What is [the] organ capable of producing a movement that constitutes a return ab extra ad intra (from the outside to the inside), a topographical inversion? It is not the senses or the faculties of the physical organism, much less is it pure intellect. Rather, it is the intermediary power which has a mediating role par excellence, i.e. active imagination. But let there be no misunderstanding here. What is involved is the organ that makes possible a transmutation of inner spiritual states into outer states into vision-events symbolizing with these inner states. . . .

Just as the soul is independent of the material physical body, as to intellective capacity for the act of receiving the intelligibles, the soul is also independent as to its imaginative capacity and its imaginative activity. Moreover, when it is separated from this world it can continue to avail itself of active imagination. By means of its own essence and this faculty, the soul is therefore capable of perceiving concrete things whose existence, as actualized in knowledge (cognition) and in imagination, constitutes eo ipso the very concrete existential form of these things. In other words, consciousness and its object are ontologically inseparable here. After this separation all the soul's powers are assembled and concentrated in the sole faculty of active imagination. Because at that time imaginative perception ceases to be scattered across the various thresholds of the physical body's five senses, and because it is no longer required for the care of the physical body, which is exposed to the vicissitudes of the external world, imaginative perception can finally display its true superiority over sense perception.

(Sadra Shirazi writes) All the faculties of the soul then become as if they were one single faculty, which is the capacity to configurate and typify . . . . The imagination of the soul becomes just like a sensible perception of the super-sensible. The imaginative insight of the soul is like its sensible insight. Thus, its hearing, its sense of smell, its taste and touch [all these imaginative senses] are just like the corresponding sensible faculties, but these imaginative senses are attributed to the super-sensible. Whereas in the outer world there are five sensible faculties, each with its specific organ in the body, in the inner world they are synthesized into one.

Henry Corbin, "Mundus Imaginalis, or the Imaginary and the Imaginal"