Himma (Sufism)

The heart is conceived as the locus of the spiritual energy of imagination or spiritual perception. Salvational knowledge is the act of mediating, imagining, projecting and ardently desiring. For a person in a condition of himma, the energy is held to be so powerful as to project extra-psychic being external to the person in that condition. Himma creates as real the figures of the imagination, although their reality is neither hallucinatory nor illusory. The results of that imagination are neither objectively nor subjectively real but belong to to the intermediary mediating realm of the mundus imaginalis.