Where is the Land Beyond the Borderzone?

We are hemmed in by our own spatially habituations.  In day-to-day experience, we reach east, west, north, and south  by travelling on a surface, and any direction may be hilly or flat. But we are now also habituated to picturing ourselves living on a globe. Hence north is up and, as the Australians say, south is “down under.” Apart from this globe-knowledge, we don’t think of living above the ground or beneath it. We reserve the heights and depths for transcendental realms. We picture the good up high ( “heaven” or Olympus) and the bad in the depths (“hell,” sheol (“pit” or “abyss”), inferno (“below”)). But these realms are not, for us, literally Up or Down. We’ve been to the Moon. We have crawlers on Mars. And all of those place also have their four directions—and the skies above.

A quite delightful discussion of this subject, if you enjoy the arcane, is presented in the initial chapter of Henry Corbin’s book, The Man of Light in Iranian Sufism. The chapter’s title is “Orientation.” In that discussion Corbin suggests that the Iranian Sufis discovered the beyond in the east, the Orient, but he modifies that superficial understanding of orient. He says:

Now one of the leitmotive of Iranian Sufi literature is the “Quest for the Orient,” but this is a Quest for an Orient which, as we are forewarned (if we do not already realize), is not—and cannot be—situated on our geographical maps. This Orient is not comprised of any of the seven climes (keshvar); it is in fact the eighth clime. And the direction in which we must seek this “eight clime” is not on the horizontal but on the vertical. This suprasensory, mystical Orient, the place of the Origin and of the Return, object of the eternal Quest, is at the heavenly pole; it is the Pole, at the extreme north, so far off that it is the threshold of the dimension “beyond.” That is why it is only revealed to a definite mode of presence in the world, and can be revealed only through this mode of presence. There are other modes to which it will never be revealed. It is precisely this mode of presence that characterizes the mode of being of the Sufi, but also, through his person, the mode of being of the entire spiritual family to which Sufism—and especially Iranian Sufism—belongs. The Orient sought by the mystic, the Orient that cannot be located on our maps, is in the direction of the north, beyond the north. Only an ascensional progress can lead toward this cosmic north chosen as a point of orientation. [p. 2]

For sticklers, leitmotive is the German plural, so there is no typo there. The “seven climes” derive from Ptolemy’s Almagest. Ptolemy actually started with 33 zones, later reduced them to 11, finally to seven, and these were then widely used in references by Arabs and Persians.

The general rules for navigation by, call them astral, travelers, are well laid out by Corbin. We’re talking about transcending places. In one paragraph he accounts both for East and North. To this we might add that the Celtic other worlds, most prominently Tirnanog, are located to the West—although the ship, as it sails off in the direction, rises in the air. And if you are in doubt consult The Lord of the Rings for more authority. That only leaves the South unaccounted for. Alas, I’m only now beginning my ant-like progress into Mayan, Inca, and Aztec cultures. For all I know they might complete the picture. But it is true. When something is really beyond, we’re up a creek. And we must do with whatever happens to be handy.

Tonalities of Being

If someone is incapable of hearing the difference between intervals of a fifth and a fourth, a musical career is not recommended. If a friend of yours cannot achieve a grasp of verb declensions, you will not take any lofty linguistic or philological ambitions seriously. Similarly, we must recognize that there exists a certain tonality of being which conditions perception of philosophical and religious facts. If this perception is lacking, better to pursue some entirely different field. [Henry Corbin in The Voyage and the Messenger, a collection of lectures and essays, North Atlantic Books, 1998, p. 5-6]

Around here we (read members of the family) were much taken with E.F. Schumacher’s book, A Guide for the Perplexed, years ago. In that he discusses the concept of adequacy, taken from the scholastic concept of adequatio rei et intellectus, thus the correspondence between the “thing” and the understanding of it. Sounds dry, but isn’t. I have the suspicion that St. Thomas and many others of that era meant something much more, using the word “intelligence,” than that word has come to mean in our times. The subtlety of that word, adequacy, becomes nicely visible in the quote from Henry Corbin; Corbin’s examples carry the wider meaning nicely. He means what people say when they have problems translating an understanding into concepts but say, instead, “I know it when I see it.” Hence Corbin’s nice word, tonalities. Music escapes the usual approach which must break things in order to parse them, and in the breaking something escapes the definition.

Adequacy has served us well. It makes one tolerant of those who simply cannot hear the music.

The Necessary “Over Against”

Sometimes, when I wake from a dream, the thought occurs: “Lord, I sure hope that life after death isn’t like dreaming.” The maddening aspect of dreaming is that there is no genuine “over against.” Everything appears to issue from the dreaming self—the scenery, the characters, the action. I do not consciously feel the process whereby this generation actually takes place; but what I sometimes become aware of is that I can modify the situation, never much but, yes, just a little, and always in my favor. Objects sometimes appear just when I need them; in my falling dreams I always manage to slow down and land smoothly, and so on. But these more or less conscious interventions are infrequent; and most of the time they wake me up.

Most characteristically of all, in dreams—where the environment is clearly unstable and unreal, however awesome, beautiful, confusing, or threatening—consciousness of the kind I call hard (thus a distanced, separated, observing, judging self-consciousness) is also entirely absent. That mental “over against” is also conspicuously lacking. And when it does awaken, as it tends to when things get really hoary, the dream is doomed to end like the descent of a lead curtain.

The substance of dreams is clearly thought, associative thought. It can be quite complex thought, thus for instance a memory of some situation which also holds within it the conscious reaction to it that I had when I first lived it. The judgments I made about the situation, e.g., “That’s awful,” do not display as an abstract judgment, however, but are mirrored back in the arrangements which I see in the dream, awful, ugly arrangements. A great power of image-forming thus seems to reside at a level below that of consciousness. Not surprisingly, therefore, the mediaeval view was that the imagination is part of the sensory apparatus. Notions like Henry Corbin’s that imagination is a higher, spiritual power are not thereby denied; his thought may be rendered by saying that imagination also has a higher form of which the dreaming brain’s uncanny skills are a lower manifestation.

The substance of dreams is unreal because they’re memories—but dynamically manipulated. The dream self is also just a memory of our self as an experiencer—and equally dynamically reactive. Memory must be functioning or else the dream would not be remembered; the emotions arise because the body dumbly reacts to what it sees with hormonal responses. These responses are quite the same as (although stronger) those we get reading a novel or watching a show. The core self, in such situations, withdraws but does not entirely go away—hence if some jarring element intrudes, we protest; if not, we feel the sudden withdrawal of the semi-dream state when the credits begin to roll. And we’ll move our bodies just a little by way of marking a kind of awakening.

All this of course makes a very strong case for the materialistic view of consciousness—as I’ve noted here before. I reject that explanation because it is incomplete and does not comprehensively explain the entirety of our experience. But the materialistic view is well-founded in partial observation. The frontal lobes are sleeping, and the primitive brain plays; or, watching a show, the frontal lobes at least relax to let us enjoy the drama.

But if I’m right the question then arises: Where is that core self when we undergo our convoluted and often quite bizarre dream-experiences? It might have to be absent so that the body can recover from the stress of real awareness. It might be absent because it too needs to be refreshed in an environment where the stresses of materiality are gone and it can then breathe freely, as it were. What I don’t buy is that self-consciousness is merely a brain function. But if it is, I certainly don’t have to worry about spending my after-life in the tohu va-bohu of the dream tale that never ends, never stops, and my stupid self can never trust the ground on which it treads.

Re-Reading Life After Life

Reading again Raymond A. Moody’s Life After Life, I was struck, this time, by the quotations from near death experience (NDE) reports concerning the functioning of the spirit or self, particularly its modes of self-perception, communications, and “senses,” thus hearing and seeing. The quotations that deal with time perception or extra-dimensionality also struck me as new—but it has been several years since I’ve last read this book with the requisite concentration it deserves. The book tends to produce a certain amount of trance—the page-turning kind—in part because it was written for the widest possible audience, because the quotations from NDE reports follow each other rapidly, and because the commentary is minimal in order to be maximally accessible.

Moody is generally ignored (so far as I can tell) by the learned—with one notable and, for me, significant exception. Henry Corbin devotes a paragraph to the book in his Prelude to the second edition of Spiritual Body and Celestial Earth. Here is part of that paragraph:

All the more significant then has been the welcome given to a recent study which treats the “life after life” and presents the manifold testimonies of their actual experiences by people who, even though they had not crossed it never to return, had none the less really found themselves on the “threshold,” for their death had already been clinically confirmed. [Here Corbin footnotes Moody’s book.] There is no reason to be surprised that such a book should meet with a moving approval from some, testifying to a nostalgia which nothing has ever succeeded in snuffing out in the human heart. Equally there is no reason for surprise if the same book has been received with scepticism. Certainly, many traditional texts were quoted in connection with the testimonies reported in this book. But how many people knew them? In fact, some of these testimonies cannot be entertained let alone understood except on the condition of having at one’s immediate disposal an ontology of the mundus imaginalis and a metaphysic of the active Imagination as an organ inherent in the soul and regulated in its own right to the world of “subtle corporeity.”

Next to this paragraph I wrote in the margin, in amazement, “My God, I can hardly believe it!!” — Yes, but such are the consequences of writing for the general public rather than staying on the reservation.

Regarding Corbin’s references to imagination, I cannot deal with that in this post beyond saying that he saw the imagination not as an extension of humanity's sensory faculties but as a unique spiritual power, which he, following Paracelsus, called the true imagination rather than the ordinary fancy. Other entries on this blog under Corbin will provide the necessary context.

Reading Moody this time, what Corbin here labels “subtle corporeity” came sharply into focus, namely that selves “see” and “hear” with great acuity but cannot touch or grasp anything material, including living bodies. The hearing does not depend on air vibrations but seems due to thought perception; seeing is odd as well. Perception of the body varies; many perceive themselves as energetic structures, but experience these structures as somewhat extendable and with certain polarities, like up and down; others perceive actual bodies. While focused on this dimension people seem able to extend their attention out great distances and see, at those distances, from up close—while yet retaining a sense of having stayed in place. Reports of what selves see on that side of the Borderzone are complicated by the fact that the experiencers find themselves in an environment with more than three dimensions and a different experience of time. It takes them far less time to experience a great deal, interpreted as a more rapidly flowing time; experiences, like life reviews, while very detailed yet take no time at all. They struggle in expressing the experience in ordinary language the concepts of which are narrowly adapted to a three-dimensional existence and our kind of time.

I got to thinking how unfortunate it is that we are so tribal and clannish in all things, not least in the various arts and sciences. Moody is not viewed as providing extremely valuable data for serious examination for the simple reason that he preferred the more benign and welcoming attention of the general public to the hostile skepticism of those who claim a calling to study how reality works.

On Corbin's Three Levels

One of the most interesting conceptualizations I’ve ever come across is Henry Corbin’s three-level world. He himself would hasten to deny that this projection is his. He would say that it is Persian and that it appears first in the Zoroastrian picture of the cosmos but is then later repeated, at a higher octave, in Shi’ite mysticism. All this is laid out in Spiritual Body and Celestial Earth. The book begins this way. The first of several introductions is a presentation of the middle world, the mundus imaginalis.

The three worlds are those of matter, those of the imagination, and those of the intellect. In Corbin’s presentation the middle world is mediating. It mediates between the highest world (cherubic intelligences) and the lowest (the material). The imagination spiritualizes matter and makes intellect accessible through images. The world where this mediation takes place is the mundus imaginalis. This realm is found in the Qur’an [25:53] as the barzak; the barzak it is the separator between two seas, the salty, brackish—and the sweet.

Qur’anic images always resonate better in me than the abstract notions derived from one or another kind of scholasticism. Muhammed was a poet, that is why. Poets rank thinkers. Sorry, but they do. I like the notion of that spit of land separating the brackish from sweet. I’ve been unable to comprehend—genuinely inwardly—the possible attractions of a world of pure intelligence...perhaps because the intelligence means only abstraction to me, nothing  more, and in that I discover, in turn, nothing but a mechanism. But also—and this is really the same issue—I’ve always favored the projections of a Qur’anic heaven, cast in terms of sensual joys over those of the West. We can’t really imagine—I can’t anyway—any kind of heaven in which pure thought produces ecstasies. That might attract the mathematician but certainly not the poet.

To this I would add a couple more comments before I actually get into the core of my reaction. The first of these is that the Mazdaist tradition seems altogether to lack any kind of cherubic level of intellect, as such. Certainly never one expressed as such. I can’t find it—not in Corbin’s summaries presented in the referenced book nor elsewhere. What I do find is magnificent moutain-scapes and waterfalls and goddesses and splendid mansions hugging cliffs. What I find is a grand and uncompromising dualism. That’s preliminary comment one.

Preliminary comment two is that in Corbin’s exposition of the mundus imaginalis I never encounter any discussion of the highest world, the world of Intelligence. The middle world might mediate, but Corbin does not discuss, beyond mentioning and pointing to, the third world, the cherubic. And the reason for this, I suspect, is that the highest level is just a place-holder, is only present by way of completing a triad. It isn’t important for Corbin. His interest is in that second, median world. He is the prophet of the mundus imaginalis; he found it; he is bringing it to the West.

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If we seek Corbin’s actual project, it is to establish the reality of the spiritual world. He conceived of our world as having retained two worlds, the physical and the intellectual, and to have abandoned the third. For the moment let’s not label it; but what he clearly had in mind was the spiritual. He pictured the modern world as active in understanding the material universe (by practicing science) and to have continued to maintain a world of thought (by practicing philosophy). But in this process meaning has been lost, the soul has been abandoned. Thus he sets out to rediscover Atlantis, as it were. And he does discovers it: it is the mundus imaginalis. He chooses the imagination as its active force and expression, contrasting it to intellect on the one hand and sensory perception on the other. This matches what he observes in modern life where, on the one hand, all of reality is based on measurable physical phenomena on the one hand and philosophy in its analytical forms has become a juggling with concepts, concerned therefore purely with language. (This, mind you, is an interpretation of Corbin, not what, in so many words, he expresses in precisely this way.) Imagination serves a very good purpose here. In modernity it is the fictitious, frivolous, and the fantastic. It is derived from matter in modern psychology and is also classed with the sensory in scholastic circles. Therefore, seeking an organ for the detection of the soul, he finds imagination, separates it from the physical, gives it rank and status, and raises it to a high rank, below the intellect but above the sensory. And, furthermore, being the organ for the detection of the immaterial, he also renders it immortal.

Terrific, I would say. Laudable. Corbin is right, of course. We have abandoned the spiritual—and, doing so, we’ve abandoned our essence. He projects a middle world to make room for the soul. But it is a middle world only because he ranks the intellect so high. In this he conforms to the traditions at least of the western world. We find this in ancient Greece already, worked to a very sharp point indeed in Plotinus. But, alas, for me, something doesn’t resonate. But what?

Let me try to give expression to this what. I find it hopelessly difficult to separate the functions of the self enough to make them genuinely free-standing realities. By this I mean intellect, feeling, willing, imagination, intuition, and perception. To me all of these things are ultimately and irreducibly one. I cannot separate any one of these forces one from the other even for a nanosecond and still retain a coherent sense of what a true agent, a conscious self, might be. Nor can I therefore reasonably give these powers a hierarchical arrangement—or conceive of reality as ordered by them in a tri-partite or any other arrangement. Schopenhauer, for instance, would deify the will, not the intellect. Same problem.

No. One cosmos, one order, a single integration. I don’t deny a hierarchical arrangement of reality. Something about that concepts everything within me finds almost self-evident. But the way I feel it, think it, intuit and imagine it, the cosmos presents itself at its very highest level just as it does at its very lowest. You might say that up there, in the cherubic realm, the cherubs have delights and joys, and insights, and see wondrous images as, down here, we do as well. It’s all in the degree. No facet of the cosmic diamond predominates anywhere—or is absent even in the deepest chasm of reality.

*   *   *

Henry Corbin’s thought delighted me from the moment I encountered it years ago in a volume titled Swedenborg an Esoteric Islam. And he continues to delight me. I’m not criticizing, here, far from it. I’m engaged in sorting my thoughts about his very up-to-date and very helpful contributions to a new age that is in process of birth.

Notes on the Prophetic Mission

These notes are occasioned by reading again Henry Corbin’s essay titled A Theory of Visionary Knowledge. It’s part of a collection of his essays or speeches published as The Voyage and the Messenger, North Atlantic Books, 1998. There Corbin lays out the Shi’ite view of the prophetic mission. Pondering a passage there, it occurred to me that the eastern world lacks a corresponding conceptualization—although holy figures are found in that realm too.

The prophetic mission is solely associated with the Judeo-Christian-Muslim cultural continuum. Why is that? My own conclusion is that ours is the only one (large and powerful although it is), in which God is conceived anthropomorphically and, in one sense, a step removed from the creation. Anthropomorphically how? The human characteristics of this figure are evident in its interactions with humanity as an external lawgiver. God is envisioned as intervening in history, in choosing people to be its own, and in sending heralds to make his will known. The interventions become even more complex when we reach the Christian interpretation. A step removed? Yes. In our most elevated scholastic philosophy, we learn that God maintains the world in existence continuously; yet God also sends emissaries to guide us. The need for emissaries suggests a distance to me.

And, for me, this is a problem. If God maintains the world in existence, if God is the source of all existence and of all the laws that organize it (no problem there), not least the gift of free will to conscious entities like us, why is there need for periodic interventions, messages from on high, chosen people, and the like.

The East evidently never entertained a concept of God as an active, intervening ruler correcting his own arrangements at intervals; hence prophets are conspicuous by absence. The East also produces seers, mystics, and holy people—and others who travel in the Borderzone. But their interpretation of these experience has always had a quite different flavor. The Tao Te Ching is a theological work, no doubt about it. In it the Tao is the all-transcending Reality which need not correct its own creation.

The Eastern view fits the facts much better than the Western, in my view. It’s simply more sophisticated. It fits my observation that mystics, seers, psychics, and prophets will invariably interpret their visions and experiences based on the culture they bring to the experience. And if, indeed, reformist messages come from the Beyond and rouse the often reluctant prophet to act in the social realm, I for one assume that the source of these messages may be well-meaning—but it is certainly not God.

New Year: Marking Eternity

Henry Corbin, the French philosopher, relates an amusing and meaningful exchange at a conference in 1954. Present at this encounter were Corbin, Mrs. Fröbe-Kapteyn, Mircea Eliade, and D.T. Suzuki, the Japanese author on Zen. In conversation with Suzuki, the company asked him what had been his first encounter with occidental spirituality. Suzuki answered that his encounter had taken place fifty years before when he had translated four of Swedenborg’s works into Japanese. To continue in Corbin’s words:

Later on in the conversation we asked him what homologies in structure he found between Mahayana Buddhism and the cosmology of Swedenborg in respect of the symbolism and correspondences of the worlds … Of course we expected not a theoretical answer, but a sign attesting the encounter in a concrete person of an experience common to Buddhism and to Swedenborgian spirituality. And I can still see Suzuki suddenly brandishing a spoon and saying with a smile: “This spoon now exists in Paradise…” “We are now in Heaven,” he explained.*

Thoughts along these lines have been running about in my head of late: the difference between what we call time (time-as-motion, as I like to put it) and eternity. I like the notion that eternity is pure duration—and think that we actually experience it whenever time-as-motion, Einstein’s time, you might say, is temporarily forgotten, when events don’t interfere with our experience of being: contemplative or creative time, also physically active times when we are in control and in the flow.

This morning it struck me (or struck me again—this is not an original observation, certainly not in a context in which Mircea Eliade, who wrote The Myth of the Eternal Return, is mentioned)—it struck me, to repeat, that our ritual markings of anniversaries, like Christmas and New Years, are (perhaps paradoxically) assertions of eternity. On days like today, time stops in a way. Our urge to set such markers—and they are absolutely arbitrary—arises, I think, from the very experience Suzuki highlights, spoon in hand, namely that we already are, if we could but keep it always in mind, already in eternity. We keep falling out of it, of course, day after day. We fall into the hectics of a lower kind of existence, into the rapids of ordinary time. But the odd feelings that mark transitions produce in us a kind of suspension; they serve as reminders that, above the torrent that keeps raging on, there is another time, that of duration, that of eternity. Swedenborg himself struggled to give this feeling expression. In Heaven and Hell (and elsewhere) he suggests that the concept of time in heaven is transformed into something else, what he labels “states.” Yes. But in this life too we can sometimes achieve states in which we slip out of the turbulence into experiences—not of magical exaltations, not of remarkable ecstasy, but of sovereignty.

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*Corbin, Henry. Alone With the Alone. Princeton University Press, 1969. p. 354.

Left to the Poets

All communications ultimately rely on shared experience, and if the experience is subtle, making it known turns problematical; one can’t rely on adequacy in the listener. The world to which Henry Corbin points, the mundus imaginalis, is actually accessible to us, but our experiences of it, especially if they are mild (as mostly they tend to be), we routinely class as mere emotions; we mislabel and dismiss them.

Corbin himself, writing in preface to his Spiritual Body and Celestial Earth, writes as follows about the imaginal realm:

…the fact remains that between the sense perceptions and the … categories of the intellect there has remained a void [in modern times]. That which ought to have taken its place between the two, and which in other times and places did occupy this intermediate space, that is to say the Active Imagination, has been left to the poets.

The poetic and the spiritual are rarely conflated for the simple reason that we class “spiritual” perceptions with religious piety whereas we place the “poetic” in a mental region marked with the sign of Eros; Eros we classify as an inhabitant of the sensate dimension. Herein lies a vast potential for misunderstanding.

The poetically-gifted (in my language “poetic” includes all of the arts) are our most experienced travelers in the imaginal world, not, to be sure, because “imagination” is often involved in the creative arts but because these arts draw their sustenance entirely from the “third” world that Corbin claims modernity has written off. Here the potential for misunderstanding is even more marked. If we select, say, ten novels from the library entirely at random, running through the fiction aisles, maybe with some special luck we’ll manage to pick up one book strongly marked by the poetic spirit. The rest will all be mere entertainment, indeed ordinary secular works. Artistic talent and poetic gifts don’t always coincide. The greats are not always fluent, the clever are rarely poets. Here that common phrase applies: “I know it when I see it.”

There is a Sufi saying that “The mystery hides itself.” This applies with special force to the genuine products of the poetic power. Only those who have ears will hear. The perception remains always private and cannot be socialized—another way of saying that it cannot be conveyed unless the hearer is himself, herself able to hear the message.

Henry Corbin

Henry Corbin (1903-1978) was a great, original, but obscure French philosopher, no doubt the most searching interpreter of Iranian religious culture to the West in the twentieth century—but by no means restricted to that scope. Most of his writings are centered on Mazdaism and Shi’ite Islam. A truly excellent introduction to Corbin is Tom Cheetham’s The World Turned Inside Out. That book, as I’m sure Cheetham himself would agree, is a mere introduction to Corbin, much as Corbin’s entire opus is itself but an introduction to a vast cultural treasure no one can casually absorb. Great obscurity—but equally great splendors—await those who enter here.

Corbin is perhaps best known for introducing the concept of the imaginal world, what he labeled the mundus imaginalis. Not to be confused with the imaginary or with the fantastic, Corbin placed this realm in an intermediate cosmic space between the world of matter and the world of pure intellect, a plane of visionary experience, to which our access is by means of a power Corbin associated with the true imagination, Paracelsus’ imaginatio vera, a visionary power Paracelsus placed in the heart. A culture that cannot recognize this faculty in man and does not help it to develop is doomed to a flat cosmic landscape and an existence polarized between sensory perception and intellectual speculation, unaware of a vertical orientation that gives meaning to existence.

I came across Corbin in an odd way. I was reading an article in Arcana: Inner Dimensions of Spirituality, a journal centered on Swedenborg’s teachings. It occurred to me that Swedenborg’s experiences and those of the twelfth-thirteenth century Ibn el-Arabi had a great many parallels. I sent an e-mail to Leonard Fox, then the editor of Arcana, and suggested that someone ought to be commissioned to write an article on this linkage. Fox answered by suggesting that I read Swedenborg and Esoteric Islam by Henry Corbin, which Fox himself had translated from French into English. I’d never heard of Corbin before. For me this was a significant discovery—and the recommended book my introduction. The first half of the book is titled Mundus Imaginalis—thus I began at the most crucial node of Corbin’s own teachings.

An excellent general-purpose entry point for anyone is Cheetham’s website entitled The Legacy of Henry Corbin.