A scholar of the Imaginal Realm

I am a great admirer of the work of Henry Corbin. A lifelong student of the medieval Sufi philosophers - especially Suhrawardi and Ibn 'Arabi - and of Shi'ite mysticism, Corbin brought the term mundus imaginalis, or Imaginal Realm, into currency in the West. In Arabic, the term is Alam al-Mithal and it refers to the true realm of imagination, an order of reality that is at least as real as the physical world, with cities and schools and palaces where human travelers can interact with master teachers.
   Corbin’s great work Creative Imagination in the Sufism of Ibn ‘Arabi is a marvelous essay in visionary spirituality that embodies his driving purpose of helping to free the religious imagination from all types of fundamentalism. I remember being seized with excitement when I first read his Avicenna and the Visionary Recital with its account of soul travel to real places beyond this world.
    Corbin is not an easy read; he assumes that his readers will be polymaths fluent in at least half a dozen languages, ancient and modern. But his work is indispensable.
    There is a fine biographical study by Tom Cheetham, The World Turned Inside Out: Henry Corbin and Islamic Mysticism. (Woodstock, CT: Spring Journal Books, 2003). Here we can read about the incident that generated his life’s work. His professor at the Ecole Practiques des Hautes Etudes, Louis Massignon, had returned from Teheran with a lithograph copy of the major work of Suhrawardi, Hikmat al’Ishraq When Corbin mentioned that he had seen some scattered references to Suhrawardi, Massignon immediately handed his only copy of the Arabic text to him, saying “I think there is in this book something for you.” Corbin later said, “This something was the company of the young Shaykh al-Ishraq [Teacher of Light], who has not left me my whole life.” He eventually translated Suhrawardi's master work as The Oriental Theosophy.
    Corbin regarded study as a quest. At age 70, looking back on his scholarly journey, he wrote that “to be a philosopher is to take to the road, never settling down in some place of satisfaction with a theory of the world…The adventure is…a voyage which progresses towards the Light" (The Voyage and the Messenger).
    In approaching the Sufis, he came armed with his early study of Protestant mystics, from whom he borrowed the idea that there is a primary distinction in religion between the Revealed God and the Hidden God, and that we can only come to know the God behind God through what in us is God-like - "the presence in us of those characteristics by which we know God."
      Corbin spent World War II in Istanbul as the only French scholar in residence at the French Institute of Archaeology. He went to Teheran at the end of the war, and spent at least part of every year in Iran for the rest of his life. His love of Persia is reflected in his description of it as “the country the color of heaven”. He died on October 7, 1978, and was spared the spectacle of seeing the land of the mystic poets in the grip of violent Islamist fanatics.
     Cheetham evokes the core of Corbin's presence in the world of ideas – his “simple, passionate refusal to accept the understanding of ourselves and our world that dominates modern secular consciousness”. Manifest history, for Corbin, is possible only because of a hidden order of events, a "divine history" unfolding behind the curtain of the world. "There is a historicity more original, more primordial than the history of external events, history in the ordinary sense of the term." In my attempt to write part of that history, in my Secret History of Dreaming, Corbin was one of my guiding lights.
      If you are coming to Henry Corbin for the first time - or seeking to distill from all you have learned from him - I recommend his book The Man of Light in Iranian Sufism. There you will find Suhrawardi's hymn to Perfect Nature. Freely adapted, it contains the following beautiful invocation of the Guide:

You, my lord and prince, my most perfect angel, my precious spiritual being
You are the Spirit who gave birth to me and you are the child who is born of my spirit
You are clothed in the most brilliant of divine lights
May you manifest yourself to me in the highest of epiphanies
Show me the light of your dazzling face
Be my mediator [between the worlds]
Lift the veils of darkness from my heart.

    I have used these magnificent words in guiding meditation and imaginal journeys in my circles of active dreamers, to open the heart and facilitate direct contact with the "soul of the soul," the Guide on a higher level. There is a two-way movement. We make a journey of ascension, rising from the heart center to the place of the Guide. Then we return, with heart, to carry the radiance of the Higher Self into embodied life.

Illustration: RM + AI

Reality is illusion, bound by a dream

 

Listen up. Leave your chores and worries. You need to know where we are.

    First there is Nainema. He is illusion. He is called “Father with an Illusion”. He is all there is.
    The illusion that is Nainema affects itself deeply.
    Nainema takes the illusion that is himself into himself. He holds the illusion by the thread of a dream and looks into it. He is searching, but finds nothing.
    He looks again. He breathes. He holds the phantasm and binds it to the dream thread with a magical glue that comes from inside himself.. Then he takes the phantasm and tramples the bottom of it, He goes on stamping until he has made an earth that is big enough for him to sit on.
    Seated on the earth he has made, holding onto the dream, he spits out a stream of saliva. The forests are born from  this and begin to grow.
    He stretches himself out on the earth and dreams a sky above it. He pulls blue and white out of the earth. Now there is sky.
    Gazing at himself, he – the one who is the story itself – creates this story to tell us how it is.
    Now do you understand? 

This is the creation story as told by the Huitoto (or Uitoto) a people of the Colombian rainforest who live by slash-and-burn agriculture, fishing, and their deep connection with the life of the jungle around them. They move through the forest at night using luminous fungi as flashlights.

   Their cosmogony is no more strange than the discovery, in quantum physics, that the act of observation plucks events into manifestation from a cosmic noodle soup of potentialities. Reality begins with illusion. A cosmic illusion becomes self-aware, looks into itself. The act of observation begins to collapse a formless wave into form. But nothing is definite until the process is tied down with the thread of a dream, and juiced by divine acts of emission.
    As in the Brihadaranyaka Upanishad, the place of creation is a state of conscious dreaming. In this Upanishad, whose title means The Great Forest Book, the state of conscious dreaming is described as a state of "emitting" [srj], a word that can also mean the ejaculation of semen. The dreamer "emits" [srjate] or projects from himself "joys, happinesses and delights...ponds, lotus pools and flowing streams, for he is the Maker." The word srj is also used to describe the way a turtle projects its head and paws from under its shell.
     In both stories from the forest, we learn that ancient wisdom traditions have taught for millennia that quantum effects observed at the smallest levels of the universe may be at work in the largest: that microcosm is macrocosm. Nainema's story tells us that reality starts with illusion. Quantum physics suggests that the universe is made of dream stuff. Go dream on it.

Sources: I have based my retelling of the Huitoto creation story on two texts. The older is in Paul Radin, Monotheism among Primitive Peoples (Basel: Ethnographical Museum 1954) pp 13-14; paraphrasing and summarizing K. T.Preuss, Religion und Mythologie der Uitoto (Gottingen, 1921). The more recent is in David  Leeming and Jake Page, God: Myths of the Male Divine (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997) 157-158

Illustration: RM+AI

What's the use of dreaming?

Most human societies until relatively recently have understood that dreaming is important for three reasons above all. First, dreams give us access to sources of wisdom beyond the ordinary mind - to the God or Goddess you can talk to, to the ancestors, to the animate powers of nature, to the greater Self. "It is an age-old fact," declared the great psychologist C.G.Jung in his last major essay, "that God speaks chiefly through dreams and visions." 

Second, dreams show us the future, in ways that can contribute to the well-being and survival of whole communities. They not only rehearse us for events that will happen; they show us possible futures,. If we are able to harvest and clarify the information, and then take appropriate action, we can improve the odds on manifesting a desirable future event, or avoiding an unwanted one.

Third, dreaming is medicine, in several senses. In somatic or prodromic dreams, we are shown what is happening inside the body and symptoms it could develop in the future. So dreams can be a source of vital, even life-saving, diagnosis.

When we do get sick, dreams are a factory of imagery that can help us to get well. Medical science is increasingly receptive to the fact that the body receives images as events, and responds accordingly. Where do we get the images that will persuade the body to adjust in the direction of health? The best images we can use for healing are those delivered by our own dreams. We know they are timely and they are authentic, or own material. The dream image may initially be scary, but I would insist that any image that belongs to us can be developed in the direction of wholeness and healing, if we are prepared to work with it.

Still on the theme of dreams in relation to healing, dreams put us in touch with multiple aspects of ourselves - with the shadow side we may have repressed or denied, with the magical child who may have parted company with us when the world seemed too cold and too cruel, with our animal spirits. Working these connections consciously can help us be stronger, and more. It can lead to soul recovery, which is what happens when we bring home vital parts of our energy and identity that went missing to live in our bodies and our lives. 

Dreaming is an essential human activity, as essential as sex or sleep. If we have lost contact with our dreams, the Iroquois say, we have lost a vital part of our souls. Dreams are important and useful for everyone.

Through our dream radar, we are able to see challenges and opportunities that lie ahead. This is part of our survival kit. Dreams hold up a magic mirror to our everyday attitudes and actions - sometimes in a quite shocking or humorous way - helping us to see ourselves from a higher perspective. In this way (as Dostoyevsky reminded us in Crime and Punishment) the dreams of the night can be a corrective to the delusions of the day.

And then there is the entertainment and refreshment value of dreams, whose gift may simply be a good story or a good laugh. You have access in dreams to a night cinema where the movies are screened  especially for you. You can sometimes step through the screen and become scriptwiter, director and star of your own productions. If you don't remember your dreams, you are missing out on the movies.

Dreaming you can travel without leaving home, not a small thing in the time of pandemic. You can come back with the memories of a delicious vacation. You can rendezvous with friends and loved ones far away, since dreaming is social as well as personal. 

Illustration: "Three Bands of Dreaming" by RM

The dream that guided Jung to reach for a more general audience

 

 Near the end of his life, Jung finally managed to put his best and most original ideas in a form that was simple enough to reach a general audience, without diluting or dumbing anything down. He might not have done this except for a dream. After watching Jung's very human interviews with John Freeman for the BBC in 1959, the publisher of Aldus Books had a bright idea: why not ask Jung to write a book for a general audience?
     Jung's answer, when approached by Freeman, was a flat No. He was now in his 80s, and did not want to take the time that remained to him for this. Then Jung dreamed that he was standing in a public place and lecturing to a multitude of people who were not only listening with rapt attention but understood what he was saying. The dream changed his mind.
     Jung had said in Memories, Dreams, Reflections, "All day long I have exciting ideas and thoughts. But I take up in my work only those to which my dreams direct me." Now he proved this, again, by embarking on the book that was published (after his death) as Man and His Symbols. He conceived it a collaborative effort and invited trusted colleagues like Marie-Louise von Franz to contribute chapters.
    His personal contribution was a long essay titled "Approaching the Unconscious" . The essay is, first and last, about dreams. He completed it just ten days before the start of his final illness, so this work may be called his last testament. It testifies, above all, to the primary importance of dreams in Jung's psychology and in his vision of human nature and evolution. Jung makes this ringing statement: "It is an age-old fact that God speaks, chiefly, through dreams and visions." 

Illustration "The Hiddem Door" RM+AI

“The dream is the small hidden door in the deepest and most intimate sanctum of the soul, which opens to that primeval cosmic night that was soul long before there was conscious ego and will be soul far beyond what a conscious ego could ever reach.” - C.G. Jung, "The Meaning of Psychology for Modern Man". 1931 lecture.

Silver Wolf invites me to see how past life memories are selected

I am back in old journals, harvesting, collating, illustrating. This entry relates to a perennial question about the workings of anamnesis: how and why do memories of other lives surface in our present lives?

August 16, 2012

dream

Silver Wolf invites me to see how past life memories are selected

I am in a village of terraced houses, in Ireland or Britain a few centuries ago. I have come here to investigate my possible past life connections with a friend. This may be one of a number of excursions I have made overnight, to different landscapes in different times.
    I leave my friend in the village and walk a path towards the woods beyond the fields. The woods are lovely, deep and dark and inviting. But at the edge of the wildwood, something is moving. It is a black snake, slithering across the path, from right to left, at a diagonal. This snake is huge. When its head reaches the other side of the path, it straightens the body to move parallel to the path. I can now see at least twenty feet of its body, and more is coming.
   I hesitate. Though I don't think this snake is venomous, I'm not sure I want to get any closer. I am ready to turn back, when I see the head of a silver wolf among the shadows of the forest. The wolf is staring intently at me. I recognize a friend, and know it is safe, and maybe essential, to go forward.
   I step over the snake, as if it is merely a garden hose.
   At the instant I do this, I am transported to another level.
   The scene changes completely. I am now in some kind of vessel, like a spaceship or orbiting observation platform. Two men are working the control panels, under huge windows. One remains at his work. The other stands up quickly, to see who has entered their space. He is clearly very surprised to find me here, but also friendly and welcoming.
    I know, before words are exchanged, that this vessel is a "relay station" and that the work of its controllers is to supervise and help to select the past life memories that become accessible to people living on the Earth plane. I understand, in this moment, that it is very important that past life memories are meted out carefully, so that we are not overwhelmed by a rush of information and emotion that could bind or distract us in our present lives.

Feelings after the dream: Excited and full of active curiosity.

Reality check: I have again been studying our relations with personalities and dramas in other times, and how these can provide a context of meaning for current relationships and challenges. Silver Wolf is a name I gave to a native shaman who can appear as man or wolf and gave me indelible instruction on the nature of various aspects of the soul and what happens to them after death. Black snakes have sometimes featured in my dreams as important dwellers at the threshold, between different worlds as well as different states of consciousness. To gain entry to an earlier time and fulfill an assignment in Celtic lands that once seemed urgently important to me (in a lucid dream followed by a shamanic journey) I once had to move beyond a seething mass of black snakes.

Illustration: RM + AI

Calling the Storm God: Private Myths, Collective Dreams

I run into storm gods quite often: Zeus and Perkunas, Shango and the Thunderers.. In a dream report I disinterred from my 2020 journals, I am reconstructing a ritual to call on the power of a storm god feared and revered in the ancient Near East. As so often, the dream set me the task Jung called "amplification": tracking correspondences in mythology and literature. 

August 9, 2020

dream

Calling the Storm God 

I am holding an extraordinary stone. It is dark reddish and may be a meteorite. There is the hint of a figure or scene, maybe its natural contours. Its shape reminds me, oddly, of the foreleg of a bull. I want to set it up in its ancient stand. I examine some bits of metal that were used to anchor it. I ask two lovely young priestesses who are assisting me to bring me some wire, figuring that I can bind the object in place. Before they return I have worked out how to get it securely into its bronze base. Power will be generated when the right words are spoken and the right powers evoked.

I have found an ancient text - Mesopotamian or Hittite - of a hymn to the storm god. I have written a free version of the scholarly translations and feel it has real power to move things for the benefit of communities as well as individuals. I share this with the priestesses and they are excited. I am going to read my work aloud for the first time to them.

I consider how to explain my hymn to a broader audience. One of the priestesses has a collection of my previous writings including an essay titled "Words from Ur". Perhaps somethng in this vein.

Now I have the stone standing securely on its plinth, I decide where I will deliver the prayer. There are three doors in the wall before me. I open the middle door. There is a tremendous surge of energy, seeking form, in the sky. 

 

Feelings: keenly interested, excited

Amplification: I knew that a storm god (Hurrian Teshub, Hittite Tarhan) was very important for the Hittites. I was soon reading up on Iškur (Sumerian) or Adad (Akkadian), a Mesopotamian storm god. Adad’s name is said to be derived from the Canaanite Hadad. The root meaning of both names is "Thunderer". He was also called Rammanu, Thunderer, in Akkadian. A text dating from the reign of Ur-Ninurta characterizes Adad/Iškur as both threatening in his stormy rage and generally life-giving and benevolent [1]. 
     I would imagine that meteorites and thunderstones were widely regarded as symbols of the storm gods. Early Hittite inscriptions speak of them as “stars falling from the sky” and the Hittites supposedly worshipped sacred stones set up at many places. A Hittite king sent a meteorite dagger to Tutankhamun. 
    The Opening of the Mouth ceremony was performed in Egypt to reanimate the spirit of the dead. A distinctive tool was used – an adze with a bent handle resembling the foreleg of a bull. It has been suggested that the actual foreleg of a freshly sacrificed bull may have been used to pump blood to revive a deceased pharaoh. The Egyptians called Ursa Major Msḫtjw, the Foreleg of the Bull .[2]
    It seems that statue magic throughout the ancient Near East involved similar arts, to import the spirit of a deity or ancestor into a statue or stone and then bring it alive.
    I looked for hymns to the Near Eastern storm gods and copied phrases that might be part of an invocation:

Thunderer 

Owner of the House of Abundance
and the House Where Prayers are Answered

Bull Rider|
who leashes and unleashes the Lion Dragon

Guardian of the Tablets

Lord of Divination

Bringer of rain from heaven and floods from underground [3]

By the Old Babylonian period Iškur/Adad was one of the great gods of the Babylonian pantheon with sanctuaries in many cities  He is "the bringer of plenty" in Enki and the World Order . In Enmerkar and the Lord of Aratta he causes a storm that makes wheat grow on a barren mountainside  Elsewhere his violence is featured. In the Old Babylonian version of the creation epic Atrahasis, "Adad was roaring in the clouds" as the Flood began. The deluge "bellowed like a bull" and the wind screamed like an eagle. 

Five years on: I note that the priestesses in my dream were modern Americans, perhaps an alert that storm gods will be heard again. 

Notes

1. Alberto Green writes that "On a tablet among the adab compositions from the time of Ur-Ninurta of Isin, Iskur is metaphorically described as a howling tempest with flashing bolts of lightning, a butting storm, and a great lion who makes all his enemies tremble, yet he is simultaneously revered as a benevolent lord and warden of heaven and earth who gives life to the land...In this important series of liturgical incantations dated to Ur III, Iskur is the son of Enlil. In addition to being called a lion, he is also represented as an enormous bull-cloud, booming his name across the sky. Here the Storm-god rains destructive hail rather than life-giving showers. He is lauded as the august bull and the great lion, mounting the seven storms like donkeys; he is also the roaring storm, thunder, and lightning. The mythic picture is that of the Storm-god Iskur galloping in his frightful war-chariot, drawn by his steeds, the lion, and the bull." - Alberto R. W. Green, The Storm God in the Ancient Near East (Winona Lake, Indiana: Eisenbrauns, 2003.) p.54.

2. Gábor W. Nemes, “The mythological importance of the constellation Msḫtjw in mortuary representations until the end of the New Kingdom” Égypte Nilotique et Méditerranéenn vol. 13 (2020) pp. 1-61.

3. Benjamin R. Foster, Before the Muses: an Anthology of Akkadian Literature. 3rd edition. (Bethesda, MD: CDL Press. 2005) p.784

4. ibid., p249.

Illustration: RM+AI

The Traveler

 

I can only keep up with him by becoming him. When I come home from our travels, I am not quite myself and no longer him. When we part company, I am left to pore over scraps of memory like the things I find in my pockets and on my phone after a regular plane trip: a boarding pass, a bus ticket, a foreign banknote, a scribbled love note, random photos of far-away cities and beaches and train stations.

It is now one of my ongoing undertakings to track the Traveler through my journal reports. Here he seems to be very like my present self, just two days ahead of me, on my present probable event track. Sometimes he is much further ahead, or on a different – mildly or radically – event track, or he is in another body in another time or another world.

Is the traveler sometimes in a different body in this world, like the kids in the Japanese film Your Name? Perhaps. I think back to the body swapping dream of many years ago when the Traveler tries on at least three different bodies – of a black athlete, a rich Republican country club type, and finally an older, eccentric scholar whose legs don’t work well, much like my current self.

I think of the dream in which I am dressing up in a blue satin ballgown, excited by the prospect of turning on my boyfriend. I wake wondering whether I have been in a woman’s body. This doesn’t feel quite right. My excitement in the dream is surely male arousal, within a man’s anatomy. Confused, I look out the window and see a tall black transvestite, gorgeously attired in a long blue satin ballgown, teetering down the steps on stiletto heels on the arm of her boyfriend

The moment of lucidity, in a sleep dream, may be the moment when the self that has been dormant in bed – or somewhere else altogether – catches up with the Traveler. It may be a moment of self-possession, of taking control of a vehicle that has been traveling under the direction of an autonomous self, like the captain of a ship coming back on board and taking over from a junior officer or crew member. However, the person in the wheelhouse may decline to give over control, and a sudden rebuff may result in falling out of the dream (for the person who wakes in the bed) and the Traveler’s disappearance from radar. So it could be like a horse bucking a would-be rider.

As I seek to track the Traveler, I watch the person who is writing these lines. I see him fumbling with his nautical analogy. I like the bucking horse analogy better, though we lose the notion that there may be a second rider. I am not going to play editor or critic. The writer’s attempt to model and understand what is happening in his many lives is part of his story, the one on which I will put the name we use in the ordinary world.

The Traveler is a multilingual word player. I play with words in English. The Traveler plays with words in many languages. One morning I was left with an unlikely phrase in French, on acccable par les hochements. This could be a newly-minted saying with the sense of “yessing someone to death”, or a commentary on the storm surge of Hurricane Irma, or both. Now I remember the Traveler’s effort to find the right words to greet Stalin at lunch in Ufa in the midst of World War II. He sought an edge of humor while trying to avoid getting his throat cut. He managed, in the Georgian language.

When I am the Traveler the journey often begins at a certain threshold, a gap between the worlds, in a twilight of the mind. I may find myself floating upwards. I roll over and as I do so I feel something pulling loose from my physical body. Lights flash at the top of my head and I find myself being drawn up into a cone of light, like a pyramid with an opening at the top. 

There are days when, flat on my back under a tree, I fall upwards into the bowl of the sky, like Rumi. There are nights when I feel I am about to blast off like a rocket, or be blown from the mouth of a cannon, through circles of red within black. Or I find myself stripping off, shedding the body like a snake skin, dropping it like an old overcoat. When the travels begin, I often find myself looking at geometric pattern. It may be a glowing energy grid. It may resemble the weave of a carpet, or the strands of a net.