7.2.3  The Seven Heavens

Allah says in Quran: (Have the Unbelievers not considered that the heavens and the earth were entangled, thus We split them, and We made from water everything living? Will they not believe then?) [21:30]. Many Muslim scholars, including Ibn al-Arabi, usually apply this verse to explain how the planet Earth and the skies, or celestial orbs, or the upper spheres, were all mixed together, then the element earth, and the planet Earth, or heavy elements in general, were gradually separated from the lighter elements and aether to form the planets and stars [II.677-678].

However, more fundamental cosmological concepts can be obtained when we consider the original abstract meanings of the words “heaven” and “earth”, in Arabic as well as in English, which respectively have the meanings of “ceiling” and “ground”. So if we take these concepts of “high” and “low” in the absolute sense, based on the conclusions in sections 3, 4 and 6 from chapter VI above, that the Universal Body and the Initial Body of the cosmos are expressed in terms of the complex-time geometry asandrespectively, while the Universal Spirit is, we can then consider the earth as the Universal Bodyand the heavens are the Universal Spirit, because they correspond to the lowest state and highest state(s) of space-time, respectively, while water is, because thisflat space describes the state of super-fluid as we shall see shortly.

The reason why the heavens are plural is because of the seven different space-time degrees of freedom that include the six internal levels that constitute the three dimensions of space, and one for the outer time, while the earthis the common ground state for all these seven levels, although each heaven has its own corresponding earth, or ground state, in the corresponding level, thus we actually have seven heavens and seven earths, as it is alluded in various theological texts.

Hence, according to the Quranic verse [21:30] quoted above, these seven heavensand their absolute earthwere initially entangled and then they have been split into the physical world and its anti-world that exist in parallel; on two opposite arrows of time, and they are continuously interacting, or perpetually annihilating and splitting again, or converting between mass and energy according to the famous equation, that had been derived in chapter V based on the Duality of Time hypothesis.

The reason why we do not notice this Cosmic Annihilation, that is taking place at every instance of time, is because it is happening in the inner levels, but in reality it is these fundamental interaction(s) that are causing all kinds of perceptions, which are the interactions between the physical and psychical worlds.

This innovative conception opens many doorways to great physical and psychical sciences that may take many books to introduce, but for example; this is what the ancient theory of vision, or perception in general, meant by saying that vision occurs as a result of the meeting of two lights: one from the object and one from the eye. In this regard Ibn al-Arabi stresses that the light beam of the Sun does not have any existential reality in its own right, without the light of the sight that actually perceives it. He says that the Sun, and all other objects, or “sources of light”, would not have any beams of light, emitted from or reflected on them, if there were no observers to see this! He admits, however, that this is an extremely tricky issue that is very difficult to believe [II.666.22]. Nevertheless, under some modern interpretations of Quantum Mechanics, this state of consciousness is the only way to explain many weired phenomena, as we have explained in section 4.5 of chapter III.

Actually, it is only hard to imagine how abstract meanings could have the same structure as the physical world because our classical conception of matter, that is based on our direct rough macroscopic experience, is simply not correct at all. With the quantum behavior of atomic particles, it becomes necessary to think of matter in more abstract forms, such as fields or forces. So in reality, we should say that it is the physical world that is like the psychical or abstract meanings, but we only happened to have performed much more studies and experiments in physics than in psychology, otherwise it may have been easier to explain everything in terms of space-time, which are naturally abstract psychological concepts, since they are primarily conceived by imagination.