Our central proposition is magick may become intelligible if we first understand how a trained mind gains access to a structured imaginal field, allows content to arise there, distinguishes reception from deliberate construction, and subsequently learns to operate within that field.

A Blueprint for the Architecture of Imaginal Practice

For centuries, descriptions of magical practice have started in the middle of the story. The magician draws a circle, visualises a figure, pronounces a name, constructs a sigil, invokes an intelligence or directs an intention. What is seldom explained is why any of this should work in the first place.

There is an even more basic problem. Before asking whether a magical operation can produce an effect, we should ask what kind of mental instrument would be required to perform such an operation reliably.

That question changes the discussion considerably.

If magick depends upon imagination, attention, intention, symbolic representation and altered states of consciousness, then these cannot simply be assumed to be available in a sufficiently developed form. They would have to be trained. A person unable to observe his own thoughts without becoming absorbed in them has little basis for deciding whether an inner figure arose spontaneously or was constructed through expectation. Someone who cannot sustain a simple inner image for thirty seconds is poorly equipped to explore complex visionary environments. Someone unaware of his own wishes, fears and projections will have difficulty deciding whether an apparently authoritative inner voice is revealing something unexpected or merely repeating what he desperately wants to hear.

The first task of magical training may therefore have very little to do with magick.

It may consist of building the instrument through which magick eventually becomes possible.

This idea provides an unexpected point of convergence between four rather different approaches: the esoteric historiography of Antoine Faivre, the hermetic training of Franz Bardon, Henry Corbin’s philosophy of the imaginal, and Carl Gustav Jung’s experiments with active imagination. Together they suggest an architecture that neither psychology nor traditional occultism has fully articulated.

At Breath4Balance we have been approaching this architecture through what we call the ultrasubjective hyperspace, or USH. The USH is not proposed as another invisible metaphysical world. It is first of all a phenomenological concept: a structured experiential domain that may become accessible when ordinary sensory engagement diminishes and internally generated perception becomes sufficiently stable, vivid and autonomous.

The question is whether that domain could provide the missing operational space in which at least part of what traditions have called magick actually occurs.

Faivre and the Problem of Imagination

The French scholar Antoine Faivre (1934–2021), one of the principal founders of the academic study of Western esotericism, identified several recurring characteristics within Western esoteric traditions. Among these were correspondences between different levels of reality, the conception of nature as living, transmutation, and what he called imagination and mediations.

That third category becomes particularly important here.

Faivre recognised that esoteric systems repeatedly depend upon images, symbols, intermediary beings and symbolic procedures. Angels, planetary intelligences, elemental beings, ritual diagrams, sacred names and visualisations serve as mediators between domains that are otherwise separated.

This is more interesting than simply observing that occult traditions are rich in symbolism. It suggests that imagination itself performs a mediating function.

A symbol makes something accessible.

An image gives form to something that previously had no perceptible form.

An intermediary figure allows a relationship to develop with something that could otherwise remain abstract, implicit or inaccessible.

Faivre was describing a characteristic of esoteric thought, rather than proposing a psychological mechanism. But his observation immediately raises the question that concerns us here: what exactly is imagination doing?

Corbin and the Organ of Imaginal Perception

The French philosopher and Iranologist Henry Corbin (1903–1978) took this problem much further. Through his study of Iranian Islamic philosophy and mysticism, particularly the work of figures such as Shihab al-Din Suhrawardi (1154–1191) and the Andalusian Sufi philosopher and mystic Muḥyī al-Dīn Ibn ʿArabī (1165–1240), Corbin encountered traditions in which imagination had a much higher epistemological status than it generally possesses in modern Western thought.

Corbin introduced the expression mundus imaginalis, the imaginal world, because he wanted to distinguish the imaginal from the merely imaginary.

His distinction was radical. The imaginal was neither physical perception nor abstract intellectual thought. It represented an intermediate mode of experience with its own corresponding faculty of perception. Corbin explicitly described active Imagination as the organ through which entry into this domain becomes possible. He characterised the movement as ab extra ad intra, from exterior toward interior.

For Corbin this was not merely psychological. He considered the mundus imaginalis a genuine order of reality corresponding to a genuine mode of perception. Later scholarship on Corbin has emphasised precisely this conjunction: imagination is simultaneously a means of knowing and the faculty through which an imaginal mode of being becomes accessible.

We do not have to follow Corbin into that ontology.

What matters for our purpose is the structure of his proposal.

If there is a special class of experience that is neither ordinary external perception nor deliberate fantasy, then perhaps the capacity to enter it depends upon developing the appropriate perceptual faculty.

That gives us our first important principle:

Imaginal experience may depend upon a trainable capacity of mind.

Corbin tells us what such a faculty could disclose. He tells us much less about how a modern practitioner would systematically construct that faculty.

For that we can turn to Franz Bardon.

Bardon: Building the Instrument Before Using It

The Czech hermetic practitioner and author Franz Bardon (1909–1958) published Der Weg zum wahren Adepten, later translated as Initiation into Hermetics, in 1956. Whatever one thinks about the extensive occult cosmology surrounding Bardon, the pedagogical structure of his training is remarkable.

Bardon does not begin with evocation.

He begins with attention.

His practical system progresses through exercises in observing thoughts, concentration, introspection, breathing, sensory imagination and increasingly complex mental operations. Later stages move toward the explicitly magical practices for which he became famous. Modern editions still preserve the organisation of the practical work into ten progressive stages.

This sequence has been central to our work in Het Innerlijke Laboratorium. Bardon’s importance lies less in his metaphysical explanation of magick than in his recognition that extraordinary experiences are unreliable when the instrument observing them remains untrained. In our formulation, the sequence begins with observing thoughts, proceeds through directed attention and the ability to remain awake in inner emptiness, and only afterwards introduces the soul mirror, breath, imagination, sensory precision and magical applications.

That order may contain something fundamental.

A person first learns to observe the stream of consciousness without immediately becoming identified with it. Thoughts arise, develop and disappear. With practice a small distance develops between awareness and content.

In the terminology of Het Innerlijke Laboratorium, this is the development of the Witness.

The next capacity is sustained attention. The practitioner learns that attention can leave a chosen object, recognise that it has wandered and deliberately return. What gradually develops is a form of directed will, less a matter of force than the ability to maintain orientation.

Then comes something that becomes unexpectedly important once we connect Bardon to Corbin: emptiness.

The Importance of an Empty Field

If every moment of internal silence is immediately filled with a thought, fantasy, memory or expectation, spontaneous imaginal emergence becomes almost impossible to investigate.

One never discovers what appears because nothing is permitted to appear. The practitioner continually supplies the material himself.

In Het Innerlijke Laboratorium we described the relevant capacity as remaining awake and present when nothing needs to happen. The practitioner neither fills the space with thoughts nor drifts into sleep or daydreaming. Presence can remain even in the temporary absence of content. Only then can something appear without immediately being absorbed into an existing story.

This may be one of the central conditions for accessing USH.

We could describe it as the construction of a receptive field.

The field is empty but alert.

There is attention, but attention has no predetermined object.

There is expectation in the weak sense that something may happen, but no specification of what should happen.

This produces a peculiar psychological condition:

high attention with low content control.

That formulation may turn out to be essential.

Too little attention and the practitioner drifts into ordinary reverie or sleep.

Too much intentional control and the practitioner manufactures the experience.

Between those two lies receptive imaginal awareness.

Bardon’s Unexpected Contribution: Calibration

Bardon then does something extremely useful. He trains deliberate imagination with almost pedantic simplicity.

A practitioner learns to form and sustain an inner object, colour or shape. Later the same training is extended into other sensory modalities: sound, smell, taste and tactile qualities.

A simple red sphere may seem very far removed from magick, but methodologically it is extremely valuable.

The practitioner learns exactly what deliberately generated imagery feels like.

He discovers how effort changes an image. He notices how quickly a colour fades, how easily a form begins to transform, when attention wanders, when a visual image becomes conceptual, and how intention restores it.

This creates something resembling a calibration procedure.

Before we can recognise spontaneous imaginal content, it may be useful to become very familiar with intentionally produced imaginal content.

Bardon therefore gives us what Corbin lacks: training of the instrument.

Corbin tells us that active Imagination can become an organ of imaginal perception.

Bardon teaches us how to increase the resolution, stability and controllability of inner perception.

The two approaches become particularly powerful when we reverse the direction of the Bardonian exercise.

From Constructive to Receptive Imagination

Here I think we arrive at one of the central ideas of this entire architecture.

We need to distinguish two modes of imagination.

In constructive imagination, intention generates content:

intention → image

I decide to visualise a red sphere. I generate it. I hold it. I correct it when it fades.

In receptive imagination, attention remains active while deliberate content generation is suspended:

receptive field → emergent image

The capacity for imagination remains available, but the decision about what should appear is relinquished.

This transition may be the threshold between ordinary visualisation and genuine imaginal exploration.

It also produces a possible criterion for distinguishing fantasy from emergent USH content.

Someone who has trained constructive imagination extensively knows from direct experience what it feels like to generate and manipulate imagery. When the same practitioner subsequently maintains the imaginal faculty while withholding deliberate construction, deviations from intention become easier to notice.

A shape appears that was not requested.

A colour changes unexpectedly.

A doorway appears where no doorway was imagined.

A figure enters.

The figure looks somewhere unexpected.

Eventually it speaks.

The important initial criterion is not vividness.

It is unintended development.

We can call this phenomenological autonomy.

Phenomenological autonomy makes no claim that the figure exists independently outside the mind. It simply describes the degree to which an experiential event behaves independently of conscious intention.

That gives us something testable within introspection.

Jung: When the Image Begins to Answer

This is where Carl Gustav Jung (1875–1961), the Swiss psychiatrist and founder of analytical psychology, becomes indispensable.

Beginning around 1913, during the period he later called his confrontation with the unconscious, Jung deliberately turned toward internally emerging imagery. His experiences were recorded in notebooks later published as the Black Books and subsequently transformed into the elaborate manuscript known as Liber Novus or The Red Book.

Jung did not simply observe images.

He interacted with them.

Figures appeared, acquired names and characteristics, disagreed with him, instructed him, irritated him and sometimes frightened him. Among the best known were Elijah, Salome and eventually Philemon.

His psychological technique of active imagination grew partly from these experiments. The early 1916 essay The Transcendent Function already describes a method for allowing fantasies to develop and subsequently bringing conscious attention into relation with the resulting unconscious material. The essay later became recognised as one of Jung’s clearest early accounts of what would become active imagination.

Jung therefore supplies something that Bardon does not emphasise in the same way: dialogue with emergent content.

Once a figure has acquired sufficient stability and apparent autonomy, consciousness can enter into relationship with it.

One can ask a question.

One can wait for the answer.

One can object.

One can refuse a demand.

One can ask the figure to explain something.

One can observe whether the response was predictable.

The imaginal figure changes from an object of visualisation into an interlocutor.

The Soul Mirror as Source Control

Before we become too enthusiastic about autonomous inner beings, Bardon provides another indispensable safeguard.

The soul mirror, which we adapted in Het Innerlijke Laboratorium, requires a systematic examination of one’s own character, including fear, pride, desire, anger, jealousy, shame, control, vanity and self-deception.

Within the present architecture, this acquires a new function.

The soul mirror becomes a form of source control.

Suppose someone desperately wants confirmation that he possesses a special spiritual destiny. He enters the USH and encounters a magnificent luminous being that tells him exactly that.

Without prior knowledge of his own needs, the encounter may appear revelatory.

With a well-developed soul mirror, another possibility immediately becomes available: perhaps the figure is expressing precisely the grandiose tendency already known to the practitioner.

Likewise, someone who longs for an authoritative father may repeatedly meet wise old men. Someone terrified of sexuality may encounter threatening seductive beings. Someone deeply invested in a particular religious system may populate the inner world with figures belonging to that cosmology.

None of this proves that imaginal figures are reducible to projection.

It simply means that projection must be treated as one candidate source.

A serious phenomenology of USH therefore requires the practitioner to know something about the instrument through which the phenomena are being observed.

Entering the Ultrasubjective Hyperspace

We can now describe the architecture more precisely.

The ultrasubjective hyperspace is the experiential domain that becomes available when external sensory dominance decreases sufficiently for structured endogenous perception to become prominent.

The first phenomena may be elementary: darkness, light, colour, movement, geometric structures or spatial depth. With greater stability, the field may acquire environmental qualities. Rooms, landscapes, pathways and architectures may develop. Eventually figures may appear.

The decisive feature is that these phenomena are experienced spatially despite their absence from ordinary external space.

Corbin would recognise this immediately. His imaginal world has form and extension without being located in ordinary geography. His language remains metaphysical, while USH deliberately begins one level earlier. We simply acknowledge that the human mind is capable of producing an immersive experiential space with properties of location, orientation, movement and encounter.

Whether this space is entirely generated by the nervous system, reveals normally inaccessible levels of psyche, participates in some transpersonal domain, or represents something else remains an open question.

The methodology does not require an answer.

It requires disciplined entry.

From Appearance to Encounter

Once an imaginal figure appears, the next task is to avoid destroying the phenomenon by immediately explaining it.

If a serpent emerges, labelling it Kundalini, sexuality, transformation or an archetype already changes the experiment.

First observe the serpent.

What does it do?

Does it notice you?

Does it approach?

Does it remain stable?

If you move, does it respond?

If you ask it something, what happens?

This is where Jung’s method becomes particularly valuable. Consciousness remains present and participates in the encounter. The practitioner is neither a passive spectator nor an author writing a story.

The figure is given room to become other.

We can then begin testing phenomenological autonomy.

Does the figure produce information or behaviour you did not anticipate?

Does it resist suggestion?

If you ask it to move left, does it move right?

If you challenge it, does the emotional atmosphere alter?

Does it recur during subsequent sessions?

Does it possess recognisable characteristics across encounters?

Does its behaviour change as your relationship with it develops?

None of these observations establishes independent metaphysical existence.

But they establish increasingly interesting degrees of experiential independence from conscious scripting.

The Operator Enters the Field

Until this point, most of the method has been receptive.

Now the Operator, another central concept from Het Innerlijke Laboratorium, becomes important.

The Witness observes.

The Operator acts from the space opened by the Witness.

Within ordinary life this means learning to introduce intentional action between impulse and response. Within USH it acquires another possible function: the Operator can act inside the imaginal field.

This is where the architecture begins to become genuinely magical.

A symbol can be introduced.

A question can be placed into the field.

A sigil can be presented to an imaginal figure.

A bodily problem can be represented imaginally and explored.

An intention can be maintained while allowing imagery to organise around it.

A figure can be asked to transform something.

The practitioner can perform an operation and observe what subsequently changes.

At this point imagination becomes an interface rather than simply an experience.

Himma: Sustained Intention

Corbin’s discussions of Ibn ʿArabi introduce another useful concept: himma, a concentrated power of intention associated with the heart and imagination.

We do not need to import the complete metaphysical system of Ibn ʿArabi to recognise the psychological importance of this idea.

Ordinary wishing is unstable.

Attention shifts. Contradictory desires appear. Doubt intervenes. The mind abandons one intention and adopts another.

A trained intention behaves differently. It can remain present without continuous verbal repetition.

Within our architecture, himma can be understood provisionally as sustained intentional presence within the imaginal field.

Its position in the sequence matters enormously.

If intention dominates before receptive imagination has been established, we merely construct the experience we wanted.

If receptive imagination comes first, autonomous content can emerge.

Only then is intention introduced.

This produces a relationship:

reception → encounter → intention → operation.

That is very different from simply visualising the desired result.

A Developmental Architecture of Magick

The whole sequence can now be seen as a progressive construction of capacities:

Witness → sustained attention → waking emptiness → self-knowledge → sensory imagination → constructive imagination → receptive imagination → autonomous emergence → imaginal encounter → Operator → sustained intention → operation → testing

This, I think, is our first genuine architecture for how magick could work.

Each stage solves a problem created by the next.

The Witness reduces identification with content.

Concentration stabilises attention.

Emptiness prevents compulsive production of content.

The soul mirror reveals likely sources of projection.

Sensory training increases imaginal resolution.

Constructive imagination teaches the practitioner what deliberate image generation feels like.

Receptive imagination suspends that generation while maintaining the capacity to perceive.

Autonomous emergence provides new content.

Dialogue establishes relationship with that content.

The Operator introduces intentional action.

Himma sustains direction.

The magical operation occurs within the resulting field.

Testing determines what actually changed.

This also explains why beginning directly with ritual or evocation is methodologically weak. Almost every source of error remains uncontrolled.

What Would Count as Magick?

This architecture does not yet prove magick.

It gives us a framework in which magical claims can be separated into increasingly demanding levels.

The first level is straightforward:

an operation in USH changes the USH experience itself.

A figure changes, a landscape transforms, a threatening presence becomes approachable, or a symbolic object modifies the emotional atmosphere.

The second level concerns subsequent internal effects:

an operation in USH produces a reproducible change in bodily, emotional or cognitive state.

Perhaps anxiety diminishes. A recurring dream changes. A previously compulsive response becomes weaker.

The third level concerns behaviour:

an imaginal operation alters how the practitioner subsequently acts in ordinary life.

This would already be significant, and entirely compatible with psychological mechanisms.

Only after these levels are established should we approach the much stronger traditional magical claim:

an imaginal operation produces effects upon external events that cannot adequately be explained through subsequent behaviour, ordinary communication or coincidence.

That is a radically different proposition.

It should not be smuggled into the earlier stages.

If magick has any externally operative component, it deserves investigation precisely because we have first removed as much conceptual confusion as possible.

From Occult Tradition to Experimental Magick

This gives us a different way of reading Western magical traditions.

Their symbols, entities and ritual structures may represent historical technologies for gaining access to and operating within imaginal experience.

Different traditions supplied different maps.

Angels in one system.

Planetary intelligences in another.

Elementals in another.

God-forms, demons, saints, ancestors, spirits and archetypal beings elsewhere.

The mistake would be to assume that because the cosmologies differ, the underlying experiential technology must also differ completely.

Faivre noticed the recurring importance of imagination and mediation.

Corbin recognised an intermediate imaginal mode of perception.

Bardon constructed the capacities required for disciplined inner work.

Jung demonstrated that internally arising figures can be engaged as apparently autonomous interlocutors.

Our contribution is to bring these elements into a single phenomenological and experimental architecture.

The USH gives us the field.

The Witness gives us observational stability.

Bardon gives us calibration.

The soul mirror gives us source control.

Receptive imagination allows emergence.

Jung gives us dialogue.

The Operator gives us intervention.

Himma gives us sustained intention.

And the Inner Laboratory gives us the final requirement: record what actually happens and test whether the result returns.

In our manuscript we already formulated Bardon’s underlying principle in almost exactly these terms: first the mind must learn to see, then attention must become directed, emptiness must remain wakeful, self-knowledge must increase, the body must participate, and only afterwards can explicitly magical work become meaningful.

Corbin now allows us to see where that training may be leading.

The First Foundation of Magick

Perhaps magick does not begin with ritual.

Perhaps it begins much earlier, with the construction of a particular kind of consciousness.

A consciousness capable of remaining present without compulsively filling its own field.

Capable of generating imagery and therefore recognising what deliberate generation feels like.

Capable of suspending generation while remaining perceptually awake.

Capable of allowing unexpected content to appear.

Capable of remaining in relationship with that content without surrendering critical judgement.

Capable eventually of introducing deliberate intention into the resulting experiential space.

Only at that point does the question become interesting:

Can an operation carried out within this imaginal space produce consequences beyond the operation itself?

That is where magick begins to become an experimental question.

We do not have an answer yet.

But we may finally have the beginnings of an architecture within which the question can be asked properly.

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References

Bardon, F. (1956). Der Weg zum wahren Adepten. Freiburg: Hermann Bauer. English editions published as Initiation into Hermetics: The Path of the True Adept. Bardon’s practical system is organised as a progressive training in mental, psychic and bodily capacities before advanced magical applications.

Corbin, H. (1964). Mundus imaginalis ou l’imaginaire et l’imaginal. Cahiers Internationaux de Symbolisme, 6, 3–26.

Corbin, H. (1995). “Mundus Imaginalis, or the Imaginary and the Imaginal.” In Swedenborg and Esoteric Islam, translated by Leonard Fox. West Chester, PA: Swedenborg Foundation.

Faivre, A. (1994). Access to Western Esotericism. Albany: State University of New York Press.

Faivre, A. (2010). Western Esotericism: A Concise History. Translated by Christine Rhone. Albany: State University of New York Press.

Jung, C. G. (1957/1960). “The Transcendent Function.” In Collected Works of C. G. Jung, Vol. 8, The Structure and Dynamics of the Psyche. Princeton: Princeton University Press. The original essay was composed in 1916.

Jung, C. G. (2009). The Red Book: Liber Novus. Edited by Sonu Shamdasani. New York: W. W. Norton.

Jung, C. G. (2020). The Black Books 1913–1932. Edited by Sonu Shamdasani. New York: W. W. Norton.

Keppel Hesselink, J. M. (2026). Het Innerlijke Laboratorium: alchemie van waarneming en bewustzijn. Manuscript. The work develops the Witness, Operator, soul mirror, breath, formula and imagination as an integrated inner instrumentarium before moving into explicitly esoteric material.

Shariat, A. (1991). “Henry Corbin and the Imaginal: A Look at the Concept and Function of the Creative Imagination in Iranian Philosophy.” Diogenes, 39(156), 83–114.