H. Corbin
Publisher: Tauris
Cited by:
Spiritual body and celestial earth: from Mazdean Iran to Shi'ite Iran by Henry Corbin A beautiful, wonderful book that gives you the opportunity to understand a mind totally different from ours. The book is an analysis of the Zoroastrian belief first and of the islamic Iranian culture after. One could ask: big deal, what does this have to do with me? Quite a lot, I would say. The book explains what is the source of the experience of that culture and in doing so we discover that all our beliefs and our own whole mind is shaped by a revolution that happened centuries ago, a revolution that dropped out the power of the images as the source of knowledge and experience, destroying an intermediate and intermediating layer existing between the mind and our senses: the author gives it the name of Mundus Imaginalis and, by means of it, he helps you understanding what is the true place and context where the main events of the myth and the religions really have happened. This way you are able to discover a sense in hugely important products of the human spirit that the people today was unable to understand before; this way we discover what is a really different mind; this way we learn how difficult is to understand other minds and other cultures and how much study and humility we need in order to look at the world without stupidity.
-- Daniele Radogna