“What Do You DO?”

by Achmahd Dahrweesh

People who begin to work with the techniques of alchemical active imagination for a long time are warned against trying to “do magic,” trying to make others do what they want for various ego-purposes.  Naturally, paying your bills and having a good family-life and getting on TV and so on, all are important at least in this life, so that that sort of conjuring with new-found imaginal powers works quite readily, of course — at first: 
     “It is just like having a small nuclear reactor all of your own,” as Dr Marie-Louise von Franz says. 
     But then it blows up on you. 
     Everytime.
     Why?
     Because the ordinary human being as long as they have a clear distinction still in mind, between me and you, just plain can not see what the results will be of trying to have things all “their own” way.
     Even when they may think they are being careful not to harm anyone else.
     Why?
     Because if the work of active imagination is done properly, and if students use AI ethically to learn first of all about their own mental insides, then the day inevitably comes when they can no longer be satisfied with only temporary personal, or private, satisfactions.

At this point, the condemned “altruism” of for example the Objectivists simply disappears as a category.

When it is finally realized that there can be no paradise on Earth or anywhere else, unless all are admitted, then the worker in response to outer misery begins inwardly, and daily, to go out on the work of rescue.
     Through the methods of AI, workers revisit mentally the scenes of the day and with genies and angels give to those around them, one-by-one, the actual gift of  free will, real knowledge of what free will is — and, even more importantly, the courage (and, success!) to actually use moral freedom for the first time in their individual lives.
     No permission obviously can be given by those not in a position to give it — so, woe betide the worker who dives back into egotism, afterward:
     “I prayed for you.”
     Of course one-by-one doesn’t seem like a lot after all, not when you get up in the morning to read the paper and find that, to all appearances, the agony continues.
     However, it is important to take note of the Sufi contention, namely that this inner work so far from being mere solipsism in fact reinforces and gives success to the outer efforts of the humanitarians and philanthropists in any case, by the so-called “synchronicities.”
     But then — through AI — you may well have had by now a glimpse at least of some other dimensions of reality, and so may have begun at last to approach the secret of the bigger thing hidden always in the smaller:

“BismAllah, ar-RaHmani, ar-RaHimi…whoever saves the life of one, it shall be as if he had saved all human being.”  (al-Quranu as-Surah V, 32)

[Emmett R Smith

[all transcription-rights reserved

[7 October 2008]