Illuminist Lodge

Sean McLoughlin LPC, SEP

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“Tradition, indeed, does not only admit of the plurality of inhabited worlds, but also the plurality of humanities filling these worlds” Rene Guenon Studies in Freemasonry and the Compagnonnage, footnote page 7

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May the spirit come forth

That hides behind the taste

May the spirit become known

That stands beyond the threshold 

May the spirit come forth 

That envelops thought

May the circle of prophets

Emerge together from beyond the curtain, the hidden recesses

Of their Earths.

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“To Measure the desire of the Soul of the World is essentially to release transmutative psycho-spiritual energies; as Juldaki says, it is to transfer gold from its natural mine to the mine of the philosophers, or in other words extrahere cognitionem– to free it through, the spiritual energy, which is immanent in the metal.” Henry Corbin, The Science of The Balance and the Correspondances Between Worlds in Islamic Gnosis according to the work of Haydar Amuli, 8th/14 century. pg 56.

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Introductory remarks:

This piece of writing is an attempt to apply alchemical symbolism and alchemical stages of transformation to Ibn Al-Arabi’s seed ideas, especially the ascent through the 7 spheres, the perfect human, and the common notions of zahir and batin. From study of Ibn Al-Arabi’s writing I think it is best to situate spirit with sulphur. Ibn Al-Arabi presents a “theology of tajalli” and the spiritual radiance from the Jabarut which inspires and shapes what occurs in the Barzakh and the Mulk fits nicely with the explosive and fiery sulphur as well as the attribution of the Red Sulphur to the Ibn Al-Arabi as a provocative agitating agent of initiation, healing, and prophecy.  

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One challenge with combining alchemical principles to Ibn Arabi’s cosmology was reducing the number of cosmological levels to three. I assigned the Barzakh to soul but in Ibn Al-Arabi’s work it would be Malakut. I initially chose the Barzakh to accentuate the pivotal place the Barzakh holds in the emanationist doctrine, whereby the rays of the light of the intellect begin to take on form and image in the barzakh, the rays of sulphur meet the deep magnetic and receptive mercury and this water becomes igneous. From the interaction of the two the stability of crystalization occurs as Salt, as cube. The Kingdom, Mulk, is associated with Salt as the cube signifies the four elements in their stable mixed state, the light and fire, received by mercury becoming image and form, then crystalized and buried or wedded in Earth. The seeds of gold then lie sleeping like the children of Nature, behind curtains, treasure chests, veils. Yet the mercury of the Barzakh pulls the seeds back towards itself so the elements and principles can be restored to their unmixed and pure bodies. One way of this occuring is death, dissolution, and resurrection another way is initiation and alchemy.

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“He sends down water from the heavens, so the ravines flow, according to her measure, and the torrent carries away the foam churned up to the surface; and from that ore you heat in the fire for the purpose of making ornaments or utensils, there is a foam like it; in this way..” Surah al-ra’d 13:17.

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Alchemy is a work that is contrary to Nature. In separating what has been mixed through Natural generation the alchemist co-creates a strife, a supernatural resonance, and a liberation is born from bonds that normally compel the life process. This outcome is similar to what may begin to occur using traditional methods of spiritual development such as periods of intense and focused prayer, retreat into self imposed solitude, and consistent exposure to the seed ideas of great people who have accomplished their own development.  Because the binds that hold the three principles and worlds together were influenced by divine agency, similar agencies are needed to begin the separation of principles.   

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As a living being who has the potential expression of the three principles of body, soul and spirit present during every moment it can become easy to awaken, uncover, and being working with them. Each principle has a body and organs of perception that operate in the world of its origin.  The Perfect Human, as the alchemical Stone, is the nexus of these three awakened bodies and processes information and life on three levels simultaneously.

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There is a desolate salt and a luminous salt. The luminous salt has received the command of the spheres, accepted the assistance of the advocates, and has reached a stage of the indwelling of the light. It is no longer just a flash which resolves into darkness. It has become a standing wave of light which persists. It can then not only be self luminous but allows others to appear that would not normally be able to arrive. This is how the subtle informs the gross and increases the latifah.

Henry Corbin tells us that the images encountered in the Barzakh are our organs of perception. This is the visionary body of the soul which I attribute to Mercury. Corbin also reintroduces the soul based mechanism whereby the images we encounter are projected out of the soul herself, as an annunciation from the soul to the soul itself. Signifying that in the awakened soul body, all of the material needed for the great work lies within.  It is a matter of agitating, sparking, uncovering it correctly to move it up and out and then through interiorization, using the seed idea projected, to be enveloped by the womb of the soul, who then remakes the world by cloaking it in Her own essence. To give rise to the awakened Perfected Human and living Earths and Heavens. 

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“And that is why, when it comes to understanding the humanity (nasut) of the Imam, that is to translating Imamology into anthropological terms as an event lived by the soul, the data of the problem will not partake of the physiology that imposes itself on sense perception and ordinary consciousness. It is an archetypal Image which will function as an organ of perception, replacing the faculties of sense perception and making perceptible an object that might correspond to the “body of transformation” in Mahayana Buddhism-and yet the humanity of the Imam is not reduced to what our “realist” exigencies would qualify s a “hallucination” and does not fit in with the idea of a hypostatic union. The problem is, then: how can a humanity that is the mazhar of the godhead be constituted, to what order of reality must it belong, that is to say, what transfiguration of it is presupposed in order that the epiphany (zuhur, izhar) of this epiphanic Figure (mazhar) may be produced not to the eyes of the body but to the soul’s “eyes of light”?

Henry Corbin, Divine Epiphany and Spiritual Birth, essay presented at Eranos, published in Cyclical Time and Ismaili Gnosis, Routledge, 2010

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“It is Allah Who has created the seven heavens, and seven earthly worlds like them: the command descends within them, so that you may know that Allah is Able to do all things, and that Allah’s knowledge encompasses everything”Surah At-Talaq 65:12, Translation Faridul Haque

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It is one thing to witness to hope to witness the Perfect Human as an exterior or objective fact. In our faith or in our desperation we might cling to the notion in a religious nostalgic hope.  It is another thing to take up the work of calling forth the Perfect Human to stand through our own initiatic process.  This is the invitation I am making in this writing and suggesting by applying alchemical principles to Ibn Arabi’s initiatic seed ideas.  Because The Perfect Human is archetypal and is archetypally related to our species we can possibly own it as an image projected from our own soul announcing to our mercurial soul based eyes a possibility for transmutation and an awakened life. The standing of the Perfect Human signifies the activation of the vertical axis of ressurection and awakening. When the principles are separated out into their pure forms they naturally harmonize with and reclaim the greatness of their origin, the three worlds, their ancestors, humanities, and inheritance. 

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“Then (the horn) is blown again, and there! They stand up and wait. And the Earth shines by the Light of her Lord.  As he brought you out, so return. Say: He will revive them, He who configured them the  first time-either to wretchedness or to happiness.” Pg 174 Book 1 The Futuhat, Winkle translation.

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The ascent through the spheres does occur on each planet and it also occurs in each subtle center.  This Hermetic idea is amplified and charged in a unique way by Ibn Al Arabi by his attribution of a prophet to each sphere. This move creates the notion of a humanity of each sphere related to the prophet as the curtain who envelops them until the principles are separated and what is hidden becomes open. The invitation to own the projection of this reality and interiorize it is to embrace the prophet of each sphere as an ancestor, as an advocate, who rides before and with you on the travel through the spheres. The prophet and you as witness, as projector, create a resonance when in proper relationship. The curtain can open and reveal the fullness of the prophetic spheres womb and heart, an entire humanity.

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“So God newly created the imaginal bodily (jasad) forms with another tajalli between the nigh-visible and the visible forms, giving tjalli to these bodily forms – both light based forms and fire-based ones, visible to the eye. He gave tajalli to the physical sensory forms, which would bear the meaning forms, and ot the jasad bodily forms, which would be incorporated during sleep and after death and before the Universal resurrection. It is the barzakh of the horn, and it is a horn of light, its ihhgest part wide and its lowest part narrow, because its highest part is Mist and its lowesrt in the Earth. These are bodily forms in which are manifested ‘concealed ones’, the angels, and the invisible human being..” The Openings Revealed in Makkah Book 2 pg 572. Winkle translation.

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Do you see the prophets as stones in a dead past or as living ores circulating in an awakened body, holding a place for emergence and return.  The flashing of tajalli has numerous steps one is the extension of life, and light, and wisdom, then comes the resolution into depth and silence. After the first step it happens again, another flash, another resolution. In building our capacity for radiance and depth we build our capacity to receive and circulate this principle of awakened life, a grace, a tajalli. To what then does it lead?   A life, a place, a space in which The Youth can visit and deliver the fullness of The Futuhat in an instant and have it be lived into and through the world. Integrated into Nature, She becomes Luminous Nature, Paracelsus’s Luminae Naturae. To find us here in a moment that persits.  This is the culmination of the three awakened bodies living simultaneously, the Perfect Human as the nexus between worlds, between bodies, of refined spiritual subtlety, deep soul, and the living awakened flowing ores of matter.  The Perfect Human is also the Anthropos, Adam Kadmon, the Anthropocosmos.

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You have a body of sulphur, of mercury, of salt. You have a future iteration of Gold of Quintessence. You are alive and embodied  in the Jabarut, the Barzakh, and The Kingdom. In each world you have a body and senses. You are Perfect, you are Human, you are Victorious; and the world is saved because you are here.

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The principles are: Sulphur: associated with father, spirit, Jabarut. Mercury: associated with Soul, Barzahk, Mother. Salt: associated with child, Kingdom, Salt.

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Ibn Arabi introduces seed images that when given life through the three bodies and senses produce the sacred cosmos.  In order to activate the seeds one must engage with the creative imagination so that the sacred cosmos is both projected and interiorized resulting in the birth of its potential into a new iteration. It arrives in life Ya Haay cloaked in the Earth and Heaven of your spirit, soul, and body.  The seed images do not begin as external objects but rather have the potential for development as subjectivities (persons) through the portal of the Perfect Human. They arise from deep within the Heavens and Earths of the spheres, enveloped by The Curtain of the prophetic ancestor, advocates of the humanities.  In order to receive these ores from deep within the sphere’s Earths the magnetic Mercurial pool of your soul must have a growing potential of receptive depth. What seeds are you willing to give birth too? Can you imagine the seeds as belonging to your very own flesh, soul, and spirit? Can you imagine them arising from the depth of your own being to be delivered to your eyes, your life? A sacred cosmos longing to be set free  from the obscurity of hiddenness.

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“This Imam is the one who knows best his companions – that there are still seven more Men who are called Alternates, by whom God preserves the seven climates, each Alternate to a climate. The spirit-beings of the seven skies look towards them; and each one of them has a power, each one, such as the spirit beings who are prophets stationed in the skies. They are Abraham the Friend, adjacent to Moses, adjacent to Aaron; after him Idris; after him Joseph; after him Jesus; after him Adam – may the peace of God be upon all of them, all together.” The Openings Revealed in Makkah Book 2 Chapter 15 The Breaths, pg 597. Winkle translation. 

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In order for the lineage of Enoch to be made new you must sacrifice the image you have of this advocate. The new body which shall arise from your very own alembic will be unknown to the worlds. Its fulfillment will occur in the depth of withdrawal, in the Silence of interiorization and disappearance. We have forgotten how to conceptualize and experience the Reality of Her world.

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May the spirit come forth

That hides behind the taste

May the spirit become known

That stands beyond the threshold 

May the spirit come forth 

That envelops thought

May the circle of prophets

Emerge together from beyond the curtain, the hidden recesses

Of their Earths.

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The spheres not only have a prophet (father) and a mother but an entire humanity (child) based on the command and portal of the divine unity in totality, including the light of matter (child/salt), spirit (ray of father/sulphur), and soul (mother/mercury). The perfect person has senses and ancestors based on each sphere’s world and kingdoms and creatures (both human and non human). The person has eyes of matter that see the kingdom of the embodied The Mulk (salt), the person has eyes of soul that see the imaginal forms, the objects of the barzakh, in fact the images are the soul’s eyes, organs of perception, pools of reflection that catch the descending might of the Jabarut and the ascending essences of the extracted ores (mercury). 

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“As for true subjection, it consists of God’s subjecting the intellective divine meanings to the perfect man and arrived saint who, through his inward strength over them, makes them spiritual forms or absent images existent in his intellective world or his afterworldly configuration. He transfers things from the world of the Witnessed to the world of the Absent by extracting universals from particulars and by grasping the spirits from the matter of the bodies and apparitions with God’s aid by way of his name “The Grasper.” [He does all this] while returning from this world to the afterworld and turning back from the state of dispersion and separation to the state of gathering and encounter; from the mine of sorrow sickness and fear to the fountainhead of joy, health, and security; and from the locus of ignorance and doubt to the seat of truthfulness and certainty. So he turns back to his folk joyfully [84:9]. That is the Day of Encounter [40:15], and that is the Day of Gathering, wherein there is no doubt [42:7]. Enter into them in peace and security! [15:46].”

Mullah Sadra. The Elixir of the Gnostics. Translated Chittick. Brigham Young University Press.2003.pg 21. 

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“The 18 universes are regarded as being the chains and veils in relation to man, and it is with man that they become 19.  Now, however, it is a question not of adding man to the sum of those universes, but of extracting him from it.  To extract man from these universes so he may constitute his own universe, free of chain and veils, amounts then, from the point of view here envisaged, to subtracting him from their totality.” Herney Corbin. “The Science of The Balance and the Correspondances Between Worlds in Islamic Gnosis according to the work of Haydar Amuli, 8th/14 century” published in the collection of essays titled Temple and Contemplation Routledge 2010.

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It is just as the spirit, too, return to his origin until the Awakening and Resurrection on the Day of Judgement, when there will be on the spirits part a lighten up in tajalli for the body with passionate love, so that in the Resurrection one’s parts will be mended together and ones limbs recomposed, through a very subtle life-force which moves the limbs towards composition, regathered from the composing spirit.  When the structure is readied, and the earth configuration stands up, the spirit lights it up in tajalli with the vibrating ray of Israfil, with the encompassing horn.  Life flows through our limbs, and an evenly formed person stands up, as we did the first time. Pg 174 The Futuhat Book 2, Winkle translation.

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The person has noetic eyes of fire that see the landscape and  angelic humanities of the intelligible realm of the Jabarut, the spirit’s movements, extending momentum, and abiding stillness become paths of the possible (sulphur).  Each sphere has a combination of these three principles. Gold is the substance and essence that coagulates when the golden thread establishes harmony between all of the sphere (Divine Name The Measure, The Balance). The creature of Gold is the creature and kingdom of the completion of deepest descent and highest ascent. The shape of gold is a ring, a circuit, offering, path, gift to the sleeping children of the future. The Quintessence is the new octave as creation continues to emerge with The Breaths, a quantum jump from the balanced elements of 4 and 7 spheres to 5 and 8.  This is one way to get to the complete circuit of the 12 Imams as a Quintessence, the emergence of the Qaim, the one who will rise Qāʾim Āl Muḥammad (Arabic: قائم آل محمد, lit. ’the one who shall rise of the family of Muhammad‘).  As the creation continues the family of each prophet grows,  the one who rises is the Quintessence, the balanced, the evened out, the result of all previous and future essences combined to a new conglomerate. 

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When Ibn Arabi assigns a prophet to each sphere he is just mentioning the prophet of a people you have not yet met or claimed as your own.  By incorporating the prophet of each sphere as an image (imaginal organ of perception) that has emerged from your own being, you can then begin to meet the inhabitants of the world (mother of mercury), the command of the world (sulphur, word of the father), the child of the world (salt, indwelling light of matter, nature, and body) and the future person of this prophets line (gold, quintessence).  The importance of the witness is established here, as it is in quantum mechanics, the Prophet is not able to move its lineage forward without a witness, without a heart that encompasses the mercy of the breath.  What is your heart primed to receive, primed to witness? Will your eye announce to the future the birth of the one who has not yet risen, or will your eye sink in doubt and despair in the error of the godless.  My eye is a dwelling which participates in the way The Breaths create the future expression of being, unity in totality, three principles, three person’s, three thunderbirds.

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Many Waters, Many Mercuries

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As each sphere has a heaven and earth, it also has a humanity, linked to the prophet of each sphere and its lineage as the standing or rising Qaim form of the soul.  By claiming the prophet as the ancestor the lineage grows and the new creation, participates in the new form of the prophet. This suggests a new Muhammad, or the light of Muhammad’s extension conquers new land as the soul conforms to the command of its paradise.  Since Muhammad is the seal of the prophets, through his growing ever new light, the lineage of the other prophets grows as well, their body grows, their spirits grows, their soul grows and is new, their earth and their heaven grows.  

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As the lineage lines up ranged and ranked in rows, a humanity emerges, coherent, measured, balanced.  The members of these humanities, this lineage, lined up, orbiting could also be seen as the words or letters of each sphere. 

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An example would be Enoch at the Sphere of The Sun.  Enoch’s humanity and body grow when the command of this sphere moves from an interior soul in dwelling to an actualized outer form, projection. This exteriorization of Enoch’s potential can then be realized in his sphere’s humanity, its resident spirits, the spirits of The Sun.  As the spirit is the light and father and sulphur, the soul is the mother, the depth, the mercury, and the humanity is the child, the body, the salt. As the humanity is balanced and measured, extended, realized, seeded,sprouted, and fruiting in these three principles then Enoch’s paradise is established and the tree of life gains a branch or its trunk pierces a new heaven and earth, the command of eternity is established. Once the paradise is fully embodied and the humanity reaches its potential, the mercury then interiorizes its fullness back into its depth.  

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In Book 2 of The Openings Revealed in Makkah Chapter The Breaths Ibn Al-Arabi provides seven short vignettes describing the 7 prophets, their day day, their element, their planet. Enoch is given Sunday: 

“Sunday, 1st day:

Every knowledge-command occurring on the first day, Sunday, is part of the Idris (PBUH) atomic matter. Every upper effect occurring on that day is the element air and fire. It is part of the Sun’s orbit, and her observation is what is set down by God therein. There is no effect occurring on the elements water and earth on this day. Part of the movement is the 4th orbit. The site of the person who guards it, with regard to the climates, is the fourth climate.” 

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This deep soular indwelling, containing now the totality of the heaven and earth of The Sun, then becomes a calling out to the next traveler on the path of descent and return. This pool of Mercury, mercy, water becomes a beacon, a caller out in the wilderness, a source of nutrients. Each sphere has a mercury that draws to towards its balm, its depth.  It claims you as its proof because you are the living representative of its humanity, and command.  In each sphere your mercury is great and draws you towards balance.  When seven mercuries are achieved, your seven ancestors accepted, then your soul rises into standing Qaim.

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Henry Cobin in The Sabean Temple:

“What is important is the ideal configuration of these ritual monuments, into whose architectural form the soul projects her imago Mundi, and then proceeds to interiorize its every detail, assimilating it to her own substance through a meditation which thus enables her to construct her own microcosm.  In this sense the Sabian Temple is above all a Temple-archetype.  Its ritual usage is best defined by and inscription, Platonic in tone, which in the year 322 A.H. Mas’udi was till able to read on the threshold of the great temple of Harran: He who knows himself is deified.”

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It is fine to approach with your forehead bowed to the ground but at some point you will be asked to stand with your lineage, as its newest light, its newest member, its totality in unity.

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May the spirit come forth

That hides behind the taste

May the spirit become known

That stands beyond the threshold 

May the spirit come forth 

That envelops thought

May the circle of prophets

Emerge together from beyond the curtain, the hidden recesses

Of their Earths.

I receive the spirit from behind the curtain

I receive the spirit of the golden seed buried in the Earths

I receive the command that awakens the ores

I extract the child from the mine

With the advocates I watch him mature and stand

Circulate the Essence 

in the Golden Ring of Being

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Part Two: Cosmogenesis Through Mesocosmatrix

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Whenever there is a cosmology that is presented the invitation to the initiate is being made to take the image, the idea of the cosmology and bring it into contemplation. What does it mean to engage contemplatively with a cosmological construct and what are the fruits of that contemplation?  By taking the seed images of cosmology and interiorizing them with the creative imagination, you are interiorizing beings that in emanationist cosmologies exists on different planes on different dimensions, and in different worlds. The way that you can tell an image is alive is that when you engage with it contemplatively or you interiorize the image and bring it into your relational field, your field of life,  it has a presence that is sensual, energetic, and alive.  This is where you weight the desire of the images to come into relationship, you want to notice the qualities of the images as you being them into contemplation in the alembic and see if they are living. If they are living they are actual beings which when interiorized easily come into resonance, communication, and conversation. This is a prophetic annunciation, an angelic conversation, wherein you take a seed image presented by a master and bring it into retreat to verify for yourself. 

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Corbin writes in Sabian Ritual and Ismaili Exegesis 1950 lecture delivered at Eranos:

“This Temple-archetype is itself a threshold, the communicating Threshold between the celestial Temple and the Temple of the soul.  In as much as it is a material edifice, constructed in the image of the star or celestial Temple, it is the passage leading to the inner spiritual edifice.  Because it leads back to the source it is the par excellence the figure and support of that mental activity designated in Arabic by the technical term ta’wil, that is to say, an exegesis which at the same time constitutes an exodus, a going out of the soul toward the Soul. In Islam, ta’wil, the “exegetic leading back to the source”, answers to that law of interioriorization, that experiential actualization of symbolic correspondences, which, being an innate and fundamental impulse of the religious Psyche, leads the Spirituals of all communities too the same goal.  In Islam, ta’wil is put into operations\ by the Batins, the esterisists or “interiorizes” of all persuasions; and as it applied above all in alchemy, what it effects is the transmutation of external rites into the rites of the spiritual Temple.”

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So what we are actually doing when we are bringing a living cosmological initiatic structure into the womb if the  contemplative soul, the alchemic alembic, is we are beginning to participate in cosmogenesis and deification, sacralizing the desolate world, person, and elements. By sacralizing them we are participating in the cosmogenesis and the creation of a sacred cosmos, the hierocosmos. The hierocosmos is epiphanic, revealed, revelatory. If you look at the concept of revelation or revealing there needs to be a witness, there is no point in revelation without a witness, there is no point in annunciation if there is not a receptive vessel or a desolate humanity that needs inspiration.  The cosmological structure is revelatory and epiphanic because it is built to be received by a witnessing soul.  What puts a human being in a special position to receive these seed images is the fact that the human being has a noetic aspects, has an imaginal aspects, has physical, angelic, jinnic aspects, every one of the kingdoms is represented and intersected through the human being. So when you take in these cosmological seed images, when you interiorize it, you are taking in these living active relational beings into the matrix of each kingdoms essence which intersects through and in you both through your appearance and your depth, so the part of you that is witnessed and the part of you that is hidden, when you interiorize these seed images into the womb of each kingdom. This contemplative process results in a seeding of those receptivities.  We can look at this in an alchemical perspective as the agents of transformation, the seeds of the paradises, the potentials of paradise, the crowing of nature, this quintessential world we are seeking to uncover and co-create.  

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The first inklings of the essences of these paradises are these seeds as they enter into the receptivities of the alembic and into the wombs of the kingdoms of which the human being is made or which intersect through the being of the human, the human terminous.  The human being at any given moment is “The Last.”  The creature represents at any given moment the last not the first.  It is the terminous of all of the energies moving from potency to act realized in being, in complete apparent and hidden presence, an epiphanic arrival and departure. The human being represents the terminous of all sacred processes.  The first is always related to the last, just as the apparent is always related to the hidden, as a unity in multiplicity, a unity in totality.  The first and the last is always said together because they are linked as a circuit that is active and penetrating one another consistently, their life depends on their relationship with one another. When we are interacting with the last, with the human being, with the terminous, we are also interacting with the first human, which is the perfect human, the imam, Adam, the first prophet, the first creature, and through that we are connected with the energies and the beings and the archetypes of the Creator,  we have as it were the command and the kingdom, the lord and the knight, the fullness and the emptiness.  Here is one way of understanding the oroborous the fixed and volatile dragons united and becoming one being, one ring, one portal through which being may fully appear in its reality. This is the gold, the coagulation of the new world, human, prophet, Imam, planet, earth, and sky, path.

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Corbin writes:

“It is the means whereby meditation can pass from the representation of the Temples or stars inscribed in the astronomical Heavens, and reproduced symbolically in the architecture of the earthly Temples, to the representation of a spiritual Temple, constituted by the coalescence of souls that take the place of the stars as receptacles and icons of the pure substances of the Light.  The Sabaeans pictured the celestial Temples as governed by Angrels to whom their cult was addressed.  In order for this transmutation to take place without degrading the beings of Light, but rather by raising the being of man to their level, the anthropomorphosis of the Temple is accompanied by a simultaneous angelomorphosis of man.  In this sense, angelology represents a fundamental structure: it forms the ideal link permitting one to envisage the transition between Sabianism and Ismaili interiorism.”

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As the last we are in a unique relationship with the first and from here we can take in the seed ideas and to receive them into the living vessel, the alchemical vessel, to take them and to nurture them through the long process of contemplation, that is inspired through the seasons of the moon and the zodiac. They are watered by the planets, watered by the stars, illuminated by the moon. They receive nutrients and inspiration through participating in the living cosmos. The human beings job is to nurture their connection to the cosmological seed ideas through study, prayer, meditation, and through engaging with them through the active imagination and ritual.

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When you take the seeds and engage with them actively, it causes the seeds that have been received by the Earths and Skys of the different kingdoms which intersect through the human being and it causes them to rise up.  The seeds send down roots into the nutritive ambient field of the worlds as they have been developed in the initiate or perfect human, these are personal qualities that are refined through the initial stages of initiatory work.  The seed ideas that Ibn Arabi hands us and the way that we receive them and the way that they grow depends on the quality of our Earths and our Heavens. The fruits of the contemplation, show the preparations of the earths and heavens and the quality by which they are received and tended, and then when they begin to stand and arise we are looking at the ambient nutrient field of the earths and heavens of the initiate’s field of life.

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The sacred cosmos which blossoms as the fruit of these contemplations is the mesocosm, or the mesocsmatirx.  The mesocosmatrix is the new iteration of the purified and living sacred cosmos which comes to fruition through its rising and ephiphanic annunciation in and through the body of the perfect human, the harmonized and awakened resurrection body of bliss of the living One.  When the mesocosm is realized, it harmonizes with the macrocosm and microcosm and a ternary unitude, similar in structure with the mercury, sulphur and salt; body, soul, and spirit, father, mother, child and along with these other alchemical ternaries there is the Gold or Quintessence which emerges through the harmonious presence of them together as the coagulation and emergent property of their relationship in harmonious victory.  In the Nature and Cosmos of Alchemy this victory is necessary and must be realized every moment in order for the world to move forward into tits next iteration.

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Corbin writes:

“Thus the themes be meditated in order to effect such an entry are, essentially, the idea of the Temple, the idea of the Angel who governs it, and the tawil or exegesis whereby one attains to the person of the Angel through the Temple. The transformation of the Ritual effected by tawil culminates in an angelomorphic vision, a transfiguration of all figures, in the sense that once Interiority is achieved, it too is projected and objectivize in its turn in the world.”

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Ibn Arabi Book 3 The Futuhat pg 8:

“Allegorically, the entities found are like a single individual who has different states. If you are this individual, images are formed from each state you have; every individual is this way. A veil is placed between you and these images. You are given a kashf removing their veils-and you are one of the sum-total of images there. Thus, you perceive the sum-total of what is there in these layering images formed upon a lifting of the veil by means of a single view. The True does not turn the single view away from the layered images in that space of a single view; instead, He removes their veiling and clothes them with their wujud, and they see themselves with the wujud they are in forever.”

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Corbin concludes:

“When subject to a rigorous esotericism, a systematic and unlimited endeavor to achieve a state of interiorization connects with the idea the alchemical Operation, and results in the creation of a third world, or mesocosm, between the classic types of macrocosm and microcosm.  This sacred cosmos is the place and instrument of the spiritual Ritual; its heavens are neither the heavens of astronomy, nor yet the inner heavens of pure subjectivity, but the esoteric heavens, rising in tiers to form the dome of the the ideal Temple of the Imam, and revealing at every tier their angelic archetype.  The unfolding of these heavens is thus both our starting point and goal of our search.”

*

Sources:

Christian Jambet, The Act of Being: The

Philosophy of Revelation in Mullah Sadra, translated from the French by Jeff Fort, (New York: Zone Books, 2006)

Henry Corbin, “Divine Epiphany and Spiritual Birth in Ismaili Gnosis” in Cyclical Time and Ismaili Gnosis, (Oxon and New York: Routledge, 2010) 

Henry Corbin, “The Science of the Balance and the Correspondences Between Worlds in Islamic Gnosis According to the Work of Haydar Amuli, 8th/14th Century” in Temple and Contemplation, trans. Philip Sherrard (Routledge: 2009)

Ibn al-‘Arabi, The Openings Revealed in Makka, translated and conveyed by Shu’ayb Dr Eric Winkel (Taschenbuch Series, Oceans Within)

Muḥammad ibn Ibrāhīm Ṣadr al-Dīn Shīrāzī. The Elixir of the Gnostics. 2005.

R.A. Schwaller de Lubicz, The Egyptian Miracle, (Inner Traditions: 1985)