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Ta'wil
Intuition
A Working theory of
Correspondence
Correspondence ~ Encounter
Contemplation ~ Symbols
The Making and Contemplation of Symbolic Images
the Silent World ~ the Imaginal World ~ Encounter
Images from the Silent World ~ the Imaginal World
This photograph is from the project Ta'wil
Introduction
The following text, written originally for my project Ta'wil from "An Imaginary Book" is a summarization of ideas that form the foundation of my creative process. The recent writings of Henry Corbin and Tom Cheetham had been especially important to me as I was working on "An Imaginary Book" and so you find here many excerpts which I have taken from their writings; to help simplify things for my purposes here I have taken some liberties in quoting them. ~ Back in the early 1970's I was very interested in depth psychologist Carl Jung's ideas related to alchemy and his theory of synchronicity as they seemed quite relevant to my creative process in photographic picture making back then; I continue to find those ideas very much alive for me today and in sympathy with the Islamic texts and theories that have influenced my project "An Imaginary Book." ~ Intuition, Correspondence-Synchronicity, Encounter, Silence, The Imaginal World . . . all these concepts, when deeply considered individually, lead to one another; and it is the Symbol which holds all the parts together as a unified whole. I have tried to define each of these concepts, below, however you will notice that because the concepts are so interrelated to each other there is necessarily overlap and repetition. ~ Most of what I have written about is based in my own experience or with the intuitive feeling and guidance that my creative process is connected to a greater Truth of which I am equally a part, which in many traditions, and in the work of Carl Jung, is identified by the capitalized word Self.
Intuition : Mode of Being
Henry Corbin, Alone with the Alone: Creative Imagination in the Sufism of Ibn 'Arabi
Imaginative vision becomes vision of the heart . . . the heart being the organ, the "eye" by which God sees Himself. In its ultimate degree, the Image will be a vision of the "Form of God" corresponding to the innermost being of the mystic who experiences himself as the microcosm of the Divine Being. . . This presupposes of course a basic visionary Imagination, a "presence of the heart" in the intermediate world . . . an intermediate world which is the encounter (the conjunction, the "conspiration") of the spiritual and the physical . . .
Intuition often manifests spontaneously, especially when the mind is quiet. A silenced mind allows the heart to open safely. Visual artists, poets, writers and mystics are especially practiced and privileged in their ways of seeing inwardly outward things. Through aligning their intuition with their individual mediums and creative processes they are able to give outward expression, sensory form, to their visions of what Henry Corbin terms the intermediate world, the world between the sensory and the suprasensory, that is to say the Imaginal World.
Intuition gives voice to our instinctual longing for the Unity of Being, the primordial union, our creative Origin. Intuition awakens us and opens us to the Truth of who we are by breaking through the separating walls of ego, the dark psychic veils that hide from us our own inner treasures. Intuition illuminates, through the Light of Creation and its manifestation of living symbolic images, our awareness of the One Reality, the Self.
Symbols
Avicenna's recitals . . . show us the repository of . . . an Image that precedes all perception, an a priori expressing the deepest being of the person, what depth psychology calls an Imago. Each of us carries in himself the Image of his own world, his Imago mundi, and projects it into a more or less coherent universe, which becomes the stage on which his destiny is played out.
The soul discovers itself to be the earthly counterpart of another being with which it forms a totality that is dual in structure. The two elements of this dualitude may be called the ego and the Self, or the transcendent celestial Self and the earthly Self. It is from this transcendent Self that the soul originates in the past of metahistory.
There is only one world; we are living in paradise right now, according to Corbin and his Sufi mystic saints. But our ego-dominated sensory experience of the world creates the illusion of a dualistically structured reality: the outer world of sensory appearances, and the inner world of divine archetypal images seeable only with suprasensory vision. The two worlds are mirroring counterparts of the one world, the Self, which the ego splits apart with its dualistic mode of being.
Intuition is a mode of perception by which we interiorize the outward world and carry those images to the intermediary realm which exists between the spiritual and material planes. The Imaginal World says Henry Corbin is where corresponding interior and exterior images can re-unite through visual forms known as Symbols.
Living symbolic images appear to live and breath and glow with a luminosity of their very own. It's as if the darker, veiled image of the outer world becomes, within a symbol, transparent such that it's archetypal corresponding image can shine through it from the inside.
Visual symbols are powerful in ineffable ways; they are mysteriously attractive and are capable of transforming our confining modes of being; their meanings are multidimensional; and they offer us the possibility of a liberating encounter with the sacred, an experience of the Unity of Being, our true and perfect nature, our own Self. Visit: The Symbolic Photograph
Correspondence
Henry Corbin, Alone with the Alone: Creative Imagination in the Sufism of Ibn 'Arabi
Correspondence is a consciously perceived intuitive experience (a psychic Event) in which we see with the eyes of the heart the subtle coincidence of an exterior physical event in time and space with its interior, mirroring, archetypal counterpart. It's a mode of being in which we are seeing the world, an event in the world, as symbol. Through that symbol we glimpse the Unity of Being. [note: C. G. Jung termed this experience synchronicity. For me correspondence and synchronicity are words referring to the same phenomena.]
Correspondence is a spontaneous, intuitive participation in a perpetual "dialogue" that is occurring between the primary dualistic modes of being: ordinary human consciousness, and the extraordinary transcendental consciousness of the archetypal, celestial world.
The Silent Dialogue
The experiences of correspondence are necessarily beyond language. They are not-sayable for the simple reason that the "language" of the sacred, the language of the Unity of Being is silence. The Silent World needs our prayers and our willingness to listen.
Some artists carry on a relatively sustained dialogue with the Silent World through their poetry, music, writing, photography, etc. They have learned to open themselves to this subtle reality through their creative process and manifest through their mediums symbolic, imaginal works which hold in union the mirroring, coinciding dual worlds that have manifested for them as experiences of correspondence. Their works, if they are true living symbols, then make palpable for others their ineffable experiences of correspondence.
A living symbol communicates to us a presence, that which cannot be known and expressed in words. Symbols are the visual embodiments of a silent dialogue, an ineffable conversation that occurs between the corresponding parts of the inner and outer worlds. Symbolic images long to be engaged, felt, experienced, and integrated into our conscious mode of being. To contemplate a true, living symbol and receive its sacred knowledge, it's "news of the universe," we must learn to silence ourselves and simply listen. With an open heart and one-pointed attention we can "hear" - that is to say, imbibe what a symbol wants to say to us in that moment.
Paradoxically, true symbols have an inherent power that can open our hearts and still our minds, enabling us to receive from the symbol what is appropriate according to our individual capacities. That is to say, symbols are open ended in meaning; they are full of potentiality; we can come back to the same symbol time and again and receive something different from it according to our present mode of being, what is latent in us and ready to become consciously recognized. The practice of contemplation, the practice of listening to the silent dialogue that takes place between a contemplant and a symbol, will be discussed further below.
Henry Corbin: Avicenna and the Visionary Recital
An encounter is a psychic Event, a rupture of the sacred into the ordinary reality of the sensory world in which we consciously come face to face with our own Divine Face, the truth of who we really are . . . what the Sufis call the Unity of Being, the True Self.
Every Moment : Ta'wil
Symbols are a means to this sacred knowledge of the Self. To access this self knowledge I must make the conscious effort to contemplate those images that reach out to me with a life of their own, that attract me with their palpable mystery, their interior light and presence of potentiality. This practice of contemplation, the interpretation of a symbol, is what Henry Corbin calls ta'wil.
Contemplation : Ta'wil
Tom Cheetham: The World Turned Inside Out: Henry Corbin and Islamic Mysticism
Contemplation, the unveiling of the hidden treasure within a symbolic photograph, and correspondingly within ourselves, requires that we silence ourselves so that we can listen to what the symbol has to say to us in that moment. Contemplation, in other words, is a form of meditation in which we go inside the image and inside our own self . . . .and listen. When our seeing becomes interiorized such that we are engaging the symbol from the silent center of our being, we will encounter a revelation of that which was hidden, latent within ourselves longing to make itself known. To contemplate a symbol is to journey within and thus return to our creative Origin, the wholeness of our Self. Visit Mode of Being.
I am always searching for images, longing to make images that will awaken me to the silent world of the Self. I have intuitively sensed, however, that images are also seeking me. Images within me and outside me seem filled with a longing to re-unite with their counterparts. Perhaps this feeling of inner necessity is about completing or accomplishing the work of the Creative Imagination, the work of the ta'wil.
Corbin writes that we each carry within ourselves a repository of images that define who we are and the world we live in. The ego has split off and fragmented these images, and our creative process instinctually consists of bringing these images back together in order to re-create at the conscious level the totality of our Being. In Sufi terms this is the return, the ta'wil, to our Origin, to the True Self. In other words, this inner creative journey is a healing process that strives to transform our polarized psycho-physical self back into its original Unity of Being.
When I am in a creative flow, when symbolic photographs seem to be spontaneously manifesting themselves with a life of their own, I feel an exuberance and an intuitive sense that the images have at last found me. They have retuned to me to help return me to my Self, my original wholeness. In these extraordinary moments of recognition, this necessary work of making symbols, contemplating them and integrating their sacred knowledge into my greater awareness of being can at times feel like praising, and at other times like a form of prayer.
Henry Corbin would say our mode of being determines our mode of perception, and therefore what we are capable of experiencing. Intuition is a mode of being, a way of perceiving the world; it's seeing from the inside, that is to say with the suprasensory eyes of the heart.
Intuition often manifests spontaneously, especially when the mind is quiet. A silenced mind allows the heart to open safely. Visual artists, poets, writers and mystics are especially practiced and privileged in their ways of seeing inwardly outward things. Through aligning their intuition with their individual mediums and creative processes they are able to give outward expression, sensory form, to their visions of what Henry Corbin terms the intermediate world, the world between the sensory and the suprasensory, that is to say the Imaginal World.
Intuition gives voice to our instinctual longing for the Unity of Being, the primordial union, our creative Origin. Intuition awakens us and opens us to the Truth of who we are by breaking through the separating walls of ego, the dark psychic veils that hide from us our own inner treasures. Intuition illuminates, through the Light of Creation and its manifestation of living symbolic images, our awareness of the One Reality, the Self.
Symbols
Henry Corbin: Avicenna and the Visionary Recital [Note: Avicenna was a Persian philosopher, 980-1037]
The symbol . . . flowers in the soul spontaneously to announce something that cannot be expressed otherwise; it is the unique expression of the thing symbolized as of a reality that thus becomes transparent to the soul, but which in itself transcends all expression.
Avicenna's recitals . . . show us the repository of . . . an Image that precedes all perception, an a priori expressing the deepest being of the person, what depth psychology calls an Imago. Each of us carries in himself the Image of his own world, his Imago mundi, and projects it into a more or less coherent universe, which becomes the stage on which his destiny is played out.
The soul discovers itself to be the earthly counterpart of another being with which it forms a totality that is dual in structure. The two elements of this dualitude may be called the ego and the Self, or the transcendent celestial Self and the earthly Self. It is from this transcendent Self that the soul originates in the past of metahistory.
There is only one world; we are living in paradise right now, according to Corbin and his Sufi mystic saints. But our ego-dominated sensory experience of the world creates the illusion of a dualistically structured reality: the outer world of sensory appearances, and the inner world of divine archetypal images seeable only with suprasensory vision. The two worlds are mirroring counterparts of the one world, the Self, which the ego splits apart with its dualistic mode of being.
Intuition is a mode of perception by which we interiorize the outward world and carry those images to the intermediary realm which exists between the spiritual and material planes. The Imaginal World says Henry Corbin is where corresponding interior and exterior images can re-unite through visual forms known as Symbols.
Living symbolic images appear to live and breath and glow with a luminosity of their very own. It's as if the darker, veiled image of the outer world becomes, within a symbol, transparent such that it's archetypal corresponding image can shine through it from the inside.
Visual symbols are powerful in ineffable ways; they are mysteriously attractive and are capable of transforming our confining modes of being; their meanings are multidimensional; and they offer us the possibility of a liberating encounter with the sacred, an experience of the Unity of Being, our true and perfect nature, our own Self. Visit: The Symbolic Photograph
Correspondence
Henry Corbin: Avicenna and the Visionary Recital
The text of the recital [the symbolic photograph] is itself a ta'wil of the psychic Event; it is the way in which that Event was understood by the soul that experienced it, the way in which the soul understood the sensible or imaginable context of the Event by transmuting it into symbols.
Henry Corbin, Alone with the Alone: Creative Imagination in the Sufism of Ibn 'Arabi
In its ultimate degree, the Image will be a vision of the "Form of God" corresponding to the innermost being of the mystic.
Correspondence is a psychic Event, an experience of grace, that dissolves the veils of ego such that we come face to face with the Sacred, the Unity of Being, The Hidden Treasure, the Face of God, the Celestial Self.
Correspondence is a consciously perceived intuitive experience (a psychic Event) in which we see with the eyes of the heart the subtle coincidence of an exterior physical event in time and space with its interior, mirroring, archetypal counterpart. It's a mode of being in which we are seeing the world, an event in the world, as symbol. Through that symbol we glimpse the Unity of Being. [note: C. G. Jung termed this experience synchronicity. For me correspondence and synchronicity are words referring to the same phenomena.]
Correspondence is a spontaneous, intuitive participation in a perpetual "dialogue" that is occurring between the primary dualistic modes of being: ordinary human consciousness, and the extraordinary transcendental consciousness of the archetypal, celestial world.
The Silent Dialogue
Tom Cheetham: Green Man, Earth Angel
The perception of meaning in art, and we can extend this to the world as a whole, is based upon the "axiom of dialogue." We are always, when we are truly paying attention, in communion with what lies beyond us. . . . As we begin to read and write the world, to hear the news of the universe, we would do well to hear these words.
The experiences of correspondence are necessarily beyond language. They are not-sayable for the simple reason that the "language" of the sacred, the language of the Unity of Being is silence. The Silent World needs our prayers and our willingness to listen.
Some artists carry on a relatively sustained dialogue with the Silent World through their poetry, music, writing, photography, etc. They have learned to open themselves to this subtle reality through their creative process and manifest through their mediums symbolic, imaginal works which hold in union the mirroring, coinciding dual worlds that have manifested for them as experiences of correspondence. Their works, if they are true living symbols, then make palpable for others their ineffable experiences of correspondence.
A living symbol communicates to us a presence, that which cannot be known and expressed in words. Symbols are the visual embodiments of a silent dialogue, an ineffable conversation that occurs between the corresponding parts of the inner and outer worlds. Symbolic images long to be engaged, felt, experienced, and integrated into our conscious mode of being. To contemplate a true, living symbol and receive its sacred knowledge, it's "news of the universe," we must learn to silence ourselves and simply listen. With an open heart and one-pointed attention we can "hear" - that is to say, imbibe what a symbol wants to say to us in that moment.
Paradoxically, true symbols have an inherent power that can open our hearts and still our minds, enabling us to receive from the symbol what is appropriate according to our individual capacities. That is to say, symbols are open ended in meaning; they are full of potentiality; we can come back to the same symbol time and again and receive something different from it according to our present mode of being, what is latent in us and ready to become consciously recognized. The practice of contemplation, the practice of listening to the silent dialogue that takes place between a contemplant and a symbol, will be discussed further below.
Encounter
Henry Corbin, Alone with the Alone: Creative Imagination in the Sufism of Ibn 'Arabi
Imaginative vision . . . presupposes of course a basic visionary Imagination, a "presence of the heart" in the intermediate world . . . an intermediate world which is the encounter (the conjunction, the "conspiration") of the spiritual and the physical . . .
Tom Cheetham: Green Man, Earth Angel
The perception of any meaningful form is grounded in the encounter with a real presence, a transcendence, beyond the human.
Henry Corbin: Avicenna and the Visionary Recital
The Event of the Avicennan recital was an exodus from this world, the encounter with the Angel and with the world of the Angel. For the Event to be expressed in its truth--that is, for its expression to restore consciousness of self as that of a stranger in the world into which the soul has been cast, and at the same time as an awakening to a celestial kinship and origin--this Event could not but be visualized and configurated in a symbol that was its eminently individual expression. For the Event carries us to the utmost limit of the world; at this limit, the cosmos yields before the soul, it can no longer escape being interiorized into the soul, being integrated with it.
When I have experienced correspondence, it was as if a light had been turned on in some dim world I had been inhabiting. A palpable sense of the sacred breaking through layers of psychic veils pervaded everything I was seeing. A mysterious luminous reality (that surely must lie just behind the surfaces of the apparent world) was somehow able to burn through those veils and awaken me from my sleeping stupor. In these extraordinary moments of intuitional perception, time seemed to have stopped; everything was suspended in silence; vast space seemed filled with a living sacred presence.
An encounter is an intense conscious experience of correspondence in which the physical becomes spiritual, and the spiritual becomes physical. Counterpart forms from the two mirroring worlds open to each other, turn inside out and conjoin with each other in our perception. Their mirroring is reflected in a perfect symmetry, an intuitional vision of unitary reality.
An encounter is a psychic Event, a rupture of the sacred into the ordinary reality of the sensory world in which we consciously come face to face with our own Divine Face, the truth of who we really are . . . what the Sufis call the Unity of Being, the True Self.
An encounter can be life transforming. Take for example my experience of seeing the double-page Qur'an illuminations in Turkey which I have written about in my Preface and in my first project, Prayer Stones. That encounter initiated a dynamic creative process that resulted in "An Imaginary Book" with its outpouring of symbolic images, sacred texts . . . and the very words you are reading right now! It was as if the images I saw in the Qur'ans awakened latent corresponding images hidden deep inside myself that must have been longing to be given outward visual form. For the nearly two full years I worked on "An Imaginary Book" and it's multiple projects I felt as if embraced by a palpable field of creative energy which guided me through a process beyond my conscious control. My primary responsibility, I came to understand, was to serve, to facilitate, to allow the work to flow unobstructed, to clear the way for what needed to be manifested.
Every Moment : Ta'wil
Henry Corbin, Alone with the Alone: Creative Imagination in the Sufism of Ibn 'Arabi
In its ultimate degree, the Image will be a vision of the "Form of God". . . a limited Form, like every form, but a Form which as such . . . emanates an aura, a "field" which is always open to "recurrent creations."
Henry Corbin and his Sufi mystics tell us that every moment of our lives is an encounter with the sacred, a recurrent creation. Artists, poets and mystics are blessed with intuitive vision, an active or creative imagination, a medium, and often an inspiring teacher or guide that helps them to remain open, watchful and receptive participants in the ever present "flashings forth" and flow of creation.
We all have access to what Corbin calls the Creative Imagination. Fortunately I have been gifted with the medium of photography through which I can give visual symbolic form to my intuitions and experiences of correspondence. The making of symbolic photographs helps to satisfy some deep longing inside me, a subtle but persistent feeling of inner necessity to create new images and to stay in touch with the creative flow of the Self and its sacred knowledge.
Symbols are a means to this sacred knowledge of the Self. To access this self knowledge I must make the conscious effort to contemplate those images that reach out to me with a life of their own, that attract me with their palpable mystery, their interior light and presence of potentiality. This practice of contemplation, the interpretation of a symbol, is what Henry Corbin calls ta'wil.
Contemplation : Ta'wil
Henry Corbin, Spiritual Body and Celestial Earth
The great theosophist Ibn 'Arabi conveys to us in a mythical recital . . . God has created for each soul a universe corresponding to that soul. When the mystic contemplates this universe, it is himself that he is contemplating.
Henry Corbin, Alone with the Alone: Creative Imagination in the Sufism of Ibn 'Arabi
The heart being the organ, the "eye" by which God sees Himself: the contemplant is the contemplated (my vision of Him is His vision of me).
Tom Cheetham: The World Turned Inside Out: Henry Corbin and Islamic Mysticism
It is the deepest purpose of human existence to journey from the outward to the inward and so “return creation to its origin.” [the words in quotes are Henry Corbin's]
Tom Cheetham: All the World an Icon: Henry Corbin and the Angelic Function of Beings
The intense and imaginative reading of a text, of the world, or of the soul will be a writing as much as a reading, and the perception of the images that arise and the places where they have their being is as much creation as discovery. Ta'wil is the exercise of the Creative Imagination.
Symbolic images are alive with creative potentiality; they are our way back, the ta'wil, to our true Origin, our Unity of Being, the Self. Symbols function as mirrors which allow us to come face to face with the hidden treasures within ourselves. We can experience the unity of the Self, and we can gain personal insights through living symbols, depending on our individual capacities, our mode of being.
The practice of contemplation is a kind of intuitive, imaginative, meditative journeying into both the symbol and ourselves simultaneously. It requires of us a highly active, conscious state of one-pointed attention in which we interiorize an image such that we can "see" it or imagine it through the eyes of the heart. When we are in our heart, the very center of our soul, we are in the Silent World.
Contemplation, the unveiling of the hidden treasure within a symbolic photograph, and correspondingly within ourselves, requires that we silence ourselves so that we can listen to what the symbol has to say to us in that moment. Contemplation, in other words, is a form of meditation in which we go inside the image and inside our own self . . . .and listen. When our seeing becomes interiorized such that we are engaging the symbol from the silent center of our being, we will encounter a revelation of that which was hidden, latent within ourselves longing to make itself known. To contemplate a symbol is to journey within and thus return to our creative Origin, the wholeness of our Self. Visit Mode of Being.
The Imaginal World
Images Longing for Each Other
Henry Corbin: Avicenna and the Visionary Recital
An intermediary universe having its own existence, this world of symbols or of archetypal Images . . . is the the world of the Imaginable, that of the Angels-Souls who move the heavens and who are endowed not with sensible organs but with pure active Imagination. As a universe "in which spirits are corporealized and bodies spiritualized," it is pre-eminenty the universe of the ta'wil, the "place" of our visionary recitals. From henceforth the soul is committed to the exodus [the journey out of the ordinary world in which it is held captive] " . . . into the Orient."
I am always searching for images, longing to make images that will awaken me to the silent world of the Self. I have intuitively sensed, however, that images are also seeking me. Images within me and outside me seem filled with a longing to re-unite with their counterparts. Perhaps this feeling of inner necessity is about completing or accomplishing the work of the Creative Imagination, the work of the ta'wil.
Corbin writes that we each carry within ourselves a repository of images that define who we are and the world we live in. The ego has split off and fragmented these images, and our creative process instinctually consists of bringing these images back together in order to re-create at the conscious level the totality of our Being. In Sufi terms this is the return, the ta'wil, to our Origin, to the True Self. In other words, this inner creative journey is a healing process that strives to transform our polarized psycho-physical self back into its original Unity of Being.
When I am in a creative flow, when symbolic photographs seem to be spontaneously manifesting themselves with a life of their own, I feel an exuberance and an intuitive sense that the images have at last found me. They have retuned to me to help return me to my Self, my original wholeness. In these extraordinary moments of recognition, this necessary work of making symbols, contemplating them and integrating their sacred knowledge into my greater awareness of being can at times feel like praising, and at other times like a form of prayer.
This link includes one selected image and a brief introduction to each of the projects listed above
Welcome Page to The Departing Landscape website which includes the complete hyperlinked listing of my online photography projects dating back to the 1960's, my resume, contact information, and more.
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