1.1.3 A Decade of Withdrawal
Driven by the strong motivation towards theoretical physics and cosmology, I took one year off from Cambridge to study mathematics in Germany, hoping that I will be ready after that to enter this challenging field. Fortunately, again, I must say, I found that this specific course which was also specifically supported by a scholarship, is purely technical and would not help me in my endeavor. Actually, deep in my heart, I was not convinced at all why do I have to study complicated mathematical tools to understand the cosmos! After all, Ibn al-Arabi did not know anything about Lie algebra, differential geometry or Riemannian manifolds!
In the next ten years, thereafter, I took several teaching positions at various universities, to support my living and use my free time to study the Meccan Revelations, Ibn al-Arabi’s main book and encyclopedia of Islamic wisdom. Henceforth, I published my first book, in Arabic, about the Path of the Heart, in seeking liberation out of the natural binding ties of the mind and soul. Only after demolishing these complicated connections, the heart could become capable of witnessing the simple metaphysical reality.
As it will be explained further below, the cosmos can be expressed easily in terms of simple Euclidean geometry, but only after understanding the complex nature of time. That is simply because the heart, being the actual observer of reality, is watching the world from a higher dimension, while the mind, together with its corporeal senses, are part of this physical world, so they can only see some partial reflections of this reality, like the mirror images which can reflect only one side of the actual objects. The mind is therefore puzzled at explaining the physical observations in terms of the real dimensions which the heart is experiencing, thus we invented Riemannian geometry to perform such conversion, and this is indeed the best approximation of reality.
The “Path of the Heart” was not directly related to cosmology, but the Sufis hold a firm view and fundamental theory that the cosmos is a mirror image of the human, to the extent that they often describe the human as a “microcosm” and they call the cosmos as the “great human”. Therefore, alongside the journey towards understanding the various spiritual relations and interconnections between the heart, the mind and the soul, we could learn many key insights and reflections about the cosmos itself, sometimes down to the most fine microscopic and physiological or spiritual details. Henceforth, just like every human, the cosmos also have a heart, though we certainly need to know the differences and connections between the fleshly heart that is pumping blood into the physical body, and the spiritual heart that is spreading life and knowledge, and what is the role of the intellect, or the mind, in all that, for both the cosmos and the human beings.