Mundus Imaginalis
This poem by Robert Duncan, published in 1960 in The Opening of the Field, is the best short evocation of Corbin’s world that I know.
Often I Am Permitted to Return to a Meadow
as if it were a scene made-up by the mind,
that is not mine, but is a made place,
that is mine, it is so near to the heart,
an eternal pasture folded in all thought
so that there is a hall therein
that is a made place, created by light
wherefrom the shadows that are forms fall.
Wherefrom fall all architectures I am
I say are likenesses of the First Beloved
whose flowers are flames lit to the Lady.
She it is Queen Under The Hill
whose hosts are a disturbance of words within words
that is a field folded.
It is only a dream of the grass blowing
east against the source of the sun
in an hour before the sun’s going down
whose secret we see in a children’s game
of ring a round of roses told.
Often I am permitted to return to a meadow
as if it were a given property of the mind
that certain bounds hold against chaos,
that is a place of first permission,
everlasting omen of what is.
ROBERT DUNCAN
I post this out of enthusiasm for the current series of lectures on Corbin’s book on Ibn ‘Arabi. I am having a wonderful time (and think others are as well - I know some are for sure) re-engaging with this remarkable, difficult and often maddening text. It’s so exciting to connect with it again after my forays into Weirdness and find that I am even more in Corbin’s spell than ever. I didn’t quite expect that.
The only problem is that we’re trying to do the book in four weeks. Ha! Eight lectures is nowhere near enough. But when I offer 8 week, or 10 week classes, the enrollment drops to a few people (who I have come to love) who can find the time to devote to this journey we have been on for, I think, 5 years now. So we will do what we can manage in a quick survey of a book that seems to me now wholly infinite in scope.
I’ll invite any of you remaining outside our charmed circle to join us, either live, or via the recordings. About a third of those in the class are recordings-only people for all sorts of very good reasons. I do think you’re missing something important. Of course I’m delighted to accept your tuition (for the next Brazil adventure), but we are having a very good time and this material is just so wonderful that I am quite sure more people would find the time well-spent.
Just email me… tcheetham@gmail.com
Or, wait until fall when we will be doing something else…
With much regret I will have to wait until fall to really give your class the attention it needs. I am confident your insights will carry forward into your next explorations.. see you then. Ron 🙃
Hello Tom. I had a really wonderfully liberating experience a few weeks ago and I would like to thank you. I have been following the work of Rob Burbea and have been cultivating a meditation practice. I found myself investigating emptiness with little real movement.
One night I woke at 3am with a lot of energy and realised that the concept of icon could be seen as synonymous with Burbea's emptiness. The gal between the two concepts allowed me to understand both in a new way. I paced around my kitchen with the phrase 'all the world an icon' bubbling in my muscles and began to perceive many features of my reality as icon. After a few steps, I came upon the realisation of my 'personal history' as a reified idol.
Once I perceived it instead as icon, it collapsed, opened, deepened, inverted into something new. My body shook with heat and twitching. It felt like the ground around me was dissolving. My sense of the past seems to have irreversibly shifted, from a concrete set of events, to a field of open questions, humming for engagement, inquiry, integration.
This was the most liberating experience of my life, and I really do feel deeply changed. The weight of the past has been fundamentally recontextualised. I will live 'forward' differently.
Today I opened 'The Angel Out Ahead' for the first time and in the opening section have seen the passages about refusing to be 'inserted into the historicality of History'. I'm not sure if these words are gesturing towards the same thing, but they seem to me to be.
Thank you dear Tom, and lots of love and blessings from Ireland.
Michael McGrath, Cork.