I.4.2 Creation as a Movie

Based on the concept of perpetual cosmic re-creation, the World can be envisaged like a movie displayed on a computer monitor. This analogy is quite accurate in most of the details, even regarding to what happens inside the computer, since the Single Monad, that is the Universal Intellect, can be considered as a kind of super-computer which creates and manipulates the World, and displays it in the Universal Tablet that is the World-Soul, as depicted in the various figures in Chapter IV of Volume II.

Ibn al-Arabi asserts that the World appears with the same seven fundamental Attributes of the Real, because the World is His divine work, and as Allah said: (everyone works according to his own type) [Quran, 17:84, and Futuhat, II.438.19]. Therefore, the Perfect Human and the World, including individual human beings, are all created according to the Image of the Real, and that s why Ibn al-Arabi considers the macrocosm as a great human being and the human being as a microcosm [Futuhat, III.11.18]. Likewise the computer is a certain kind of image of some specific aspects of the human mind, because the way it 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, such as consciousness and free will, even though this is possible in principle.

It is known that the movie which is displayed on the 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 the film 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. Similarly, the Single Monad is continuously and perpetually wearing new forms, which make us observe and experience motion, by mere illusion or creative imagination.

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 image is also internally created in one chronological sequence, 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 instance, for us, but a full divine Week for the Single Monad itself, since we only exist for one moment in this Week, takes another form in another point of space, and so on. So in one single instance of time, 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 these forms within this Single Monad, and motion is meaningless when we talk about one single all-encompassing entity, but it is only some outward change of states.

It takes the Single Monad a full Week of creation to scan all the states in the cosmos, but since each individual observer is one single state, as conscious observers and not as corporeal bodies, they live a single moment in each full Week of event , in which they observe the other surrounding states as the traces or memory of the forms left over by the Monad after it has passed over them in one linear chronological sequence.

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. 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.

When we look at the screen of a computer monitor, 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 I.6, this still picture is made by a single electron beam that scans the screen over and over again, one pixel at a time, starting from the lower left corner of the screen, and scanning horizontally all the 800 pixels that form one horizontal line, then switching back to the left to make the second line, and so on till all the whole 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, and we never see the pixels being displayed 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 I.7: The dynamic World is analogous to the sequence of images, or a movie, 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, producing one pixel at a time. Because this process is performed at very high speed or refresh rates, we see, by illusion, a dynamic character moving in the two dimensions of the screen.