Quest Magazine

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

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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.

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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.

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Printed in the  Summer 2024  issue of Quest magazine. 
Citation: Smoley, Richard "Walking through Darkness: An Interview with Sandra Ingerman" Quest 112:3, pg 12-19

By Richard Smoley

Sandra Ingerman, a world-renowned teacher of shamanism, is recognized for bridging ancient cross-cultural healing methods with modern culture. She has taught for forty years, including workshops worldwide on shamanic journeying, healing, and reversing environmental pollution using spiritual methods.

Sandra has authored twelve books, including Soul Retrieval: Mending the Fragmented Self; Medicine for the Earth; Walking in Light; and The Book of Ceremony: Shamanic Wisdom for Invoking the Sacred in Everyday Life, as well as Awakening to the Spirit World: The Shamanic Path of Direct Revelation (coauthored with Hank Wesselman). Her latest book, coauthored with Llyn Roberts, is Walking through Darkness: A Nature-Based Path to Navigating Suffering and Loss (Sounds True).

Sandra is known for gathering the global spiritual community together to perform powerful transformative ceremonies as well as inspiring us to stand strong in unity so we do our own spiritual and social activism work while keeping a vision of hope and light.

This interview was conducted via Zoom in December 2023. It is available on YouTube. An edited version is below.

 

Richard Smoley: Shamanism is a religion associated with primitive tribes. Can you say a little bit about it in a present-day context? How is it practiced by Americans today?

Sandra Ingerman: Shamanism is actually the oldest universal spiritual practice. Archaeological evidence suggests that it dates back over 100,000 years. You can imagine that a practice that started 100,000 years ago had to keep evolving to meet the needs of the people.

One reason that shamanism has been around so long is that it gets good results. I know this sounds a little harsh, but there are shamanic cultures back in the olden days where, if the shaman couldn’t heal the people and couldn’t help them find food, the shaman was actually killed. Shamanism has always been a very result-oriented practice. It’s not, “Oh, isn’t it nice to do a ceremony or take a shamanic journey?” That’s not what shamanism is about. Instead, does it heal the people? Does it heal the land? Does it make our lives better? It’s a practice that has gotten really good results.

When I started practicing shamanism forty years ago, I was a psychotherapist, and I’d hear from a couple of students about different ceremonies that were done for healing. I said to myself, “This can’t be bridged into our modern-day culture. There’s no way to work with this in a session with a client.”

Yet shamanism has evolved so that we can work in a modern culture. We have shamanic practitioners going into schools, helping children look at how they can live a balanced life, connected to nature. We have people dealing with unbelievable trauma who are getting help from Western shamanic practitioners. We have priests and nuns practicing shamanism. We have doctors, nurses, and lawyers practicing shamanism, besides people who are just seeking help in their own lives or who want to bring the work into their community.

Over the years, we’ve been able to interest people in shamanism at a time on the planet where we need help. They can direct help to our culture, where oftentimes healing methods and ceremonies from indigenous cultures just don’t work in a Western world. They’re not translatable.

Smoley: One principal difference between shamanism and conventional psychotherapy has to do with the spirits. As you’ve suggested, shamanism is based on the reality of the spirit world and our capacity to relate to it, whereas modern psychology denies that there’s any such thing. Could you talk about that difference?

Ingerman: I’ll tell you what happened to me as a psychotherapist.

Forty years ago, I moved to Santa Fe, and I had two separate practices. Back in those days, I stuck to the legalities and had two different business cards: one as a psychotherapist, and one as a shamanic counselor.

I was teaching my shamanic clients how to meet their own helping spirits. In shamanism, the most powerful ceremony is the shamanic journey: a practice of direct revelation, where everybody has their own divine helping spirits who can help them, and people can become their own authorities.

My shamanic clients were journeying to their spirits. Their spirits were helping them, giving them advice, and healing them. My shamanic clients were moving much faster than my psychotherapy clients, where we seemed to just be going around in a loop. It could have been that I wasn’t a great therapist—I don’t know—but at some point I saw my shamanic clients moving so fast. I told my psychotherapy clients that I was no longer doing traditional therapy. If they wanted to move with me and become shamanic clients, they could. Otherwise I would refer them out to another psychotherapist. Everybody moved with me except one person.

With shamanism, we can give a client the ability to have their own self-directed revelation. They get their own answers instead of having to follow what an authority figure is sharing with them. Oftentimes that’s good information: the therapist doesn’t have the same perspective that the spirits have. The spirits have no body. They’re out in the divine realms, and they have a different perspective to us in the world.

Some people who are in therapy want that comfort of having a therapist. It depends on people’s personalities. Do they want to become their own authority figure, or do they want the help of somebody else? I see the practices as being very different, but a lot of psychotherapists are now bridging shamanism into their practices. They teach their clients how to journey as well as doing psychotherapy work. That’s another way that shamanism has evolved: it has been bridging into psychotherapy a bit.

The other important point is that when a person goes into psychotherapy, it’s the therapist who does the diagnosis of what’s going on for them. In shamanism, if I go to my helping spirit and say, “This is my diagnosis of my client,” my helping spirit may say to me, “Oh, Sandra, that’s such a beautiful theory, but that has absolutely nothing to do with what’s happening with your client right now.” The beauty of shamanic work as a psychotherapist is, I can defer to the helping spirits, who see what the client really needs.

Part of the looping with my psychotherapy clients was that we weren’t hitting the core issue, so we kept on having to talk around and around. The helping spirit I’ve worked with for forty years now has never been wrong. When I journey for a client, the very first thing he does is say what the core issue is and what needs to be healed. Once you get that core issue, everything falls into place.

Smoley: You’ve mentioned the shamanic journey. Could you give us some idea of what it entails?

Ingerman: Shamanism is about ceremony, which is a way for us to come back to place of stability and center. Our ego mind gets disturbed by what’s going on in our lives and the world.

When we perform a ceremony in shamanism, we move away from our ego, we step away from our humanness, and we allow our spirit to connect with helping spirits.

In shamanism it’s believed that when we’re born—all of us, whether we believe in shamanism or not—there are helping spirits who come in, volunteer to help us, protect us, and keep us safe and healthy throughout our lives. They won’t prevent our big lessons, so yes, tragedy comes into our life, because we have to grow. But it’s believed that we always have these spirits around us.

A shamanic journey is a ceremony where we do preparation work—singing and dancing, meditation, spending time in nature—to step away from our ego so that it is not coming into the journey. It’s our spirit speaking to these divine spirits.

In shamanism, it’s said that there are three worlds. There is the lower world, which seems very earthy. It’s a wonderful place, and there are helping spirits, power animals, guardian spirits. Guardian spirits could be a tree or a plant or a fairy; there are also teachers, mystics, ancestor figures.

Then we go to the middle world, where we have the opportunity to speak with nature, but working in the unseen. We step into a different dimension of reality with nature; we can talk to trees and plants as indigenous people used to do, and say, “What are your healing properties? What’s your story? What has your life been like?” We get to communicate with nature. And that’s probably the biggest illness in our culture today: how disconnected people are from nature.

The third world is the upper world. So there’s the world tree: the roots go down to the lower world; the trunk is the middle world; the branches go to the upper world, and we climb up using different tools and ways to get to the upper world. That’s where many teachers in human form live again. We have a variety of spirits that we can go to. They could be ancestors, religious figures; people see goddesses and gods from all different cultures. Teachers can be very surprising: a young child could come in as a teacher.

Once we start to journey, we learn who our helping spirits are. We journey to the lower world, we journey to the upper world, and we ask for a teacher or power animal or guardian spirit. We wait to see who shows up. We don’t pick them. They pick us.

Then we forge an amazing relationship, so that whenever we go into a shamanic journey, our spirits are there. We know they’re going to be there. We know who our spirits are.

As I’ve said, I’ve been working with this one spirit for forty years, so how can I not trust what he says? He’s never been wrong. It’s amazing to have that kind of support.

How can people enter into a journey, moving their humanness out of the way so that their spirit can fly into the unseen realms and they can have direct revelation and conversations with these amazing spirits? Typically in most cultures, some kind of percussion is used to go into an altered state; in most cultures a drum is used. That’s what I use. Rattles are used; I also use rattles. People in different countries also use bowls and bells. A didgeridoo might be used in Australia.

Then there are plant spirits, which many shamans use to go into the unseen realms. Plant spirits are wonderful, but we can use a drum or rattles. With these methods, we can make the information accessible to us on a day-to-day basis, because we can still hold our consciousness. We can get practical answers like, what do I do in the next minute? What do I do tomorrow? instead of the bigger, planetary, cosmic things we might be shown using plant spirits. What I love about shamanic journey is how practical it is.

Smoley: On this topic of communicating with nature and nature spirits: one of those enigmatic creatures is the bee. The bee has many esoteric dimensions, both symbolically and in many other ways. Maybe you could talk a little bit about bee shamanism. Do you know anything about that?

Ingerman: I’ve put out this message for forty years now, so people know I’m strict about this: every time a helping spirit comes to you, it’s bringing a unique gift that you personally need, not what anybody else needs; it’s what you need.

Shamanism is a practice to empower yourself so that you become your own authority. I tell people, if you want to know about what the symbolism of Bee is for you, journey to Bee, and ask Bee for yourself.

I have a hard time with books saying that this creature means this, and this creature means that, because I’ve found that people miss the unique gifts that the universe is trying to share. They go into generic work, they go into what one author discovered, but we really need to keep our own authority. If we want to know what Bee is about, I tell people to go to Bee and talk to Bee.

Smoley: That’s very helpful. In the course of these spirit conversations, there is always the possibility of being deceived. In your new book, Walking through Darkness, your first chapter is on Coyote, which is well known as a trickster figure, often portrayed in a cartoonish, Wile E. Coyote kind of way. Your chapter suggests that deception is possible; it is part of the game. Could you comment a bit about this? How do you sort through deception?

Ingerman: I was using Coyote as a metaphor. My coauthor, Llyn Roberts, and I used animals as metaphors; we weren’t talking about them as real spirits.

I use myself as an example. The book is about my roadmap of how I got through the dark night of the soul. I have a disorder that developed nine years ago, so the book is about how I’ve worked with it. If you have something rare or unknown, people jump out at you and say, “I can help you. I know exactly how to help you. I can cure you in one month, or two months. Just do whatever I say.”

That whole chapter was about how, when we’re walking through the dark night of the soul, it’s not spirits that try to trick us. The spirits are trying to help us, if we would listen to them. But people we meet can act as coyotes, as tricksters who try to deceive us and bring us to the wrong path. A lot of them are heart-centered and compassionate. They feel that they can help, but they plant seeds of hope that aren’t going to grow. In that chapter, I was trying to share how people who are dealing with a lot of darkness are often prey to human beings who want to be authorities and say, “Follow me: do this, and I can help you.”

Those of us who are dealing with mysterious ailments find that until we go inside and talk to our body and soul ourselves, we’re going to be deceived by other humans, because they don’t know what’s happening for us.

I know people get lost in how spirits deceive human beings, but I’ve never taught that in forty years. I believe that your intention creates your reality. If you believe the spirits are going to give you good information, they’re going to give you good information.

Smoley: One thing that precipitates dark nights of the soul is the deaths of loved ones. Perhaps you could talk about the shamanic approach to this subject, both in terms of the bereaved and working with the recently deceased.

Ingerman: For some people, the next step of their healing process is life; for others, the next healing step is death. We demonize death in this culture. We do everything to try to avoid it. Many people are terrified of death and don’t understand what’s coming.

Death is the next step of our evolution to bring us to a new dimension of reality. From a shamanic point of view, working with death is not so much about trying to keep people alive, but trying to help people have a good journey back home. One of the best things that you can do for a person who’s dying is to go into a meditative state and move away from your ego, from your mind. Drop into spirit, and see yourself as a being of light, because that’s what we all are. Our spiritual identity is actually light. When you sit in a state of light with somebody who’s dying, it brings amazing peace for them.

In this culture, we immediately say, “No, grandma, no, mom, no, dad, you’re not going to die. Stop talking like that; that’s crazy talk.” That’s not what dying people need. They need people who are going to hold space. Listen to the dying person as they talk about their memories, their fears; sit with them in meditation, being in a place of light.

From a shamanic point of view, most people transcend out of what we call the middle world. I talked about the middle world as a place of nature. The middle world is Earth School. We’re here to learn; we’re here to evolve. When a person dies, they don’t belong in Earth School anymore; they’ve graduated. They might need some more teachings and healing, but it’s time for them to leave the middle world.

In a Judeo-Christian culture, of course we all want to go up, so we talk about people going up to the heavens, going back to the divine, to the upper world, to beautiful territories. From a shamanic point of view, people typically do that on their own, and different cultures give the soul different time lines to grieve its own death. Some cultures say that a soul has a year to grieve their own death before they’ve moved on. But most cultures give about three days before they bury or cremate a person. I would never do any work to help somebody cross over for at least three days.

If everything goes right, we all transcend on our own. But from a shamanic point of view, it’s understood that there are circumstances where souls get stuck in the middle world: they don’t know they died. This is one of my specialties. I’ve worked with students where we go back to the Vietnam war. We go back to an airplane crash, and everybody’s wondering where the ambulances are. Why isn’t anybody here? They don’t even know that they died. You oftentimes have to take them back to their homes and show them how their family has aged and their loved ones have died. That’s how long they’ve been gone.

Once they’re convinced, you can start to escort them up to the upper world. Oftentimes we have to do psychotherapy on spirits to let them know that they don’t belong here anymore. A lot of times a husband or wife or lover won’t leave the middle world because they want to take care of their loved ones. In that case, it has to be explained that they can’t help their loved ones while they’re stuck in the middle world. They need to move on.

This aspect of shamanism is psychopomp work, and psychopomp is a Greek word which means conductor of souls.

If a person dies in a terrorism attack or a war, is shot, or dies of drug abuse or suicide or some way that wasn’t expected, the death was a surprise, and the soul gets confused. In these cases, we have to do psychopomp work: talking to the soul, letting them know a loved one is waiting for them. Sometimes a loved one will come down and help.

It’s not OK to wander the earth as a ghost. Basically, we all know what that’s like. We’ve all had some kind of visitation or some weird feeling that there’s a spirit in the land, our house, or someplace we’re visiting. A very important part of shamanism has always been to keep the middle world as clear as possible, where those of us who are here for Earth School are learning our lessons, and those of us who need to transcend have left.

For those of us who were left with our loved ones gone, grieving is an important part of shamanic work. Grieving is a process that takes time: we really have to take the time. I remember working with a banker who said to me, “My mother just died, and I’m in such a state of grief, but my bank made me come back to work immediately.” We don’t give people the time to grieve the way people did in indigenous cultures: doing ceremonies, making sure that they’re in a good place, making sure that we honor them.

 I love to lead ceremonies for funerals. When I do, I always have people tell a funny story about the person who left, and I go around the group and have people share a story about that person; then we all release that person. For the one who’s deceased, part of the healing is being released by everyone who loves them instead of being pulled back down here.

Smoley: My family lives where Indian burial mounds are about a mile due west of us. It is a forest preserve, and you can walk around through it, which we do regularly. It always has a slightly unwelcoming quality. Trying to attune myself to whatever’s going on there, I’ve gotten the impression that the people who lived there a thousand years ago decided to become local nature spirits and become guardians of the land. They’re not too friendly to the newcomers. That’s just my impression. Does that make any sense from your point of view?

Ingerman: Absolutely. In my forty years of teaching and traveling, the first thing I do is journey to the local ancestors. I learned this on my own going to workshops. We were flooded out. The weather was always bad. We couldn’t do our ceremonies.

It finally came to me that there are ancestors that choose to stay here to protect the land, so I tell people to call in the helping ancestors of the land. Always use the word “helping.” That means you’re dealing with divine, not deceptive beings, because in the middle world, people who haven’t crossed over can cause some problems. They’re not divine beings. They’re still stuck here. They haven’t transcended yet.

I always say to the ancestors of the land, “I’m bringing a group. We’re really open-hearted people. We don’t know your ways, but we want to learn how to bring healing, how to bring balance back to this great earth. Will you please honor us and help us as we do our work?”

I can tell miracle story after miracle story of what has happened when I started doing that. Storms would clear; hurricanes would clear, so we could do our ceremonies. We’ve always been supported, but I always have to call in the helping ancestors first.

I will never travel to a place until I journey and talk to the local spirits, tell them the intention and whom I’m bringing, and ask for their permission to come. If I’m traveling on a vacation, I do exactly the same thing: “I’m coming to your land to rest. Will you help to make this trip without obstacles for me?” I believe that talking to the helping ancestors is one of the most important things to do before we step onto land that is not our home.

Smoley: This may be one of the problems in the American psyche. I was a student in England for a couple of years. I had many friends there, and still do. I had a sense that their connection with the land—particularly with those that are sensitive in the ways we’re talking about—is very different from ours, because they are the descendants of the ancestors of that land. Their ancestors have been there for thousands of years. Here the whites came in as invaders, so there seems to be a break in the American psyche between who we are and our connection to the land and the spirits of the land. Could you address that?

Ingerman: I talked about that a lot in my earlier books. I think if you don’t honor your ancestors, and you don’t know who your ancestors are—which happens to a lot of us in America—you have no future. You need to know there’s a line: there’s past, present, and future. There is no future when you don’t care who your ancestors are or you don’t honor them in any way.

For me, this has been a big issue in that my ancestors emigrated to escape being murdered and wiped out. When they came to America, all they wanted to do was integrate. So throughout my life, I could never get anybody to tell me about my relatives. Until I started working with Ancestry a year ago, I didn’t know where my grandfather came from. I asked his sister, and she said, “I don’t know. Why do you want to know?” To me, it’s a real illness of our culture.

If you go to an indigenous culture for healing and you say you’re from America, the first thing they’re going to do is try to connect you to your ancestors. They see that one of the biggest causes of illness in America right now is that we have no connection with our ancestors.

From a shamanic point of view, it’s our ancestors who have our back. Our ancestors want us to be successful. They want us to be healthy, they want us to be happy, but a lot of people in the West reject their ancestors because they were traumatized growing up. They projected all the way back beyond their parents to their ancestors. This is a real cause of illness, because if we honor our ancestors, we have more support than we ever realized. A lot of people here don’t want to know about their ancestors, and I find that unbelievably sad.

I remember one of the first times I was teaching in Austria. At lunch a man was talking about how he still lives in the house that his ancestors lived in 900 years ago. I couldn’t believe it. What would that feel like to be so connected to one’s ancestors? I’m struggling just to find out where my ancestors came from.

Smoley: People who have worked with ancestral spirits often find that the ancestral spirits themselves need healing work. Could you talk a little bit about this?

Ingerman: I recently taught a class where I had people go back and ask their ancestors if they needed healing. The power of journeying is so wonderful because we get answers, we get direct revelations, so I’ve been able to help a lot of people.

Through journeying, we can go back and ask, what stories need to be healed? What stories need to be changed? How can I change my behavior so I change the story of our ancestors so that we’re moving forward to a better life instead of repeating all the traumas that they’ve gone through?

There’s healing that can happen. There’s also information that we can get about changes we need to make in order to stop carrying forth our looping behaviors. We’re carrying all these stories in our DNA; oftentimes we just continue to live them out.

Smoley: To go on to another subject, a major theme of shamanic work is working with power animals. Could you talk a little bit about power animals—discovering them, interacting with them, enabling them to help you?

Ingerman: They are one form of helping spirits. Again, it’s believed that when we come into this world, we are accompanied by guardian spirits. If this is not an actual animal—if you’re not working with Tiger, Bear, or Eagle—you don’t use the term power animals. You don’t call a tree a power animal; you don’t call a fairy a power animal; you don’t call insects power animals, so I use the term guardian spirits. They volunteer to protect you when you’re born. You wouldn’t have an eagle as a power animal; you have Eagle. You have the whole species that is protecting you energetically.

Power animals can live in the lower world and in the upper world. They live in the transcendent realities and are considered divine beings. They come into our lives and work with us in healing.

I work with a guardian spirit that you would call a power animal. My helping spirit is for my questions and for my clients. He does all healing work on my clients, whereas my teacher in the upper world helps me with writing, teaching, and developing courses to help the planet.

We have a variety of spirits, and power animals are just one of them. That was the point I was trying to make before: when a modern-day practitioner journeys to meet their power animal, often the first thing they will do afterward is run to some symbol book and look up the meaning instead of realizing that their power animal came to them for something incredibly specific. It’s a gift. It’s a strength. They’re bringing something to that person that they’re not bringing to any other human being on the planet. Power animals come to us for very individual reasons. When you journey and you meet a power animal, it’s part of the discipline to discern why. Why did they come into your life? What do they have to teach you?

I try to teach the discipline of developing a strong relationship with a power animal so that they’re your buddy instead of going to some book to find out why. That way, you lose the gift that this power animal is bringing into your life, because you think it means something else.

Back in the eighties, as I was traveling, teaching forty workshops a year around the world, people would keep giving me gifts. One year, people kept giving me gifts that featured owls: an owl fetish, an owl feather, an owl mask. I said, “OK, something’s going on with Owl. Why is Owl coming into my life?” Instead of running to a book, I took a journey, and I said, “Why is Owl coming into my life?”

My guardian spirit came to me and said, “It’s not that Owl sees in the dark; Owl has a particular radar that you’re going to need soon.” Then the journey stopped, and I let it go, because in shamanism, when you journey, you’re outside of time,  so soon can mean another lifetime. But actually the answer manifested quickly to me.

I was teaching a workshop in St. Louis, and I had to come back late at night because I had clients on Monday. I’m on a plane, and there are no lights; the crew is walking up and down the aisles with flashlights. All of a sudden, the captain comes on and says, “I bet you’re wondering what’s happening. We’ve lost our radar. We’re getting ready to go through a storm, and I don’t know how to get through it.”

Obviously we got through the storm; I’m still here. But what a lesson I got! My power animal, who is a guardian spirit, told me I would need radar soon. And here I am in a plane, and the pilot is saying, “We have no radar.”

If I had gone to a book and looked up Owl, there’s no book on the planet that talks about Owl having the gift of radar. I would have missed probably the biggest lesson of my life: that the universe was trying to protect me from an event before it happened by giving me a spirit that could help.

What an amazing lesson to get: that the universe knew something was going to happen to me in the future and was giving the help that I needed in the present. I would have missed that lesson if I would have gone to a book.

 Smoley: That’s a great story. I’m coming to the end of the questions I can think of. Do you have anything else you would like to add?

Ingerman: As a collective, we are going through a very dark time. From a shamanic point of view, it’s an initiation. We’re actually being initiated: our ego is being stripped so that we can step into a higher consciousness.

That’s what’s going on in the planet right now, with all this dissolution and destruction. We are experiencing an amazing amount of loss, but it is the loss of unhealthy ways of thinking and living. From a shamanic point of view, as our ego is stripped and our mind can no longer figure out a solution, that’s when the power of our spirit steps in. Our spirit is a reflection of Source, of the creative powers of the universe; it knows everything.

We have all this knowledge that’s within us, but it’s covered up by our ego, by advertising, by social media. We lose what our spirit is really trying to evolve to, so we’re going through a powerful time of loss. This time is bringing us to a place where we can remember why we’re here. We are nature; there’s only oneness, there’s only love, and there’s only light. That’s where this initiation is trying to take us.

It’s important to find practices that help you learn how to tune into nature, read the signs that the universe is giving us moment to moment through omens, and work with some kind of discipline so that you can go deep. You can let your ego be stripped, and you can feel the amazing feeling that happens when your life is filled with spirit. All of a sudden, there’s a knowing; there’s no fear. You’re dropping into a place of honor, kindness, compassion; you realize that you’re walking forward with a whole community of people to create a different story than the story that we’re living right now.

With all the pain and suffering that’s happening right now, this is actually a positive time. It’s a time when we need to hold space for each other and see each other in our own light and our own divine perfection.

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