Active imagination

Active imagination is a cognitive methodology that uses the imagination as an organ of understanding. Disciplines of active imagination are found within various philosophical, religious and spiritual traditions. It is perhaps best known in the West today through C. G. Jung's emphasis on the therapeutic value of this activity.

The imaginal realm is known in Islamic philosophy as alam al-mithal, the imaginal world. According to Avicenna, the imagination mediated between, and thus unified, human reason and divine being. This mediating quality manifested in two directions: on the one hand, reason, rising above itself, could attain to the level of active imagination, an activity shared with the lower hierarchies of the divine realm. On the other hand, in order to manifest the concrete forms of the world, divinity created a range of intermediate beings, the angelic co-creators of the universe. According to philosophers of this tradition, the trained imagination can access a "nonspatial fabric" which mediates between the empirical/sensory and the cognititional/spiritual realms.

Through Averroes, mainstream Islamic philosophy lost its relationship to the active imagination. The Sufi movement in Persia, as exemplified by Ibn Arabi, continued to explore contemplative approaches to the imaginal realm.

Henry Corbin considered imaginal cognition to be a "purely spiritual faculty independent of the physical organism and thus surviving it". Islamic philosophy in general, and Avicenna and Corbin in particular, distinguish sharply between the true imaginations that stem from the imaginal realm, and personal fantasies, which have an unreal character, and are "imaginary" in the common sense of this word. Corbin termed the imagination which transcended fantasy imaginatio vera.

Corbin suggested that by developing our imaginal perception, we can go beyond mere symbolic representations of archetypes to the point where "new senses perceive directly the order of [supersensible] reality". To accomplish this passage from symbol to reality requires a "transmutation of the being and of the spirit" Corbin describes the imaginal realm as "a precise order of reality, corresponding to a precise mode of perception," the "cognitive Imagination" (p. 1). He considered the imaginal realm to be identical with the realm of angels described in many religions, which manifests not only through imaginations but also in people’s vocation and destiny.

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