“The wisdom of Khālid b. Sinān,” wrote Muḥammad ibn ʿAlî ibn Al-ʿArabī (henceforth Ibn Arabi when I write his name) in his masterpiece The Bezels of Wisdom (Ar: Fuṣūṣ al-ḥikam) “resides in the fact that, in his mission, he manifested the Prophethood of the Isthmus.”1 He goes on:
He claimed that he would reveal what was there [at the Isthmus] only after his death. It was therefore ordered that he be disinterred. When he was asked about the matter, he revealed that its regimen was in the form of this world, by which it may be known that what the apostles said in their worldly lives was true. It was Khālid’s aim that the whole world should believe in what the apostles told them, so that divine Mercy should be available to all. He was ennobled by the roximity of his mission to that of Muḥammad, knowing that God had sent him as a mercy to the worlds. Although Khālid was not himself an apostle, he sought to acquire as much as possible of the [all-encompassing] mercy of Muḥammad’s mission. He was not himself commanded to deliver God’s dispensation, but wished, nevertheless, to benefit from it in the Isthmus, so that his knowledge of creation might be greater. His people, however, failed him. A prophet does not speak of his people as failing, but rather as failing him, in that they did not enable him to fulfill his purpose.
Ibn Arabi goes on to clarify that the Isthmus—barzakh in Arabic—is the realm where the intention that stands behind failure is manifested and rewarded. Khālid b. Sinān “raises the question as to whether the wish for something to happen is the same as its happening or failing to happen. In the Sacred Law there are many instances that support such an equation.”2
The barzakh is an important aspect in Ibn Arabi’s overall metaphysical vision.3 In The Meccan Revelations, he describes it thus:
The Real is sheer Light and the impossible is sheer darkness. Darkness never turns into Light, and Light never turns into darkness. The created realm is the barzakh between Light and darkness. In its essence it is qualified neither by darkness nor by Light, since it is the barzakh and the middle, having a property from each of its two sides. That is why He “appointed” for man “two eyes and guided him on the two highways” (Koran 90:8–10), for man exists between the two paths. Through one eye and one path he accepts Light and looks upon it in the measure of his preparedness. Through the other eye and the other path he looks upon darkness and turns toward it. (M.R. 3:274.28)4
The barzakh exists as the medium between the sheer Light of Absolute Reality that is God and the nothingness of Absolute Darkness; in a sense, one could make the argument that it therefore includes the material world known to us by sense and from which we abstract the forms. Indeed, epistemologically, Ibn Arabi more or less admits this when he posits Imagination (khayâl) as holding the epistemological primacy immediately beneath “knowledge of the divine names and of self-disclosure and of its all-pervadingness,” that is, God’s unknowable essence and manifestation in and as the worlds (2:309.17). This is the height of philosophy and of revelation together, which is to say, the apocalyptic quality of the ordo essendi shining downwards in revelation and the summit of the rational capacities of the ordo cognoscendi rising upwards to consummate union with God. The scales between are the barzakh, and the barzakh is traversed only by khayâl. Indeed, it is khayâl that enables reason to perceive revelation coming down from above, so to speak, and only khayâl that is competent to aid it in rising up the path offered by God to the unifying knowledge and love of God in the “Three Books” of universe, the human soul, and the Koran. Only together can reason (ʿaql) and imagination (khayâl), as the two eyes of the heart (qalb), behold God by revelation (kashf). The collective barzakh must therefore be qualified and distinguished accordingly, as must the kind of imagination that is able to access it. The totality of creation can only be comprehended by “Nondelimited Imagination” (al-khayâl al-mutlaq), in which “the entire cosmos inasmuch as it is contingent and evanescent” is laid bare to our awareness, in William Chittick’s words, as “both God’s face (wajh)…and God’s veil (hijâb),” both revealing and concealing God’s names and nature. This is, to put it in other terms, what I have described as a stage of qualified nondual awareness, still capable of operating in the world defined by dualistic boundaries while remaining continuously aware of the nondual unity of God, world, and self.
At one stage beneath this transcendent vision, though, is the ʿâlam al-khayâl, also called the ʿalam al-mithal, which Henry Corbin once called the mundus imaginalis, the “imaginal world” itself. The mundus imaginalis stands between the reality beheld in its ultimacy as God’s face and veil and the opacity of matter: it is the na-koja-abad, the “eighth climate.” This is a place where, as Chittick puts it, “spiritual beings are corporealized, as when Gabriel appaered in human form to the Virgin Mary; and where corporeal beings are spiritualized, as wehn bodily pleasure or pain is experienced in the posthumous realms. The mundus imaginalis is a real, external realm in the Cosmic Book, more real than the visible, sensible, physical realm, but less real than the invisible, intelligible, spiritual realm. Only its actual existence can account for angelic and demonic apparitions, bodily resurrection, visionary experience, and other nonphysical yet sensory phenomena that philosophers typically explain away.” Indeed, “Ibn ʿArabî’s foregrounding of the in-between realm was one of several factors that prevented Islamic philosophy from falling into the trap of a mind/body dichotomy or a dualistic worldview.”
Both terms can be referred to by the language of barzakh: the Supreme Barzakh (al-barzakh al-aʿlâ) corresponding to Nondelimited Imagination, which beholds Nondelimited Being, and the lesser sense of barzakh specifically encompassing “the ‘location’ of the soul after death and before the Day of Resurrection.” And it is also the realm of dreams and visions, and of what we might more broadly call “altered states of consciousness.”
Now, importantly, imagination also includes “the microcosmic human book, in which it is identical with the soul or self (nafs), which is the meeting place of spirit (rûh) and body (jism). Human experience is always imaginal or soulish (nafsânî), which is to say that it is simultaneously spiritual and bodily. Human becoming wavers between spirit and body, light and darkness, wakefulness and sleep, knowledge and ignorance, virtue and vice. Only because the soul dwells in an in-between realm can it choose to strive for transformation and realization. Only as an imaginal reality can it travel ‘up’ toward the luminosity of the spirit or ‘down’ toward the darkness of matter.” That is to say, imagination is also at work in all of our sensory knowledge and rational sorting through it that is so important to, say, Aristotelian epistemology: in other words, when we take in sense data through our sense organs, we are creating a picture in our minds of what the world around us is like that is an act of imagination itself, an act of things imaging themselves forth and our receiving those images and traveling “along” them, so to speak, to the thing imaging or being imaged; and on that front, imagination is actually the only kind of knowing we can do short of direct and absolute communion with the imageless God. The soul’s imaginal powers and agency in the imaginal realm increase the higher our consciousness rises and decline the lower it falls.
Now, there are numerous points of continuity and discontinuity to be found in Ibn Arabi with the Hermetic tradition analyzed last time and with the overall Middle and Late Platonic house that Hermetica and Islamic philosophy alike are situated within. (Platonism, like the house of Jesus’s Father, has many mansions; Jn 14:2.) On the one hand, imagination (φαντασία) has a long and storied history in the Platonic-Aristotelian tradition. Imagination is the repository of impressions in Aristotelian psychology of the sensory impressions on the soul; considered differently, imagination also plays a role in Plotinian epistemology, though it is often a suspect one in the Enneads. Imagination, or the faculty of imagination (φαντάστικον; Damian Caluori prefers “faculty of representation”) is not bad in itself, but it is easily misled. Plotinus says that “That which is called ‘thinking of falsities’ is imagination that has not waited for the judgment of the faculty of discursive thinking. But in that case, we acted under the persuasive influence of something inferior. It is just as in the case of sense-perception, when we see falsely by our common faculty of sense-perception before the discursive faculty makes a judgment. But the intellect has either been in contact with its object or not, so that it is inerrant. In fact, we should say that we are, in this way, either in contact with the intelligible which is in Intellect or we are not. Actually, we are in contact with the intelligible in us. For it is possible to have it, but not to have it at hand” (Enneads 1.1.9.8).5 Elsewhere, “Imagination is an external blow by that which is non-rational” (1.8.15.18). Like Ibn Arabi, Plotinus admits both that imagination can partake of what is truly intelligible and that the relation is in some way epistemologically necessary for our sense perception to convey any information to us at all (4.3.23.33); but imagination can “incline to the body” (5.1.10.26), and what imagination conveys to the soul must be judged by discursive thinking (5.3.3.6); otherwise, imagination “compels us and desire drags us towards wherever it leads” (6.8.2.8). There is no vehicle of the soul worth talking about in Plotinus, and certainly no body of resurrection: the closest we get is in Ennead 4.3.27.7-8 and 4.7.4-8, the latter in disputation with Stoic pneumatic corporealism, but Plotinus does not there describe at any length something like a vehicle of the soul of the sort we get in, say, Porphyry, Synesius, Iamblichus, or Proclus. The idea itself is derived, as we intimated last time, from Plato: it is mentioned in Phaedrus 247b and Timaeus 41d-e, and in the later Neoplatonic thinkers it gets full rendition as a series of “pneumatic, airy bodies,” “a higher equivalent or paradigm of the normal body, responsible for the perceptions and desires of the ordinary body,” which “enable the soul to continue to have at least some perceptions and memories after death,” which “provide human beings with the identity necessary for them to stay themselves through the circle of reincarnation.”6 In brief, “This ‘pneumatic’ body shares many features with ordinary bodies but is made of fine enough stuff to have an existence above and beyond the spatiotemporal, sensible realm”; it is “not eternal, yet last during the entire time that the soul takes part in genesis, through all its incarnations” before its final return to the One.7 The pneumatic vehicle of the soul is necessary given later Neoplatonic rejection of Plotinus’s concept of the undescended Intellect; thus, “[h]aving denied a paradigmatic and impersonal identity at the centre of each self, the post-Plotinian Neoplatonists must seek novel foundations for identity, this time personal and individual. One such foundation is found in the pneumatic body. Truthful to those interpretations of Aristotle that see the principle of individuation in matter, they reinterpret this matter in Platonizing spirit as purer, intelligible matter and ‘luminous’ bodies formed out of it.”8 Hence, the luminous or, indeed, astral body of Neoplatonism is a conscious response to the problems with Plotinus’s own epistemology and psychology, in which his suspicion of imagination surely plays a role.
But Ibn Arabi, I think it fair to say, goes beyond even this in postulating khayâl and barzakh/mithâl as not only a real way of knowing (which the Neoplatonists would have contended as well) but also as a real place, a genuine realm of the universe, which exists as the mediating term between the absolute world of the intelligible forms that emanate directly from the One (God) and the dark nothingness of matter and evil in which those forms are communicated through, in, and to embodied souls. The Plotinian faculty of imagination is the means by which we perceive these appearances, which are the only media of the forms; and while “phantasia depicts things for the soul, [nevertheless] it may deceive the soul in depicting things as desirable, dangerous, and so on.”9 Phantasia is also that which “render[s] unified the perceptions from different organs,” and so, as Plato says in the Sophist, “is somewhere between perception and belief (Soph. 264a-b).”10 But if in Plotinus reason is the master of fantasy, for Ibn Arabi, fantasy leads reason in directions it has no natural aptitude for on its own. That is to say, imagination can perceive the forms more immediately in their perceptible appearances (or, the “conceptual form” of perceptions) than reason can, which must by definition sort through sensory data and syllogize towards uncertain conclusions about their intelligibility; imagination is a more immediate, intuitive grasp of reality.
Ibn Arabi also takes much more seriously than Plotinus seems to the category of fantasy as disclosing both the inner world of the soul and the diversity of the spiritual plane of reality, in a way that is perhaps muted by Plotinus’s anxiety about whether appearances are false or whether fantasies are delusions. For a philosopher like Ibn Arabi, meeting a god, an angel, a demon, a jinn, a spirit, a ghost, seeing another world, whatever in the barzakh is a real encounter with something, regardless of whether the way that that something appears to us is how it really is or merely how we’re capable of understanding it given our own spiritual and cognitive limitations. Ibn Arabi’s is, on the whole, a philosophy that takes seriously what we might refer to as “paranormalcy,” the experience of altered states of consciousness and other phenomena that defy immediate, simplistic explanation but that also elude direct scientific observation. By taking the barzakh as a genuine dimension of cosmic existence which is connected to but distinguished from both the material world and the highest, purest reality that simply is God, Ibn Arabi’s worldview not only makes an opening for the standard Abrahamic/apocalyptic tropes specific to his Islam but also for the eerie, the weird, and the phantasmal to find a home in Neoplatonic metaphysics. These things all live in the barzakh, where they subsist as far as they are able, whether as forms achieving corporeal appearance (but not complete physicalization) in a way consonant with the aptitude of their observers and/or as material objects achieving some degree of conceptual representation.
Imagination is, then, much more than “the junkyard of the mind.” It has been an enduring topic of fascination in both Western and Indian philosophies.11 In the latter, discourse on the imagination begins with discourse about māyā (माया), the power of creation and “magic” (it is in fact derived from the same Indo-European as the Persian maguš- and the Greek μάγος and cognates). “Imagination” proper, though, is kalpanā (Skt: कल्पना), and is closely related to the more negative take on māyā that one finds in Sanskrit philosophy both Buddhist and Hindu. As Douglas Berger notes, the argument between the two broad traditions was over whether or not imagination itself was responsible for our perception of the material world or only our inferences about it, a debate that ends up spilling over into metaphysics and epistemology generally as questions about what is real and how we can know over the course of the Sanskrit philosophical tradition.12 At the apex of the revolt against the notion that our perception can give us access to “veridical” cognition, the Buddhist philosopher Vasubandhu suggested in the Vimśatikā that “This [the external world] is consciousness only, because there is appearance of non-existent things, just as a person with cataracts sees non-existent hairs, moons et cetera.”13 Numerous critics of Vasubandhu’s idealism, especially Vātsyāyana and Śankara, contend that, so Monima Chadha summarizes, “we cannot imagine (dream, hallucinate, etc.) an absolutely unreal thing.” That is to say, even fantasized objects encountered in dreams or described in myths—Chadha uses the example of a centaur—are derived in some sense from our real experience, by the comparison and conflation of like properties to like properties, or by new combinations of properties with which we are familiar. By contrast, “an ‘absolutely unreal’ thing can have no properties, and hence a fortiori no properties in common with an existing thing.” But more to the point, Uddyotakara—the champion of the Nyāya school of Indian philosophy that grappled most pertinently with Indian Buddhist epistemology—challenges Vasubandhu’s assumption that a thing dreamed is not real. Hence, as Chadha writes:
“If non-apprehension of an object in the waking state is required to support the claim that the objects of dream experience do not really exist out there, then apprehension in the waking state must be an indicator of their existence, otherwise there would be no contrast between what is apprehended and what is not (Nyāya-Vārttika, 4.2.33). If there is no such contrast, then Vasubandhu’s argument fails because there is no support for the claim that objects of dream experiences do not exist in the external world. And, if there is such a contrast between apprehension and non-apprehension, then at least some external objects must exist. Clearly, Vasubandhu’s argument for thesis of universal delusion (or idealism) does not succeed completely, nor are the realists totally defeated.”
Now, it is one thing to have a conversation past one another, and another thing to put two different conversations into conversation with one another and have them talk past one another. Neither Ibn Arabi’s questions, nor his methods, nor his answers are dealing with exactly the same issues as those that motivated Buddhist and Hindu debates about cognition and epistemology happening in Sanskrit before his lifetime; neither did the polemics that characterized those schools’ interactions with one another. But both touch upon a common problem here—the role imagination plays in how we can claim to know anything and what it reveals about the things subsequently known—and both open up a common set of questions about the reality of the imaginal and the unreality of the material, or, rather, how imagination encompasses both the “ordinary” sense perception that we engage in all the time, as well as the inferences we draw upon it in moving towards intellection, as well as our experiences in altered states of consciousness like dreaming, hallucination, visionary experiences, and the like. Ibn Arabi’s solution—that everything other than God is barzakh, that the barzakh includes but is also more than ʿalam al-mithâl, the mundus imaginalis, the Dreaming, whatever we wish to call it—has a metaphysical and epistemological elegance to it that is more closely represented by the “Hindu” philosophical response to the Buddhists than by any of the individual Buddhist philosophers writing in Sanskrit (though one could put a positive spin on Vasubandhu’s recognition that what we say about waking consciousness and what we say about dreaming consciousness has to have some kind of common term to be intelligible at all). But Ibn Arabi is more closely matched not by the later Advaita tradition in this regard, whose suspicion of kalpanā as engrossing us in māyā due to our own avidyā, “ignorance,” but by the Pratyabhijña of Abhinavagupta, with its sense of the imaginal powers of the transcendent Shiva as intentionally responsible for the manifestation of the world in all its diverse realms and forms as theophany.14 Surely there is also some parallel here to the classic Puranic image of Vishnu dreaming the multiverse into being while sleeping peacefully on the ocean of milk, from which Lakshmi arises in the primordial age before the ages, that dream realized in creation with each breath out and destroyed once more with each breath back in, only to be reborn in the next revolution.
It is worth pausing before continuing to recapitulate some of the essential ideas we have seen in so many diverse authors (Plato, the Corpus Hermeticum, Plotinus, Synesius, Marsilio Ficino, Ibn Arabi, Vasubandhu, and more in the last two articles alone, for anyone keeping score). First, in the Neoplatonic tradition, matched by the Vedantic and Kashmiri Shaivite traditions of Hinduism, with some parallels in other Hindu and Buddhist schools in Sanskrit, the idea of Mind and Life as the most basic emanations of existence includes the idea of bodies that are subtler than our animal bodies, whose transparency to the raw nature of reality, agility, and agency in the universe are certainly much greater than that of our lower forms. Second, the existence of such bodies serves both metaphysical/ontological and epistemological purposes in the philosophical traditions where they occur. Metaphysically, they serve to guarantee some kind of continuity of the individual beyond the dissolution of the earthly body and between the assumption of any new bodies (whether in rebirth or resurrection). Epistemologically, though, such bodies, and the realms that they inhabit, serve to clarify our power to know anything at all by providing a bridge between the pure realm of intelligible forms and the corporeal world that we take in by the data our sensory organs are capacious to receive. Third, the faculty that these subtler bodies instrumentalize for the soul is specifically that of the imagination: the soul’s ability to construct and/or receive the appearance of a form and/or to conceptualize the matter it experiences in an immaterial way. Different thinkers and schools relate to the power of the imagination differently, with some expressing greater skepticism about its value and potency to convey veridical experience to us, and others expressing greater optimism about reality as it is disclosed to us by the imagination. But most of these authors agree that imagination is key to our ordinary cognition, not only by inference but also, in some way, by unifying the sensory data we perceive into something like a unified perception of the world. So, for philosophical or religious traditions that believe in the possibility of divine revelation and the ability of the human mind to know something about the transcendental nature of reality via rational reflection on revelation, imagination plays a key intermediary role in God’s communication of God’s self to the human mind and of the human mind’s ability to ascend to the contemplation of God.
With these three points in place, we are also seeing an emerging fourth concern, which is with the nature of altered states of consciousness or dreams and the reality or unreality of the things perceived there. We might call this the problem of fantasy: whether the fantasies of the mind, bright or dark, are in some sense an act of cognitive communion with the world around us or merely a delusion of the soul. This will command our attention in the next issue.
Ibn Al-ʿArabī, The Bezels of Wisdom, trans. R.W.J. Austin (CWS Mahwah, NJ: Paulist, 198), 268.
Al-ʿArabī, The Bezels of Wisdom, 268.
See James W. Morris, “Spiritual Imagination and the ‘Liminal’ World: Ibn ʿArabi on the Barzakh,” Postdata 15 (1995); 42-49, 104-109.
I have utilized the quotes in Chittick, William, "Ibn ‘Arabî", The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Spring 2020 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), URL = <https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/spr2020/entries/ibn-arabi/>.
The translation is Plotinus, The Enneads, ed. Lloyd P. Gerson, trans. George Boys-Stones, John M. Dillon, Lloyd P. Gerson, R.A.H. King, Andrew Smith, and James Wilberding (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018).
Pauliina Remes, Neoplatonism (Ancient Philosophies; London: Routledge, 2014), 128-129.
Remes, Neoplatonism, 129.
Remes, Neoplatonism, 130.
Remes, Neoplatonism, 139.
Remes, Neoplatonism, 140.
See Amy Kind, “Philosophical Perspectives on the Imagination in the Western Tradition,” 64-79 in The Cambridge Handbook on the Imagination, ed. Anna Abraham (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020), and, in the same work, Chakravarti Ram-Prasad, “Imagination in Classical India: A Short Introduction,” 80-93.
See Amber Carpenter, Indian Buddhist Philosophy (Ancient Philosophies; London: Routledge, 2014), especially 169-231.
I have borrowed the reference from Monima Chadha, “Perceptual Experience and Concepts in Classical Indian Philosophy,” The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Fall 2021 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), URL = <https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2021/entries/perception-india/>, who in turn makes use of the translation of Joel Feldman, “Vasubandhu’s Illusion Argument and the Parasitism of Illusion upon Veridical Experience,” Philosophy East and West, 55 (2005): 529–541.
In this respect, Anantanand Rambachan’s reading of Śankara puts Śankara more in this vein of thinking, choosing to see brahman’s manifestation as the world as an intentional self-multiplication and celebratory manifestation. See Rambachan, The Advaita Worldview: God, World, and Humanity (New York: SUNY, 2006).
These pieces give me a lot to think about and I always have to read them more than once! Forgive the rambling, but maybe you can help clarify a couple of things for me.
If I understand correctly, according to Ibn Arabi, the whole realm of our perceptual experience lies within the barzakh— it is only intelligible to us because it participates in the actual light and reality of the One, and only appears as a succession of discrete objects/perceptions because that One is particularized by matter. In this way our whole phenomenal realm can be said to both exist and not exist, since it occurs entirely within the isthmus. Is it correct to say that any “matter” that appears to us (even an imagined atom) already has being through its participation in the light that makes things capable of being represented — also, any image we make of God, insofar as it is an image, is marked by the darkness that draws boundaries, making something recognizable as a “this and not that” — therefore, either side of the isthmus, while permeating every aspect of our imagined world, cannot in itself be imagined: neither God nor the unreal darkness of prime matter.
Thank you so much for this series! There is a dearth of good writing on philosophy of the imagination, and you're bringing together exactly what (I've long thought) needs to be synthesized by a sensitive, articulate scholar.