I've just started looking at Henry Corbin, and I am inspired!
Here's an essay: The ‘Ālam al-Mithāl – Henry Corbin & the Ṣūfī Ibn ‘Arabī
I have extracted bits, and post my thoughts below. Hopefully this is leading somewhere ...
In the mysticism of Suhrawardī and Ibn ‘Arabī, the contemplative intellect is invoked as one of the many figures in a complex Angelology of subsistent images. This Angelology can be described in his language as the intermediate state of the “creative Imagination,” of which the contemplative intellect is but a manifestation. It is this principle of creative Imagination which Corbin holds as the singular conduit of all spiritual experience and phenomena.
Corbin speaks of “a universe endowed with a perfectly ‘objective’ existence and perceived precisely through the Imagination.” As in certain aspects of Tibetan Buddhism such as Dzogchen, this organ of Imagination is the direct doorway into, and state of, the archetypal experience.
“The ta’wīl is essential symbolic understanding ..."
I have always understood the symbol as Corbin understands them. Signs point to the thing signified, the Thing is immanently present in, and through the symbol. Thus a sign points to something, the symbol is that that, in another form. The essence of the thing signified is present in the symbol.
To enter into myth and symbol is to experience a language distinct from rational evidence.
Corbin's gnosis, of the Islamic ta’wīl, is a carrying back of a thing to its principle, a break from the literal form, towards a “symbolic exegesis” that transcends and sometimes even contradicts the rational historical meaning. “All minds have not the same degree of discernment: to some men the literal aspect, the zāhir, is addressed, while others are capable of understanding the hidden meaning, the bāṭin.”
Religion gives subjectivity to otherness, the mysticism of Ibn ‘Arabī gives subjectivity to world itself through the creative imagination, through mutual knowing, through what Corbin calls Ibn ‘Arabī’s “theophanic prayer.”
Here I delight. I have long sought to defend the world as a Biblical good, as not simply a transmit camp between one place and the next, a place we find ourselves in we can't wait to escape from. Religions, in their outward form, tend to crystalise the distinction between higher and lower, body and soul, spirit and matter, and render the one always good, the other always less so. It a false duality. It is all-in-all.
Corbin's universe is a multidimensional structure of existence not unlike the Dzogchen interpretation of the kayas in Tibetan Buddhism: a concurrent multidimensionality, dependent on the cultivation on one’s own awareness to perceive these interwoven realms.
Aha! (emphasis mine) Here is the thing I've been speaking of – inspired by the Tibetan Buddhist Marco Pallis, of self relaising itself not only in succession but in simultaneity!
One does not enter the archetypal realm in the sense that they leave somewhere else behind. Rather, one enters the archetypal realm through the doorway of one’s own perception. One integrates the intermediate space of the archetypal field (the Sambogakaya) into their intrinsic awareness. Existence in the world of everyday appearances (Nirmanakaya) never ceases. The nihilistic Eastern philosophical frame of appearances as illusion does not carry over here. Further more, the experience of the archetypal field is itself a doorway into the Dharmakaya, the realm of pure unmitigated awareness, emptiness itself, openness and space. One does not leave to go to the Dharmakaya. Rather the dharmakaya exists concurrently and through the Sambogakaya and the Nirmanakaya. All manifestation in the Sambogakaya and Nirmanakaya arises from the un-manifested emptiness of the Dharmakaya. The ongoing process of holding this state of multidimensionality is seen as liberatory in the Dzogchen perspective... we see this same process of Gnosis and multidimensional integration in the “theophanic” prayer of Ibn ‘Arabī.
Here's the Big Bit:
(denominational) dogmatisms argue that this Self, experienced as the pure act of existing, is only a natural phenomenon and consequently has nothing in common with a supernatural encounter with the revealed God, attainable only within the reality of the Church. The term ‘Self,’ as we shall employ it here ... refers neither to the impersonal Self, to the pure act of existing attainable through efforts comparable to the techniques of yoga, nor to the Self of the psychologists. The word will be employed here solely in the sense given it by Ibn ‘Arabī and numerous other Ṣūfī theosophists when they repeated the famous sentence: He who knows himself knows his Lord. Knowing one’s self, to know one’s God; knowing one’s Lord, to know one’s self. This Lord is not the impersonal self, nor is it the God of dogmatic definitions, self-subsisting without relation to me, without being experienced by me. He is the he who knows himself through myself, that is, in the knowledge that I have of him, because it is the knowledge that he has of me; it is alone with him alone, in this syzygic unity, that it is possible to say thou. And such is the reciprocity in which flowers the creative Prayer which Ibn ‘Arabī teaches us to experience simultaneously as the Prayer of God and the Prayer of man.”
I would only add, that while I've got a lot of word unpacking everything that's said here, that the Christian apophatic tradition, from Dionysius the pseudoAreopagite (6th century) through a string of mystics, notably Augustine (who tried to preach this to the catechumen), Bonaventure, Eckhart, St Katherine of Siena, and others, have all expressed this idea. In Scripture we read:
"We see now through a glass in a dark manner (in the self-of-this-world); but then face to face (in the supernatural encounter). Now I know in part (in this world); but then I shall know even as I am known (in that multidimensional universe of all modes of being) (1 Corinthians 13:12).
"Dearly beloved, we are now the sons of God; and it hath not yet appeared what we shall be. We know, that, when he shall appear, we shall be like to him: because we shall see him as he is." (1 John 3:2)
The point Corbin makes, is that this knowing, in denominational dogmatisms, is always at some distant point in the future, or in another existence, after perhaps innumerable existences ... whereas the gnosis spoken here is a knowing here-and-now.
In both the modern scientific world view and in that of the rational organized religion, subjectivity resides in the human being. The world itself, once rife with spiritual and symbolic meaning, becomes objectified, spiritually inactive.
This first happened at the Fall, when the primodial Parents traded this metadimensional vision for sensory delights. The aftershocks reverberate down through time.
Concerning the world’s major religious traditions, it is only in the outliers and, often, the heretics ...
A point of balance here. Corbin and others will readil;y acknowledge that the path of gnosis is not the path for all. Perhaps only for the rare. Either way, the religious traditions have to cater for everyone, and the pastoral needs and good of their faithful. However, this in no way removes the accusation laid at the door of those dogmatic institutions for their failure to embrace the outlier, and for too-often persecuting them. The insistence that it is the pastoral message of the lowest common deniminator that governs all is a dumbing down of religion and it's the flaw that undermines and eventually brings down every denominations that seeks to be popular through egalitarianism.
In short, it's complex.
Here's an essay: The ‘Ālam al-Mithāl – Henry Corbin & the Ṣūfī Ibn ‘Arabī
I have extracted bits, and post my thoughts below. Hopefully this is leading somewhere ...
In the mysticism of Suhrawardī and Ibn ‘Arabī, the contemplative intellect is invoked as one of the many figures in a complex Angelology of subsistent images. This Angelology can be described in his language as the intermediate state of the “creative Imagination,” of which the contemplative intellect is but a manifestation. It is this principle of creative Imagination which Corbin holds as the singular conduit of all spiritual experience and phenomena.
Corbin speaks of “a universe endowed with a perfectly ‘objective’ existence and perceived precisely through the Imagination.” As in certain aspects of Tibetan Buddhism such as Dzogchen, this organ of Imagination is the direct doorway into, and state of, the archetypal experience.
“The ta’wīl is essential symbolic understanding ..."
I have always understood the symbol as Corbin understands them. Signs point to the thing signified, the Thing is immanently present in, and through the symbol. Thus a sign points to something, the symbol is that that, in another form. The essence of the thing signified is present in the symbol.
To enter into myth and symbol is to experience a language distinct from rational evidence.
Corbin's gnosis, of the Islamic ta’wīl, is a carrying back of a thing to its principle, a break from the literal form, towards a “symbolic exegesis” that transcends and sometimes even contradicts the rational historical meaning. “All minds have not the same degree of discernment: to some men the literal aspect, the zāhir, is addressed, while others are capable of understanding the hidden meaning, the bāṭin.”
Religion gives subjectivity to otherness, the mysticism of Ibn ‘Arabī gives subjectivity to world itself through the creative imagination, through mutual knowing, through what Corbin calls Ibn ‘Arabī’s “theophanic prayer.”
Here I delight. I have long sought to defend the world as a Biblical good, as not simply a transmit camp between one place and the next, a place we find ourselves in we can't wait to escape from. Religions, in their outward form, tend to crystalise the distinction between higher and lower, body and soul, spirit and matter, and render the one always good, the other always less so. It a false duality. It is all-in-all.
Corbin's universe is a multidimensional structure of existence not unlike the Dzogchen interpretation of the kayas in Tibetan Buddhism: a concurrent multidimensionality, dependent on the cultivation on one’s own awareness to perceive these interwoven realms.
Aha! (emphasis mine) Here is the thing I've been speaking of – inspired by the Tibetan Buddhist Marco Pallis, of self relaising itself not only in succession but in simultaneity!
One does not enter the archetypal realm in the sense that they leave somewhere else behind. Rather, one enters the archetypal realm through the doorway of one’s own perception. One integrates the intermediate space of the archetypal field (the Sambogakaya) into their intrinsic awareness. Existence in the world of everyday appearances (Nirmanakaya) never ceases. The nihilistic Eastern philosophical frame of appearances as illusion does not carry over here. Further more, the experience of the archetypal field is itself a doorway into the Dharmakaya, the realm of pure unmitigated awareness, emptiness itself, openness and space. One does not leave to go to the Dharmakaya. Rather the dharmakaya exists concurrently and through the Sambogakaya and the Nirmanakaya. All manifestation in the Sambogakaya and Nirmanakaya arises from the un-manifested emptiness of the Dharmakaya. The ongoing process of holding this state of multidimensionality is seen as liberatory in the Dzogchen perspective... we see this same process of Gnosis and multidimensional integration in the “theophanic” prayer of Ibn ‘Arabī.
Here's the Big Bit:
(denominational) dogmatisms argue that this Self, experienced as the pure act of existing, is only a natural phenomenon and consequently has nothing in common with a supernatural encounter with the revealed God, attainable only within the reality of the Church. The term ‘Self,’ as we shall employ it here ... refers neither to the impersonal Self, to the pure act of existing attainable through efforts comparable to the techniques of yoga, nor to the Self of the psychologists. The word will be employed here solely in the sense given it by Ibn ‘Arabī and numerous other Ṣūfī theosophists when they repeated the famous sentence: He who knows himself knows his Lord. Knowing one’s self, to know one’s God; knowing one’s Lord, to know one’s self. This Lord is not the impersonal self, nor is it the God of dogmatic definitions, self-subsisting without relation to me, without being experienced by me. He is the he who knows himself through myself, that is, in the knowledge that I have of him, because it is the knowledge that he has of me; it is alone with him alone, in this syzygic unity, that it is possible to say thou. And such is the reciprocity in which flowers the creative Prayer which Ibn ‘Arabī teaches us to experience simultaneously as the Prayer of God and the Prayer of man.”
I would only add, that while I've got a lot of word unpacking everything that's said here, that the Christian apophatic tradition, from Dionysius the pseudoAreopagite (6th century) through a string of mystics, notably Augustine (who tried to preach this to the catechumen), Bonaventure, Eckhart, St Katherine of Siena, and others, have all expressed this idea. In Scripture we read:
"We see now through a glass in a dark manner (in the self-of-this-world); but then face to face (in the supernatural encounter). Now I know in part (in this world); but then I shall know even as I am known (in that multidimensional universe of all modes of being) (1 Corinthians 13:12).
"Dearly beloved, we are now the sons of God; and it hath not yet appeared what we shall be. We know, that, when he shall appear, we shall be like to him: because we shall see him as he is." (1 John 3:2)
The point Corbin makes, is that this knowing, in denominational dogmatisms, is always at some distant point in the future, or in another existence, after perhaps innumerable existences ... whereas the gnosis spoken here is a knowing here-and-now.
In both the modern scientific world view and in that of the rational organized religion, subjectivity resides in the human being. The world itself, once rife with spiritual and symbolic meaning, becomes objectified, spiritually inactive.
This first happened at the Fall, when the primodial Parents traded this metadimensional vision for sensory delights. The aftershocks reverberate down through time.
Concerning the world’s major religious traditions, it is only in the outliers and, often, the heretics ...
A point of balance here. Corbin and others will readil;y acknowledge that the path of gnosis is not the path for all. Perhaps only for the rare. Either way, the religious traditions have to cater for everyone, and the pastoral needs and good of their faithful. However, this in no way removes the accusation laid at the door of those dogmatic institutions for their failure to embrace the outlier, and for too-often persecuting them. The insistence that it is the pastoral message of the lowest common deniminator that governs all is a dumbing down of religion and it's the flaw that undermines and eventually brings down every denominations that seeks to be popular through egalitarianism.
In short, it's complex.