Imaginal Love

his most accessible and perhaps finest book, Creative Imagination in the Sufism of Ibn ‘Arabī.

All are willing to risk everything in order to be open to the world.

nothing is literal – nothing is only what it seems on the surface. Everything has depth, breadth, and extended reference.

Corbin died in 1978, the year of Khomeini’s Islamic Revolution in Iran. I assume that Iranian unrest provides the context for Corbin’s remarks.

The deep interiority and objective reality of the Temple is the most important thing for Corbin.

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.

We have to give up our attachment to psychology itself, to the literalism of psychotherapeutics.

You have to be able to suspend your own viewpoint, and your own emotional reactions.

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]