They say I circle around you
Nonsense.
I circle around me.

— Rumi

What is the role of imagination in shifting our perception?
What does the reciprocity of perception mean?
To what extent do we allow our perception to shift us?

Can imagination guide our perception to the extent that it reshapes the way we see the living world?

And can imagination open us to experience the living world in its wholeness,
as the Persian mystics once did?

In the Persian mystic tradition, there are three kinds of imagination:

Taṣawwur is the simple act of bringing an image to the mind’s eye.

Tawahhum is fantasy or hallucination, an optical illusion of the mind
with no true root in reality.

Takhayyul is neither the mind’s eye nor mere illusion, but the heart of the mind, creative imagination, or the seeing of a mystic vision.

Takhayyul is the domain of the imaginal: both tangible and abstract.
Its visions rise from higher realms, yet become perceptible here through a certain quality of consciousness.

If the mind has a heart, and that heart can see,
it perceives the imaginal dimension of reality.

In our time, when imagination, visualization, and perception are so heavily manipulated from the outside, can we re-train, disorient, and bewilder our imagination once again?
Can we open the heart of the mind to perceive the world in its wholeness?

The Persian philosopher Suhrawardi uses the metaphor of steam for this realm: neither water nor fire, yet somehow both.
This imaginal version of reality is not fixed or stable—it is steam.

When for a moment you slip free of the hours,

relation no longer abides.

You become familiar with what is without relation.

The hours know nothing of timelessness—

for there is no way there

except through bewilderment.

— Rumi

Creative Imagination

In Suhrawardi’s philosophy, every place—including the human body—has its own West and East: a passage from the darkness of sunset toward the light of sunrise.

It is the journey of the soul that has descended into this physical reality from the pure realm of white-light consciousness, the pure unity of the imaginal East where the sun rises, into the darkness of matter—the imaginal West where the sun sets to bring the dark night.

“A voyage which progresses toward the Light” (Corbin 1998, 140).

The journey of the bird of the soul from the cage of the body into the infinite sky,
where it meets the first man of creation, red like fire, one side turned toward the light,
the other toward darkness. That is why he is red: he carries the dense matter of the body toward the light of the soul.

Creative imagination is remembering the quality of light to understand light—receiving the images that reflect and symbolize one another from the world of the soul.

Drink the words of wisdom,
for they carry hidden light—

since this earthly body
cannot receive the unveiled light.

Drink, so that your soul
may receive the unveiled light,
and you may see the unseen
without veils.

Then you may traverse the sky
like a star—
or even journey beyond the sky
into the unconditioned realm.

Rumi

Score: Listening to the Thirst
Metaphor of the Dry Landscape and the Source of Water

Please read the poetry. Allow the images to come to you. Receive the imaginal of the poetry.

The thirst in the body is a message from the water:

this longing means it will surely bring you to the water.

Your dry lip is proof

that it will finally reach the spring.

This longing is a blessed movement in the body

that removes the obstacles on the path of the seeker.

It is like a rooster at dawn

calling out loud that the sun is coming.

Though you don’t know how, still keep seeking.

On the path of Truth no means is needed —

the seeking itself is the only tool.

In whatever state you are, keep seeking.

O dry-lipped one, always seek the water.

From Mathnawi, Book 3,

(Jalaluddin Rumi)

Now find a place, and start to move. Follow your physical state and then your emotional state. How do you feel today? Allow the response to come into movement. Let it move you.

As you are moving, bring your awareness to: What does dryness mean for your body Where in your body do you feel dry? Is there any body part that is asking you for more connection? that is thirsty?

Allow the image of dryness to rise: a dry land, perhaps a desert, cracked earth, ash. Where in your body do you feel a dry land, calling for water, feeling thirsty?What dry landscape comes to your imagination? Is it moving or still? What is the quality of the movement? What is the pace of the movement? What emotions does it bring up?

Let the lack of water, the thirst, and the seeking for water inspire the movement. Can longing itself be a movement?

Let the emotion come into movement. Stay with the sensation inside the body around the dryness and thirst of the physical or emotional state. Feel the absence of water in that part of your body.

Is there a symbol, image, or feeling you can connect to that helps you remember this experience?

The imaginal aspect of dryness itself can be a remembrance that water exists, not as an obstacle, but as a call back to a relationship with water.

Now as you’re moving, let go of the dry landscape of your body part, and imagine a source of water, running, pure, clean, fresh. Allow this imagination of water inspire another movement journey. The search of the dry landscape for water now becomes a call from the source of water into reunion. Slowly make your movement bigger as the fluid body starts to move.

Undulate your spine. Remember the water around the spine, and let the image of water move you. How do you receive a call from water? How do you receive movement from the water? Where in your body do you feel the water more strongly? Allow the image to come into movement and into sensation. How does your dry landscape meet the water? What image of water rises? Is it spring water? Rain? River? Ocean?

Receive the movement as a call from the water source.

Let the movement flow as water. Expand the movement. How does the dry landscape remember water? How does your body orient itself toward water? Stay with whatever image rises.

Drawing Score

Now go to your drawing pad.

What was the color, texture, image, and landscape of the dry land in your movement exploration? And how did you imagine the source of water? What was the landscape of the water? Where was the water situated in relation to the dry landscape? Allow the metaphor of dryness and the water source that you embodied to take your visualization and come onto the paper from the world of the imaginal into the physical realm.

How am I experiencing the dry landscape and the source of water in relation to each other? Let your imaginal start to draw.

Writing Score

Now go to your journal. Based on your movement exploration and the drawing, write the dialogue between the dry landscape and the source of water.

Read your dialogue out loud. Then read the poetry one more time.

Closure of the Imaginal, Gratitude to the Metaphor

One more time, remember the metaphor of the dry landscape, the dry lip, and give thanks to the wisdom of thirst as a remembrance of water.

Give thanks to the wisdom of water, and to all the ways it calls you. Remember the place of need in your body and the deep longing to reach for water. Give thanks to the blessed motion of seeking, and to the search for water that removes the obstacles on the path.

Take a sip of water, and let it nourish the dry landscape.

Whatever circles
comes from the center.

— Rumi

In most of the ancient traditions, including the Persian, there was an intimate relationship between human and nature.

In Persian mystical poetry, the imagination serves as the living catalyst of this relationship, a force that honors kinship across every part of existence. Persian mystics lived within a dimension of reality that holds an entire imaginal ecosystem, usually unseen by us, yet fully alive and ever-growing. While we we consume ourselves with identifying and categorizing ourselves and our ecology, drawing borders and dividing more and more from each other and the earth, this imaginal ecosystem quietly weaves us back together into a single web of coexistence through subtle threads.

The Persian mystics and poets trained their consciousness to see these invisible threads, listen to the unspoken, and move with the unseen. Through the imaginal that connects everything and nothing, they uncovered the hidden part of human nature. In this realm, different parts of existence rebirth—manifesting as metaphors, symbols, and images that rise and fall within consciousness, offering their wisdom and reminding us of our own, to the extent that we open to receive them—much as air enters our limbs and we welcome the outer ecology inside us, then leaves again, returning a part of our inner ecology to the world and weaving us back into the web of life.

Can active imagination, as a catalyst, re-orient our relation with the unified world and open our consciousness wide enough to receive the imaginal dimension of existence, allowing every part of existence to teach its wisdom to us, rather than only some?

Set aside the ordinary mind,
and then open your true awareness.

Close your ears,
and then listen with the ears of the heart.

Rumi

Mystic Realization Through Active Imagination

You know what I become with you —
twenty times more
than the meadow becomes with the rain.

Rumi

Imagine a vast meadow stretching out to eternity, and the wide sky beginning to pour rain.

Can you visualize it in full detail? Perhaps a meadow you once stood in when the rain first started. Let the image rise — the smell, the breeze, the drops, the colors.

Now let the consciousness of the meadow and the rain enter your own consciousness to teach you from the perspective of being them.

The pouring water onto the land shares the consciousness of giving oneself fully to something, pouring on them; all the drops become an expression of longing and giving. Can you imagine that you’re the rain, fully expressing yourself to the meadow?

And now the vast meadow that stays ever present with every drop of the pouring rain, receiving fully and absorbing every single molecule of water to nourish itself. Can the meadow share its consciousness with us? To teach us how to receive fully, openly, and expanded from every drop of water?

The mystical way of realizing the animate nature of reality is fluid, ready to shift: to become meadow, sky, the rain on the meadow, the drop, even the molecules, to learn from their unique consciousness that exists in all.

Score: Embracing the Raw, Releasing the Ripe: The Tree of Life Metaphor

find a quite place that feels good for your body and imagination. Have drawing pad and colors, also bring a fruit with you.

Please read the poetry . Allow the images from the poetry to come to your imaginal field,

This world is like a tree, O friends.

We hang upon it like half-ripe fruits.

The unripe grip the branch hard,

clinging to the tree too seriously,

because in rawness one is not yet ready

for the everlasting life.

But once it ripens and turns soft and sweet,

it holds the branches gently,

yielding its grip,

ready to drop,

ready to fall into the earth,

From Mathnawi, Book 3, (Jalaluddin Rumi)

Movement exploration

Now stand or lie down. Start to move with your own flow. How does your body want to move today?

Stay with the sensation of muscles, bones, and fluidity. Notice where you feel any tightness or openness, and follow the pace and rhythm your body desires.

Notice your relation to the earth. Bring your awareness to any body part or parts where there is holding, contraction, or resistance in relation to gravity .

As you’re moving, just witness how that body part is not fully giving its weight and yielding to gravity. Track the contraction, tightness, or holding back. Can you imagine this as raw and not yet ready state?

As you are moving and bringing your awareness to that body part, move with the image of a raw fruit. Imagine its relation to the branch as your raw body part’s relation to gravity. Slowly visualize and allow that body part to take on the quality of the unripe fruit holding to the branch. Let the image move you. What is the sensation of rawness, not-readiness?

For another minute or so, move as if that body part is an unripe fruit and the earth is the tree.

Drop the image. Drop the movement.

Now, where in your body do you feel ready — soft, supported, fully yielding to the earth?

Bring awareness there. Let that body part move you. How does it explore its relationship with gravity? Does it feel different from the raw part?

Slowly imagine and visualize a soft and ready fruit; loose, free, ready to fall. Let that quality enter the ready body part.

What is the pace, the force, the state of ripeness?

For a minute or two, let the quality of ripeness and how it holds the branch move you.

Drop the image. Drop the movement.

Now: standing visualization

Imagine there is an invisible line coming from the center of the earth, passing right through the middle of your body, going all the way through your spine to your head and up to the sky. Imagine this line is the imaginal tree, connecting the ground, your body, and the sky. Your legs and feet, your pelvis, upper body, arms, hands, shoulders, face, and head are extensions of the tree — the branches.

Imagine both the unripe body part and its relation to the center line, the tree, and the ripe part and its relation to the tree. Bring your awareness to how the imaginal tree — rising from the center of the earth, and going all the way through your crown to the sky — is holding both the ripe and unripe parts.

Feel the quality of unripeness and its connection to the tree. What does the unripe fruit have to share with you? Listen carefully.

Now feel the ripe part; feel its softness. Allow the readiness and ripe fruit to share their wisdom with you. Visualize its relation to the branch and listen carefully.

Now imagine both the raw and ripe parts together holding the imaginal tree of your body. Stay with the image of tree, and listen carefully to what the tree metaphor has to share with you.

Drawing score

Find your drawing pad. Draw three images:

The first one, visualize where you feel ready, mature, and yield into. Let the movement exploration take visual shape. Come to color, line, and texture.

The second, visualize where you feel raw. How does this raw state—the unreadiness, tightness, holding, and clinging take visual shape? Witness it as an unripe fruit that is not yet time to drop and be received.

Now, create a third drawing. Visualize the imaginal tree of your life passing from the center of the earth, through the center of your heart, and up to the sky, holding both the raw and the ready states. Allow the shape, color, and line to give a more vivid image to your imagination.

Step away and look at all three drawings.

Closure of the Imaginal, Gratitude to the Metaphor

Now Go to your fruit and feel it. Is it ready or unripe? Let the consciousness of the fruit enter to your consciousness. Remember when it was still on the branch—did it fall off naturally, or was it cut when it was still raw? Read the memory of the fruit and its journey of holding onto the branch, and slowly move into the consciousness of the tree…

Take a bite. Give thanks to the fruit, both the real and the imaginal. Give thanks to the metaphor of the tree, with its wide branches reaching out and supporting both raw and ready fruit as one.

Daylight, full of small dancing particles,
and the one great turning, our souls
are dancing with you, without feet, they dance.
Can you see them when I whisper in your ear?

— Rumi

Dear Dancing Bodies,

I hope this finds you in ease, wherever you are, as we weave together in the field of the imaginal , where time and space bend and all forms, shapes, bodies, colors, and the entire universe symbolize one another.

As a reminder of this unseen part of reality, especially when our physical reality becomes too harsh and fast, dominating the other aspects of existence, pause for a moment. Possibly next to the body of a tree or plant. Imagine your subtle body, or what mystics call the light body , standing next to the subtle body of the tree, while in the physical dimension you are sharing the same air and the same ground with the body of the tree. Slowly allow the subtle body of you and the tree to begin a movement exploration together. Flow with the breeze, perhaps moving the branches and moving through your limbs. Welcome the dancing body of the tree through your breath.

Can this dance bridge the imaginal body of you and the tree into this physical reality? Can dance be an act of persistent listening to the tree’s presence, where every movement forms a connection to the unseen? Do you feel changed by the tree? Close your journey with bowing and giving thanks to the tree.

In Persian mystical traditions, the imaginal is a living realm that bridges ordinary and non-ordinary reality. It cannot be grasped by analysis, but needs to be listened to and embodied. Just as Persian mystics once did with their multidimensional and expansive experience of reality, we need to allow ourselves to be changed, to be moved, and to be danced by the imaginal. In this way, this subtle part of existence begins to relate and speak with us in a domain where everything is not fixed but fluid, receptive, and open.

In this dimension of reality, the threshold between different forms of existence becomes loose , and the interconnectedness and kinship with all beings become more visible. As Shahāb al-Dīn al-Suhrawardī, the Persian philosopher, describes, the universe is the reverberation of Gabriel’s wings — and you are that reverberation.

Here we are entering the symbolic and metaphorical realm of Persian mystic poetry as a doorway into the imaginal dimension of life. This allows us to access the mystical way of perceiving reality, to move more freely through different ways of being, to unlock new parts of ourselves, and to discover the potential of other ways of participating in our unified living world through the act of reciprocity and mutual respect.

Score: Activating the Channel of Receiving : The Throat Metaphor

Please read the poetry. Allow the images from the poetry to come to your imaginal field:

The creator bestows a throat

A channel both to your body and soul

It bestows a separate throat for every part of you

A Grace of the creator bestows a throat on the earth,

to the end that it may drink water and make a hundred herbs to grow.

Again, it bestows on the creature of earth a throat and lip,

in order that it may eat its herbage in desire.

And once more the earth opens its wide open mouth

this time to eat and swallow the earthly beings.

I beheld the atoms and particles

everyone of them has a wide open mouth to receive.

So from the moon above in the sky

to the fish deep down in the water

there is nothing in the creation

that has not a throat in respect of its drawing sustenance.

The soul too has a channel to receive,

just only when the throat of the body

gets free, empty, and available.

Then its sustenance becomes Majestic.

From Mathnawi, Book 3, Opening Chapter

(Jalaluddin Rumi)

Now: Find a space to sit or stand. Let the body arrive. Be aware of where you are meeting the earth. Let yourself soften to the earth. Soften your shoulders, belly, pelvis, and surrender to the gravity that moves you to the earth. Allow your jaws and throat to soften and open and feel the connection from your throat to your chest, to your belly, pelvis, feet and all the way to the earth. Allow a movement or a voice to rise.

Stay with the image of the throat, while you bring your awareness to your throat. Then start to move as if different body parts each have a throat. How does this imagination move you? Where do you access easily in your body to open its imaginal throat? The chest? The belly? The throat? The hands? The feet? Let the image become a sensation; allow the sensation to move you. Find a gesture or movement phrase that you can repeat, then slow down the movement, take a pause, and feel yourself. Perhaps an image rises. Does the image have a voice? Is there any poetic resonance that wants to come into the space?

Now go to your drawing pad. Allow the color and shapes to come to the paper to draw your movement journey. Ask yourself: How am I opening my receiving channel today? How much does my throat want to open today? Is it the size of the earth’s throat, or the size of an atom? Is there any creature coming to your imaginal field that calls you to open your receiving channel like them? A plant? Or animal? Or maybe any object like the mouth of a glass? Free your imagination. First, allow your visualization to come into your drawing, and then let the words join them. You may start your creative narration: “As I am opening my throat, I receive…”

Now step back and look at what you drew, then read aloud your narrative. If you feel called, add your movement phrase while you are reading your narrative. End your journey by giving thanks to the metaphor of the throat and to the imaginal in any way that they come to your space, open you, and teach you. Take a sip of water, and imagine the throat of the earth and all earthly creatures too, receiving water.