6.7 - Comments on the Opening Poem

“If you consider existence as mere example, you could manage it to the right or to the left.

With knowledge, you could bring it down to the earth, or you could make it a full moon when it is a crescent.

You could make it a bejeweled crown on the head, after it was a shoe in the foot of time.

Spanning all the universes east and west, as well as everywhere between them, north and south.

How often we have perceived in it some real deficiency, but when we came closer we only saw perfection!

How often have you asked Allah to provide your needs, and how often have you answered His requests?

My sun is rising on it, and at that, the shadows are extended over all the worlds.”

Ibn al-Arabi (Diwan, p. 333)

At the beginning of the Bezels of Wisdom, Shaykh Muhyiddin says that: “The Cosmos is imaginary, yet it is in reality: real, and that who appreciates this fact, has truly accomplished all the secrets of the Path.” Therefore, although the cosmos is ontologically real, we can only perceive its manifestations though our active imagination which plays an essential role on how we view and interact with the reality, thus evolving with it, or making it evolve with our perception. In effect, this means that we can, in principle, have full control of events and not just live through them as passive objects.

This essential fact that Ibn al-Arabi is alluding here in this poem, quoted at the top of this chapter, is otherwise known as the “(Imaginary) Reality of Realities”, which is neither existing nor non-existing, because it can be imagined without having any real entity. Our temporal existence in this world is actualized through this imaginary reality.

We have discussed this with more details in the introduction of the “Book of Eternity”, while in the “Duality of Time” this essential reality of existence has been applied to discover the complex-time geometry that is based on the reality of imaginary numbers, and we have shown in the final chapter of this book that this is the secret of Alchemy that is indeed the original Quantum Theory because it manipulates the very geometrical points of space which are being dynamically re-created in the real levels of time.

Therefore, when we are able to dive into these real levels of time where everything is being created at every instance, we could manage them as we want, to the right or to the left!

The right and left here are the two extreme states of water and air, which are the two complex numbers (c, 0) and (0, c) respectively, where “c” is the speed of light that is the speed of creation. We showed that these two states are occurring as a result of splitting the seven heavens into fire: (c, c) and earth: (0, 0), so that: (c, c) + (0, 0) = (c, 0) + (0, c).