2.1.3 Geometry and the One-to-Many Relation

Ibn al-Arabi quotes the Pole of Spirits, who is Prophet Idris, known in the Bible as Enoch, and who is the most knowledgeable of everything concerning the Natural World and the effects of the Higher World on it, as Ibn al-Arabi described him; thus he quoted him saying that “the world exists between the circumference and the point” [I.154.22]. This simple statement is illustrated in Figure II.1 below, which also depicted right on the title page of this book, since it is really the principal idea behind Ibn al-Arabi’s eccentric concept of time and creation. Simple and straight as it may seem to be, the secret of geometry, and thus: physics and cosmology, is encoded in this statement, because it is the key to unravel the mystery of space and time.

Figure II.1: Despite their multiplicity, the indivisible central point, denoting the Real, meets each point from the circumference of the circle of creation. This One-to-Many relation can only be conceived with the oneness of time; that the individual entities of the multiplicity of creation may exist only one at a time, while the Single Monad is alternating between them.

Ibn al-Arabi then explained that the “abstract point” at the center of the circle meets “any point” in the circumference with its “whole entity” , without division or multiplicity. Similarly, all the creations are emerging from the Real, without affecting His unique Oneness or Unicity. However, the problem is that physical entities are different from the above abstract mathematical example of the circle and its center point, depicted in Figure II.1. Nevertheless, with the correct understanding of the real flow of time, according to the Single Monad Model and Duality of Time Theory, the ultimate purely-geometrical nature of creation is revealed in a unique manner that connects the multiplicity of creation with the ultimate Oneness and Unicity of the One and Unique God, Who is the Creator of all corporeal and incorporeal worlds, without being multiplied in Himself or composed of any other (sub)entities.

When we understand this essential issue of one-to-many relation, we will be able to solve many fundamental problems in philosophy, physics, cosmology, and mathematics, because this is the key that connects between discreteness and continuity which are reflected on various levels in Nature, such as: space-time, wave-particle, energy-mass, singularities-infinities and many other less obvious dualities.

Ibn al-Arabi was well aware that this paradoxical relation between the Creator and all manifestations is in clear apparent contradiction with the widely accepted philosophical maxim, a central assumption in the prevailing contemporary Neo-Platonist philosophical cosmology, that “from the One only one can emerge (or proceed)” . Logically, according to our normal simple intuition that is primarily based on physical embodiment, it is not possible to imagine a relation between the One and the many without affecting the unique Oneness of the One, because He must meet each individual one at the same time, so He must have many simultaneous aspects. Ibn al-Arabi solves this riddle by asserting that the interface between the One and all the many existent things doesn’t happen all at once. Rather, at any single instance of time, there is in reality only one single relation or interface, a unique divine “with-ness” , as he calls it, following the Quran [57:4], between the One and only “one” of the many multitudes of entities in the world. But what happens at this particular instance with the other entities, since their existence is preserved only through this unique creative relation between them and their Creator? The answer is: they do cease to exist, but their existence is maintained by (immediately) re-creating them again, perpetually. As we have repeated explained in the previous volumes, this principle of re-creation, or the “ever-renewed creation” , is based on some central verses from Quran, including: (Are We tiered of the first creation? Nay, but they are unaware of the creation anew.) [50:15], and: (each Day He is upon one task) [55:29].

Therefore, in order to understand the relation between the unique Oneness of the Real and the apparent multiplicity of creations, Ibn al-Arabi adds time to the previous philosophical statement, which can be then restated as:

“from the One only one can proceed at a time.”

Ibn al-Arabi, however, affirms that this particular mode of creation was chosen by Allah to be like that, although in fact He might have created the world in any other way, so it is not any (external) restriction imposed over Him, the Exalted. In other words, this principle is not necessarily implied by the Existence of the Real, that only one can proceed from Him at a time, and that it is impossible otherwise. But He willed that, and if He had wished that the world should exist all at once, and that nothing were ever dependent on anything else, it wouldn’t be difficult for Allah to create it like that. In such a case we would be living in a completely different logic. Yet, even within this primordial source of our current logic, causality is a macroscopic statistical phenomena and not any designated principle that cannot be broken. Therefore, because it explains the dynamic emergence of space-time geometry, the Duality of Time Theory explains the very cause of causality and how it can be broken in certain circumstances, such as the non-local behavior of quantum tunneling and entanglement.

The genuine complex-time explains how the geometry itself is being created dynamically, so the Universe becomes self-contained without any other predefined background geometry or topology. The dynamically created time-time geometry is essentially granular, but this depends on the relative position of the observer. In a simple statement, since observation is an instance of time, the observer exists in a fractal dimension between two consecutive complete integer spatial dimensions, as we are currently living, or evolving in the outward fractal dimension of time, between two and three spatial dimensions. Therefore, we will always “see” the two-dimensional space continuous, because we only see it after its creation, while the three-dimensional space will be discrete because we “see” it only one two-dimensional image at a time, but we can then “imagine” it to be continuous because we integrate these images with their super-symmetrical psychological folds to imagine the third dimension. In reality, however, this third dimension is only achieved as we progress with time and does not itself evolve in time, from our current position in this Lower World, though this might be the case in the Hereafter as we described in Chapter VII of Volume I.