"...the Imagination (or love, or sympathy, or any other sentiment) induces knowledge, and knowledge of an 'object' which is proper to it..."
Henry Corbin (1903-1978) was a scholar, philosopher and theologian. He was a champion of the transformative power of the Imagination and of the transcendent reality of the individual in a world threatened by totalitarianisms of all kinds. One of the 20th century’s most prolific scholars of Islamic mysticism, Corbin was Professor of Islam & Islamic Philosophy at the Sorbonne in Paris and at the University of Teheran. He was a major figure at the Eranos Conferences in Switzerland. He introduced the concept of the mundus imaginalis into contemporary thought. His work has provided a foundation for archetypal psychology as developed by James Hillman and influenced countless poets and artists worldwide. But Corbin’s central project was to provide a framework for understanding the unity of the religions of the Book: Judaism, Christianity and Islam. His great work Alone with the Alone: Creative Imagination in the Sufism of Ibn ‘Arabi is a classic initiatory text of visionary spirituality that transcends the tragic divisions among the three great monotheisms. Corbin’s life was devoted to the struggle to free the religious imagination from fundamentalisms of every kind. His work marks a watershed in our understanding of the religions of the West and makes a profound contribution to the study of the place of the imagination in human life.

Search The Legacy of Henry Corbin: Over 800 Posts

Wednesday, September 6, 2017

Purpose Summit


Join the Purpose Summit for FREE!
Video Interviews with top experts
Starts Sept 10th
Hi Friends -
I was interviewed recently for the Purpose Summit which begins this Sunday September 10th.  In my video interview I shared my perspective on the subjects of: purpose, soul, purpose discovery work, the pitfalls along the path to purpose embodiment and more.  The interviewer has read Corbin and 4 of my books.  His questions elicited some interesting facets of my work and I think you'll find edifying.

I invite you to join this FREE online event which starts this Sunday Sept 10th.  You'll get a new video in your inbox every weekend with an engaging interview on the subject of purpose.

Tom Cheetham
Here's what you'll experience during the summit:
  • Intimate interviews, giving you a taste of each expert's take on the subject of purpose, soul and cultural transformation.
  • Insight into a variety of practices and techniques that support you to discover your soul's deep purpose.
  • Directions on how you can find and embrace a life of true impact.
How the Summit works:

Every weekend you receive an email with a link to a fresh interview.  After 7 days, the video will be replaced by the next weekly inspirational interview.



Are you ready to learn from those who have discovered their own soul level purpose?  

Now is the time for you to fully inhabit your raw, authentic nature and channel the electric force that emanates from the center of your being.


You are invited to join the Purpose Summit.
It's totally free.
Each week a new video will pop into your inbox.

*

Tuesday, September 5, 2017

Truth etc... and N. Berdyaev


A pre-history of post-truth, East and West
MARCI SHORE
1 September 2017

In 2014, Russian historian Andrei Zubov was fired from his Moscow professorship for comparing Putin’s annexation of Crimea to Hitler’s annexation of the Sudetenland.1 Two years later, at a festival in the post-industrial Czech city of Ostrava, Zubov spoke to a large audience about the task of historians. ‘My dolzhni govorit’ pravdu’, he said. We should speak the truth. This declaration – all the more so when uttered in Zubov’s baritone – sounded quaint, even old-fashioned. In particular, the Slavic word pravda – truth – invoked with no qualification and no prefix, suggested a bygone era. Who believed in truth anymore?

The end of ‘The End of History’ arrived together with the end of belief in reality. The Cold War world was a world of warring ideologies; in the twenty-first century, both American capitalism and post-Soviet oligarchy employ the same public relations specialists catering to gangsters with political ambitions. As Peter Pomerantsev described in Nothing is True and Everything is Possible, in the Russia of the 2000s, distinguishing between truth and lies became passé. In this world of enlightened, postmodern people, ‘everything is PR’.

Reality television has rendered obsolete the boundary between the fictional and the real. Truth is a constraint that has been overcome; ‘post-truth’ has been declared ‘word of the year.’ In Washington, the White House shamelessly defends its ‘alternative facts’. At the beginning, American journalists were taken off-guard: they had been trained to confirm individual pieces of information, not to confront a brazen untethering from empirical reality. The New Yorker captured the desperation with a satire about the fact-checker who passed out from exhaustion after the Republican debate. He had to be hospitalized; apparently no one replaced him. READ MORE


WITH THIS REFERENCE OF INTEREST:

"In the wake of the Stalinist Terror, the Russian philosopher Nikolai Berdyaev wrote an essay titled ‘The Paradox of the Lie.’ The lie was the condition that allowed totalitarianism to come into being, asserted Berdyaev. In his experience, this lie was an expression of the deep deformation of human consciousness; as a result of this deformation, individual conscience fled ever more from the world."

I've made a more readable version available here.