The Intermediate World
The unseen lands, the mundus imaginalis, the world of active imagination, the World of Faerie, the perilous realms to which one is unexpectedly transported, is where time stands still, and wonders abound.
We have heard about such places all our lives, in story and legend, myth and fairy tale. And therein lies the rub: because it is “fairy tale,” by definition it must be made up, there cannot be any truth in it, behind it, or underlying it. Fairy tales, we all know, are for children. Gullible children. We adults, we know better. There is no such thing as magic, no such thing as other worlds surrounding us.
There is only this hard mechanistic universe, constructed like a machine out of particles, and which run itself with rigid incontrovertible rules.
The thing is, this world we live in is all so undeniably real. You hit your hand on a rock, it hurts. We take things and build stuff, and that stuff can be there for generations. We can plan our day because this mechanical world is so very predictable. And more importantly, we can MAKE MONEY.
Besides, have a look at the alternative. Those vocal advocates for any other world besides this most obvious and excellent world we all of us live in are, quite simply, nuts. They take drugs, are incoherent most of the time, or quietly intone humming sounds that lull you to sleep, waving their hands and generally giving off a vibe of “I know something mysterious that you do not know. Believe in me and I will take you there.” What happens most often is they take you all right—for your money.
And religion? Humph. They have been saying the same thing about other worlds for centuries, and now look at them, scandals from top to bottom. How can they be taken seriously?
And yet … science has increasingly demonstrated the idea that what we see as the world around us is constructed from our own mind.
Our eyes, ears, nose and skin give us information about the world, but it is not complete. We know this because we have developed instruments that extend those senses, such as a microscope, in which a whole new world of microbes is revealed.
We are overwhelmed with stimuli from the world around us, but that information is filtered by the limits of our senses. We cannot smell what dogs smell. We cannot hear what bats hear. In the past, we needed that filter for survival, to keep the species alive.
Those who paid more attention to the iridescent vibe of that flower than to the tiger rushing down on them did not live to pass on their genes.
Also it was not really important what made that particular tiger different to any other tiger, Just the label “Tiger!” was quite sufficient to trigger the appropriate response: “Run like hell!”
So we label things, like “tree” or “chair” or “river” and then we tend to look at the label “Oh, its just a tree” and rarely if ever see the actual tree in all its nuance.
This is all good enough to get us around in the world, but it does tend to flatten everything. It gets boring just seeing the same old labels around us. “Just another tree,” “Just another mountain.”
The whole point I am trying to make is that we do NOT see the real world around us, even the supposedly solid physical bits. We see a representation of the world that comes from within us. It is like living in a house of mirrors. We only see ourselves, and then believe there is nothing else.
But there are ways to escape this trap, and they have been used since time immemorial the encourage the development of this faculty, this ability to perceive the worlds around us.
In our modern Western society, the biggest obstacle to even starting to expand this very human part of ourselves is disbelief. Again the labels come out: “it’s make believe, its phantasy, we tell these stories to kids, we don’t believe them!”
But a different form of seeing was the whole basis for Goethe’s science. Coleridge, Keats, Wordsworth, George MacDonald and C.S. Lewis all drew heavily on this ability to produce their work. JRR Tolkien wrote Lord of the Rings by entering the world he called Fairie—and his essay On Fairie Stories[1] is just about the best introduction one could have to the topic.
Henri Corbin, the great Persian scholar, describes how the sages of that country, over the centuries, perfected the ability to a high art.
Corbin, like Tolkien, took great care to distinguish mere everyday phantasy from a developed, skilful and conscious ability to enter deeply into this world that opens to us when we have learned to operate the faculty that is latent with all of us, but rarely developed. He even had a name for it: the Mundus Imaginalis.
Iain McGilchrist, psychiatrist and author of The Master and his Emissary, said in a recent interview:
“Intuition and imagination are now thought of as second-class ways of coming into contact with reality, perhaps leading us away into fantasy, but as I say in that book and am constantly saying, fantasy is one thing but imagination is the only chance we have to reach reality. It is not a matter of putting fancy dress versions of the world in front of the world. It is clearing all that away so that for the first time we can see reality for what it is. Those of you who know the work of Wordsworth and Coleridge will know exactly what I am talking about.”
So, how can we reach such insight? How can we adjust our minds to access this realm of understanding? It is all a matter of our mental stance, as what we can perceive is determined by our attitude, our habitual way of thinking and of acting. It is essential to cultivate those modes of being, those mental states that can reveal a fuller reality.
In fact, many people who do have the spontaneous experience of entering this “other world” are frequently overwhelmed and find it not at all pleasant, mainly because they are not prepared. It is too far away from their habitual ways of thinking. The reason I am saying all this is to introduce a document specifically designed to give directions on how one might become prepared for such an encounter.
Not everyone has them. Not everyone can develop the faculty needed when they want to. It is one of the Rules of that Perilous Realm (as Tolkien called it) that such occurrences happen when they are needed, and cannot be forced.
But one can provide oneself with the information and tools necessary to take advantage of such an occurrence when it may come along.
What I would like to do here is introduce a document, written by a dear friend who has made an in-depth study of these things, which does just that: begin to provide the information and tools necessary to prepare you for exposure to such unfamiliar experiences.
Making Sense of Non-Sense
Introduction
There is a tendency to either dismiss, mythologize, rationalise, or reify the concept of subtle environments and imaginal realms. In doing so, these topics are effectively removed from the sphere of legitimate study, handicapping our intellectual and imaginative faculties and narrowing the horizons of our ever more impoverished human culture. This is not only a shame but also close-minded and short-sighted.
In pursuance of this project of re-acquaintance we will need to determine:
- what is meant by the term ‘subtle’ in this context;
- what manner of beings inhabit such environments;
- where such environments may be ‘located’; and
- what governs ‘access’ to such environments.
The term ‘subtle’—when used to describe the environments we are investigating—is indicative of the fact that such environments cannot be perceived or encountered by most people most of the time. Also, while in classical physics all matter has mass and volume, and it is thus generally held that two material objects (or environments) cannot simultaneously occupy the same coordinates in space-time, it is nevertheless true that such environments as we are discussing do seem to have some degree of overlap with so-called empirical space and its historical temporality. Such environs are therefore referred to as ‘attenuated’ or ‘subtle’.
There are, in fact, a multitude of subtle realms which condition, and are in turn conditioned by, the states of beings living in the so-called empirical realm and before proceeding further it is important to be clear that although we will speak about Heaven, Hell, the alam al-mithal, and other subtle realms (natural and supernatural), their juxtaposition should not be taken for conflation. For our purposes here, let us allow that there are natural and supernatural subtle environments; the supernatural environs, both Divine and infernal, infusing the natural environs—both the normative human environ of what academics like to call empirical reality as well as those that while also natural, are subtle.
The celebrated author and Oxford don J.R.R. Tolkien has written on the nature of certain subtle realms found in the folklore of various Northern and Western cultures, and provided some indication of what one might expect to find therein:
…all manner of beasts and birds are found there; shoreless seas and stars uncounted; beauty that is an enchantment, and an ever-present peril; both sorrow and joy as sharp as swords. In that land a man may (perhaps) count himself fortunate to have wandered, but its very riches and strangeness make dumb the traveller who would report it. And while he is there it is dangerous for him to ask too many questions, lest the gates shut and the keys be lost. The fairy gold too often turns to withered leaves when it is brought away. All I can ask is that you, knowing these things, will receive my withered leaves, as a token that my hand at least once held a little of the gold.
Tolkien also reveals that subtle realms represent:
...a state wherein will[,] imagination[,] and desire are directly effective—within the limitations of the world. Above all where beauty—of all the three the most magical—is natural and relatively effortless.
Finally, Professor Tolkien provides insight into our culture’s confusion regarding the beings that inhabit such realms. He avers that if such subtle beings exist, then it follows that…
…they are bound by the Moral Law as is all the created Universe; but their duties and functions are not ours. They are not spirits of the dead, nor a branch of the human race, nor devils in fair shapes whose chief object is our deception and ruin… They are a quite separate creation living in another mode… For lack of a better word they may be called spirits, daemons: inherent powers of the created world, deriving more directly and ‘earlier’ (in terrestrial history) from the creating will of God, but nonetheless created, subject to Moral Law, capable of good […] and possibly (in this fallen world) sometimes evil.
The nature and existence of subtle realms and the ontological states of the subtle beings that may reside therein is likewise a concern in Middle-Eastern cultures generally and the Islamic tradition particularly.
Gracia López Anguita paraphrases the perspective of Sheik al-akbar Ibn al-'Arabi, when she declares that subtle beings:
…Because of [their] intermediary nature, [are] closely related to the doctrine of the barzakh and the world of imagery [and that] the question of whether [they are] superior or inferior to man is less relevant than the principle that all created beings represent a form of manifestation which must be internalized by man on his path to spiritual realization..
Lore on the existence and function of subtle beings is also found within Asian spiritual traditions, which agree that subtle environs are home to:
…powerful beings belonging to the [natural] realm but they have subtle bodies that humans cannot ordinarily perceive… As they are sentient beings within samsara who have their own karma, perceptions, and tendencies, they are not [inherently] enlightened beings. Hence, as Buddhists, we do not take refuge in them. These beings abide in areas where there is water, such as in streams, springs, ponds, rivers, lakes, and the oceans […] they also abide in woodland areas, such as forests and jungles [and] become extremely displeased when someone pollutes their environment… They are also displeased when people living on their land or near them are disharmonious and quarrelsome… If we have offended [them] in any way, they can [cause] severe drought, or floods…
Classical Islam has numerous technical terms to describe such subtle realms. For our purposes here, we will focus on the one with the greatest currency in contemporary scholarship: the alam al-mithal.
The French philosopher, theologian, and Scholar of Persian theosophy,Henri Corbin, describes the alam al-mithal as a…
…median and mediating universe, an intermediate world between the sensible and the intellectual (intelligible), an intermediate world without which articulation between sensible and Intellectual (intelligible) is definitely blocked.
Corbin also indicates that…
Neither the active nor the agent Imagination is […] in any sense an organ for the secretion of the imaginary, the unreal, [or] the[merely] fictive…
For this reason, as he states, it was necessary for him to coin a term in a classical Western language that could:
…differentiate radically the intermediate world of the Imagination[…] from the merely imaginary.
To that end, Corbin drew upon Latin to coin the expression mundus imaginalis as the literal equivalent of the Arabic alam al-mithal, declaring that the function of the mundus imaginalis and of Imaginal Forms is…
…defined by their median and mediating situation between the intellectual and sensible worlds. On the one hand [the imagination]immaterialises the sensible forms, on the other it ‘imaginalises’ the Intellectual Forms to which it gives shape and dimension. The Imaginal world creates symbols on the one hand from the sensible forms, on the other from the Intellectual Forms. It is this median situation which imposes on the imaginative faculty a discipline which would be unthinkable where it had been degraded into ‘phantasy,’ secreting only the imaginary, the unreal, and capable of every kind of extravagance. Here there is the same total difference already recognised and clearly remarked by Paracelsus between the imaginatio vera (Imagination in the true sense) and ‘phantasy.’ In order that the former should not degenerate into the latter, precisely this discipline, which is inconceivable if the imaginative power, the active Imagination, is exiled from the scheme of Being and Knowledge, is required... The imaginary can be innocuous; the imaginal never can be so.
The last sentence should be sobering to wayfarers.
Professor Tolkien also went out of his way to make a point of cautioning would-be sojourners in subtle realms that it is:
…a perilous land, and in it are pitfalls for the unwary and dungeons for the overbold.
It is a commonplace of traditional lore that the occultation or veiling of subtle environs is lessened or removed if and when we are ‘called’ or ‘invited’ into them—when we are in a state of harmony with their raison d’etre (even when—as for instance with infernal realms—that may mean being in a state of general disharmony).
The 17th century Swedish theologian, Emanuel Swedenborg, explains how this works:
…all things appear, just as in the world, to be in place and in space, and yet […] all changes of place […] are effected by changes of state in the interiors, which means that change of place is nothing else than change of state… Those are near each other who are in like states, and those are at a distance who are in unlike states; and spaces [...] are simply the external conditions corresponding to the internal states…
While humanity typically inhabits the particular natural space we call the empirical world, we may through innocent affinity sojourn in pure lands, while through the cultivation of various qualities, types of experience, and degrees of self-knowledge we may (and do) enter and exit veritable hells.
There are certain commonalities apparent to all who have any experience with the nature of such subtle environments, and these may be enumerated as follows:
- Change of Time—a sense of time dilation;
- Change of Place—a sense of being in the world and yet removed from it;
- Change of Person—a sense of light (or darkness) suffusing persons;
- Change of State—a sense of combined dreaming and wakefulness.
While we may examine each of these ‘changes’ in turn, there is also something of each in all the others.
But we will examine these in detail in the next Bonus Episode!
[1] https://coolcalvary.files.wordpress.com/2018/10/on-fairy-stories1.pdf