In Persian as well as Turkish its name is sohbet— the traditional name for the inexplicable closeness and pleasure and joy felt by the pure-hearted in each others company. This is the reason why “Sufis say there are three ways of being with the mystery: prayer, then a step up from that, meditation, and a step up from that,” sohbet or the supreme joy of mystical dialogue.
To be drawn into the reality of sohbet is suddenly to have the direct experience that, instead of just talking to some other human, you are speaking with “a person like the dawn”. And the funny thing is that, right at the climax of noting down this conversation with Jung, Corbin even states explicitly what’s going on.
“Supreme joie du dialogue”, he carefully records: the supreme joy of dialogue. But he’s not just noting down some theoretical idea they discussed, one more passing subject of conversation. He is also recording what actually took place in that space between him and Jung—as an immediate continuation and confirmation of the “joie extraordinaire” or “extraordinary joy” Carl Jung had already experienced on being so uniquely, so completely, understood by Henry Corbin.
In other words, what they were talking about and what they were doing were one and the same thing. Their discussion was, itself, the experiences they were discussing.19
And to have left their interaction there, in the borderless formlessness of infinite mystical union, would psychologically have been a total disaster.
But Corbin was no fool—which is why, at the end of his notes, he marks the stage of bringing everything back again into a world of separation. There is Jung, and there is Corbin, and there is a healthy reminder of the differences between them because Jung will always be the psychologist and healer; Corbin will never stop being the mystic and metaphysician. Or as Corbin himself explains, Jung’s main focus will always be on the case of some sick patient needing help while mine will always be on the ideal case of a mystic.
And then he adds the three words, in ancient Greek, which bring everything to a close: monos pros monon, “alone to alone”.
This, originally magical and mystical, expression was a key theme for Corbin because it conveys so well the nature of our invisible bond with the divine reality inside us. For him it captures the infinitely simple, but endlessly mysterious, essence of true individuation—of the process which allows would-be humans to grow up to become real individuated humans, genuinely “solitary, authentically alone, freed from every collective norm” because they just let themselves be held in a constant alignment with the eternal aloneness of their higher self.
Here is that same inner secret, again, for which Corbin liked quoting the prophet Isaiah’s Secretum meum mihi; “My secret is for ME”. And it’s a secret which always will be monos pros monon, alone to alone, “in the sense that no one else is present to such intimacy”.
But this, too, isn’t all.
Behind that mystical sense of connection to one’s own divine reality there is another, even more ancient meaning of those words. Monos pros monon also can refer to the most intimate conversation and dialogue between two human beings. And as a matter of fact this particular meaning features right at the start of that review Corbin wrote for Answer to Job.
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