1.2 The First Serious Study
For this reason, after about ten years of retreating away from traditional physics and cosmology, I decided to take it a step further; so I started to communicate with recognized scholars in the subject, until I decided to do the Ph.D. with Prof. James W. Morris at Exeter University.
My general theme was to study Ibn al-Arabi’s cosmology, and I remember that in the early correspondence with Prof. Morris he told me that this subject had not been seriously tackled since the time of Henrik S. Nyberg (1889-1974), in his famous critical commentary and translation of three related short books by Ibn al-Arabi: “Kleinere Schriften des Ibn al-Arabi” which was published in 1919. He also acknowledged that this really requires someone who is knowledgeable and interested in both physics and Sufism at the same time. However, cosmology, or cosmogony, is a broad field; so after some discussion we settled on the subject of “time”, which turned out to be the key.
However, after performing all the initial stages and summarizing the interdisciplinary literature survey and other diverse investigations, and after collecting the relevant materials from Ibn al-Arabi’s extensive literature that he deliberately spread over his many enigmatic books, I found that it is absolutely impossible to put it together in any scientific manner, according to the current logic. For example, on the one hand he frequently confirmed that there is a minimum indivisible time, and yet on the other hand he also confirmed that this time is the normal twenty-four hours day itself. He also says that Saturday is the day of eternity and all the days of the week, including Saturday itself, are occurring in Saturday!
These, and other complex issues, were later explained in the previous books, but I wanted to mention it in this introduction to show again how much our common sense and complicated rational thinking is really creating the big obstacle that is preventing us from understanding the simple reality. It was very hard for me, even after more than two decades of preparation and spiritual guidance, to overcome this obstacle.
At various stages I decided to stop the project, and even towards the end I simply decided to put these problems as they are without being able to provide any logical explanation, until the door was slightly opened and it was put all together in the initial Single Monad Model. Few days before this happened, I saw in a dream that I was circumambulating the Kaaba and its door was suddenly opened to me and I entered inside, looked at the sky through its roof, and a gust of heavy rain started falling.
However, the duality nature of time was not very clear in the first version of the Single Monad Model, although a special chapter was devoted to the concept of the intertwining between week days, which is in fact the intertwining between the inner and outer levels of time.