#IshraqiInstitute

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Alchemy and the Hidden Secret

“Alchemy for [Henry] Corbin is essentially the inner, spiritual work of attaining union between the human soul and its heavenly counterpart within the mysterious ground of the ‘hidden secret’ pointed to by the symbolic image. This is the intermediate place between spirit and matter, the mundus imaginalis, where the spiritual world assumes an objective reality, and where the transmutation of the prima materia of the human psyche into the subtle or spiritual body is the work of an alchemical opus that involves encounter with an angelic presence through the faculty of the active imagination.”

~ Angela Voss, “Becoming an Angel: the mundus imaginalis of Henry Corbin and the Platonic path of self knowledge”.

Image: Water lily. Image description: A white water lily of the genus nymphaea. Image author: Plane777 at English Wikipedia. Image source: Wikimedia Commons. Image licence: Public domain.

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Nature is Imagination Itself

“The tree which moves some to tears of joy is in the eyes of others only a green thing which stands in the way. Some see Nature all ridicule and deformity, and by these I shall not regulate my proportions; and some scarce see Nature at all. But to the eyes of the man of imagination, Nature is Imagination itself. As a man is, so he sees. As the eye is formed, such are its powers.”

~ William Blake.

Image: Royal Oak Tree. Image author: RegalShave. Image source: Wikimedia Commons (orig. PixaBay). Image licence: Creative Commons CC0 1.0 Universal (CC0 1.0) Public Domain Dedication.

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Seeing How to See

“[T]hrough his imagination, Goethe could, when practising ‘active seeing’, enter into the inner being of whatever he was observing, in the way that the philosopher Bergson argued ‘intuition’ could. Here ‘imagination’ is not understood in the reductive sense of ‘unreal’ but in the sense given it by Hermetic thinkers such as Ficino and Suhrawardi, as a means of entering the Hūrqalyā, the Imaginal World or anima mundi that mediates between the world of pure abstraction (Plato’s Ideas) and physical reality (in Goethe’s case, a plant or a cathedral).”

~ Gary Lachman, The Quest for Hermes Trismegistus: From Ancient Egypt to the Modern World.

Image: Plato and Aristotle in The School of Athens. Artist: Raphael (1483–1520). Image source: Wikimedia Commons. Image licence: Public domain.

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Renaissance, Reformation and Scientific Revolution

“[T]he Renaissance could have marked the beginning of a new civilization based on a creative partnership between humanity and nature. But that was not to be. The Protestant Reformation of northern Europe was, in some ways, a reaction against the sensate spirit of the Renaissance; and similarly, the emerging mechanistic worldview of the Scientific Revolution included a reaction against the idea of living, ensouled nature. Rather than the Renaissance view that science was a divine art through which humanity could care for and cultivate the world, the perspective of the coming era could be summed up in the Enlightenment conclusion that “the negation of nature is the way toward happiness.”

~ David Fideler, Restoring the Soul of the World: Our Living Bond with Nature’s Intelligence.

Image: La nascita di Venere. Image description: The birth of Venus. Image author: Sandro Botticelli (1445–1510). Image source: Wikimedia Commons. Image licence: Public domain.

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Imagination

“Imagination, [Colin Wilson] said, is ‘the ability to grasp realities that are not immediately present’. Not an escape from reality, or a substitute for it, but a deeper engagement with it. We could also say that imagination is simply our ability to grasp reality, or even, in some strange way, to create it, or at least to collaborate in its creation.”

~ Gary Lachman, Lost Knowledge of the Imagination.

Image: Girl with outer space imagination from NASA. Image author: NASA/Jenny Mottar. Image source: Wikimedia Commons. Image licence: Public domain.

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Moonrise ~ D. H. Lawrence

And who has seen the moon, who has not seen Her rise from out the chamber of the deep, Flushed and grand and naked, as from the chamber Of finished bridegroom, seen her rise and throw Confession of delight upon the wave, Littering the waves with her own superscription Of bliss, till all her lambent beauty shakes towards us Spread out and known at last, and we are sure That beauty is a thing beyond the grave, That perfect, bright experience never falls To nothingness, and time will dim the moon Sooner than our full consummation here In this odd life will tarnish or pass away. . Image: Mediterranean moonrise, Port-la-Nouvelle. Image author: Maxime Raynal. Image source: Wikimedia Commons (orig. Flikr). Image licence: Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic (CC BY 2.0).

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Paradise Lost

“[Poet and Platonist Kathleen] Raine maintains that we have lost our sense of wonder; the same wonder that is the beginning of knowledge ... Nowadays poet-prophets like Raine are rather strangers known only to limited circles of elites and true intellectuals. Therefore, it seems that the elites should, availing themselves of the rich tradition of such rare poets, help all humanity to regain their lost paradise of dedication to Beauty, Truth and the Good.”

~ Shadi Mohyeddin Ghomshei, Three Windows to Plato’s Academy: A Study of Kathleen Raine’s “A House of Music”, “Soliloquies upon Love” and “A Blessing”.

Image: Decay and colour (42245973300). Image description: Lost Place. Image author: A_Peach from Berlin, Germany. Image source: Wikimedia Commons (orig. Flikr). Image licence: Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic (CC BY 2.0).

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The Big Gamble

“I think that this idea, that the materials and self work can take you far enough for other things to kick in, was [Idries] Shah’s innovation, his “big gamble”, to fit a 21st century community of which very few would actually have physical contact with a living teacher. It goes beyond the need for a physical contact with a teacher, in my opinion.”

~ H. M. Forester, Secret Friends: The Ramblings of a Madman in Search of a Soul.

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The ishraqi institute: What we’re about

Active imagination, aesthetics, alchemical imagination, ally, anima mundi, art, William Blake, Tom Cheetham, consciousness, Henry Corbin, creativity, daemons, depth psychology, empathy, the Endarkenment, esoteric traditions, David Fideler, Marie-Louise von Franz, Jean Gebser, Becca Harpur, Patrick Harpur, hidden church, James Hillman, holism, James Hollis, illumination, imaginal world, imagination, inner-tuition, inspiration, integral consciousness, intuition, invisible college, ishraqi, Robert A. Johnson, Carl Jung, knowledge, Gary Lachman, lost knowledge of the imagination, love, Iain McGilchrist, Michael Meade, Radmila Moacanin, mundus imaginalis, music, mythology, poetry, psyche, Philip Pullman, Jeffrey Raff, re-enchantment, Kathleen Raine, Rainer Maria Rilke, Renaissance, Romantics, scientism, secret commonwealth, self, shadow, Idries Shah, soul, David Tacey, Richard Tarnas, unconscious, underworld, Linda Bonnington Vocatura, Angela Voss, western tradition, wisdom; and much more ...

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The Return of Plato: Beauty, Imagination and Vision

“The notion that beauty was an essential component in the search for the ultimate reality, that imagination and vision were more significant in that quest than logic and dogma, that man could attain a direct knowledge of things divine—such ideas held much attraction for the new sensibility growing in Europe [during the Renaissance].”

~ Richard Tarnas, The Passion Of The Western Mind.

Image: La renaissance des arts et des lettres. Image description: The renaissance of arts and letters by Henri Sieurac Musée des Augustins, de Toulouse. Artist: Henri Sieurac (1823–1863). Image source: Wikimedia Commons. Image licence: Public domain.

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Keep It Going, and Pass it On

VENTURA: “[A]ll of this passing things on, in all its forms, may not cure the world now—curing the world now may not be a human possibility—but it keeps the great things alive. And we have to do this because, as Laing said, who are we to decide that it is hopeless? And I said to my son, if you wanted to volunteer for fascinating, dangerous, necessary work, this would be a great job to volunteer for—trying to be a wide-awake human during a Dark Age and keeping alive what you think is beautiful and important.”

~ James Hillman and Michael Ventura, We've Had a Hundred Years of Psychotherapy and the World's Getting Worse.

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Enchantment, Disenchantment and Re-Enchantment

“Perhaps we can plot the development of human thought in three stages. The first is enchantment through animism and pantheism. The second is disenchantment through rationality and reason. The third, and this is the possibility that interests me, is re-enchantment through postmodern science, philosophy and depth psychology. In the third stage, we return to the ancient perception of the world and know it differently, with a new understanding.”

~ David Tacey, The Darkening Spirit: Jung, spirituality, religion.

Image: Apollo's enchantment, by Henry Howard (British). Image description: Surrounded by the pantheon of Greek gods and the Muses, Apollo, god of the sun and of music, enchants his divine colleagues with his skill at the lyre. Artist: Henry Howard (1769–1847). Image source: Wikimedia Commons. Image licence: Public domain.

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The Battle for the Soul of the World

“It was [Henry] Corbin's contention that European civilization experienced a "metaphysical catastrophe" as a result of what we might call the Great Disjunction. This was signaled by the final triumph of the Aristotelianism of Averroes over Platonic and neo-Platonic cosmology championed by Avicenna. To the defeat of that cosmology is coupled the disappearance of the anima mundi, the Soul of the World. The catastrophic event that gave rise to modernity is the loss of the soul of the world ... [Corbin] warns us that the history of the West has been the theater for the battle for the soul of the World.”

~ Tom Cheetham, Green Man, Earth Angel.

“Our western philosophy has been the theater of what we may call the ‘battle for the Soul of the World.’ ... Is it a matter of a battle that has finally been lost, the world having lost its soul, a defeat whose consequences weigh upon our modern visions of the world without compensation? If there has been a defeat, a defeat is still not a refutation.”

~ Henry Corbin, Spiritual Body & Celestial Earth, xiv.”

Image: Nasa earth. Image author: NASA ESA. Image source: Wikimedia Commons. Image licence: Public domain.