Most of these introductory articles are exracted from Volume I of the Single Monad Model of the Cosmos: Ibn al-Arabi's View of Time and Creation... more on this can be found here.
Oneness and the Four Levels of Symmetry
In fact, the complex-time geometry concludes that we are imagining the reality because we are observing it from a genuinely imaginary time dimension. Since the ultimate reality is One, we cannot view it from outside, because there is none! Thus, as we quoted in the Introduction, in the Book of Theophanies, Ibn al-Arabi ascribes to God as saying:
``Listen, O My beloved!
I am the conclusive entity of the World.
I am the center of the circle (of existence) and its circumference.
I am its simple point and its compound whole.
I am the Word descending between heaven and earth.
I have created perceptions for you only to perceive Me.
If you then perceive Me, you perceive yourself.
But don't ever crave to perceive Me through yourself!
It is through My Eyes that you see Me and see yourself.
But through your own eyes you can never see Me!''
When we look from outside, which is absolutely impossible, Ultimate Symmetry is trivial, because it means that all possible transformations produce the same original configuration. In the full abstract sense, this is only possible for flat unbounded space with infinite number of dimensions, which is also equivalent to one abstract geometrical point in this space. With such a perfect symmetry, no change is conceivable at all, and therefore there is no time in this ultimate state of absolute oneness that has been briefly described by Parmenides in his single renowned work, a poem called ``On Nature'', where he explained that existence is timeless and uniform, and reality is one and unchanging. However, Parmenides was not able to convince other prominent philosophers, such as Socrates and Aristotle, so his student Zeno tried again by reformulating the same argument in terms of what to become known as Zeno's paradoxes that have never been resolved ever since, and we don't have access to their original teachings, which may have been mostly oral. Remarkably, there is a profound correspondence between the metaphysical views of Parmenides and Ibn al-Arabi's doctrine of the Oneness of Being that has been developed to the Single Monad Model of the Cosmos and Duality of Time Theory in the previous two volumes.
Nevertheless, although we do have access to the most important works of Ibn al-Arabi, spanning hundreds of books and tens of thousands of pages, even in their original forms, in his own hand writing, in addition to the various extensive interpretations offered by his direct followers and close students, but his outstanding philosophy has not been yet given the required attention, mainly because of the difficult symbolic language he habitually used, in addition to the fact that he intentionally scattered his controversial conceptions over his many works and in different contexts within his magnum opus, the Meccan Revelations, and other shorter books and treatises.
Although he did never use the term directly, the Oneness of Being is one of the most controversial doctrines which many later Muslim scholars attributed to Ibn al-Arabi, usually with various polemic meanings and interpretations. In the same context in western philosophy, Spinoza introduced the pantheistic concept of God and His relation with the World, in a way that may resemble Ibn al-Arabi's view of the Oneness of Being, which lead some scholars to consider Ibn al-Arabi as pantheist who identify God with the world, although he often declares in many ways, according to the original Islamic creed, that the Essence of God can not be compared to anything. Unlike Spinoza and all other philosophers, Ibn al-Arabi relies on intuitive knowledge, rather than reason that can not produce true knowledge of God.
Practically, therefore, it is not possible to describe the Ultimate Symmetry of the Essence of God, since He is absolutely Unique One, and can not be confined to dimensions or compared to any other entities, because there is none. What we can at best do is describing His outward manifestations, through which He is creating everything in the World. As Ibn al-Arabi declares, the Greatest Element the most realized in the unity of the Creator, so instead of speaking about the ultimate symmetry of the Real, as a divine Name, we speak about the symmetry of this real-through-whom-things-are-created. The Single Monad is like the circumference of the circle of the World, and the Greatest Element is like an abstract point at its center, so just as the point meets the circumference with its whole entity, so does this Greatest Element meet with its whole entity all the aspects of the Single Monad. There are 360^3=46,665,000 subtle links between the Greatest Element and Single Monad, from which the three spatial dimensions are originated. Therefore, this Ultimate Symmetry is described by a perfect homogeneous Euclidean geometry, whose points are simple spirits called the Constant Entities that can be described as the most primordial moments of time.
When this level of Ultimate Symmetry is lowered, more compound spirits are created, by combing time moments and forming normal-complex spatial dimensions, which can be described by Riemannian manifolds, since space is no more homogeneous. This is the level of Hyper Symmetry, that is indeed the spiritual realm of light, though it can take various forms according to the number of spatial dimensions involved. These spirits are nothing but the bosons, which are the forces or the energy particles.
In the level of Super Symmetry, each of the four bosons is split into two fermions, and the reason why we have three different generations of fermions is due to the three dimensions of space, so in total we have 24 = 4x3x2x1 fermions that form all kinds of physical as well as psychical objects.
Finally, Normal Symmetry governs the compound structures that can be observed in the macroscopic world on the various levels of Nature, including molecules and crystals, rocks and mountains, botanic and animal life, planets and stars, and all other kinds of abstract and non-figurative symmetries.
