4.2.7  Creation Scenario

Later Muslim writers, especially the great masters of mystical poetry in Persian and other Eastern Islamic languages, developed a great range of familiar symbolic forms intended to elaborate and communicate the basic Quranic imagery for the cosmological processes and their symbolic expression that we have discovered in the writings of Ibn al-Arabi. One of the most powerful and multi-faceted of those images was Ibn al-Arabi’s famous account reminiscent of the Sun-Line-Cave section of Plato’s Republic, of the Universe as a vast “shadow-theatre”, a true “divine Comedy”. Thus in contemporary terms, based on the concept of perpetual cosmic re-creation that we have explained in section 2.1, we may envisage the world as like a movie being displayed on a computer monitor. It is quite fascinating to discover that this analogy is quite accurate in most of the details, even regarding what happens inside the computer, since the Universal Intellect can be considered as a kind of “supercomputer” which creates, organizes the world and displays it in the Universal Tablet that we described in section 3.1. Ibn al-Arabi already asserted that the world appears as “living, hearing, seeing, knowing, willing, able and speaking” with the same seven fundamental Attributes of the Real, also described further in section 4.7. This is because the world is His divine work, and as Allah said: (everyone works according to his own type) [17:84, II.438.19]. This is also equivalent to what we have repeatedly noted: that the Perfect Human Being and the world, including individual human beings, are all created “according to the Image” of the Real, and that they are also the second-level shadows of the Real.

Likewise the computer today is certainly created as a certain kind of “image” of some specific aspects of the human mind, and certainly the way the computer works resembles the human mind in many respects. However the shadow or the image, in the mirror for example, resembles at best only one facet of the original. Likewise, human beings don’t fully resemble the Real, just as computers don’t, and cannot, fully resemble humans in many other respects.

As we have seen, Ibn al-Arabi repeatedly showed that in many respects both the world and the essential human being work in the same way. That is why he generally considers the macrocosm as a great human being and the human being as a microcosm [III.11.18]. Just as our own world is essentially constituted by the meanings, images and states that are reflected in our spirit, soul and intellect, so the world also reflects the divine “meanings” brought into creation by the Universal Intellect, so that the phenomena that we perceive are the doubly reflected forms of these original meanings. However, Ibn al-Arabi also repeatedly asserts that the world wouldn’t exist if the observing “eye”, or also: “I” as the identity, of the viewer is not there. So because of the underlying reality of the created world as essentially “imaginal” forms or multiple “reflections”, we can only understand the cosmos if we understand how we perceive it, since for Ibn al-Arabi it is all ultimately, and quite literally “in the mind”, albeit a different kind of “Mind” at each level of manifestation. We will also see in chapter V how these concepts play an essential role in the Duality of Time interpretation of Quantum Mechanics, and particularly on the effect of measurement and how the wave-function collapses.

It is known that the movie which is displayed on the cinema screen is composed of a large number of succeeding still pictures that pass rapidly before the eye at very short intervals, so that the human mind observes only smooth changes between those successive pictures. By running this movie at the proper speed we feel, by illusion, as if a normal motion of objects and images is happening on the screen. If we suppose that the screen has no visible edges, and especially with the new technology of three-dimensional holographic movies, it would be very hard initially to distinguish this illusion from reality.

Now if we examine how the picture is displayed on the screen of the computer monitor, for example, we realize that it is even more closely similar to Ibn al-Arabi’s view of creation. In this way the whole cosmos is a combination and rapid succession of imaginal forms, or shadows, that are created by or through the Single Monad in a similar manner to the single electron beam which is creating the picture on the computer screen, one pixel at a time.

As Ibn al-Arabi has pointed out, the Single Monad is continuously and perpetually “wearing” new forms, which make us observe and otherwise experience motion. When we open our eyes we see a picture of many things around us, and if we keep on watching we see things moving. Each mental picture is also created in series and not all at once. Therefore, at every single instance and at each single point of space there exists a monad with a specific unique form. This same monad, still in the same instant, for us, but a full divine “Week” for the Monad itself, since we only exist for one moment in this Week, as we shall describe further in section 4.4, takes another form but in another point of space, and so on. So in one single instant, the picture that we see is a combination of a huge number of reflected forms of the same Single Monad, which scans the whole of space at no time for us, and without real motion on the part of the Single Monad, because space itself is what we subjectively experience as a consequence of the succession of forms within this Single Monad, and motion is meaningless when we talk about one single all-encompassing entity, but it is only change of states.

It takes the Single Monad a full “Week” of creation to scan all the states in the cosmos, but since each one of us is one single state, as spiritual observers, or consciousnesses, not as corporeal bodies, we live a single moment in each full “Week of event”, in which we observe the other states around and within us as the traces or memory of the forms left over by the Monad after it has passed over them in one linear sequence. Ibn al-Arabi succinctly referred to this cosmological fact, in a favorite image of the later mystical poets, right in his Forward to the Meccan Revelations, when he said:

‘Then He released the Breath (of the All-Merciful), and the water waved because of its vibration, and foamed ... Then the water diffidently withdrew and returned back heading for the middle, but it left over its foam on the shore that it produced. The world is the churning of this water that contains most things.’ [I.4.7]

The “water” here is also another name to the Single Monad itself, or maybe the Greatest Element, because in the famous expression of the Quran: (every thing was created from the Water) [21:30], and the “foam” is the created forms, or their images, or traces, left over by the Single Monad after it has “scanned” into existence the created world, in six divine Days, from Sunday to Friday, and then, on Saturday, returned back to the middle to start over anew [II.438.3]. That is why Ibn al-Arabi also affirms that the cosmological “ruler” of the last Day of time, Saturday, has the ability of holding and fixing (i.e., memory), in order to hold the cosmic picture and integrate it with what follows. For this reason Ibn al-Arabi describes Saturday as the Day of Eternity, as we shall see in section 4.8.7.

If this perpetual creative motion of the Single Monad is conceptually “stopped” and taken in isolation, all this will form a kind of “still picture” of things around us, including our bodies and as spirits or states of realization. Within this conception, the dynamic manifest world, then, is the instantaneous, continuously renewed succession of these slightly changing still pictures. As we showed in section 4.6, motion is observed because things successively appear in different places, but indeed there is no actual motion: for the observed objects are always at rest in the different positions that they appear in, because Allah is constantly re-creating the cosmos in ever-renewed forms.

What we have just explained is exactly similar to what happens on the screen of the computer monitor: when we look at the screen at any instance of time, we see a still picture that is composed of an array of dots, or pixels, in the two dimensions of the screen; for example 800 horizontal by 600 vertical pixels. As demonstrated in Figure 4.3, this still picture is made by a single electron beam that scans the screen over and over again, one pixel at a time. It starts from the bottom left corner of the screen and scans horizontally all the 800 pixels that form one horizontal line, then it switches back to the left to make the second line, and so on till all the screen is scanned, ending up by the upper right corner; just to switch back again in order to start a new picture from the bottom left corner, in the same way. Because this process is performed at very high speed or refresh rates, around a hundred million times per second, we only see a continuous picture in the two dimensions; we never see the pixels being drawn one by one. By watching the continuous swift succession of pictures, we observe motion. While the beam is creating them, each pixel on the screen takes a specific form of a certain color and intensity that may slightly change from one frame to the other, creating the illusion of motion. This momentary form that the pixels wear every time they are scanned lasts only during the very short time while the beam is in its place. Once the beam leaves the pixel to the next one, the form vanishes intrinsically; we only see the traces of these forms for a short time till they are scanned again to wear a new form.

Figure 4.3: The dynamic world is exactly similar to the images displayed on the screen of a computer monitor, where each frame is composed of an array of dots, or pixels, in the two dimensions of the screen, and they are all created by a single electron beam that scans the screen over and over again, one pixel at a time. Because this process is performed at very high speed or refresh rates, we see, by illusion, a dynamic pictures moving in the two dimensions of the screen; we never see the pixels being drawn one by one.

In terms of Ibn al-Arabi’s understanding of the cosmogonic process, the electron beam here is like the Single Monad, the screen is like our internal imagination, but also, outwardly or objectively, it is like the effective “substrate” that we described above as Universal Tablet; while the cosmos is like the series of pictures on the screen, which are printed on our imagination and in the Universal Tablet. Ibn al-Arabi’s description of the world is identical to this example of the computer monitor, even the names that he gives to the Single Monad as the “Higher Pen” and to the cosmic Soul as the “Higher Tablet”, indicate that the process of creation is similar to the process of a pen’s writing on a tablet, which is also similar to the electron-beam writing on the screen. To take yet another of Ibn al-Arabi’s most favored cosmological images, we creatures are the “letters” and the “words” that are spoken by the Creator through the creative Breath of the All-Merciful, after having been written down by the Higher Pen on the Higher Tablet, as we also described above.

It is fascinating to notice that this analogy between the world and the computer applies to many of the details, and not only with regard to the visible manifest world, but also to the spiritual world that is analogous to the processor, the memory, the hard disk and the software running inside the computer. It is enough to notice that the processor of the computer, no matter how fast it may be and how many jobs it may do very quickly, but it can only do one elementary job at a time. So from outside we see multiple processes and many images, running and interacting, but from inside only one thing is manipulating all that, one by one, in series, one single bit at a time.