Chapter II: Ancient Philosophy and Cosmology

“People, and most other creatures, don’t feel the motion of the world because it is all moving; so the witnessed dimensions don’t change. That is exactly why they also don’t feel the Earth’s revolution around its center.”Ibn al-Arabi, The Meccan Revelations: II.677.21

“It was written in one of the Pyramids of Egypt, that it had been built when (the constellation of) Aquila was in Leo (zone 5), and now it is clearly in Capricorn (zone 10) as we see it today (around 1236 AD). This means that the ‘fixed stars’ are actually moving in the zodiac!”Ibn al-Arabi, The Meccan Revelations, I.141.18

“If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe.”Carl Sagan, Cosmos

As far as we can trace back in recorded history, the origins of cosmology are rooted in Mesopotamia, the region of Tigris-Euphrates river system now including Iraq, Syria and south-eastern Turkey, where the Sumerians, Akkadians, Babylonians and Assyrians inhabited from the onset of written history around 3100 BC.

The Sumerians developed sophisticated astronomy with advanced mathematics based on the sexagesimal system, that is still being used today in reporting time, including the modern ongoing practice of dividing the circle into 360 degrees, each degree into 60 minutes, and each minute into 60 seconds.

We will see in chapter VII that this system is indeed not a simple convention at all, as we are used to think. Dividing the circle into 360 degrees is actually profoundly related to the theoretical value of the speed of light in vacuum and the corresponding three-dimensional structure of space-time geometry. It is enough to notice here that the ancient astrological tradition of dividing the heavens into twelve zodiac zones, and the day and night each into twelve hours, can be connected to the modern Strings and Quantum Field theories that are forced to apply complex analysis to manipulate infinites and divergences. For example, the infinite divergent summation of all natural numbers:, is commonly manipulated to converge into:

Additionally, there are various overwhelming evidences that ancient philosophies and cosmologies were actually advanced and accurate much more than what we have ever thought, and we may eventually need to return back to these arcane interpretations of nature, that had been long dismissed because they did not appear to make any sense according to our theories of physics and cosmology. However, when interpreted correctly, these ancient conceptions can be reconciled with our modern views and may also be the only way to reconcile the deep discrepancies between our own different theories.

For example; the classical elements: earth, water, air, and fire, which the Sumerians, and many later civilizations, employed to explain the complexity of nature, can be interpreted as the four condensation levels of aether, that is the background space which is created dynamically in the inner levels of time as we introduced in chapter I and will explain further in chapter VII. These four elements, together with their quint-essence, are indeed the five levels of time that correspond to the various possible degrees of freedom, or the dimensions, starting from the metaphysical onenessand up to the three dimensions,, andof physical multiplicity that is dynamically evolving through the outer time. So in total we have four levels of dynamic existence in time:,,, and, which become seven when considering the two opposite directions of each one of the three spatial dimensions:,, and.

From these seven levels of time come the seven days of the week, while the seven heavens and seven earths are actually the two extreme states of each one of these seven levels of time, which correspond to vacuum and void, from which all the states of matter are composed. The ancients, therefore, have sound reasons to call them heavens and earths, because these two extreme states actually correspond to waves and particles, or energy and mass, or light and matter, respectively. So indeed everything in nature is made from these four ultimate elements, while the compounds that we find in Mendeleev periodic table of chemical elements, and also the elementary particles of the Standard Model, are only two humble steps towards this ancient unification that we believe to have been long superseded!

It is no coincidence that most ancient civilizations devised their theories around closely similar ideas, that we came to dismiss only because we could not understand their realities. I believe that the essential conceptions in most ancient civilizations were originally exquisitely revealed through prophets and saints of various religions, but subsequently transformed into legends and myths. The role of philosophers and scientists was rediscovering these divine conceptions and trying to restore them into their original correct form, after the repeated misinterpretation throughout the long history, especially with the lack of any adequate means of preservation or communication. Although this have greatly changed in the last era, we keep neglecting and ignoring important historical records and books, believing that they have been already superseded by our modern theories.

Therefore, it is extremely important to study the ancients’ cosmology and natural philosophy and theology in order to understand their original conceptions and interpret them correctly in the light of our various advanced modern theories that have been facing their own critical discrepancies and contradictions in the last century. Indeed, these same conceptual conflicts between the various leading theories had already occurred repeatedly before at peak times in ancient history. In one way or another, the newer theories have always managed to find practical solutions but never really solved the contradiction. The best example in this regard is Zeno’s paradoxes of motion and multiplicity, which are the first mathematical formulation of the conflict between the discretuum and continuum views of space and time. These paradoxes have been supposedly refuted in different philosophical and mathematical methods, but now the same conflict is raging again between Relativity and Quantum theories, as manifested in the cosmological constant problem that produced about one hundred and twenty orders of magnitude discrepancy in calculating the vacuum energy between these two leading theories of modern physics and cosmology. This huge discrepancy is a critical catastrophe that can no longer be deferred by any more practical solutions. The Duality of Time is promising in this regard because it provides a fundamental solution by introducing an essential conception that is able to bridge the gap between physics and metaphysics, by pushing the fundamental philosophical observations to a new profound level, beyond the physical boundaries, because the most basic principle of causality becomes now a consequence of the sequential metaphysical creation in the inner levels of time.

In this chapter, we want to give a comprehensive review of the main ancient conceptions and how they developed throughout the history that preceded the current modern theories, which will be reviewed in chapter III. It will be noticed that there have been always two opposite views, manifested in various ways, such as: the continuum and discretuum structure of space, the atomic and substance theories of matter, the geocentric and heliocentric models of the universe, and the modern relativity and quantum theories. Scientists and philosophers are stuck between these two walls because they are studying the various phenomena of physical multiplicity, while reality is indivisible. Other philosophers have studied the metaphysical or ontological oneness of nature, but they could not make any application of it, because their theories were all abstract and incomplete. As we have repeatedly said, the Duality of Time connects between the ontological reality of oneness and the phenomenological multiplicity, which will make all the previous opposing views complementary.