1.1.2 Enters Ibn al-Arabi
In Cambridge, I used to sit with my friends, who share similar interests on philosophy and mysticism, and we used to discuss the various emerging views and modern theories concerning physics and cosmology. We were particularly fascinated by those weired predictions that emerged from the principles of relativity and quantum theories. Hence, one of the turning points in my life was certainly when one of my friends, Ahmad Achtar, now a lecturer at the University of London, pointed out to me that Muhyiddin Ibn al-Arabi had already presented, in his various books, many of those weird ideas and innovative cosmological conceptions. I could not believe, at that time, how someone could possibly have any good model of the cosmos, many centuries before the recent revolution in science and technology! He did not even have any telescopes or computers to analyze his observations and test his conceptions.
Nonetheless, shortly after I started reading Ibn al-Arabi’s works, I realized that despite the amazing achievements of modern science and technology, physicists, astronomers and cosmologists are simply looking in the wrong direction, and using erroneous and extremely limited intellectual and technical tools, that at most may provide some partial and distorted images of the immense and complex macroscopic and microscopic Universe. Conversely, instead of relying on the intellect alone to analyze the apparent motion of celestial objects, mystics chose to contemplate, meditate and reflect upon their inner dimensions; via the heart rather than the mind.