This final installment of a trilogy endeavors to demonstrate in the language
of modern physics how multiplicity emerges from divine oneness.
Attempts to explain the relationship between the diverse phenomena humans
experience and the possibility of an underlying metaphysical oneness date back
to ancient cosmology. Yousef (Duality of Time, 2018, etc.) argues that
humans’ perceptions of both phenomenal multiplicity and continuity are mirages,
the emanations of an irreducible ontological unity: a single monad, the
expression of absolute divine unity. People experience the world as they do
because they only view it from an “imaginary time dimension,” a perch from the
outside that can’t possibly exist if the universe is truly one. At the heart of
this book is the postulation of “nested symmetries,” five kinds that account for
the “apparent dynamic multiplicity of creation.” Oneness of God is “conceived”
as an “abstract point beyond geometry.” Normal symmetry applies to the physical
world governed by the laws of classical mechanics, specifically the elements of
space and time understood in Euclidean terms. Super-symmetry denotes the
relation between the physical and psychical, which is essentially identical to
Quantum Field Theory’s matter/antimatter couplet. Hyper-symmetry refers to the
connection, explored in quantum mechanics, between particles and waves and, by
extension, the appearance of continuous space. And ultimate symmetry explains
how the curved space of contemporary physics can be generated from Euclidean
geometry’s “homogenous” space. Underlying these threads is the divine Principle
of Love, the original source of motion that explains the universe’s longing to
continuously return to a state of harmony. Yousef is at his best providing
historical accounts of physics, both ancient and modern—he is especially deft in
detailing ancient cosmology—and the theoretical problems that persist within
them. But his writing can be exasperatingly dense (“Although the things might
outwardly seem to be continuously existing in their evolution, nothing is ever
repeated the same twice, since their elementary microscopic components are
always created anew in different forms, that may still resemble the perished
ones, but they are not themselves”). Furthermore, his fusion of science and
Islamic revelation is really just a translation of the latter into the terms of
the former. For example, he simply identifies energy particles with “spirits.”
This then becomes a springboard to a lengthy discussion of the kinds of spirits,
including angels, that exist.
An ambitious but unconvincing argument involving ancient gnostic theology.
The science of Time is a noble science, that reveals the secret of Eternity. Only the Elites of Sages may ever come to know this secret. It is called the First Age, or the Age of ages, from which time is emerging.
