In the early thirteenth century an Andalusian mystic named Ibn ‘Arabi (1165–1240) left Murcia, a city in southeastern Spain, for the East and never came back. Ibn ‘Arabi claimed that the heart possesses a creative power, and that this power does not merely imagine things but actually makes them. Henry Corbin (1903–1978), the French philosopher who produced the first French translation of Heidegger before spending the better part of three decades studying Persian manuscripts in Tehran, renders the Arabic term for that power, himma, as “the force of an intention so powerful as to project and realize (’essentiate’) a being external to the being who conceives the intention.” To explain this idea, Corbin uses a Greek word, enthymesis — “the act of meditating, conceiving, imagining, projecting, ardently desiring.”
Accessing the imaginal world has nothing to do with wish-fulfillment, New Age manifestation, or positive thinking that promises sports cars and trophy wives for those who visualize hard enough. Corbin insisted on the distinction. The imagination he found in Ibn ‘Arabi and in Suhrawardi, the Persian founder of the Illuminationist school, does not exist to satisfy consumer fantasies. Suhrawardi outlined a cosmology with three main terms: the world of sense, the world of pure intellect, and between them an intermediate world with its own geography, its own inhabitants, and its own laws, which Corbin named the mundus imaginalis. He distinguished the imaginal from the imaginary. The middle world, the imaginal, is perceived, not invented. He called the faculty that perceives it the active imagination, an organ of knowledge rather than a source of enrichment or entertainment. Ibn ‘Arabi, for his part, wrote of the barzakh, his own term for that intermediate region: “Since the barzakh is something that separates what is knowable and what is unknowable; non-existent and existent; intelligible and unintelligible; negated and affirmed — it has been given the term barzakh.”
The West dropped this middle term, despite occasional efforts to revive something similar by visionaries such as Pico della Mirandola or William Blake. Corbin dated the loss to the thirteenth century, when Latin readers of Averroes reduced imagination to a bodily faculty tied to the perishable individual; others put the break three or four centuries later, with Descartes or with the Reformation. Whatever the exact chronology, the West ended up with a cosmology that has a huge gap in it. We demoted imagination from an organ of perception to a private theater in the skull. The word imaginary became synonymous with “not real.” That demotion is so complete that it now feels like common sense rather than an intellectual event with a specific history.
Some may object that we have since learned that the world is not made out of intentions. Except that this is not exactly what we have learned. Bell’s theorem, formulated in 1964, converted a long-standing philosophical quarrel between Einstein and Bohr into a measurable question: if particles carry their properties with them, and if nothing travels faster than light between two measurement sites, the correlations between them must obey a specific statistical ceiling. Quantum mechanics predicts correlations that exceed it. In 2022, Alain Aspect, John Clauser, and Anton Zeilinger won the Nobel Prize in Physics for a sequence of experiments, running back to the 1970s, that progressively closed the loopholes in experimental tests of that theorem. The ceiling is violated, consistently and by wide margins. The universe cannot be both local and real — particles do not simply carry definite properties around with them independently of measurement, and no local account of any kind reproduces what the laboratories keep finding.
It would be a huge overreach to propose that the Bell results “prove” that consciousness creates matter. Most physicists resolve the apparent paradox by surrendering locality rather than realism, which leaves the world objective if strangely connected. Nothing in the experimental record vindicates Ibn ‘Arabi’s idea of himma. The real implication is narrower yet still crucial: the results withdraw the intellectual authority with which materialism dismisses accounts like Corbin’s as pre-modern superstition. The Western model of self-contained objects bearing fixed properties failed in the laboratory, under its own protocols. This does not settle the question of what the imagination is capable of. It reopens it.
Anyone who has spent time with living ceremonial traditions encounters realities that do not fit the materialist frame. Indigenous traditions do not practice variants of one underlying technique. Their cosmologies differ, their plants differ, their songs and diagnostic methods and understandings of illness differ, and each works best within its own territory. Yet the ceremonies produce changes, sometimes unbelievable ones. The magic of one lineage works differently from that of another — but it works, showing efficacy on its own terms.
The maverick English biologist Rupert Sheldrake’s hypothesis of morphic resonance offers one account of this. It remains outside the scientific mainstream and has been contested for four decades. Sheldrake proposes that repeated patterns of activity establish morphic fields that make the same patterns or forms easier to repeat. Applied to human cultures, a field of this kind would be primarily shaped by the tradition that laid it down rather than by any universal constant. Although Sheldrake also argues for something like the “hundredth monkey” principle, which suggests cultural practices can spread nonlocally, once a certain threshold is reached.
Applied to ceremonial practice, morphic resonance could help explain how a people living in one valley for many centuries, singing the same songs to the same beings on the same nights, can build a force with real-world effects. If such fields exist, they are not metaphors; they are the reason the tradition persists. I have seen a number of “magical” effects working in their original contexts. Sheldrake’s mechanism may not be the answer, but he addresses something that is generally ignored: magic is stubbornly local. Any theory of the imaginal must account for this.
In terms of how the powers of the imaginal can be applied, I am interested in the work of Georg Kühlewind (1924–2006), the Hungarian philosopher and practitioner of Rudolf Steiner’s spiritual science. In Becoming Aware of the Logos, his reading of the Gospel of John, Kühlewind writes: “To become aware of the Logos is to become aware of the Logos in oneself.... The world speaks. Before all else, it utters speaking itself. Or does speaking utter the world.”
The Logos, in his account, is the meaning-making activity that is already occurring in every act of perception. The activity is usually invisible precisely because we look through it. Nobody perceives raw sensation and then adds interpretation. We perceive and interpret as one intermeshed process, and it happens constantly, below the threshold of conscious attention or intention. The expression and creation of meaning are, for Kühlewind, intersubjective: “A single human being has no reality; the existence of ‘man’ begins with the word that floats between I and you.”
If Kühlewind is correct and perception is already a creative act, the question is not whether imagination participates in constituting the world — it does so continuously, unavoidably, in everyone — but whether that participation can become intentional, and what changes when it does. William Blake, the poet who saw angels in a tree on Peckham Rye as a boy and escaped a beating for saying so only through his mother’s intervention, put the same claim in its most compressed form: “Imagination is not a State: it is the Human Existence itself.” Imagination, as a cognitive organ, is not tangential; it is essential to building a world, or what phenomenologists call the “life world”.
A moment’s reflection reveals what this implies for politics. Our shared world runs almost entirely on abstractions that cannot be pointed to or tangibly grasped: sovereignty, credit, nationhood, corporate personhood, the market’s confidence, the legitimacy of an election — none of these has a physical location, yet all of them are brutally effective, capable of putting armies in motion or foreclosing on millions of homes. They are intentions, imaginal constructs, given an objective weight — himma at global scale — sustained by collective attention, mediated into existence, and dissolving if and when attention withdraws from them. This is not a mystical or esoteric reading of politics: it is a literal one.
A civilization that forgets or forfeits the imaginal “other world” does not become rational and sober. It splits. On one side you find a flattened materialism that can describe physical and sociological mechanisms but cannot say anything about meaning, purpose, or transcendence. On the other side, we find unanchored fantasy, paranoid conspiracy, and religious delusion. You end up with the spiteful dreamlife of people whose capacity for vision and initiation has been amputated for generations, addicted to dopamine hits.
The imaginal was never the enemy of realism. It was the thing that kept fantasy accountable to something. Earlier societies maintained a balance by acknowledging a real order in the middle world that could be handled correctly or incorrectly. The category of this third term gave people a way to understand how and why negating or misusing the imagination could have terrible consequences.
None of this implies or justifies retreating from concrete reality. The political realm carries its own weight and cannot be dissolved into pure consciousness. A nonviolent resistance movement, an armed rebellion, a general strike — none of these is a visualization technique. The past fifty years leading up to today’s techno-authoritarianism show us what happens when individual spiritual practice or inner work is treated, in itself, as a replacement for collective action.
The stories and images a society uses to define itself originate from specific sources and creators. Today, we are seeing these narratives produced through manipulative mechanisms oriented toward capturing attention instead of techniques for establishing shared coherence and a basis of evidential truth. AI contributes to the onslaught of deceptive media, “fake news,” and a collapse of shared context, and those who make these memes and images have largely abdicated responsibility for what they do.
Stepping away from active participation in that intermediate realm does not free anyone from its influence. It merely leaves people trapped within images fashioned by others, lacking the tools to counter these influences.
This raises the question of practice. None of the figures mentioned above treated this as a theory with no application. Ibn ‘Arabi prescribed specific disciplines — retreat, fasting, the repeated invocation of the divine names — and insisted that a seeker submit what he encountered to a teacher who could distinguish genuine vision from the soul’s own appetite. Kühlewind taught exercises in attention, on the grounds that the faculty in question atrophies without use. He believed that almost everything in contemporary life is engineered to prevent its use. The universal proposition is that the imagination must be trained and honed.
Starting this Sunday, I am leading a six-week experimental seminar, Magic, Prophecy, and the Creative Act. We’re going to test this proposition, moving through studies of myth and psychopolitics, the daimon and the question of magical practice, divine madness and the poet as seer, prophecy and the Logos, and the initiatory logic of ordeal. Each participant is invited to develop a single project across the six weeks, applying what we are studying and exploring in tangible ways. We meet live on Zoom, Sundays for lecture and discussion, Wednesdays for workshop, and every session is recorded for anyone who cannot attend in person.
Details and registration can be found at https://www.liminal.news/magic-prophecy-and-the-creative-act. Until Saturday, we are offering a “late-bird” special of 33% off. I hope you will join us for this experiment!
Great article, Daniel. Important topics. Thank you for once again putting a spotlight on an under-appreciated, often misunderstood zone of thought.
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Thats all you’ll get instead of what I would have said…