4.3.2 The Throne and Its Contents
Figure 4.5: The Throne and what it contains down to the Pedestal. the Universal Body, which is the first physical existent, may be though of as the primary particle from which all other particles are being created perpetually, one by one, or it can also be though of as a cloud containing all other particles.
As shown in Figure 4.6, the Universal Body seems to contain everything beneath it including the zodiac, with all the stars and galaxies. Alternatively, we can consider that the physical world is formed “by”, rather than “in”, the Universal Body because, like the Universal Intellect and Soul, this Body is called the First Body because it was the first particle to be created, and the following particles are merely its perpetual recurrence in the real flow of time, because the world, both as material and spiritual, is formed by the Single Monad through the continuous manifestations of this Monad, so the Universal Body is its physical image. If we then consider that the First Body was the first elementary particle to be formed by the Single Monad then the physical world is formed by this First Body, but the other possibility is that the Universal Body is some sort of a huge cloud of matter in primary form, which then developed into stars and galaxies, as it is the current view of modern cosmology, in which case we could say that the physical world is formed in the Universal Body.
The first thing which was formed in, or by, the Universal Body was the Throne, on which Allah established his authority, as the Creator and Sustainer of the Universe, all from His divine Name: the All-Merciful, which means that all creatures beneath the Throne are to be granted the creative Mercy of their existence from Him. Therefore the first thing that the Highest Pen or First Intellect wrote in the Higher Tablet or Universal Soul was this Throne in which the entire creation is to appear and develop with the flow of time, as shown in Figure 4.5.
Inside, or beneath, this divine Throne there appeared the Pedestal, whose relative dimension and plenitude, in comparison to the infinitely vast dimensions of the Throne, Ibn al-Arabi compares here to a tiny ring in a vast desert. And within this Pedestal is the sphere of the divisions of the zodiac, as in Figure 4.6, and the sphere of the fixed stars, or constellations, including beneath them the separate orbs of the five planets, the Sun, the Moon, and the Earth, as depicted further in Figure 4.7.