung broke up with Freud, they split and had a big falling out. He underwent a crisis of consciousness, he wasn’t sure on his path forward. He started to look inward and take note of what was going on in his mind as he experienced these things. He found that his imagination was taking him to very deep places in the psyche. He started to develop this technique called active imagination as a way of communicating with this unconscious content coming up from his deeper psyche.

Debra Maldonado  12:29

Instead of passive imagination, active means you’re not only just opening up your mind to that imagination, but being able to interact, chat, have more of a dialogue with it.

Robert Maldonado  12:45

He wanted to create a two-way communication system, instead of just letting the unconscious submerge our awareness through its powerful symbols and emotions that arise from the unconscious. He said, “What about the conscious role in this equation?” How can we, as conscious beings, start to communicate back and forth, create a two-way communication, this transcendent function he called, to develop our ability to take advantage of what’s coming up from the unconscious mind. That’s what he called active imagination. It’s an active way of participating with the contents of the unconscious in a powerful, meaningful way to direct it, to direct our own personal evolution.

Debra Maldonado  13:44

One of the things we talk about in the mind itself is that the ego can do active imagination and have an agenda based on the past conditioning and want to manipulate the unconscious to follow what it wants. If you haven’t done shadow work, what will happen is you’ll use active imagination to impress upon the unconscious what you want. I did this when I first started as a hypnotherapist, like reprogramming. The ego is like, “I want to find money. I want to pre-program and talk to my imagination and imagine wealth.” That’s really like when you have a wall in your house and you want to paint it a different color. That’s like painting over the last color, just overlaying it. The two-way communication, when you do shadow work and do the individuation, you’re actually stripping off the old paint and are able to have a fresh wall without being tainted by the past, you’re creating something new. That’s a metaphor for it, not exactly perfect, but understanding that we want to be open to what the unconscious wants to tell us versus directing it, “you’re going to think positive now, you’re going to stop being so sad”, or telling emotions they should change. It’s more like welcoming in curiosity and non-judgment.

Robert Maldonado  15:13

That’s a good way to think about it. Jung was individuating from that point of crises of awareness, of consciousness. He started to develop this idea that there must be a growth principle within the psyche that’s prompting us to grow ourselves from within.

Debra Maldonado  15:40

It’s like trusting in our deeper nature. There’s a deeper nature beyond the conditioning from our mind and our life experience and our memories, which we can use imagination for. A lot of people that write use characters from their life. But there’s another force within us, a creative force that we were born with before all our life experiences that we can tap into. Whatever you call it, it’s that deeper self we’re really inviting into our lives. 

INTERMISSION  16:12 

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Robert Maldonado  17:07

Here’s a quote directly from Carl Jung. He says “Active imagination requires a state of revelry halfway between sleep and waking.” Now this sounds familiar, of course, this is what meditation is in Eastern philosophy. It’s a state of mind that connects both the waking state, our alert state of mind and the deep sleep state, or the restorative state of mind where you’re forgetting who you are, you’re transcending the ego, the awareness of the senses and experiencing the deeper psyche.

Debra Maldonado  17:54

When you go to sleep at night, your ego goes dormant. You’re either in a dream state or deep sleep. Then when you wake up, you still aren’t fully putting on your ego clothes, you’re not waking. You are in that in-between state where more possibilities are available. I always find — and many of you can probably relate — that you have the best ideas in the morning, or when you’re in the shower, or when you’re walking or doing something out of habit, and your mind is able to just be free. It’s that altered state that actually facilitates more imagination. Did you know that Edison, when he was looking at the incandescent bulb and trying to come up with the solution for it and discover how it works, he’d do an experiment, then he’d lay down on his couch in his office and imagine another way to do it, then he’d go up and try it. Then he’d lay back and imagine another way to do it. He’d do that all the time. He used active imagination, digging into the well of that deeper self, deeper creative, universal self to bring forth a new idea. Einstein did the same thing when he rode the light beam to come up with E=mc2. Scientists use this beautiful facility we have in our mind, but we have to practice it and understand how to use it.

Robert Maldonado  19:29

Not only scientists, artists are very in tune to this process. A lot of music, a lot of great art comes through this act of imagination, or different forms of it.

Debra Maldonado  19:43

Even actors, they have an inner dialogue with their character to pull things out. There’s ways they can use active imagination for that.

Robert Maldonado  19:56

But for most of us, we’re not after changing the world overnight, or creating the next big invention. We are simply working with dreams, working with our emotions, our own growth, our own personal development. How can we use active imagination to further our process? One of them is dreams. How do we work with dreams? How do we use active imagination and work with dreams? We know dreams are incredibly difficult to interpret because they speak a symbolic language. The unconscious has its own language, it’s going to use it to talk to us. Most of us don’t know how to understand that language.

Debra Maldonado  20:47

It’s like hieroglyphics. You see these symbols, you’re trying to decode it. Everyone’s dream and symbol library is different, based on their own personal experience, cultural experience, all those associations. We’re very unique. You can’t read one dream for one person the same as you’d read it for another.

Robert Maldonado  21:05

How does active imagination help us with dreams? Imagine you’ve dreamt of a powerful symbol that left a powerful impression on your mind. You wake up and understand this is not a regular dream. There’s something powerful about it, I feel it in my bones that my mind is trying to tell me something. Or you’re working on a problem, on a question in your life. All of a sudden, you have a dream that tells you something about how to proceed.

Debra Maldonado  21:48

It has that sticky feeling where you can’t let go of the memory of that dream, you wrestle with it all day. It’s has a heavy feeling tone to it, it can be positive or negative, that deep impact.

Robert Maldonado  22:03

Jung called these big dreams. You have a big dream that has a numinous quality, a sense of spirituality to it. You can take that symbol, let’s say, you dream of a bird that in the dream was really important for the feeling it brought to you, but you don’t know how to interpret it. You go into this halfway between sleep and waking state that Jung is talking about, which is a meditative state. It’s a relaxed state of mind where you’re still awake and alert, but you’re also looking inward into the unconscious.

Debra Maldonado  22:59

It’s relaxed, you’re not trying to force anything, you’re not attached. The main thing with active imagination is to not be attached to the outcome. Enter it curious, without any expectation or attachment or wanting to force anything. Just allow it, it’s like a gentle tapping, like a feather tapping a balloon, back and forth, a very light explorative creative flow.

Robert Maldonado  23:27

Once you’re in that state — and this will only take a few minutes — once you’re in that relaxed, open mind state of mind, bring in the symbol. Call it in or imagine it at the center of your awareness. You’re not going to direct it. The instruction is like this: simply focus on generating as clearly as possible that symbol in your imagination, holding it as much as possible, still, steady, clear. Then, as you’re doing that, let it go. You’re still holding it in mind, but you’re letting it do its thing. If it starts to move, it starts to morph, let it go. Just follow it with your awareness and see where it leads you. That’s a very good description of that halfway point between being awake and being asleep where you’re at. You’re in a state of a dream, a dreamlike state, but you’re paying attention to it. What it’s going to give you is more information on the meaning of the symbol. You can use your conscious mind to ask the question, “Lead me to the meaning of the symbol.”

Debra Maldonado  25:02

Also noticing the feeling of the symbol. If it shifts, you’re exploring. Of course, we always recommend having a coach because the coach can help you with the whole framework because this technique isn’t a standalone technique, it’s something you want to do in a whole process of individuation. But for me, I use active imagination every morning, I do an animus meditation, which is your alter self. Jung came up with the anima animus, the male counterpart, or the masculine, not male, but masculine archetype. I do the animus meditation, it’s like my deeper self. I have an elaborate active imagination every morning that’s just this place I go to. Then I ask for a symbol every day. Sometimes it’s very vague, then it just pops up. It’s just weird. I don’t force it, it just pops up. Instantly, it doesn’t make any sense. Why am I getting this symbol? The more I allow it to be there, I start to see, just being with it. I think I’m seeing what the message is. Because for us, the unconsciousness speaks to us usually in words. “You should do this. This is the plan for you.” You’re resisting something, it comes in the form of symbolic messages. It’s a deeper message than words can even carry. I found it extremely powerful in my every day, my goals, my outer life to check in every morning and do this little journey into myself. It’s really powerful. First thing in the morning, I get out of bed, I do it. It’s a wonderful practice. It taught me so much about what’s going on inside. What I think it really does is it helps you see that there’s something inside of you that’s greater than your ego, that really cares about where your life is going. It’s a deep, caring part of ourselves that wants the best for us. It’s inside of us already. It’s not from the outside. We start to become our own inner resource in life to tap into and have that experience.

Robert Maldonado  27:26

Do you journal?

Debra Maldonado  27:28

I journal sometimes. Actually, I did a lot more before I did the Jungian work. In personal development, a lot of journaling. I remember imagining what it’d be like to receive a beautiful love letter from a man that loved me. I never had a great relationship. We lived in Colorado at the time, I sat on the hill, it was Easter, it was beautiful spring day. I was sitting on the rock and just journaling. “Dear Deborah.” I wrote this beautiful love letter from my true love. What’s really interesting is that it just flowed out of me, the letter you gave me when we first met was almost identical word for word to what I imagined. What happens is that you’re starting to see that what you create in your imagination is creating a seed for it to show up out there. But you have to be non-attached. That’s the thing, you have to be tapping into that deeper, imaginative non-ego self that actually creates more space and more ideas than your ego. It’ll look maybe a couple inches over your comfort zone. But your imagination is limitless. How about you? Contemplation is another way we use.

Robert Maldonado  28:51

In Eastern philosophy, there’s this idea that there’s higher knowledge, which is different from lower knowledge, or regular knowledge. Let’s say, regular knowledge is information about the apparent world, the way we experience it, but higher knowledge is information or knowledge about the true self, the true nature of your being, which is what the Upanishads, the Gita, the Dhammapada, all these texts are talking about. It says, first you hear it, or you read it through and you’re hearing it internally. Then you contemplate it. That’s where active imagination comes in. You can contemplate higher knowledge to let it really soak in as to what is the meaning of this higher knowledge.

Debra Maldonado  29:49

What would be the imagination part of that?

Robert Maldonado  29:53

That you focus on the teaching. Let’s say, you read something that says everything is awareness.

Debra Maldonado  29:59

Or you can focus on a spiritual symbol?

Robert Maldonado  30:03

Buddha meditating or Adi Shankara meditating, or something like that. Then you imagine it at the center of your mind. Imagine that symbol and let it flow. Jung would actually have characters speak to him in his active imagination. He wrote down a lot of his experiences in the Red Book. That’s what the Red Book is. It’s his experience through active imagination. Then you let it go and follow it and see where it leads you into, a deeper understanding of that lesson or that knowledge.

Debra Maldonado  30:52

If you do have a symbol that you’re not sure what happens, you can do that as well. You sit with that symbol and be curious about it. For me, sometimes it’s sitting there in my mind and contemplating it. You’re just leaving it in your imagination, you’re open, you go in and out of those states all day. In that moment, do you ever have an insight that just pops out of nowhere? You’re busy in the day, maybe you are eating dinner or going for a walk, and it all comes together. It’s like the unconscious is constantly pushing forward to make itself conscious. The wisdom is already there, it’s opening the doors, letting go of the ego defenses and the agenda of the ego to survive, allowing this surrender to our deeper self. It’s a beautiful process. What I love about it is that you don’t have to know a lot to do it. You just have to trust it, and it’s fine. Of course, it’s imaginative. But you don’t have to follow many steps and make sure you check all the boxes. It’s very free-flowing. You start to trust yourself in a way you never did before.

Robert Maldonado  32:14

It’s available to us 24 hours a day. Because when we’re asleep, we’re dreaming, we’re looking into our imagination. Where do dreams come from? From the imagination. Our senses are dormant, then our imagination is showing us all these incredible symbols as dreams. When we’re awake, we’re actually imagining our reality. Our mind is actually constructing it from within. It’s taking in sensory information, of course, but the feeling of it, the meaning we ascribe to our reality, even the colors and the stories, the feeling tone to it, it’s all coming from our imagination.

Debra Maldonado  33:10

Let me ask you this, Dr. Rob, is our memories imagination? Not just our imagination, but are memories our imagined reality?

Robert Maldonado  33:23

Dream recall. This is something interesting about how the brain works. It actually stores memory in different parts of the brain. For example, it tears it into pieces and says “The sound is over here, the sense of touch is over here for this memory, the colors are over here, the person I’m imagining or remembering is over here, their face and all their background.” When we recall a memory, it puts it all together. Every time we remember something, we remember it in a unique way.

Debra Maldonado  34:05

Doesn’t our imagination actually do that memory? We’re imagining what happened in the moment, we make up what that activity meant about us, what is safe, what’s not. We imagine it being something, we make up the story through imagination, then it’s stored in our memory, we think it’s a fact we know. How many times have you spoken to siblings that this has happened when we were kids, and they’re like “That never happened!”? It’s because it’s imagination. Memory is a mixture of our imagination and maybe some experiences that the senses picked up.

Robert Maldonado  34:47

Because the experience itself was imagination. Imagination doesn’t mean it’s not real, it didn’t happen. It means that’s how we experience reality. We imagine it, we have to interact with what we feel is out there, bring it to our awareness and process it. Just like on our computer, it’s no accident that we have these little folders on the desktop that we can click on, open them up, and examine what’s there, run a little video with several things together to form something new. That’s how our mind works at that level.

Debra Maldonado  35:32

What about people that can’t imagine? We hear this every class we’ve ever taught, every time we’ve ever done a workshop, people say to us “But I can’t visualize.” What would you recommend for people? Because we all have the ability. Maybe you can’t visualize on cue, or you have a misunderstanding of what visualization is, or resistance. We expect visualization to be a 3D high definition movie with all the details. But visualization can be in pieces, you’re getting pieces, you’re not seeing the whole scene, maybe seeing little images. They think “I’m not imaginative, I can’t do this.” What would you say?

Robert Maldonado  36:30

We get clues from people that we call savants. Savants can have a photographic memory. I saw a video recently of this artist, they showed him New York City from a helicopter, they took him on this ride. He memorized the city scene from just that experience, then he was able to reproduce it in detail on a huge board. He drew it out, every building that was there, every little window, just the way it was, they compared it to the actual city scape. What the mind is capable of, that’d be the extreme. Somebody that is able to use their memory like a photograph almost, take a picture and recall it the same identical way they saw it. For most of us it’s a little bit patchy. We remember some details, then we imagine the rest.

Debra Maldonado  37:46

We fill in the details. That’s where the imagination comes in after the fact as well.

Robert Maldonado  37:52

It conserves energy and space in our minds so that we’re not filled with all the details that would clutter up our mind. It records important elements, things that are new or unexpected take priority. Things that are usually there, we just fill them in with our imagination. That way we’re able then to focus on what’s important and not clutter our mind so much. There’s something to that. Then when we recall things, our imagination fills in most of it. People that can’t visualize, it’s a skill. There are some of us that have a better ability, that’s what I was getting at. Some people have that powerful ability to hold on to images visually, then they can visualize it again. Whereas some of us, most of us are somewhere in the middle. We have good ability, but not so good. There’s probably people on the other extreme that have problems or trouble visualizing.

Debra Maldonado  39:13

From my experience, people that have always had some kind of a deep trauma or they didn’t want to remember a situation, like PTSD, you see people have the visuals come but sometimes it’s totally shut down as a protective mechanism. Also, if it’s not cultivated as a child, if you’re told you should be more logical. I think there’s genetic component to it as well. But everyone can cultivate it, like you said.

Robert Maldonado  39:41

It’s a skill you can practice and cultivate and get better at. But in general, when anybody says “I need to go to the store”, they’re visualizing the going, the store, all these things already in their mind. Everyone has this general ability to visualize.

Debra Maldonado  40:03

You can say “Picture your childhood home or your childhood bedroom”, it comes to your mind. Picture a parent or someone you know, it comes to your mind. You have the ability, it’s just cultivating it. We have meditations that we teach in our coach training to help our coaches with their clients to cultivate imagination. One last question before we go. Is everything imagination? Einstein says imagination is everything. What we’re really seeing in the world is a result of our own imagination.

Robert Maldonado  40:40

Everything has to be processed through the imagination in order to appear in our mind because what can you experience without your mind? Nothing. Everything we experience from a memory, a dream, our current reality, emotion, thought, everything is a mental experience. It appears to us differently, it appears to us as if the stage is set for us already, we’re simply walking on to the stage of life, everything is there for us. Then we’re just interpreting things from our own perspective. That’s an illusion the mind creates. What is happening is we’re creating the stage as we walk onto it, we’re filling it with meaning, with color, with memories.

Debra Maldonado  41:43

Imagination is the building blocks of our reality.

Robert Maldonado  41:48

It’s the interaction that creates what we call reality. It’s a very different condition than what it appears to be, that’s the key. It’s mind blowing because it’s seamless, the appearance, or the illusion it creates is difficult to get behind. You have to start to understand what the brain’s doing. What is color processing? How does the brain decode vision and hearing? Once you start to see those things, it makes sense that it’s a mental experience we’re seeing and what we call reality is our own interpretation of the world.

Debra Maldonado  42:38

When we’re doing active imagination, it’s the ability to understand our reality, be able to bend our reality, interact, and have more expression of our true nature.

Robert Maldonado  42:52

That’s one of the big implications of this that if indeed, that’s what’s going on, we’re the authors of our reality, we can change it, we can shape it and form it. That’s the empowerment model that Jung gives us. It’s up to us what we do with this reality.

Debra Maldonado  43:18

This has been a very juicy episode. I really love talking about active imagination, I hope you did too. If you enjoy the show, please don’t forget to subscribe if you’re watching us on YouTube, or if you’re listening to us on the Spotify, iTunes or other podcast services, it really helps us a lot if you can do us a favor and subscribe so other people can find us, find this work and get inspired every day to live their greatest life. Take care, everyone, we’ll see you next week.

Robert Maldonado  43:47

See you next time.

Debra Maldonado  43:48

Bye bye. 

OUTRO  43:50 

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