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.
And dreams, for Ibn al-‘Arabi, are only the most familiar entry into this world; visions, the experiences of mystics, and above all the events of the afterlife belong to the same realm. The Prophet’s Night Journey, the forms in which angels appear, the ‘body’ of the resurrected, the gardens and fires of the next world - all are imaginal realities, not crude physical objects but not unreal fantasies either. This is why Ibn al-‘Arabi can take the vivid imagery of scripture with full seriousness without crude literalism: the resurrection-body is real, but it is an imaginal body, a subtle form in the barzakh, more real and more vivid than physical flesh, not less. The mistake of the literalist is to make these imaginal realities into dense matter; the mistake of the skeptic is to make them into ‘mere imagination,’ nothing at all. Ibn al-‘Arabi threads between: they are imaginal - which is to say, really real, in the realm of the really real that is neither matter nor pure spirit.
The doctrine of the imaginal world matters because it recovers a whole dimension of reality that both crude materialism and crude spiritualism erase. The materialist says: only physical matter is real; dreams, visions, spiritual experiences, the afterlife are ‘just in your head,’ subjective noise produced by the brain, ultimately nothing. The abstract spiritualist or rationalist says: the real is the immaterial, the conceptual, the formless; images and forms are a lower, deceptive realm to be transcended. Ibn al-‘Arabi refuses both reductions. There is, he insists, a real intermediate world of forms-that-are-not-matter, where meaning and image, spirit and shape, meet - and it is the world in which much of the most important human experience actually occurs: dreaming, vision, the encounter with the sacred, the life of the soul after death, the meeting of the heart with its God.
This reframes how we should understand religious imagery, scripture, and mystical experience. When scripture describes God on a throne, angels with wings, the gardens of paradise, the modern reader is forced into a false choice: either crude literalism (a physical throne, literal feathers) or dismissive metaphor (‘just symbols for moral ideas, nothing real’). Ibn al-‘Arabi offers a third reading: these are imaginal realities - really existent forms in the barzakh, neither dense matter nor empty metaphor, perceived by the awakened imagination. The throne is real, the wings are real, the garden is real, in the realm where such things are real. This gives the religious imagination its proper dignity: it is not a childish stage to be outgrown by the philosopher, nor a literal description of physical facts, but a genuine faculty of perception trained on a genuine world. And it gives the inner life its proper depth: your dreams, your visions, your imaginative encounters with the sacred are not noise but excursions into a real region of being - one through which, rightly disciplined, the heart can come to meet the living God.
This is the opening of the lesson. The rest — the dialogue, the primary source, and the recall — is in the app.
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…
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