god is a circle
the imaginal realm
Thinking about God is a deeply personal experience.
Each of us imagines God according to the stories, experiences, texts, films or music we have encountered throughout life.
If you grew up in a religious family, it is very likely that your image of God resembles an entity with long hair and a beard, someone loving and merciful, or perhaps a meticulous observer, always watching, ready to punish at any moment.
In recent years, I have spent a great deal of time thinking about God, always from a place of curiosity. I remember that in 2018 I took a course on the history of religions, taught by a doctorate in theology from the Catholic University of Leuven, in Belgium. That experience allowed me to deconstruct many ideas I had taken for granted about God and religion, and gradually to build, I believe, a more mature understanding of God, religion and spirituality.
My interest in these questions took an unexpected turn when I heard the song God Is a Circle by Yves Tumor.
God is a circle? That idea stayed with me.
In November of last year, while at the University of São Paulo (USP), I walked into a bookstore on campus. As I browsed the shelves, a purple book caught my eye. The title read O livro da produção dos círculos (The Book of the Production of Circles). The author: Ibn Arabi.
The connection was immediate.
At the same time, I thought about different things. I recalled Yves Tumor’s song, the idea that God used mathematics as the language with which to create the universe, and the circle on the cover of Be Here Now by Ram Dass. I didn’t think twice, I had to buy that book.
The Book of the Production of Circles is, at the same time, fascinating and abstract. Counterintuitive when measured against many traditional ideas of God, yet strangely clear once you begin reading it.
It is not a conventional theological treatise; rather, it is a symbolic map of Ibn Arabi’s spiritual path, a path that anyone seeking to encounter their God, their artisan, their creator. For Ibn Arabi, life itself is a journey of return toward God.
The circle is a simple yet inexhaustible figure. It has no beginning and no end; it does not move in a straight line, nor does it establish hierarchies. In Ibn Arabi’s thought, the circle expresses the unity of all that exists. The center represents the divine: immobile, eternal. The periphery represents the world: multiple, changing. Yet both belong to the same figure. There is no real separation between God and creation, only different ways of experiencing the same reality.
This idea breaks with the image of a distant, detached God. In Ibn Arabi, God is not outside the world, but rather permeates it. To live is to move within that circle, to wander, to learn, to love and to lose as part of a single turning that, sooner or later, brings us back to the origin. It is not about reaching God, but about recognizing that we have always been within that movement, within that Circle.
One of Ibn Arabi’s most profound contributions is his conception of imagination.
For him, imagination is neither fantasy nor an escape from reality. It is a realm in itself: the imaginal realm. An intermediate space between the purely spiritual and the purely material, where invisible truths take form without becoming fully solid.
The imaginal realm is not “unreal.” It is real in a different way. Within it, symbols do not represent something external; they are what they reveal. It is there that dreams, visions and deep intuitions appear, and it is also there that the divine becomes accessible to human experience without being reduced to rigid concepts.
In The Book of the Production of Circles, the circle inhabits precisely this imaginal realm. It is not merely a geometric figure or a decorative metaphor, but a mode of knowledge. By contemplating it, we do not understand God as an idea; we intuit God as totality, movement and unity.
This helps explain why Ibn Arabi writes in such a symbolic way. He does not seek to explain God, but to allow the reader to enter that intermediate space where understanding is felt and knowing is experienced. Reading him is not about accumulating information, but about traversing the imaginal realm with attention and humility.
In a world obsessed with what is measurable, immediate and linear, Ibn Arabi reminds us that there are dimensions of reality that reveal themselves only when we accept the mediation of imagination, not as illusion, but as an organ of spiritual knowledge.
Perhaps it is there, in that imaginal realm, that the human and the divine meet without canceling one another.
In a world that insists on moving forward without pause, Ibn Arabi invites us into a different logic: that of return. He reminds us that the spiritual search does not consist in going farther, but in looking deeper.
Perhaps God is not a bearded figure or a silent judge. Perhaps God is a movement. A constant turning. A circle that contains us even when we believe ourselves lost. And perhaps, in the end, thinking about God is nothing more than learning how to inhabit that circle, and that imaginal realm, with a little more awareness, humility and wonder.