Seeing the Unseen: The Imagination and the Imaginal
Printed in the Summer 2024 issue of Quest magazine.
Citation: Kinney, Jay "Seeing the Unseen: The Imagination and the Imaginal" Quest 112:3, pg 20-24
By Jay Kinney
In this essay, I would like to continue the discussion of the remarkable metaphysical insights of the great Sufi shaykh (“master”) Ibn ‘Arabi (1165‒1240) that I last touched upon a year ago in these pages (“Imagining God Imagining the World” in Quest, spring 2023).
In this case, it is a consideration of the special role of the imagination—both human and divine—in fostering a capacity to see what might be called the unseen. For this work, I will be heavily relying upon the religious scholar Henry Corbin (1903‒78), who had a special interpretation of Ibn ‘Arabi and seeing the unseen in what he called the “imaginal world” (mundus imaginalis).
In our contemporary era, the imagination is often considered a capacity or talent to simply make things up. If someone tells us, “Oh, you are just imagining things,” this usually implies that we are being fanciful or conjuring up things that don’t exist. In a more complimentary usage, we might refer to a favorite author or artist as “having a great imagination.”
However, as Henry Corbin was at pains to point out in his study Creative Imagination in the Sufism of Ibn ‘Arabi, the imagination in earlier religious eras was considered a capacity of the human heart to be receptive to higher spiritual planes or realms. Thus the imaginal world might be considered a space within the conscious loving heart that is hospitable to self-revealings of God (Allah, in Arabic), which Corbin calls “theophanies.”
In these days when medical science is busily mapping out locations in our brain where different emotions or thoughts are seemingly triggered, it is assumed that human cognition is located in the brain and not in the heart. But it is probably safe to say that what Corbin and Ibn ‘Arabi were referring to as the “heart” is not the physical organ of the heart itself, but a subtle energy center sensed in that general bodily region, akin to what is perhaps more familiarly called a chakra in Eastern esoteric teachings, a latifa in Sufi teachings, or what might be called the core of one’s being.
According to Ibn ‘Arabi, this “heart” is where intuitive mystical knowledge is fostered. The tradition of Islamic mysticism known as Sufism, within which Ibn ‘Arabi is often known as the shaykh al akbar (or the “greatest Master”), continues to encourage its practitioners to develop and cleanse their hearts in order to better intuit the spiritual realm. This might be helped along by certain prayers, meditations, chants (dhikrs), breathing exercises, visualizations, and bodily movements, as well as qualities such as sincerity and diligence—but of course nothing is guaranteed. Ultimately it is a matter of divine grace, which is not beholden to time or place or anyone’s expectations.
A related but slightly different take on the imagination was encouraged by the great twentieth-century psychologist Carl Jung, who shared with his mentor Sigmund Freud a deep interest in what they called the “unconscious,” the repository in the human psyche of emotional reactions, forgotten memories, and unprocessed traumas that would commonly find expression in dreams, for example. Freud famously ascribed most of these symbolic upsurges to sexual incidents and desires that his patients experienced early in life that were still unresolved and expressing themselves in their neuroses.
While there was no doubt some truth to this, Jung felt that a largely sexual reading of dreams and other outpourings of the unconscious was not broad enough: it left out human yearnings for religious and spiritual answers that had traditionally played a key role in resolving and healing human anxieties.
Jung found that often the most effective advice for his troubled patients was to encourage them to reengage with the religious traditions in which they had originally been raised. I don’t interpret this as a simplistic solution of dumping them back into their earlier belief systems. More likely it reflects an insight that those earliest and most influential symbol systems still spoke to them on some level and perhaps held a key to reencountering the numinous core of their earliest sense of divine mysteries unfolding in their lives.
Jung, utilizing intuitive hunches of his own, developed the practice of creative imagination (or active imagination): encouraging some patients to enter into a meditative imaginal realm where they could allow images, symbols, entities, and messages to bubble up more or less unfiltered from the unconscious, perhaps woven into mythic dramas or lucid dreams. These were considered valuable raw material that would help them better understand their own motivations and concerns.
Working in part from his own inner experiences, Jung thought it possible to enter into dialogues or cognitive interactions with “beings” within one’s unconscious who embodied different aspects of ourselves yet seemed to have a volition of their own and lessons to teach us. Needless to say, such notions were quite controversial and for many people might amount to playing with fire. After all, hearing and talking to voices in one’s head is one of the hallmarks of schizophrenia and is not normally considered a condition to be cultivated. Yet with certain cautions and conditions, Jung seemed to feel that this effort was worth the risk.
Henry Corbin, professor of Islamic studies at the Sorbonne and scholar at the Imperial Iranian Academy of Philosophy, seems to have been destined to meet up with Jung. This occurred when Corbin was invited to participate in the annual Eranos conferences at Ascona, Switzerland, after the Second World War, which also welcomed the participation and insights of Jung, Mircea Eliade, Joseph Campbell, and other scholars. The result of this cross-pollination of psychological, religious, and mystical concerns was groundbreaking and fostered the encounter between concepts such as Jung’s creative imagination and Corbin’s exploration of Ibn ‘Arabi’s metaphysics of the imaginal.
As this cross-discipline multilogue in the 1940s and 1950s spread within elite Western cultural discourse, it began to seep into wider creative circles of poets and writers at large, as chronicled by Tom Cheetham in his several penetrating books delving into the depths of Henry Corbin’s studies.
Cheetham noted the impact of Corbin’s Creative Imagination in the Sufism of Ibn ‘Arabi on poets such as Charles Olson and Robert Kelly, who discovered that Corbin’s defense and exposition of the imaginal spoke to their own experiences of how the imagination worked in their intuitive poetic output.
Cheetham also pointed to Mary Watkins’ insightful book Invisible Guests: The Development of Imaginal Dialogues, which quoted several authors’ experiences of their relationships with their stories’ or novels’ characters more as characters dictating their own dialogue and actions than as authors running the show. For example, Watkins shared a description by the popular British children’s author Enid Blyton of her own writing process:
I shut my eyes for a few moments, with my portable typewriter on my knee—I make my mind blank and wait—and then as clearly as I would see real children, my characters stand before me in my mind’s eye. I see them in detail—hair, eyes, feet, clothes, expression—and I always know their Christian names, but never their surnames . . . I don’t know what anyone is going to say or do. I don’t know what is going to happen. I am in the position of being able to write a story and read it for the first time, at one and the same moment . . . Sometimes a character makes a joke, a really funny one, that makes me laugh as I type it on my paper—and I think, “Well, I couldn’t have thought of that myself in a hundred years!” And then I think, “Well, who did think of it, then?”
Who, indeed?
It is not uncommon in our ego-based daily lives to cling to our self-created identities and relegate everyone and everything else to the category of “other.” But Ibn ‘Arabi mystically realized that the entire cosmos, with all its myriad minerals, plants, animals, and other beings, were expressions and extensions of what might be called the Absolute; thus a unity of being underlies the apparent multiplicity of existence.
Similarly, all of us humans encompass a multitude of facets within ourselves. They may each have a voice, as Enid Blyton attested, but ultimately we and they are all expressions and outcroppings of the One.
Which brings us back to Ibn ‘Arabi and his metaphysical philosophy, which has had a major impact on Sufism and Islamic mysticism in general. In describing his own imaginal experiences, Ibn ‘Arabi attested to his visionary encounters with the living presences of the monotheistic line of prophets as envisaged in Islam, including Adam, Noah, Abraham, Moses, and Jesus, as well as with Sufi masters and saints, all of whom remained available beyond linear time and space to those who successfully sought them out.
Such encounters took place in the imaginal world, which, in Ibn ‘Arabi’s metaphysical system, was an intermediary realm between the eternal and the temporal, between the ineffable and the concrete, or the divine and the material. It was a realm in which angels or jinns or archetypes or ideas could be subtly perceived and interacted with—the world of dreams, but also of visions and theophanies.
As Ibn ‘Arabi’s greatest modern interpreter, Corbin underscored that beings we might take to be mythical or symbolic live their own existence in the imaginal world. This rather paradoxical assertion was confirmed by Jung in his encounters with Philemon, an imaginal sage, that he chronicled in his Red Book and Black Book journals. According to both Jung and Corbin, many of these noncorporeal entities serve spiritual functions. (For more on this, I direct you to Daniela Boccassini’s recent paper “The Invisible Teacher and His Disciples: C.G. Jung’s and Henry Corbin’s Approaches to ‘The Green One.’”)
No matter how much we might like to be given unambiguous truths to believe in, the path of the sincere seeker of al-haqq (the “Truth” or the “Real”) is not toward some dogmatic final answer that takes care of all doubts thereafter. Rather, it is the ongoing engagement with the paradoxical, the ambiguous, the unclear—the truths spoken in a foreign accent that one grasps, at best, only 75 percent of the time.
My notebooks of conversations with my spiritual teachers or guides (down-to-earth, not imaginal) are scribbled notes of truncated sentences, misheard translations, and wild guesses at what was really being said. For whatever reason, I have a hard time with thick foreign accents, yet more often than not, I was somehow led to guides (or their interpreters) who spoke with such accents. This forced me to concentrate on what they were saying and hone my intuitive skills to grasp the underlying message.
But perhaps the greatest gift I was given was from my drawing instructor in my first year in art school, at Pratt Institute in Brooklyn. He instructed his students to keep sketchbooks and fill them each week with pencil drawings drawn from life: our fellow students, the old brownstone houses in Pratt’s neighborhood, local kids on a playground jungle gym, fellow riders on the subway, and whatever caught our fancy or presented a visual challenge.
There was a catch, but a very valuable one. We had to toss out all the bad habits we had unknowingly built up over our prior lives in our attempts at art. We had to train ourselves to really see what we were looking at. How shadows were cast by the sun as the day progressed. If we were indoors, how the walls in a room met the floor in angles that appeared to slant differently depending on our location observing the room.
We had to take three-dimensional depth into account: people or cars or buildings in the distance were proportionately smaller the farther away they were. At the same time, those visual components were not on some perfectly horizontal plane, but seemingly on a ground ramping upward or downward, depending on whether we were viewing them sitting down, standing, or from a higher elevation.
In short, by learning to visually really see the world around me, I was also trained in the capacity to really see what I visualized in my imagination. This was an extraordinary gift, which not only served me well in illustration assignments or creating comic stories or intricate images but would later enable me to allow scenes, people, and their spatial interactions to arise out of my unconscious (in a Jungian sense) in dreams or exercises of active imagination. I made a habit of recording my dreams and pondering them for messages, often symbolic, of what my unconscious was trying to tell me.
By a route that I don’t fully understand, I was led to Corbin’s and Ibn ‘Arabi’s delineation of a metaphysical imaginal realm, where one might be able to make contact with spiritual beings who transcend linear time and space, yet who seem to play a significant role in guiding humankind.
I do not mean to inflate my experiences in this realm, as they are far and few between, and nothing I wish to brag about. At the same time, I can’t deny that there was something going on. It was impacting me and yet throwing me off center. I was being tossed into the mix of what seemed to be imaginal encounters but also into outpourings of desires, many of which are taboo in today’s world.
All of which sounds pretty heady and properly induces skepticism (as most of my own spiritual unveilings have done). We are not provided with solidly proven truths. We are given ambiguous flashes of insight that we have to work our way through, weighing one intuition against another, trying to interpret our heart’s messages. It seems that the goal is not certainty but an open-hearted engagement with the paradoxes of a divine reality (haqq) that is simultaneously the All and the infinite manifestations of multiplicity.
Of course, Corbin, Ibn ‘Arabi, and Jung do not have a monopoly on the creative imagination. In the eighteenth century, Emanuel Swedenborg’s detailed visions of heaven can be interpreted as coming from his access to the imaginal world, as can the later poetic visions of William Blake or William Butler Yeats. The Theosophical Society’s own history is rife with communications at a distance with H.P. Blavatsky’s Masters, and with the clairvoyant readings of Annie Besant and C.W. Leadbeater. Joseph Smith, the founder of the Church of Latter-Day Saints (commonly known as the Mormon Church), reputedly received the text of the Book of Mormon (the Mormon Bible), along with other prophetic declarations, in a kind of visionary trance. That only scratches the surface.
“But hold on!” one might say. “Many of these visions or revelations or creative imaginings seem to contradict each other. Doesn’t that imply that they are all bogus or false prophecies?”
After decades of wrestling with this question, the best answer that I have come up with is that, as unique individuals, every person has their own history, their own influences, their own talents and blind spots, indeed their own relationships to the Absolute, which may work for them alone.
The convoluted New York subway system that I find myself trying to navigate through in my dreams (which are oddly consistent, given that they often take place years apart) express certain anxieties or challenges that I experienced in my time of living in Brooklyn in my art school days. But there is no reason that my imaginal subway system should line up with anyone else’s.
Henry Corbin spent much of his life trying to draw parallels or links between the myths and symbols of Persian Zoroastrian angelology, Shi’a Twelver Imamology, Ibn ‘Arabi’s mystical visions, and other imaginal systems (including Jung’s). It was a stunning and magnificent effort, but one so dense and erudite that very few (except perhaps Tom Cheetham) have been able to fully grasp it. But that makes it no less valuable or numinous.
Ibn ‘Arabi asserted that ultimately the open heart needed to accept the seeming contradiction of the many and the One at the same time. The Absolute—that which underlies all of what is— simultaneously manifests as the multiplicity within each of us and within the cosmos at large.
The realization of this truth is not an abstract philosophical exercise but an experience—perhaps fleeting, occasional, or permanent—that suggests, as my drawing teacher taught me, that what we see depends upon the perspective from which we view it. Being open to the possibility that the unseen may be seen with the eye of the heart is just one of the perspectives to be found in Ibn ‘Arabi’s teachings.
Sources
Boccassini, Daniela. “The Invisible Teacher and His Disciples: C.G. Jung’s and Henry Corbin’s Approaches to ‘The Green One.’” Transcultural Dialogues 12 (Jan. 2023), Alain Daniélou Foundation website.
Cheetham, Tom. All the World an Icon: Henry Corbin and the Angelic Function of Beings. Berkeley, Calif.: North Atlantic Books, 2012.
———. The World Turned Inside Out: Henry Corbin and Islamic Mysticism. Woodstock, Conn.: Spring, 2003.
Corbin, Henry. Creative Imagination in the Sufism of Ibn ‘Arabi. Translated by Ralph Manheim. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton/Bollingen, 1969. (Retitled Alone with the Alone in more recent editions.)
Izutsu, Toshihiko. Sufism and Taoism: A Comparative Study of Key Philosophical Concepts. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984.
Watkins, Mary. Invisible Guests: The Development of Imaginal Dialogues. Fairfax, Calif.: Human Development Books, 2015.
Jay Kinney was the founder and publisher of Gnosis: A Journal of the Western Inner Traditions. His lifelong studies in mysticism and esotericism were nourished by his contacts with the TSA dating back over fifty years ago.
Richard Smoley: Shamanism is a religion associated with primitive tribes. Can you say a little bit about it in a present-day context? How is it practiced by Americans today?