III.4.6 The Cosmos as the Inscribed Book

Following the mystical analogy between the world and the Book, Ibn al-Arabi asserts that the world is an inscribed book in the unfolded scroll of existence [I 366.3, III 112.23, II 367.18, III 455.19], alluding also to Quran where Allah swears by the Mount (of Revelation), by the Book inscribed in an unfolded Scroll, and by the Populated House [52:1-4]. Ibn al-Arabi showed in many occasions that the Populated House, that is also called the Grave, located in the seventh heaven [II.453.1], is the Heart of the true believer that encompassed the Real while neither His Heavens nor His Earth were able to encompass Him [I.120.24], alluding also to one famous Hadith. Going along with this comprehensive comparison he adds that Allah said about Jesus, peace be upon him, that he is His Word that He recited onto Mary [Quran, 4:171], and Allah also said that His Words never exhaust [Quran, 31:27], and they are the creations written by the First Intellect in the Tablet of the Universal Soul, as we explained with more detailed at the beginning of Chapter IV in Volume II.

Therefore, the Universal Spirit is like the Ink used for writing the Book of the Cosmos, and the First Intellect is the Pen that writes the Words of Allah in the Tablet that is the Universal Soul that is the sum of the images of all creations that are coming into existence. The First Intellect is the Single Monad that keeps fluctuating between the Real and the Soul to conduct the effects of the manifestations of Allah into the world. These manifestations are the divine Names that act on the creations. Every time he goes back and forth between the Real and the Soul, the Intellect conducts one command or one divine task to one entity in the world, where he appears in the form of that entity. The Intellect keeps appearing in the form of all entities until a complete frame of the cosmos is conducted into the Soul, which takes a full Day that is an indivisible time called the single Day [IV 425.8-11] that is a mere instance of the actual time flow in our time scale, as Allah said in Quran: (each Day He is upon one task) [55:29]. This comprehensive image of all divine manifestations that was scanned over one Day/instance is printed in the Heart and reflected onto the Soul.

The Heart here acts exactly like a mirror which never keeps any information of the images displayed on it, but it is always ready to display and reflect new images. These images, however, as they keep flooding out of the Heart, are memorized in the Soul and sometimes summarized and analyzed by the Intellect. Ibn al-Arabi also declares that the Populated House is the Perfect Human [III.295.8] and he adds that the perfect divine form appeared only through the Perfect Human, so he is the heart for the body of the cosmos that is everything other than Allah, and he is the House populated with the Real because he encompassed Him, so his rank is like the heart between Allah and the world because it turns over in every form that each day he is in a task, so he has this divine vastness because Allah the Exalted described Himself as being each day in one task, and the day here is the single indivisible time, so he is in tasks (as many as there are entities in the world) [III.295.9].

In his ascension Ibn al-Arabi says that he saw the Populated House and he discovered that it is his heart [III.350.18], and he explains that Allah established the Populated House, that is called the Grave, in the seventh heaven and it is aligned with Kaaba, and then he goes on to say that this house has two doors through which seventy thousand angels enter every day from the eastern door, that is the door of the rising of lights, and they exit from the western door, that is the door of the hiding of lights, so they enter into the unseen where nobody knows their destiny. He then adds that Allah creates these angels each day from the river of life from the drops that drip when Gabriel shakes off after he immerses himself in this river. These angels when they exit from the western door they meet with the angles created from the thoughts that occur in the heart of every human that are also seventy thousands thoughts each day, because the hearts are all created from this House [II.443.7].

Figure III.3: The Cosmic Heart.

As it is symbolically demonstrated in Figure III.3, the Heart of the Cosmos is the divine Word, or Command, that keeps manifesting in different forms to compose the chapters of the book of the cosmos, and since each word is composed of letters, the entities of all creations are these letters and they keep changing and combining to form the new words that are the different manifestations in the Heart. The letters have different forms and shapes but all are made up of dots that are images of the Universal Spirit that is the real-through-whom-creation-takes-place that is the most perfect image of the Real, Allah the Creator. Thus we can easily understand Ibn al-Arabi s assertion that Allah, the Exalted, is for the heart of the knowing human believer, just like the heart for the human, so He is the Heart-of-the-Heart [III.430.2], that is sometimes called as the Secret , though this is only true for the knowing believer among humans in particular. The heart of other creatures and other humans who may not be so realized in their reality, may be too thick and veiled that its secret has a secret which on its turn has a more subtle secret, so some Sufis have suggested seven layers of secrets where the Real is directly reflected in the most profound secret in the heart [I.117.8]. We can now also understand why the Populated House, that is the Cosmic Heart, is situated in the seventh heaven (the first from above) and why Ibn al-Arabi always associates it with Saturday [II.398.13, II.442.17] that is the day of eternity; the reason is because this orb contains the other six orbs that are responsible for space while this orb is the orb of time.