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mount_weary commented on the word himmah
"It is by virtue of their empowered imaginations that souls consign themselves to Hell. Ibn al-ʿArabī writes that a 'wind' drives such souls to Hell, '(the driver) being none other than their own desires and inclinations, and Hell the distance they imagined (to be between them and the Reality).' For Ibn al-ʿArabī, the drama of salvation remains crucially dependent on a proper use and understanding of that empowered imagination that comes to the soul both in the after-life and on this earth in mystical experiences.
Ibn al-ʿArabī refers to this faculty of the empowered imagination by the word himmah. Himmah refers to that transfiguration of the mystic's imagination that allows him to do two important things: (1) it allows him to convert the imaginative faculty into an 'organ' that perceives the subtle realities or spiritual dimensions that otherwise lie hidden to physical sense organs and (2) it allows him to endow the creations of his own imagination with objective, extramental existence through a process involving both concentration and mental projection."
—via Mysticism: Experience, Response, and Empowerment
May 19, 2016