Imagining a Better World

     The last day of August. Sensing a liminal space, feeling this seasonal threshold, I was lured from the luxury of the back porch, camera in hand, in search of the image that invited and scaffolded the glimpse beyond. The bold flowers, richly colored and so soon to fade and fall, captured the shutter. Often, the image recovered on my computer screen invites further meditation, a doorway opening imagination.

     The phenomena of images widens enormously, amazingly, in the writings of Henry Corbin. 

 “when a thing manifested to the senses or the intellect calls for a hermeneutics (ta’wil) because it carries a meaning which transcends the simple datum and makes that thing a symbol, this symbolic truth implies a perception on the plane of the active Imagination. The wisdom which is concerned with such meanings, which makes things over as symbols and has as its field the intermediate world of subsisting Images, is a wisdom of light (hikmat nuriya), typified in the person of Joseph, the exemplary interpreter of visions” (p. 190, Alone with the Alone).

     In addition to the ending of August, this week marks the beginning of another school year. It’s the first time in over sixty years that my vision is not focused in a school room. Not preoccupied with planning and presenting lessons, my mind finds space and time for reflection. It’s like looking into the photographic image to see beyond. My teaching career culminated in the Good Stories course.

     Reflected in eye of my mind and imagination, Good Stories served as a playground in the symbolic world. The importance of this kind of activity, taken seriously, goes mostly unrecognized in our age characterized by scientific proof and material values. The extinction of spirituality traces to many trends such as the triumph of rationalism (at least back to Descartes’ cogito, ergo sum , ~1637) and more than a century of nihilistic ponderings about the “death of God.”

     In Good Stories, we imagined the land of fairies, the flight on the firebird, the possibilities of the “water of Life,” the beast to beauty transformations, and other happenings beyond the surface level. Was Martin Luther King, Jr. crazy to dream of a world able to see past skin color on into a world with love for all God’s children? Was the academy right to treat dismissively any course dedicated to developing the human lens for seeing through story? Is the truth only found through the microscope, through behaviorism, the world as it is? The events and implications of hurricane Harvey and the monsoon in south Asia push us to wonder how policy makers and voters might expand vision beyond immediate and personal gratification, further than literal dogma, the denial of God. 

Meadow Musings

Poetry in an early-morning, late-summer, meadow muse:

The rainbow seeds from last evening’s slanted sun, just 

before setting, spilled by thunder raindrops. 

Then overnight their eggs hatched and in the dawn-fog climbed up 

the laddered webs onto vines some lawn-lovers call weeds

disparagingly, but secret sharers see sky-blue stars,

Queen Anne’s Lace, common grass making Jacob’s ladder.

[And thanks to Mr W for the fine music--he recently played this track here nearby the meadow but prefers to go unnamed...]

Knowing Education

Henry Corbin, Alone with the Alone: Creative Imagination in the Sufism of Ibn ‘Arabi. Can there be any better occupation for the gift of retirement than contemplation in such as this book! 

“the form in which each of us receives the master’s thought conforms to his ‘inner heaven’; that is the very principle of the theophanism of Ibn ‘Arabi, who for that reason can only guide each  man individually to what he alone is capable of seeing, and not bring him to any collective pre-established dogma. The truth of the individual’s vision is proportional to his fidelity to himself, his fidelity to the one man who is able to bear witness to his individual vision and do homage to the guide who leads him to it. This is no nominalism or realism, but a decisive contemplation, far anterior to any such philosophical choice, a distant point to which we must also return if we wish to account for the deformations and rejections which the spirituality of Ibn ‘Arabi has so often incurred, sometimes for diametrically opposed reasons, but always  because men have sidestepped the self-knowledge and self-judgment that this spirituality implies.” pp. 75-76

     Imagine an education, a lifework, aimed at making “philosophy and mystical experience inseparable: a philosophy that does not culminate in a metaphysics of ecstasy is vain speculation; a mystical experience that is not grounded on a sound philosophical education is in danger of degenerating and going astray” (p. 20).

     True learning manifests in “symbolic exegesis which ‘carries back’ the literal statements to that which they symbolize and of which they are the ‘cipher,’—taught, in other words, how to interpret the external rites in their mystic, esoteric sense” (p. 50).

     Notions such as these push me back to the horse where spirit and matter merge, in our better moments almost indistinguishable, a moving meditation, always short of the perfections of harmony-beauty-unity, and yet animated and inspired in the flow.


     Postscript. It's interesting that when I opened Facebook to share this post, I was reminded: