Visionary Experience

Visionary experience names the mode of inner event in which autonomous images — figures, landscapes, voices, whole narrative sequences — present themselves to consciousness with the compelling reality of perception but without external cause. The phenomenon is distinguished from ordinary fantasy by its autonomy: the ego does not produce the images but encounters them, and in the encounter is addressed by them.

For Jung, the category is the foundation of his whole mature method. His own visionary sequence of 1913–1916, recorded in [[jung-red-book|The Red Book]] and theorized as active-imagination, is the laboratory from which analytical psychology in its developed form proceeds. For Corbin, reading the Ishraqi-Sufi tradition, visionary experience is the native mode of the mundus mundus-imaginalisis — the world of Hurqalya — in which the soul encounters realities that are neither merely subjective nor sensibly outer but situated in their own ontological register. The numinosum is the quality by which visionary experience announces itself as ontologically weighty rather than merely psychological. See active-imagination and mundus-imaginalis.

Relationships

• active-imagination
• mundus-imaginalis
• jung-red-book