Observations placeholder

Shihabudin Yahya Suhrawardi – Book of Oriental Theosophy; comment by Qutbuddin Shirazi [translated by Henry Corbin and Nancy Pearson]

 Therefore imaginative forms exist neither in thought, since the great cannot be imprinted in the small, nor in concrete reality, otherwise anyone with normally healthy senses would be able to see them. 

 But they are not merely non-being, for if so one could neither represent them to oneself, nor distinguish them one from another, and different judgements of them could not be formed.  Since they are something with real being and are neither in thought, not in concrete reality, nor in the world of Intelligences – for they are corporealised forms, not pure Intelligibles – they must necessarily exist in some other region and the latter is what is called the world of the archetypal image and of imaginative perception. 

 It is a world intermediate between the world of the Intelligence and the world of the senses; its ontological plane is above the world of the senses and below the intelligible world; it is more immaterial than the first, less immaterial than the second.  It is a world in which there exists the totality of forms and figures, dimensions and bodies, with all that is connected therewith; movements, rest, positions, configurations etc all of them self subsistent ‘in suspense’ that is to say, not being contained in a place nor depending on a substratum………..

 Among the forms in question there are some which are dark – those which torment the reprobate; these are hideous, repulsive, the sight  of them causes the soul suffering, whereas others are luminous and their sweetness is tasted by the blessed and these are beautiful resplendant forms