#suhrawardi

"Here let us pause, for it seems to us that with the symbol of Ibn ‘Arabi as disciple of Khidr we have reached the center which dominates the co-ordinates of our spiritual topography. Whatever name we may give to the disciple’s relationship with his personal invisible guide, the events it determines do not fall within quantitative physical time; they cannot be measured according to homogeneous, uniform units of time and chronology regulated by the movements of the stars; they find no place in the continuous chain of irreversible events. These events, to be sure, are enacted in time, but in a time that is peculiar to them, a discontinuous, qualitative, pure, psychic time, whose moments can be evaluated only according to their own measure, a measure which in every instance varies with their intensity. And this intensity measures a time in which the past remains present to the future, in which the future is already present to the past, just as the notes of a musical phrase, though played successively, nevertheless persist all together in the present and thus form a phrase. Hence the recurrences, the possible inversions, the synchronisms, incomprehensible in rational terms, beyond the reach of historical realism, but accessible to another “realism,” that of the subtile world, ‘alam al-mithal, which Suhrawardi called the “Middle Orient” of celestial Souls and whose organ is the “theophanic Imagination” that will concern us here." -Henry Corbin