Ibn al-‘Arabi · Theology
Between the world of pure spirit and the world of dense matter lies, for Ibn al-‘Arabi, a third realm - the world of imagination (khayal), the barzakh - where meanings take on form, where visions and dreams are real, and where the heart meets God in images.
Most pictures of reality divide it into two: the spiritual and the material, the invisible and the visible, mind and body. Ibn al-‘Arabi inserts a third realm between them, and it is one of his most original and influential contributions: the world of imagination (alam al-khayal), also called the ‘world of images’ (alam al-mithal) or the barzakh - the ‘isthmus’ or ‘intermediate.’ It lies ontologically between the world of pure spirits and meanings (which have reality but no form, shape, or location) and the world of dense physical bodies (which have form but lack the luminous subtlety of spirit). The imaginal world is where these two meet: a realm where spiritual realities take on form - become visible, shaped, embodied in subtle images - and where material things are spiritualised - refined into luminous, meaning-laden forms.
The crucial point, against all ordinary usage, is that this realm is real. When Ibn al-‘Arabi calls it ‘imagination,’ he does not mean ‘the unreal, the made-up, the fantasy.’ He means a genuine level of being and a genuine mode of perception, as objective in its own way as the physical world is in its way. The imaginal world has its own landscapes, its own bodies, its own events; it is the world in which dreams occur, in which visions are seen, in which the dead dwell between death and resurrection, and in which the forms of the next life are real. To dismiss it as ‘mere imagination’ is exactly the modern prejudice Ibn al-‘Arabi’s whole doctrine is designed to overturn - the assumption that if something is not physical, it is nothing. Between the physical and the nothing, he insists, lies a vast and populated third world.
Ibn al-‘Arabi’s most immediate evidence for the imaginal world is something everyone experiences nightly: the dream. In a dream, you perceive a whole world - landscapes, faces, conversations, events - vividly, in form and image, yet that world is not made of physical matter; no one with a microscope could find the dream-house in your skull. Where, then, is the dream? It is not ‘nowhere’ - you really did experience it, and it can carry real meaning, even prophetic truth. It is not in the physical world. It is in the imaginal world, the realm of forms-without-matter, perceived by the imagination. The dream is a nightly excursion into the barzakh, a daily proof that there is a mode of real experience that is neither bodily nor bodiless but precisely in-between: formed, vivid, meaningful, yet not material.
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You learned that Ibn al-‘Arabi posits a real intermediate world - the world of imagination (khayal), or barzakh - between pure spirit and dense matter, where meanings take on form and bodies become subtle; that dreams, visions, and the resurrection-body belong there; and that imagination is a cognitive faculty for per…
Leads to Plato.
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