The main difficulties of opinion anyone has with 'religion' in general at this point are to be counted as merits of good instinct. Anyone who shows an unwillingness to be shystered under a certain God-concept is just being relatively cautious and smart. Human beings have this funny way of learning from experience - the herding of slaves into the temporal Temple has shown itself time and time again to be a dubious exercise of illicit power, at least in most cases. It's different everywhere you go, and we wouldn't dare say this applies necessarily in East Anatolia, Nepal or Haiti, for example. Let's confine our sphere of discussion to this Godforsaken place we find ourselves in, shall we? Unfortunately for the humanistic hopes of our friends and enemies, secularism has shown itself to be equal-to if not far worse in its capacity for atrocity, criminal abuse of power, and exploitation of human beings in the service of insane idealistic goals. That's another discussion. Our concern is that people are doing their own job of robbing themselves of Reason with a capital R by being so quick to associate all atemporal phenomena, such as "Myth,""Archangelic Hierarchies," and "Gnosis" with the idiots who ignorantly speak on behalf of such things — both for and against. To follow the scientific method means to set up the experiments and observe the results, not to posit the result and find experiments that will support it. Well, this basic and noble idea can be counted as an archaic concept at this point. But in the mid 20th Century there were still a few people around who had a pretty good grasp on it, and it helped them dive deeply and meaningfully into our favorite subjects. You'll be happy to know that none of the books here strain the scientific method nearly as far as currently popular scientific speculations on "Dark Matter," the "Omega Point" or any other such nonsense. If such things can be considered perfectly reasonable, despite their being based on essentially nothing that qualifies as observation, then there is nothing to differentiate it from the many squawking New Age conundrums of the late 20th century. Such dark times.

In any case, by comparison, the stuff here should not ruffle even a single feather from here to the farthest horizon of the earth traversed by Men of Reason.

The two articles in this book will introduce you to some fundamental concepts that we strongly feel are pre-requisites to mobilize oneself in a certain, nearly lost dimension of human experience. Strangely, almost incredibly, these are concepts that are conspicuously absent both from academic studies and from most of the so-called "spiritual teachings" peddled shamelessly and haphazardly throughout the West. The first article, "Mundus Imaginalis, or the Imaginary and the Imaginal" salvages from oblivion man's internal way of connecting to the greater suprasensory universe — the way of his Imagination — by re-invigorating us with respect and value for that denigrated and mostly latent apparatus assigned to the perception of reality. Ultimately, our placement within that reality is un-perceivable without it. Through the example of the Imaginal perception's use in key Sufi concepts, Corbin pulls the cobwebs off and lifts the idea of the "imagination" out of the philosophical basement of "fantasy" and unreality. Due to our modern Manichaen predicament, by such an act the status of 'ordinary perception' will temporarily switch historical places with "imagination," and 'ordinary perception' will become something assigned to the contemplation of unreality. But don't get all paranoid about Gnostic/Neoplatonic world-hatred just yet — such a grim state of affairs exists only for 'ordinary perception' to the degree that it is cut off from the Imaginal.

Corbin introduces us to an entire world of interrelated phenomena that demonstrate themselves irrefutably to "exist," just not in any blatantly manifest or conveniently chronological way. For the Greeks, schooling in the quadrivium would equip one to perceive the nature of these interrelated phenomena on a deeper experiential level, for the Sufis this would be schooling that leads to Dhikr. We are closer here to Plato than any Stephen Hawking type will ever be, so again, don't get your panties all in a bunch thinking this is some wild Islamic extremist mumbo jumbo. To the contrary, since the knowledge of these things is dependent on the keenness of the Imaginal perception, as opposed to the mere opaque demonstrability of a perceptual apparition in "objective" reality, it becomes clear that the "instrument" of this knowledge, which is part of you yourself, must be adjusted and attuned to it in order to verify it. The tools are there. The manual is usually not.

Everyone's heard that the world is an illusion before; it's a pretty easily digestible bit of doctrine intellectually. But have you ever had the "illusory worlds" hold over your mental processes suspended by nothing other than RATIONAL thinking? Sure, when you did LSD the illusion of the world was made manifest, but that was counter-rational... so it ended. Then you heard some Guru talking about it, and smelled some incense and did some breathing excercises & if you were lucky maybe watched Maya fold up and fade away a few times. That was nice for you... then it ended. Unbeknownst to most, the Rational mind, the trained mind, is the penultimate weapon against Maya. And Corbin is like a sword through butter. This is precisely why inferior thinkers who were threatened by his insights into historicity had to wait until he died to try and "discredit" his ideas. Try poking a hole in his stuff by refuting his "Phenomenology" — if you stick your green little knife in there far enough you'll be answered with archangelic voices who speak Reason better than you ever will. All the better for you. That's the whole point. Bring your skepticism along, fucker, no one's asking you to check it at the door. On the contrary, the more critical thinking you've got the better.

This article descends not to mere polemic; it's more an introduction into a worldview that is more consistent with the facts of logic, observation and experience, and simply exposes what a lot of our conditioning has blinded us to. Namely, that the Imaginal function of perception has access to things unseen that situate us in reality, existing prior to all phenomena. And all of this can be clearly demonstrated. What's more, this wider world is seen to wholly contain ours, and our terrestrial perception corresponds only to the mimesis, reflection and simulation of the wider sphere. Again, we are standing firmly on Neoplatonism & perhaps even going back into antiquity towards Plato and beyond, while it could be said we are simultaneously jumping beyond Kierkegard, left of Baudrillard, right of Derrida, straight into as-yet unexplored post-post-modern philosophical terrain... We know what you're thinking, you're going, "yeah, right - exaggerate some more." Well, you'd better get ready to revise what you thought about Muslims being "primitive and backward," motherfucker. Because it takes a Frenchman of Cobin's calibre (chair of department at Sorbonne, director of Franco-Iranian Institute, creator of Bibliotheque Iranian) to show us just how FAR BEHIND we are. This all takes place in the first 33 pages.

Anyways...

The second article, "Comparative Spiritual Hermeneutics" is simply required reading. Besides being unbelievably inspiring, this has concise introductions to every major terminological obstacle you will face in the Corbin oeuvre. It also expands upon the symbolic landscape laid out in Mundus Imaginalis. The treatments of heirohistory and mimesis here are the kind of thing that lovers of Baudrillard should find ecstatically pleasing, but just never seem to have the balls to face up to. Fucking Marxists... oops.

But anyway, do yourself a favor and check this one out. And don't be put off by our ranting here. We're just being colorful and idiotic; Corbin is nothing like us. We hate to mar his good name with our crazed enthusiasm. But we can't help ourselves. All we're saying is take it from him, not us.