Imaginal Love

Corbin that “ultimately what we call physis and the physical is but the reflection of the world of the Soul; there is no pure physics, but always the physics of some definite psychic activity.” [17]

Hence, the opposite of idolatry would not consist in breaking idols, in practicing a fierce iconoclasm aimed against every inner or external Image; it would rather consist in rendering the idol transparent to the light invested in it.

opposite. It is abstraction which is literal; the concrete is always imaginal.

There was a progressive distancing of the relation between the written sign and the world to which it refers during the long development of writing from pictographs to alphabetic scripts.

He said to me once that as he sat lost in contemplation over those ancient texts, sometimes he was afraid that he wouldn’t be able to get back.

This is one reason poets and mystics make such bad politicians ‒ to do anything at all with the world you have to see it abstractly. The full reality of things is far too complex for any response beyond simply standing there and singing.

If the progression from sanity towards mental illness is distinguished by degrees of literalism, then the therapeutic road from psychosis back to sanity is one of going back through the same hermeneutic passage ‒ deliteralizing.

When feeling is undeveloped, then the world is awash in emotions, which manifest the natural powers of the world undifferentiated by consciousness. Emotions are the un-felt energies of things.