The Puzzle Method

An Approach to Active Imagination

Background

The two questions I am asked the most are probably these two:

1. How do you put your ideas into practice?

2. How do you avoid deceiving yourself?

These are good questions, as the unconscious mind has two approximate sides to it.

The First: a deceiver who rationalizes, fantasizes, projects and deludes.

The Second: a hidden wise companion who fashions your dreams.

The two cannot be decisively differentiated, and therein lies the problem. The deceiver is always in the midst of the ego and the companion. The reason is simple: the ego and unconscious are in equilibrium. If the ego is hot, the unconscious will be cold and vice versa. Since there is no ultimate separation, a region exists where the opposites meet and mingle; a contradictory space where is and isn’t are not well defined.

As soon as we encounter ambiguity, we begin to perceive this inner “place” without. We begin projecting, as all ambiguities reside in this buffer where we sense the presence of “the enemy” but remain dissociated and so perceive it to be “out there.”

Demons, as a rule, do not dwell on this or that side of a conflict, but in the midst of the two. This is why diabolos (devil) means to throw apart or divide while symbolon (symbol) means to throw together.

The imagination is the buffer where both diabolic and symbolic activity take place. The former was known in Greek as phantasia whence came “fantasy” and “phantasm.” The latter was put under the nous, “the eye of the heart” darkened by the fall.

The imagination has a bad reputation in the church because this nuance is lost in translation. The English “imagination” does not differentiate one from another and is thus conflated with phantasia — that which is only imaginary.

Even so, it would seem then that the imagination is something like the bowl of a hundred candies, ten of which are poison. How can you identify the poison ones? And if it is impossible, isn’t it wisest not to eat any of them?

Phantasia arises not from the depths but from the shallows. That’s why fantasy is itself shallow. The ambiguity closest to the known world is the easiest to control and we do this reflexively, before we even have the option to choose not to.

The trick then, is to jump right into the depths and subvert this process of distortion. The way this is done is through something like misdirection. The ego is made to look at something in the foreground so that something can happen in the background without disruption like in a magic trick.

The things which at the time seem the least important or even ridiculous are consistently the most important. What is implied or read between the lines consistently reveals itself to be the actual content of the message similar to the way that a plot twist causes “signal” and “noise” to trade places.

This seems to be the natural way the unconscious communicates. However, becoming aware of this tendency and trying as much as possible to facilitate it by creating space for ambiguity is what I call the puzzle method.

In Practice

The puzzle method is an approach to active imagination which attempts to obstruct and subvert self-deception. Zell and I began to really develop this process in the Spring of 2023 and this precipitated the greatest leaps in my understanding.

It was based on the way I write stories: I never outline. I create problems and then try to solve them without cheating and fictionalize the process. I think this makes for more engaging stories.

I was lucky enough to learn early in life that if you do this — as long as the rules of the story are not too tight and contrived — you can almost always solve the problem. If you can’t do that in a satisfying way, it’s usually because a character made a mistake whose consequences have caught up to them.

Often when you do find the solution, the problem is resolved so serendipitously that it were as though somebody had knowingly hidden the key. The twist in Fight Club is a really good example of this. The book’s author Chuck Palahniuk claimed he realized what was going on part of the way through writing. It was not planned.

The puzzle method is when you intentionally locate a “knot” which does not make sense to the conscious mind when encountered. In general, every puzzle you are able to imagine can in principle be solved without cheating unless there is something wrong with the rules. In those cases, the puzzle just moves up one level of abstraction. The question simply becomes: “what’s wrong with the rules?” In fact, this usually is how the puzzles are solved. It tends to be that the problem cannot be solved without first reframing it, and that’s the point of the exercise.

The axiom must be: whatever the problem I encounter, it is not random and it can be solved. Not only is it not random or insoluble, it is technically impossible that it could be either. Moreover, whatever problem appears is the one presently in need of attention. If you cannot solve the puzzle in the time you have, write it down and keep returning to it until you can.

In order to explain (and prove the point), I will show you a recent example:

Active Imagination (February 14, 2025)

I brought the radio downstairs to the third chamber and placed it on the throne. When I did, a voice in the static told me to return to the fourth chamber and understand what was there.

A hand mirror appeared on a table before the throne. I was to take this along.

As I turned to leave, I noticed a strange humanoid creature covered in black oil scurrying out of hiding and running for the door. The voice on the radio told me the creature was a spy and to go after him. I caught up to the creature and cut him down with a sword I had received earlier. He bled out on the steps and his blood caught fire and burned him up.

As instructed, I returned to the upper chamber with the mirror. There were four rectangular monoliths positioned at the North, South, East and West. Each had a circular hole near the top like a window.

When I looked through these openings, I saw an octahedron hovering in the midst of the room, but it was only visible through the windows. I reasoned that this was an “empty slot” into which something could be placed, and that each window would reveal something different about whatever was placed there.

I went to the center and held the hand mirror to this space. When I did, it was gripped and suspended in the air as if by magnetism. I then went around the room looking at it through the windows. It appeared as different things through each.

Through the first, I saw a turtle. Through the second, a human head. Through the third, a bulldozer. Through the fourth, a red bird.

I didn’t see what a turtle, bulldozer, red bird and head all had in common, nor how a hand mirror could possibly represent all four at the same time.

I went back downstairs to the radio, expressing my frustration and asked for a hint, but the radio simply told me to return and assured me that I would understand if I tried. I went back and contemplated the images again.

I supposed they loosely corresponded to four elements.

Bulldozer: Earth

Head: Air

Red Bird: Fire (looked like a phoenix)

Turtle: Water

It felt off though because it was too easy. But it called the fixed signs of the zodiac to mind and made me notice that “bulldozer” contains the word “bull.”

The head of a man, a “bull” and a bird.

Three out of four seemed to be clear allusions to the heads of a cherub. This did not seem accidental. But why the turtle where a lion should be?

I also realized that since the object being observed was a mirror, it was probably just reflecting the four monoliths’ own natures back at them — that’s why it’s a mirror. So we were using a mirror to establish the function of this apparatus. Each monolith corresponds to one aspect of the cherubim, and reveals one of the four “heads” of whatever is placed between them.

I reasoned from this that one monolith was faulty.

I left the chamber and fetched some of the flaming blood from the steps. I brought this back and poured it out onto the monolith which then began to glow. When I looked through it, I then saw the mirror as a flaming crown.

I concluded that perhaps the oily creature had been sapping the essence of the Lion one and that was why his blood had become fire when he bled out. Thus, putting the fire back restored that monolith and made it work again.

The reason I can trust this story is because I didn’t see the solution coming. I did not understand the four images, how they related, nor why the creature I slew had flaming blood until later. If there’s no click or eureka moment at the end, it’s either not the real solution, or there wasn’t enough weight on the bar.

You have to be fully submerged.

There’s a kind of retrocausality here, as if part of me somehow perceived the solution first, and then constructed the problem by working backwards. I discussed this mechanism in my last post on spinal tunneling. The act of solving the puzzle is an exercise in remembering the future whence the pieces came and it strengthens the connection between the part that makes the puzzle and the part that solves it.

Doing this actually seems to repair damaged psychic structures represented by the puzzle itself. This is why you’ll generally feel much more clear-headed after.

In this case, the signal sifted out was clear: the part of me that should be like a lion is currently more akin to a turtle. I’ve become too reclusive. I’m hiding in my shell working all the time and probably not eating enough. Doing this actually makes progress slower (like a turtle). The voice who says otherwise is an oily vampire who works for the enemy. Note that he was hiding in a throne room, and despite not being the king, seemed to have the “crown” in his possession, though this was not revealed until the very end.

This imbalance caused a number of other problems. The head was severed, indicating a disconnection with the body. The bull was a machine — my work had become mechanical. The bird was a fire bird, which may suggest that it was trying to do both its job and the fiery lion’s job.

These puzzles are not arbitrary which is why they contain real solutions. They represent actual fragmentation. The loose ends are frayed wiring. This is why as soon as you mend those wires, something comes through that was previously not able to.

Of course, the fact that they are real problems means they require real solutions which are necessarily difficult to find. If the problem requires no contemplation or lateral thinking, it wasn’t real. The purpose of the exercise is to strengthen one’s capacity to reframe and notice what one does not habitually notice. These are the things to which the unconscious attends. These “knots” are tightly wound symbolic accretions of the things one has failed to attend to. Untying them functions as a kind of atonement.

This particular example occurred at a time when I had tunnel vision. I was myopically forcing myself to work. I was doing this because I was making no progress, and I was making no progress because I was working this way.

The puzzle was tailored to my condition. I was given five seemingly random images. If you look at them myopically, as discrete things, they make no sense. You have to “zoom out” and look at the pattern to understand anything in it. At every turn, I was forced to look at things more holistically.

The link between a motorized construction machine and a bull is a subtle one. It’s not conceptually adjacent and requires some loosening of thought to discern. I was also straining so hard at the mirror that it took a minute to stop and consider what a mirror actually is and why I would be given one in the first place. This is the point.

The Greek word phantasia refers to something like surface appearances. It’s what something seems to be at face value. If one understands that the images point to something which both transcends and unites them — something which requires a kind of ritual of initiation to perceive — the veil now becomes an instrument of revelation instead of a snare.

The unconscious speaks through gaps in knowledge. You can thus invite the unconscious to speak more by opening up those spaces and examining how their contents behave. This is mostly done by feel, the intellectual understanding tends to come later, but there can be exceptions.

It is relatively easy to make a given thing happen in your imagination, but as the scenario continues to play out, the subtler, more consistent and less localized currents of the unconscious begin to exert their influence.

If you ask them to (and if they oblige) they will bring you to one of these thresholds, and you’ll know you’ve found one because it won’t make any sense. The fact that you know you’re confused, means that you’ll have to integrate whatever designed the puzzle in order to solve it, and nothing false will really make the lock turn.

You can’t stack the deck if you don’t know what game you’re playing.