Hillman is reversing the entire humanist premise — the premise that gave Descartes his floor, that placed imagination securely among the mind's own instruments. If you read the sentence as a mere paradox to be unwound and resolved, you miss the blow. The self that would do the unwinding is precisely what the sentence has just displaced. You are not the author of your images; you are their theater, their necessary occasion, the flesh they require in order to appear at all.

This cuts against spiritual practice as much as against ego-psychology. Meditation traditions train the meditator to witness thoughts and images from a stable platform of awareness — which is to say, they reassert the position Hillman has just dissolved. The disciplined witness, the detached observer, the higher self surveying its contents: each of these reinstates a sovereign "we" that the images are passing through. Hillman's sentence refuses that consolation. The images have their own momentum, their own intention, their own agenda that precedes your interest in having one. Depth work on this reading is not the ego directing its gaze toward the unconscious; it is the ego discovering it was never directing anything — that something else has been doing the imagining all along, and that the discovery of this is, if anything, where psychology actually begins.