Quest Magazine

Printed in the  Summer 2024  issue of Quest magazine. 
Citation: Trull, David "Drill, Baby, Drill" Quest 112:3, pg 38-40

By David Trull

Set a timer, put pen to paper, and write. Let your hand dance across the page. Don’t second-guess its path. Whatever emerges is fine. Judge nothing. Pretty soon you’ll find the shrill cries of your inner critic fading. When the timer goes off, walk away and return in ten minutes. Scan the words for something that shines. Pan for gold. Usually you will find some.

I received this advice in a fiction workshop. The goal, our instructor informed us, was to connect the imagination with the subconscious. When too closely coupled with our surface thought processes, the imagination produces material it thinks will please the little conductor that sits behind our eyes and renders the output dull and quotidian. To infuse your writing with vital force, she said, you must bypass the conscious mind. Of course, she also warned us to revise and revise and revise again, but make sure that what you are polishing is the subconscious gold that first caught your eye.

Before I tried this exercise, my stories were semiautobiographical accounts of past travel experiences, childhood incidents, or thinly veiled imitations of stories I had ingested over the years. I loved none of it. After committing to a daily free-writing habit for several months, my stories became about a boy haunted by visions of a self-immolating Buddhist monk, a woman exhibiting her half-finished paintings as a way to expunge her guilt over abandoning her dying mother, and a homeless teen with leukemia hopping freight trains in the early oughts. As I revised the strange and unfamiliar words, I felt alienated, as if I’d glanced in the mirror and locked eyes with a stranger. It wasn’t unsettling, however. More like exhilarating.

After graduation, a college buddy of mine found work on an oil rig off the California coast. At one point, he had a bit of shore leave, and I grabbed a beer with him at a bar near his launch point, a place with walls festooned with taxidermic swordfish and a murky lobster tank gurgling away in the corner.

I grilled him about his experience, and he told me that although he and his crew were engaged in exploration, they’d found nothing so far. I asked how they knew where to drill, and he said they really didn’t know. It was trial and error, tapping one section of ocean floor and then another, praying to hit the motherload. Sure, they used advanced sonic equipment to identify areas that had a high chance of hiding black gold, but they still had to bounce around and stand ready to capture the stuff when they struck.

This conversation reminded me of my stories, not because I’d written about fossil fuel extraction, but because the drilling process bore a strange resemblance to my fiction exercise. In a way, I was circling above the ocean floor of my mind and drilling for something that could move the world. We know how oil deposits come to be where they are, but where did my strange stories come from?  And how did they get there without my knowing? Would I have ever uncovered them if I hadn’t gone wandering without judgment?

I have always thought of my imagination as my possession, a private world all my own. As we talked, I started to wonder if my imagination might have more in common with a solitary oil rig glittering amidst a dark and vast ocean, perched above a sea no more mine than the one lapping against the barnacle-encrusted pier beyond the windows.

During undergrad, I spent about a month under the spell of Carl Jung and his concept of the collective unconscious. Jung thought that much of the content of our unconscious mind was the result of genetic inheritance rather than the accumulation of personal experience. This inherited material manifests as archetypes (most clearly seen in the repeated character types in literature and storytelling traditions: the Trickster, the Hero, the Tyrant, the Mother) and in our instinctive behavior, such as traditional religious practices and sexual mores. Much of what we consider individual expression is simply a shaping of shared archetypal clay available as a birth rite to all.

While Jung’s theory of a shared unconscious explains the deep patterns found in human society, religion, and behavior, I wonder if some repeating forms emerge because humanity has remained huddled around the same fire, the same deposit of imaginal energy. We are born into a community that siphons its spirit from a particular repository of the mind. The surrounding landscape is unforgiving, and our survival drive keeps us close to this source. To fraternize with novel imagery would, we feel, be futile at best, and suicidal at worst.

Fossil fuels are dwindling. The supply is not infinite, after all. Toxic by-products have accumulated in the atmosphere, wreaking havoc on weather patterns and poisoning our lungs and bloodstreams. Likewise, the images and archetypes that once served to sustain us have begun to lose their potency.

I am not the first to notice that we seem to be collectively running out of fuel, especially in the realm of art. Theater marquees have become bloated with glossy remakes of aged blockbusters, dance floors throb to resampled choruses from thirty years ago, and aging rockers sue young stars for “stealing” their melodies, to the point where the young can only throw up their hands and wail, “There’s only so many ways to put together seven notes, man!”

I once heard someone say that complex societies collapse when the costs of further complexity outweigh the returns. The torrent of economic, literary, and artistic progress over the last few centuries is perhaps a sign that our species, as it shifted into modernity, struck a rich imaginative well. The present struggle to produce novel and interesting work raises a question: has this deposit at last run dry? Are further attempts to mine it worth the energy cost? Maybe this is why, in recent years, talk of collapse has risen in both pitch and volume.

Speaking from experience, I can tell you that millennial and Gen Z artists feel a strange kinship to those California farmers forced by the depleted aquifers beneath the state’s Central Valley to extend their irrigation wells to expensive and dangerous depths, expending ever greater effort merely to maintain the status quo. Same water, same crops. Same notes, same songs. The present condition of the earth mirrors the state of our minds.

I don’t, however, endorse the “nail in the coffin” stance so many older generations of journalists take: those who love to declare that art is finished, that everything worth saying has been said, that kids these days don’t possess the depth of experience required for true artistic expression.

It feels bizarre, as a younger person, to say this, but perhaps the solution is the imaginal equivalent of that cringey fossil fuel rallying cry, “Drill, baby, drill!” (albeit with far more positive possible outcomes). Before I began to access my subconscious, I had concluded that I didn’t have much to say as a fiction author. The jury is still out on that, but now I am at least able to produce something that excites me and some readers: words and images that hold a charge sufficient to draw me to my pen and paper every day to see what might emerge. The process alone, ripe with uncertainty, is enticing.

Maybe oil rigs are the wrong metaphor. It could be that our imagination more closely resembles the ancient conception of the firmament, a glass dome holding back boundless waters. At our core, we are a nomadic species. The patch of imaginal sky beneath which we have pitched our tents may have succumbed to drought, but there are infinite heavens beyond our encampment, skies which may not, as we fear, restrain the destructive waters of a world-annihilating flood, but instead hold a life-giving rain. Physical migration has always been a part of humanity’s development. Perhaps instead of continuing our futile rain dance, we would do better to pull up stakes and find a fresh piece of mental sky.

David Trull has worked as a fireworks salesman, forensic tax researcher, railroad logistician, teacher, songwriter, and musician. He studied philosophy through a Great Books immersion program at Thomas Aquinas College in Ojai, California. A lifelong autodidact, he has advanced his explorations through a self-designed curriculum focused on the intersection of philosophy and theology. Raised in St. Louis, Trull now orbits between Santa Barbara, California, and the San Francisco Bay Area.

Printed in the  Summer 2024  issue of Quest magazine. 
Citation: Levine, Arlene Gay "Through the Muntins" Quest 112:3, pg 35-36

By Arlene Gay Levine

Reality leaves a lot to the imagination.

—John Lennon

One sapphire-sky morning, I sat at my kitchen table, gazing through a window overlooking the garden and an emerald profusion of trees beyond.

My home is an old English Tudor townhouse dating back to 1938, so each pane possesses a muntin located on the glass itself. These vertical elements divide the windows into a grid. (The earliest known use of the noun muntin is in the Middle English period, 1150‒1500, as a variant of the obsolete montant—from the French, literally, “rising.”)

Through the muntins, on a neighbor’s towering oak about 300 feet away, I spied what looked to be an eye in the sky opening into the tree’s luxurious crown. During this Alice in Wonderland moment, my musings sent me soaring into another realm.

As a verb, to muse is to thoughtfully consider something. Used as a noun, it means a person, especially a woman, who is a source of artistic inspiration. In mythology, the Muses were nine goddesses who symbolized the arts and sciences.

For me, a muse is virtually anything in Spirit’s world that serves to inspire a sense of awe and wonder. How lucky we are that such sources are infinite! Without this element, the imagination might never take off at all. Sadly, many people never tap the wondrous power inside them that provides the means to reveal scientific discoveries, compose magnificent music, craft new worlds through the written word, prepare a feast without a recipe, or possibly even conceive of a plan to return this planet to what the Creator intended when the words “Let there be light” were first spoken.

As an educator for over two decades, I made it my mission to restore the miraculous power of creativity to my pupils. In many cases, they had not been encouraged to develop it, or worse, were admonished to “stop daydreaming,” “pull their head out of the clouds,” and get back to the “real” world.

Perhaps you had an invisible playmate who seemed to speak to you through the soundless sound of an inner voice that was quite as genuine to your ears as your mother calling you for lunch. If you shared the wonderful things that you and your imaginary friend spoke about with adults and sometimes even other children, you may well have experienced scorn, insults, or even concern that you were “letting your imagination run away with you.”

Before I completed my MA degree in education, I was offered a brief opportunity to teach at a Montessori school and encountered an astounding key to unlock the hearts and minds of my pupils. There was a limited number of children in each class and many fascinating aspects of this system. These included hands-on learning, silent time and particularly “choice time,” when the class could select from various “centers” set up around the room. These areas were dedicated to activities such as drawing, music, reading, writing, and construction. What a boon to free creativity for the lucky youngsters who could afford to attend!

Flash-forward a few years. As in many serendipitous events in my life, I found myself selected to work with gifted children in a system called Talents Unlimited in a public school located in the largest federally subsidized housing development in the nation. There I became a certified Talents Unlimited practitioner, trained in developing creative and critical thinking skills in my elementary school students. Later I worked instructing other teachers and supervisory personnel as a staff developer.

Established primarily by Carol Schlichter based on the works of Howard Gardner, Calvin Taylor, and Robert Sternberg, the Talents Unlimited model was designed to help teachers recognize and nurture the multiple talents of all children. The program allows students to grow their talents as they learn and acquire knowledge in six areas, including productive thinking, decision-making, planning, forecasting, communication, and academics.

The first skill, aptly named “productive thinking,” is involved most closely with the imagination. The steps included are: (1) Think of many ideas. (2) Think of varied ideas. (3) Think of unusual ideas. (4) Add to your ideas to make them better.

One morning, my class was busy working at the centers I had created at home, based on their suggestions of which topics interested them. Gazing at their complete absorption, it reminded me of a full-on “flow” experience straight out of Mihaly Csikszentmihalyli’s captivating book, Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience. He explains how by concentrating our creative energies within, we can accelerate beyond our everyday abilities into a state of transcendence.

To my eye, the children seemed to shine like balls of energy, projecting total immersion in their task. In that moment, it was not a huge leap to envision that perhaps we all are centers of expression for the One who creates and sustains the universe. With an open heart I whispered, “Namaste”: “The Divine within me bows to the Divine within you.” Enthralled by that wave of light, I decided to imagine I too was a sixth grader in Mrs. Levine’s class and began writing a play. Every day when it was “Center Time,” I would pull those pages out from the drawer of my desk and keep writing. The finished product was called A Talent for Friendship.

Excited by the results, I decided to read the class a few scenes. After that, I asked them to use their productive thinking skills to decide what I should do with the manuscript now. Their many, varied, and unusual ideas led to them producing, directing, creating costumes and props and acting in the play, which they presented in the school auditorium for all the grades to enjoy.

Along with the delight of encouraging the imagination of my students, the most rewarding results came from parents.

They expressed gratitude for my expanding the vision of these youngsters beyond the stultifying violence and crime emanating from their windows and TV screens. Einstein said, “We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them.” In other words, when our rational ego intellect generates a problem, we must use our spiritual, creative mind to find the solution.

 Now, dear reader, here is your assignment. This article began with a fanciful journey through the muntins of my window to an eye into the sky. Imagine that you are gazing through an eye in the sky. Use your productive thinking skills to list the many, varied, and unusual things you see there and what happens next. (This task touches on another of the six components included in the Talents program: forecasting.) Add to your ideas to make them better.

Perhaps together you and I will envision a way to make our world a safer, wiser, kinder home for all of us.

All the Names I’d Like to Give Myself

Call me what you will
but I have names for myself
wishes of who I want to be
dreams of an open face
dancing whole person
able to take the heat
Call me Luna, call me Sol
I’ll answer to either or both
because they are me in its entirety
Call me resilient ground cover, murky tide pool,
encouraging firmament, fiery diadem
spinner and spun in the cosmic maze
There is always a world for me, of me, by me
from the words I chose, from the singing
syllables of sound strung together into thought
I imagine myself: a velvet rain forest
in the Amazon at dawn with a dozen squawking
lime-sherbet parrots dining on mango flesh
ripe as the morning
Call me crazy, call me shadow, call me
the beginning of an idea stirring
on the tip of your medulla oblongata
as succulent as fresh bee whiskey
capable of stinging senses
jolting the overgrown glade of your
sleepy life back into existence
Call me what you will

-Arlene Gay Levine

Arlene Gay Levine is the author of 39 Ways to Open Your Heart: An Illuminated Meditation (Conari Press) and Movie Life (Finishing Line Press). Her prose and poetry have found a home in The New York Times, numerous anthologies, including most recently The Power of the Pause (Wising Up Press), and a new collection from Highland Park Poetry. Her poems appear online at A Year of Being Here, Your Daily Poem, Verse-Virtual, and Storyteller Poetry Review. She is the creator of Logos Therapy, a transformational writing process from which the exercise in this article originated. The poem here was previously published in Movie Life and subsequently performed as spoken word set to modern dance in the off-Broadway show Identity.

Printed in the  Summer 2024  issue of Quest magazine. 
Citation: Wyatt, Tim "Imagination, Inspiration, and Intuition" Quest 112:3, pg 32-34

By Tim Wyatt

The Mind is the great Slayer of the Real. Let the Disciple slay the Slayer.

—The Voice of the Silence

We regard mind and intellect as the crowning achievements of human development—and in one sense this is true. It has been a long and torturous road turning humans into thinking beings. Let us not forget that in our distant past, it required extraterrestrial intervention to cement the mind principle in humanity. According to Theosophical teachings, during the Third Root Race, when the process of acquiring mind had stalled, the Lords of the Flame (the Solar Pitris or Agnishvattas) arrived from Venus to give struggling humanity a helping hand in the mental realms.

Over the past few centuries, the human intellect has undergone accelerated development. Until the fifteenth century, few ordinary people possessed individualized intellects. At that time, the bulk of humanity shared a group consciousness of the race, the nation, the tribe, the clan, or the family, often with a heavy overlay of religious dogma. Indeed this is still the case for many people. Look at mob violence, organizational groupthink, or behavior at large sports or music events.

Human intelligence has blossomed during the past 250 years of industrialization, urbanization, improved education, and the increasing use of technology, especially in communications. In England during Shakespeare’s time, the average peasant had a vocabulary of a mere 400 words. When the United States Army measured the IQs of recruits in World War II, it noted a significant increase in intelligence from the recruits of World War I less than a quarter of a century earlier. In that intervening period, radio, cinema, and enhanced transportation (or something else) had made farm boys from Iowa that much smarter.

In our digital world, communication is now instant and global. Some feel that this infrastructure is playing a key role in improving human mental abilities. Others disagree entirely. They feel that because this technology is so ubiquitous, it is harming rather than improving communication by polluting the planet with vast amounts of digital trash and low-grade information. There are also concerns that this technology may actually be stopping people from using their minds because so many people permit technology to do their thinking for them.

The onslaught of artificial intelligence (AI) is often cited as the biggest threat to humanity—ironically by the very people who promote its development, such as the tech billionaire Elon Musk. AI may serve as the guillotine of truth through mass manipulation of information or deepfake videos.

The transhumanist movement peddles the absurd notion that human evolution and ability can be enhanced by the imaginative addition of microcircuitry and/or exotic materials. But it is becoming abundantly clear that technology—cooked up by the human intellect—is fast becoming mankind’s jailer, especially when used for nefarious purposes such as war, social control, or surveillance.

Defining exactly what mind is has become one of the hottest yet most elusive topics in the burgeoning area of consciousness research. Materialist science (sometimes called the new religion of scientism) remains blinkered by confining mind solely to the physical brain and regarding consciousness purely as an epiphenomenon, or by-product, of electrochemical reactions in the cerebral cortex. This model can only define mind and consciousness in terms of physical infrastructure. Science insists that without a brain, there can be no mind.

Although the scientific world has been confronted by the weird world of quantum physics (which is itself based on nonmaterial worlds), superstring theory (based on numerous dimensions), and the mighty mysteries of dark energy and dark matter, only a few enlightened scientists are slowly beginning to divest themselves of the exclusively materialistic paradigm.

Occult science takes a diametrically opposite view. Theosophy generally divides mind (manas) into the lower mind of concrete, everyday, mundane thoughts and a higher mind, which is able to conceptualize and deal with higher abstract concepts. Above these two faculties is another, more sophisticated variety (latent in the vast majority of people): the sixth human principle of buddhi. Derived from the Sanskrit root budh-, which means to awaken or to perceive, it is often mistranslated as intuition (sometimes even as reason or intellect), but it has a far wider function. It is direct perception or awareness transcending rational thought, described as “divine instinct” by H.P. Blavatsky.

The Theosophical Encyclopaedia defines buddhi as the spiritual soul: the operating vehicle of our highest principle, atma, or spirit. It is “the faculty which manifests as spiritual intuition, insight, understanding, all of which is far deeper and higher and subtler than our reasoning faculty.”

Buddhi appears as the voice of conscience, the sense of right and wrong, as well as the ability to perceive and appreciate harmony, beauty. and truth. Reflected through the manas, it is wisdom offering “a synthesizing, unifying vision, as against the analytical, divisive faculty of the rational principle.”

Perhaps in its crudest, undeveloped form, buddhi appears as hunches or gut feelings, but in reality, it has a much deeper, synthesizing role. Although many people experience these feelings or other flashes of insight, they often tend to mistrust and dismiss them because they haven’t been filtered through the rational mind. This is a big mistake, because in many ways this is a purer form of perception than the rational mind.

When buddhi is dormant, the mind, manas, remains the acme of human achievement. When buddhi is awakened and operating in conjunction with manas, it becomes the divine Ego, or the soul of Theosophical teachings.

It is widely speculated that this sixth principle of wisdom-intuition is now unfolding in larger sections of humanity and will be further developed with the emergence of the sixth subrace of our present Fifth Root Race in the coming decades and centuries. (Small numbers of vanguard members of this new subrace are already in incarnation.) In the distant Sixth Root Race, buddhi will eventually become standard-issue and fully functional. It will be our permanent sixth sense, operating alongside our existing faculties of sight, hearing, touch, taste, and smell.

It is also widely observed that certain children coming into incarnation at the present time are showing more developed intuitive faculties in terms of empathy and compassion. Sometimes they are referred to as “indigo,” “rainbow,” or “star children.” Many seem resistant to mainly left-brained means of classroom learning. They do not perceive the world the way their parents or grandparents did. Some are (almost certainly wrongly) diagnosed as having mental disorders such as autism or attention deficit and hyperactivity disorder (ADHD).

Awakening, liberating, and utilizing the wisdom-intuition principle in humans will be a vital evolutionary leap forward, because it spells a major uplift in consciousness, operating beyond the limitations of the intellect. After all, it is the ordinary intellect that has created and reinforced the prevailing materialist mantra, adopted almost universally by science and the majority of people, that the physical world is the sole reality and that belief in subtle realms or mind beyond brain is either crude superstition or wishy-washy speculative nonsense.

Buddhi opens up entire new horizons of perception by energizing and enhancing the faculties of both imagination and inspiration. It revolutionizes consciousness and opens the doors to the soul. Over time, this principle will enable human beings to transcend the three-dimensional, five-sense physical world and form links to the spiritual and supersensible realms.

This development will ultimately produce a new way of transcendent spiritual thinking, described by the Austrian esotericist Rudolf Steiner as “active, loving, spiritual, and free.” He believed that spiritual thinking—employing imagination, inspiration, and intuition—was the central stimulus at the heart of all great advances in science, art, philosophy and religion. When we extend our consciousness in this way, we change the world.

However, there will be opposition to this new, nonmaterial, nonlinear way of thinking from a variety of vested interests, not least science. As is the case with all new ideas (and this has always been true throughout human history), they are resisted, mocked, derided, and dismissed by cynics. The exponents of these new ways of thinking are attacked, undermined, ridiculed, cancelled and sometimes even killed.

Nevertheless, the majority of humanity do not need to achieve buddhic consciousness for it to precipitate major change. A change in consciousness among a comparatively small number of people can have a disproportionate effect on the wider world when they are working in close, focused harmony together. Followers of Transcendental Meditation have detected immediate effects in a local area when they commenced their activities, even with only a few people involved. This included better health and lower rates of crime. In fact, they found that it took just the square root of 1 percent of a given population to achieve this effect.

The present world population stands at just over 8 billion people. One percent of this is 80 million. And the square root of that is a mere 9,000 people—the population of a small town—and far less than the worldwide membership of the Theosophical Society.

Tim Wyatt is an esoteric author, publisher, lecturer, and filmmaker based in Yorkshire, England. His books are available from www.firewheelbooks.co.uk

Printed in the  Summer 2024  issue of Quest magazine. 
Citation: Sorkhabi, Rasoul "Henry Corbin’s Discovery of the Imaginal Realm in Sufism" Quest 112:3, pg 26-31

By Rasoul Sorkhabi

In Sufi philosophy, distinct words are used to denote the different meanings of imagination. Here I cite three strands of imagination, designated by different Arabic words. First is tasawwur, “picturing in the mind.” For example, when we read or hear the word elephant, we bring an image of elephant to our mind. This faculty, “the mind’s eye,” is a form of mental mechanics using sensory memories. Second is tawah’hum, “fantasy” (sometimes “hallucination”), which has no correspondence to reality. For instance, in a dark room a rope may appear to you as a snake, and you may be as frightened as if you had seen a real snake in daylight, but that imagination has no external reality. Third is takhayyul, which is difficult to translate. Although it is often translated as “imagination,” it is distinct from the two strands of imagination mentioned above.

In this article, I expound upon this particular mode of imagination, takhayyul, through the works and life journey of the French philosopher Henry Corbin, who discovered it in Sufi literature and philosophy and devoted his life to researching various facets of what he called “the imaginal world” (mundus imaginalis) to distinguish it from “imaginary” things as we normally conceive of them.

From Paris to Tehran

Henry Corbin (pronounced Kor-ban) was born on April 14, 1903, in Paris to Henri Arthur Corbin, a business executive, and Eugénie Fournier Corbin. His mother died a week after giving birth, and Henry was raised by his aunt (Arthur’s elder sister) and uncle, Amélie and Émile Petit Henry.

Corbin studied at Catholic schools and completed his secondary education at the Saint-Maur Abbey in Paris in 1922. He then joined the École Pratique des Hautes Études at the Sorbonne (University of Paris) and studied medieval philosophy under Étienne Gilson, a prominent Thomist scholar. Corbin graduated in 1925 with a dissertation on “Latin Avicenna in the Middle Ages.” He continued his studies at the Sorbonne, receiving his postgraduate degree in philosophy in 1926, followed by his doctoral diploma in 1928 with a dissertation on “Stoicism and Augustinianism in the work of Luis de Leon” (a sixteenth-century Spanish poet). While still a student, Corbin began working at the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris, and in 1929, he received a diploma in oriental languages (Arabic and Sanskrit) from the École des Langues Orientales at the Sorbonne.

A chance meeting in 1928 with Louis Massignon, the director of Islamic studies at the Sorbonne, was life-changing for Corbin. After Corbin told Massignon about why he was interested in Islamic philosophy, Massignon handed him a copy of Hikmat al-ishrâq (“Philosophy of Illumination”) by the twelfth-century Persian Sufi master Shahab al-Din Suhrawardi (1154‒91).

Massignon had just brought this Arabic book back from a trip to Iran; it was a 500-page lithographed edition with commentaries. As Corbin recalled later, “Massignon said to me: Take it, I think there is something in this book for you” (Jambet, 39‒41). Although a dense text, Suhrawardi’s book fascinated Corbin. Suhrawardi, known as the Master of Illuminist Sufi philosophy, discussed how the philosophy of enlightenment was developed and handed down by various masters through the ages dating back to Hermes in ancient Egypt, Zoroaster in Persia, and spiritual philosophers like Pythagoras and Plato in Greece, and was later continued through Sufi masters until his own time. Charged with blasphemy for his unorthodox ideas, Suhrawardi, aged only thirty-six, was brutally put to death in 1159 in Aleppo (now in Syria).

In 1933, Corbin married Stella Leenhardt, daughter of the Protestant pastor and ethnologist Maurice Leenhardt. She remained Corbin’s lifelong companion and even helped him with his paperwork and publications. During the 1930s, Corbin intensively studied the works of German philosophers and spent much time in Germany. Through his lectures, articles, and translations, Corbin introduced the German philosophies of existentialism and phenomenology in France. (When Corbin read the existentialist philosopher Martin Heidegger’s Being and Time, published in 1927, he wrote on the margins notes and references to the writings of Sufi philosophers.) Jean-Paul Sartre, who later championed existentialism, learned about Heidegger through Corbin’s works.

By the end of the 1930s, Corbin had mastered and integrated several philosophical skills. These included hermeneutics or interpretive reading of medieval texts (from Gilson and Massignon); Edmund Husserl’s phenomenology (a transcendental-idealist understanding of theosophical notions as consciousness arising from direct lived experiences rather than historical, psychological, or sociological incidents); Protestant Christian theology from Martin Luther to Karl Barth; and existentialist philosophy from Søren Kierkegaard to Heidegger.

With these experiences and a passion for Suhrawardi’s theosophy, Corbin embarked on his path of “uncovering the veiled” teachings of his favorite Sufi masters and philosophers. (The term “uncovering the veiled,” kashf al-mahjub, was used by some Sufi masters as their book titles, and Corbin edited and translated one of them, written by the tenth-century mystic Sajestâni.) During 1933‒35, Corbin translated two treatises from Suhrawardi into French, and his first paper on the Sufi philosopher came out in French in 1939. Corbin’s prolific and original studies contributed to a renaissance in Persian Sufism in the twentieth century.

In October 1939, Corbin and his wife went to Istanbul. Corbin wanted to study the original manuscripts of Suhrawardi at libraries and museums in Istanbul. A trip that was meant to be for a few months lasted six years as World War II engulfed Europe. During these years, Corbin served as the sole member of the French Institute of Archaeology in Istanbul.

In September 1945, as a new person was appointed for Corbin’s position, the Corbins took a train for Iran. In the capital, Tehran, Corbin gave an impressive lecture on Suhrawardi. He was appointed by the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs as the head of Iranology at the Institut Français de Recherche en Iran, a position he kept until 1970. The Corbins returned to Paris in October 1946.

In 1949 Eranos conferences, led by Carl Jung, were launched in Ascona, Switzerland. Corbin was a regular participant in these annual gatherings, where he befriended Jung, Mircea Eliade, Gershom Scholem, among other noted scholars.  Some of Corbin’s major works were presented at Eranos and initially published in the yearbook Eranos-Jahrbuch; they were later translated into English and published in the Bollingen Eranos series by Princeton University Press.

In 1954, Corbin succeeded Louis Massignon (at the latter’s suggestion) in the chair of religious and Islamic studies at the Sorbonne. Each year until the late 1970s, Corbin would spend autumns in Tehran, doing research and teaching at Tehran University; he would then spend winters and springs in Paris, and summers at Ascona. In 1973, Corbin retired but still continued his research work, and in 1974 began a position at the newly established Royal Iranian Academy of Philosophy in Tehran.  

Corbin died on October 7, 1978, at age seventy-five, in Paris, and was buried in the cemetery of Champeaux in Montmorency, north of Paris. Corbin’s wife, Stella, helped with the posthumous publication of Corbin’s works until she passed away in 2003. The Corbins had no children. “Our children,” he once said in an interview in Tehran, “are these books.”

On the Shoulders of Giants

Corbin devoted his life to Suhrawardi’s philosophical project of integrating “discursive or verbal philosophy” (hikmat bah’thi) with “experiential mysticism” (hikmat dhouqi); the idea of the imaginal realm arose from this integration. What is perhaps most remarkable about Corbin’s work is that he did not limit his research to Suhrawardi; he studied, translated (into French), and commented on the works of all major Sufi masters and Islamic philosophers who had, in one way or another, contributed to the concept of imaginal realm (Corbin 1994, 2014). These included Avicenna (Ibn Sina, 980‒1037), Ruzbehan Baqli (1128‒1209), Ibn ‘Arabi (1165‒1240), and Mulla Sadra (1571‒1635), thus spanning six centuries of philosophical work, which Corbin masterfully synthesized.

Avicenna was a renowned philosopher, physician, and psychologist. His Canon of Medicine in Latin translation was a major medical textbook in Europe for six centuries until the eighteenth century. Avicenna also wrote several allegorical Sufi stories which Corbin analyzed in his book Avicenna and the Visionary Recital.

Ruzbehan Baqli, whose two main works Corbin translated, highlighted two teachings. First, love and beauty can be seen and sensed only if “veils” of ignorance, greed, and arrogance are removed from our hearts. Second, mystical findings or secret teachings can be only expressed in metaphors and symbols.

Corbin, who used to call Suhrawardi “my Master” (shaykh), collected and translated all of the Master’s Arabic and Persian works in three major volumes published in 1945, 1952, and 1970.

Corbin’s work on Ibn ‘Arabi, translated into English under the title Alone with the Alone: Creative Imagination of the Sufism of Ibn Arabi, is one of the best works on the teachings and thoughts of this Andalusian theosophist, whose original works in Arabic are indeed dense and complex.

Mulla Sadra, who like Ruzbehan Baqli came from the city of Shiraz in Iran, was probably the last major philosopher of medieval Islam. Like Suhrawardi before him, Sadra attempted to reconcile rational and spiritual philosophies. In fact, the copy of Suhrawardi’s book that Massignon had given Corbin in 1928 contained commentaries by none other than Sadra. 

The Imaginal Realm

To better understand the concept of imaginal realm, we need to situate it in Sufi cosmology. Sufi philosophers conceptualized the existence of several realms (âlam). Sometimes these are translated as “worlds,” but the word for “world” in Arabic, dunya, means the physical world, while âlam denotes a more general sense of “realm.”

The idea that existence has several modalities or realms is not new. In the third century AD, the Neoplatonist philosopher Plotinus suggested four realms: the One, nous (or intellect), psyche (soul), and the corporeal world (nature). This categorization served as a basis for later Islamic philosophical thinking.

Muslim philosophers believed that the divine realm (âlam lâhut) is “absolutely concealed” (ghayb mutlaqa) and cannot be conceived by the human intellect. Avicenna regards God as “necessary (causeless) being,” while Suhrawardi describes God as the Light of Lights (nur al-anwâr), implying that the entire creation is an emanation or illumination of lesser lights (anwâr) at various levels and degrees. The created world (âlam khalq) has four realms: (1) the realm of intellects (âlam jabarut); (2) the realm of pure souls (âlam malakut); (3) the imaginal realm (âlam mithâl or âlam khayâl); and (4) the physical realm (âlam mulk or âlam nâsut): the lower corporeal world.

The imaginal realm is the bridge between the physical body and the higher realms. Therefore it is neither physical nor purely spiritual: it is both tangible and abstract. It is imaginal—an image sourced in the beyond and yet perceptible here. To describe the imaginal, Suhrawardi uses the analogy of steam, which is neither water nor fire yet has qualities of both in itself. In fact, the Sufi term mithâl, translated as imaginal, actually refers to an image that exemplifies or symbolizes an ideal model. But this ideal model is different from Plato’s universal Ideas, which are fixed, perfect models of physical objects. The imaginal realm consists of “ideas or images in suspension” (suwar mu’allaqa). They are similar to images on the mirror: reflected and visible and yet not existing on the mirror. These images incarnate in the physical realm through our creative or active imagination (khayâl fa’âll).

Creative imagination in Suhrawardi’s teachings involves a journey from “the sunset on the west” toward “the sunrise on the east.” Here the words “west” and “east” should not be considered as geopolitical divisions. They indicate that in every location and in every human body, there is the darkness of sunset as well as the light of sunrise. “The adventure of a mystical philosopher is essentially seen as a voyage which progresses toward the Light” (Corbin 1998, 140). Avicenna and Suhrawardi liken this journey of the soul to the flight of a bird from its cage to the open sky or to its forest home.

The imaginal realm is also the bridge to the realm of angels, which, according to Suhrawardi, populate the realm of intellects. Suhrawardi uses Zoroastrian terminology for beings (Lights) in the realm of intellect, the first of which—that is, the closest light to God—is Vohu Mana: “Good Mind” (Avens).

Creative or active imagination is the faculty of connecting to the imaginal realm; it is like a ladder on which one ascends from bottom to top. Corbin believed that the imaginal realm is the source of creative art, inspirations, prophetic revelation, spiritual dreams, mystical visions, and myths. Corbin was fond of Persian arts—the architecture of mosques, gardens, and colorful geometric designs on ceramic, tiles, ceramic and pottery—and considered them to have come from the imaginal realm.

Corbin suggested that many mystical stories, or what he called “visionary narratives,” were inspired by the imaginal realm. He translated and commented on such narratives by Avicenna and Suhrawardi. For instance, one of Suhrawardi’s stories is based on a quote from the Sufi master Abu Ali Fârmadi (1016‒84) saying that our spiritual perceptions are like hearing the “sound of Gabriel’s wings.” Corbin suggested that even though such stories do not make sense rationally or physically, they symbolize observations and experiences of what takes place in the imaginal realm but cannot be put into words.

Where is the imaginal realm? Here Corbin uses various metaphorical terms found in Sufi literature, including “the eighth clime” (based on the ancient idea that the earth had seven climes or zones); the land beyond the mythical mountain of Qâf, the axis mundi in Sufi thought, which connects the earth to the heaven; the emerald cities of Jabulqa on the east and Jubulsa on the west; or the land of Hurqaliyâ or Nâkojâ-âbâd (“Nowhereland”). These names, although apparently geographic, refer to a realm which is not found on maps. Rather it is the place visited by the enlightened person, who, like Joseph Campbell’s “hero,” returns to society and shares the images and consciousness of Light. 

How can one tell mental fantasy (tawah’hum) from spiritual vision of the imaginal realm (takhayyul)? According to Suhrawardi, the imaginal realm links to the realm of intellects and angels, so the images or ideas arising from it have angelic qualities of intelligence, benevolence, and beauty. Fantasy, however, can be proven to be unreal, and if it persists in the person’s mind can even lead to destructive feelings and demonic thoughts.

Corbin adds that the imaginal realm brings about a certain quality of consciousness that has been expressed by various mystics in different cultures and ages. In this sense, the imaginal realm is suprahistorical. For this reason, Corbin disliked attempts to explain away mystical texts and arts merely through historical, social, or psychological analyses. If mental imagination, tasawwur, is “the mind’s eye,” creative imagination, takhayyul, is the “heart’s eye.” Hence Sufis emphasize that in order to contact creative imagination and spiritual vision, the heart should be awake and pure.

Corbin’s Influences on Modern Thought

Corbin is less known than Carl Jung, Joseph Campbell, Mircea Eliade, and other mystical scholars of his generation, probably for two main reasons. For one thing, he wrote in French, not English, and then often in a technical language that is less accessible to the public. Moreover, although his thoughts have wider implications, he articulated them in the domain of Sufism, which would be of interest chiefly to certain groups of readers.

Nevertheless, as Corbin’s books have become available in English, his works and thoughts are gaining increasing attention. The concept of the imaginal realm has a special appeal to Jungian psychologists because of its applications in dream analysis, mythology, religious experience, and archetypal psychology. The American psychologist James Hillman (1926‒2011) in particular was fascinated by Corbin’s ideas. In recent years, Tom Cheetham has published a number of books on Corbin from the viewpoints of Jung’s and Hillman’s psychology. The literary critic Harold Bloom is another major thinker influenced by Corbin. He not only wrote an introduction to the 1997 edition of Corbin’s Alone with the Alone but also published an entire book, Omens of Millennium: The Gnosis of Angels, Dreams, and Resurrection (1996), that is rooted in Corbin’s ideas and works.

Corbin’s wife, Stella, reported that days before his death, Corbin had asked his doctor if he would live enough to finish a work in progress. His doctor had replied: “If you had hundred years more, you would ask me the same,” to which Corbin had said: “Maybe! Nevertheless, through my books I am fighting against the same thing as you. Each in our own way, you the doctor, I the historian of religions, we are fighting the same struggle, we are fighting against death.” In Corbin’s vision, death meant darkness, and life is light of consciousness from the imaginal realm.

Sources

Avens, Roberts. “Henry Corbin and Suhrawardi’s Angelogy.” Spring, 1988: 3‒20.

Bloom, Harold. Omens of Millennium: The Gnosis of Angels, Dreams, and Resurrection. New York: Riverhead, 1996.

Cheetham, Tom. The World Turned Inside Out: Henry Corbin and Islamic Mysticism. Thompson, Conn.: Spring Journal Books, 2003.

Corbin, Henry. Avicenna and the Visionary Recital. Translated by Willard Trask. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1960.

Corbin, Henry. Alone with the Alone: Creative Imagination in the Sufism of Ibn ‘Arabi. Translated by Ralph Manheim. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1969, 1998. (The earlier edition was published under the title Creative Imagination in the Sufism of Ibn Arabi.)

———. History of Islamic Philosophy. Translated by Liadain Sherrard. London: Routledge, 2014.

———. The Man of Light in Iranian Sufism. Translated by Nancy Pearson. New Lebanon, N.Y.: Omega Publications, 1994.

———. The Voyage and the Messenger: Iran and Philosophy. Translated by Joseph Rowe. Berkeley, Calif.: North Atlantic, 1998.

Jambet, Christian, ed. Henry Corbin. Paris: Éditions de l’Herne, 1981.

Sorkhabi, Rasoul. “Henry Corbin and the Renaissance of Persian Sufism.” Interreligious Insight 8, no. 3 (Dec. 2010): 26‒37.

Rasoul Sorkhabi, PhD, is a professor at the University of Utah. His life spans both East and West, as he has lived and studied in Iran, India, Japan, and the U.S. This is his sixth contribution to Quest.

PHOTO CREDIT: Photo by courtesy of L’Association des amis de Henry et Stella Corbin: www.amiscorbin.com.