Allow the Journeying Object to take the shape it wants to take — whether that’s as a person, a landscape, a scene, a motion, or something else. Simply allow this to happen, and notice what shapes it tends towards.

Crystallize.mp4

We practiced the crystallization process in Volume 0: Imaginal Freestyle. You’ll remember that this process is a bit of a dance, a back-and-forth between conscious and unconscious intention.

  1. Once you have your journeying object (in Imaginal Freestyle, it was an evocative phrase), you can sit with it, drop it into your subconscious, and simply notice what comes up — imagery, emotions, memories, the works.
  2. Once you have those subconscious impressions, bring them back into consciousness (maybe even write them down), let your intuition notice what feels like it has a spark and what doesn’t. Maybe note any patterns you see, even among the impressions without a spark. Once you have a sense of everything with some spark to it, hold that in your awareness, and drop it back into the subconscious.

Repeat that essential process (with whatever changes feel intuitively right to you) as many times as it takes to get what feels like a powerful journeying object, a robust starting point.

I often think of this process as a bit like collaborative sculpture. I drop a slab of stone into the deep Psyche, which sends it back with some weathering into a new shape. I chisel away where the shape seems to want chiseling, then drop it back to the Psyche, which weathers and cracks the shape in new ways before sending it back to me — on and on. We end up with a strange and mysterious, but often very powerful piece of psychic sculpture.

That’s the core of the move; here are some more things to remember and play with.

Practices

Note: practices in this section of the course (Volume 3) will be less step-by-step and will require more of you to meet the instructions halfway. Step-by-step instructions are good for beginners, but as we move along in practice, it’s best to develop discernment in how you apply prompts and instructions for yourself.