Quest Magazine

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.

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.