Chapter I: From Physics to Metaphysics

“If the material world rests upon a similar ideal world, this ideal world must rest upon some other; and so on, without end. It were better, therefore, never to look beyond the present material world.”David Hume, Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion

“Moonlight floods the whole sky from horizon to horizon. How much it can fill your room depends on the windows.”Jalaluddin Rumi, The Essential Rumi

“The best and most beautiful things in the world cannot be seen or even touched. They must be felt with the heart.”Helen Keller, The Story of My Life

I grew up on fantastic stories of demons crossing the walls, powerful giant genies bursting out of Aladdin’s magic lamp, and the wind carpet that can transport humans to remote destinations, in addition to other supernatural tales like those found in the One Thousand and One Night stories. Later, with more reliable and authenticated sources, I heard and read numerous accounts that some modest Sufi saints could habitually travel to Mecca for Hajj and return in hours, not to mention the confirmed miracle of the Night Journey of Prophet Muhammad, peace be upon him, who traveled on the steed Buraq to “the farthest mosque” from where he also ascended to heaven, to encounter events that would normally take many years of our local time that we count.

This unconventional sense of space and time created a natural disposition to believe that physical boundaries must be ultimately artificial. Although this was suppressed later after learning science and logic at school, it was greatly reinforced again after studying the modern theories of Relativity and Quantum Mechanics, where various weird phenomena, such as time travel and quantum tunneling, are theoretically predicted and sometimes confirmed experimentally on the microscopic scales.

One of the big questions, that reserved a considerable space at the back of my mind, was about “the world of dreams” and how exactly they could be related to the physical world. Many dreams seem to have undeniable relevance to the physical reality, and sometimes they clearly describe future events with overwhelming details. Conversely, therefore, could the physical world itself be a longer dream that will also end in the same manner, when we wake up into “the real world”! If this is true, then is it possible to access this real world voluntarily, just as we do have some relative control of sleeping and waking?

From time to time, this big question surged to the frontages, often when I read the various books on psychology and philosophy, especially in most religious accounts which talk about the Hereafter and describe our world as “the Lower World”. For example, one narration affirms that “people are asleep, and when they die they actually wake up!”. In this regard also, the Sufis often describe various “types of dying”, or, in fact, “wakening”, some of which are voluntary, and easily reversible. it is also overwhelmingly evident that all their numerous and detailed descriptions of the hypothetical “Higher World” cannot be sheer fantasy. In their numerous books, many Sufis give detailed accounts of their voyages to other Earths and meeting other creatures or people who had already ceased many centuries ago, and even those who are not born yet. There is no chance that all these astounding stories are merely the product of human fantasy that physicists, philosophers and cosmologists, who are trying to understand the world, keep ignoring them.

Of course, physics theories usually deal with more practical and applicable ideas, away from these “non-realistic” conceptions. However, as the modern theories of physics have already developed to the cutting edges, they are being confronted by many contradictions and sharp phenomena that have no place in the material aspects of nature. As a result, physicists are now open to more considerations beyond the classical boundaries of physics.

Actually, at some earlier stages in the history of modern science, the distinction between metaphysics and physics was shallow, and many other diverting subjects, including mathematics, cosmology, and ontology, were all studied under the umbrella of natural philosophy. The reason why these fields are not anymore connected in modern science as they used to be in philosophy is simply because of the industrial revolution which produced many applied fields and subfields even within physics itself, but the main theoretical physics cannot be detached from metaphysics and philosophy.

By the merit of its own fundamental nature, the subject of time permeates all the diverging fields of science and philosophy, and it is the only notion that is going to unit them together again; as it turned out to be the most fundamental and primordial structure of EVERYTHING, including the physical and metaphysical worlds, with all their narrower fields and conceptions, such as: space, atoms, and particles, in addition to the psychological realms of souls, minds and spirits; all are linear chronological instances of time. This means that, just like the physical world, the psychical world is also made of atoms and molecules, so the dreams are as true as the normal material experiences, except that they evolve in a time direction that is orthogonal to our time, and both are genuinely imaginary, while the real world is only momentarily accessible through discrete perceptions that may become realized in certain situations such as terminal death or the voluntary Sufi realization.

In this way, the Duality of Time will not only unite Relativity with Quantum Mechanics, leading to full Quantum Field Theory of gravity, and explaining the other fundamental interactions in terms of its complex-time geometry, but also uniting all that with the ontic or psychological realms, and thus replacing the theory of super-symmetry with the hidden symmetry that is already present through the same anti-particles in the Standard Model, thus also explaining the apparent baryonic asymmetry, the hierarchy problem, and many other fundamental issues.