4.3  Origin and Structure of the Cosmos

Ibn al-Arabi declares that the fundamental reason for creating the world is divine “Love”. In explaining this ultimate underlying principle he often refers to a famous divine saying; the Holy Hadith of the Hidden Treasure, quoted at beginning of this chapter. According to this narration, Allah says that He was a hidden or unknown Treasure, so He “loved” to become known, thus He created the creation, and revealed Himself to them, in order to grant them the privilege of coming to know Him. Therefore, this Allah’s love to become known is a Mercy from Him that He wanted to grant to all His creatures. This Mercy is, therefore, the first state of the presence of Allah with regard to the world to be created, and hence it formed the abstract “space” in which the cosmos would appear.

Following indications in another prophetic Hadith, Ibn al-Arabi calls this abstract space as the Primordial Cloud. According to his account, mainly in chapter 371 of the Meccan Revelations, the reality of this cloud accepted the forms of the “Roaming Spirits” that Allah created directly, without any intermediaries. This direct creation caused these angelic Spirits to roam, completely absorbed, in the presence of Allah, knowing nothing but Him. They don’t even know about themselves, i.e., they have no self-consciousness. Allah then appointed one of these Spirits and granted him a special epiphany of divine Knowledge that engraved in him all what Allah wants to create, through him, in this entire cosmos, until the Last Day. The other primal Spirits could not know about that, because they are completely absorbed in divine Presence.

This initial epiphany of knowledge caused this Spirit, that is then called the First Intellect, or the Universal Intellect, or also, using a central Quranic symbol, the Higher Pen, to become aware both of himself and of the other Spirits, while they didn’t know about him. Among many other names and descriptions, mentioned further in section 2.3, the First Intellect is also called the Single Monad, especially when we talk about physical creation and the cosmos, but this actually also includes the metaphysical creation.

According to Ibn al-Arabi’s distinctive, and controversial, conception of the Oneness of Being, the realities of things in the Universe are nothing but imaginary forms or reflections of this unique Single Monad that is the only created entity that can be described as having a real existence, while all other things are merely its various imaginary forms, including “vision and the visible, hearing and the heard, imagination and the imaginable, thinking and the thinkable, ... etc” [III.404.12]. For this reason also, one of the other interesting names of the Single Monad is Everything, because it is actually creating every single thing, physical and metaphysical.

This theory of creation, the Single Monad Model Model, is therefore the Theory of Everything; first because of the reality of the Single Monad that is Everything, and then because it is the only way to incorporate the two contrasting theories of Classical and Quantum Mechanics, since the first, even in its modern form of Relativity, supposes space and time, or both together, to be continuous, thus it is based on the the physical nature of particles, while the latter stems from the discrete nature of energy and fields, and thus it is based on the metaphysical nature of waves. Particles and waves are actually two contrasting phenomena, so they can’t be both true descriptions of the physical reality, but they are two emerging phenomena of the indivisible oneness reality of the Single Monad that combines them both and makes them complementary, as we shall explain in chapter V.

The importance of understanding the reality of time is, therefore, in providing the link between the actual oneness of the Single Monad and the apparent multiplicity of the witnessed physical world, where the two complementary phenomena of particles and waves take place. For this reason, Ibn al-Arabi says that: “the science of time is a noble science, through which (the meaning of) Eternity is truly revealed. ... But only the elites of Sages, among the Men of Truth, may know (the reality of) Eternity, that is also known as the First Age or the Age of ages. From this Eternity time emerged” [I.156.34-157.1].

Based on this account, Ibn al-Arabi stresses that love is the primary cause of all kinds of physical and metaphysical motion in the Universe, and this requires four essential properties: life and knowledge, and then willing and ability, which are the source of the four elements of Nature: water, earth, air and fire, respectively. For this reason, the Universal Soul is supplied with two forces, responsible for physical and metaphysical motion, and also directly linked to physical and psychological time, as we shall see in section 3.1 further below.

The Principle of Love, as the primary cause of first creation and all subsequent motion, or re-creation, is the most fundamental principle from which the principle of least time or stationary action is derived. We talked about the principle of action in chapter II (section 15) and we have seen in chapter III how the various theories, including General Relativity and Quantum Field Theory, applied this principle to formulate their mathematical models, but we will see further in chapter VI how the Principle of Love leads to the fundamental dualities in nature, and mainly to the Duality of Time.

Love, is therefore, not only a moral or ethical quality, but a natural physical inclination in all objects and particles in this world to unite with their “partners” in the “mirror-world” that exists in the “reverse time” direction, in parallel with our own world that exists in the normal time direction that we encounter. These two parallel worlds are intertwined together, and when the union is instantly achieved between the two opposite directions of time, they annihilate together to create one dimension of space, or energy, but also instantly separate again to return to their physical disconnection. The creation is always perpetually fluctuating between these two states of mass and energy, or particles and waves, or space and time, in our normal three-dimensional space, but also other corresponding dualities in lower, and possibly higher, dimensions, as it will be elaborated further in chapter V. This is quite similar to the concept of space-time foam which decays into virtual particles and antiparticles that then annihilate back to energy without violating physical conservation laws. This model, therefore, explains creation ex nihilo, but as “after nothing”, rather than “from nothing”, and from this essential difference we will be able to find the ratio between “one” and “infinity”:and also calculate the speed of light.