4.4.3  Discrete Nature of Time

The most important and distinctive of Ibn al-Arabi’s ideas about time is that he considers it to be quantized, and the way he understands that, as he declared in the Meccan Revelations and other books that “the smallest time is the single time that doesn’t accept division” [II.384.31]. In other places, he declares that there is an indivisible duration of time [IV.425.8] that is the smallest possible time or Day.

As we have noted in chapter II, there has been a great deal of debate in the history of philosophy and science as to whether time, and also space and matter, are discrete or continuous, though most philosophers and scientists deal with time as an infinitely divisible quantity, as we discussed in chapter III in all the theories of physics and cosmology, including Relativity and Quantum Mechanics. However, the Asharite theologians have a distinctive physical theory of the indivisible atoms, which is entirely built on the discreteness of space and time, and Ibn al-Arabi himself acknowledges his debt to them for that understanding. For example, Abu Bakr Muhammad al-Baqillani (940-1013 AD), one of the famous Asharite theologians, suggested an atomic nature of time, according to which in each atom of time the entire world annihilates and is re-created in a slightly different form. This perspective is at least verbally and conceptually very much in accord with Ibn al-Arabi’s fundamental principle of the ongoing re-creation of all things, as we have seen in section 2.1, although the Asharite theologians didn’t make any reference to the key experiential basis of this spiritual insight which is so central to Ibn al-Arabi’s discussion of the ever-renewed creation. What is also new and distinctive here about Ibn al-Arabi’s understanding of this conception of time is that the actual quanta of time equals our normal earthly day itself.

Figure 4.8: At every moment, in our normal time, there is a full day around the globe: evening somewhere, morning somewhere else, and noon in other places. The day that we perceive and experience is therefore a collection of successive snapshots of the actual Days of events which are the actually existing basis for our experience of the flow of time.

It is not easy to bridge the gap between this metaphysical hypothesis and our everyday familiar experience of indefinitely divisible time: of the year into months, the month into weeks, the week into days, the day into hours, hour into minutes, minutes into seconds, and so on apparently infinitely.

For Ibn al-Arabi, as we have already seen in section 4, time itself doesn’t have any independent existence, but is reduced to motion or, more precisely, to the ongoing creative acts of God, or cosmic events, with each discrete divine Task, or one cosmic event, happening each Day, according to the Quranic description of God: (each Day He is upon one task) [55:29]. And since, as Ibn al-Arabi explains, Allah specified in this verse that He is every Day in one task, and not many, as we perceive in our illusion, this means that this Day has to be indivisible, because only one divine action or event should be happening in it [Ayyam al-Shaan: 6]. As we have seen, Ibn al-Arabi uses the same Quranic term and therefore calls this fundamental quanta of time “the Day of Task” or “the Day of event”, or using an expression taken from the physical theory of Asharite theology: “the singular time” [I.292.16, II.82.6]. Therefore the single Day of task in reality equals our normal day; or more precisely, a full revolution of the celestial sphere as viewed from the Earth, but to clarify this counter-intuitive understanding of the foundational divine Event, we need to introduce some related new concepts that are also based on certain Quranic verses, as we will explain further in sections 4.10.1, 4.10.2 and 4.10.3.

Since the world is re-created every singular day over and over again [II.208.26, II.385.4], we, i.e. our spiritual souls, or consciousnesses, as part of this world, ordinarily experience only our very limited portion from this singular day; a single instantaneous moment of time equals the global 24-hours-day taking place within the entire world at that particular instant, but as divided up in actual perception by the total number of perceiving entities and their perceptions in the world. During this divine creative glance, we perceive a still picture of our limited perception of the world, after which we intrinsically cease from existence, and then in the second Day, or actually a full Week of seven days, we live another moment to perceive a different still picture, due to the ever-new creation created by Allah in this singular day. Thus, through a succession of these instantaneously re-created new pictures of the whole, we observe what appears to be motion, just as with the illusion of cinematic projection, as we explained in section 2.7.

In addition to that, Ibn al-Arabi also reminds us that at every moment there is a full day around the globe: evening somewhere, morning somewhere else, and noon in other places [Ayyam al-Shaan: 6]. Therefore, as we can see in Figure 4.8, at every moment for us, which is a full day when viewed globally, Allah creates a single event in the world; and then He re-creates the world in ever-new events at each succeeding moment. The day that we perceive and experience is therefore a collection of successive snapshots of the actual Days of events which are the actually existing basis for our experience of the flow of time.

Therefore, the Day of event is a single and indivisible duration of time that equals the entire earthly global day at each instant, but because the Universal Intellect scans in this Daynumber of states in the whole creation, it appears to the observer who is one of these states as infinitely divisible, because it is extremely small:seconds, andis surely unimaginably huge. That is simply because the observer exists only for this infinitesimal amount of time during every Day of event. This infinitesimal amount of time is what we call now, or the moment, or the presence, and this is the only real part of the imaginary time as we explained in section 2.7.

The event is nothing but the single universal creative divine Act, which is what He creates in each day of the smallest Days, which is the single indivisible time [IV.425.11]. In every Day of event, Allah re-creates the world in a new image that is similar to the previous one, but with possible minor changes, that cause the illusion of motion. Or in other words, in every Day of event, Allah causes one unique, singular Act in the world, because Allah is One and His Command is one, as He said in Quran: (Our Command is one, like the twinkling of an eye) [54:50]. However, this same single Act will have different results on the different entities in the world, depending on the capabilities and characteristics of each individual creature. For example, when Allah inspires the Universal Soul to move the element of fire in order to heat the world, the effects of this single Act depend greatly on the individual creatures, so those who are ready to burn will burn, and those who accept heat will be heated, and so on [Ayyam al-Shaan: 11]:

‘So the task in relation to the Real is one from Him, but in relation to the recipients of the whole world, it is many tasks (or events) that, were it not (all) confined by existence, we could describe as infinite.’ [II.82.6]

Therefore the moments that we feel flowing, as day-times and night-times pass, are actually a collection of discrete space-time quanta, and not a straightforward combination of the actual flow of the single divine Days. The normal days that we encounter are “intertwined” with the actually existing cosmic Days of tasks, in a special way that we shall explore in section 4.10.3. As a result of this intertwining, we see the appearance of a multitude number of events in our normal days.

Ibn al-Arabi also points out that “in each day of our normal days, that is from sunset to sunset or from sunrise to sunrise, there is the end of three hundred and sixty days” [Ayyam al-Shaan: 6]. That is because in every moment of the normal day, there is the end, or the beginning, of a day in one place, and there is a corresponding beginning, or end, of another day in another place. To explain this further, let us divide the circumference of the Earth into 360 longitudinal lines and the day into 360 degrees of longitude. Therefore, any whole day that we encounter, in any specific place on the Earth, is a combination or the sum of the ends (last degrees) of 360 days occurring in other places on the Earth; or in the same way, it is the sum of the first degrees of 360 days around the Earth. For example let us suppose that we are on the first longitudinal line at the first degree of the day, then the second degree of this same day on this first longitudinal line is the first degree of the day beginning on the second line, and so on. In another way we can also say that the 360 degrees of the day on the first line are the collection of the last degrees of the lines 360, 359, 358 and so on down to line number 1. Therefore in every moment there is one full day around the Earth: now, for example, it is morning somewhere, noon somewhere else and evening and midnight in other places; but all in total is a single full day happening every single moment in our time.

So the flow of these original Days marks the actual sequence of events that spans space and time. But because we live in and can only observe a tiny point of the whole space of the globe, we encounter linear time as our normal observed days of the week, which are the “circulated days” described in section 4.10.1. Therefore, these original Days of event are intertwined with our normal observed days, as we shall also explain in section 4.10.3.

The idea of discrete time, and space, is not new in the history of philosophy and physics, as we have summarized in chapter II, though it had been completely discarded after the advent of classical Newtonian mechanics, which considers space and time as infinite continuum. However, many philosophers, such as Kant, Russell and Leibniz, have opposed Newton’s hypothesis that space and time have a separate linear and continuous entity. With the advent of Quantum Mechanics, Field Theory, Quantum Gravity and the Superstrings Theory, that we reviewed in chapter III, the idea of quantized time was revived again, but there is yet no fundamental success in this respect.

The human mind naturally thinks of quantities as either discrete or continuous; there is no other way. A closer examination of Ibn al-Arabi’s view time, however, shows that it is indeed neither discrete nor continuous. We have to remember that he considers time as imaginary after all, as well as most other quantities such as space and even mass. As we indicated previously, such seemingly strange conclusions result directly from Ibn al-Arabi’s fundamental theory of the oneness of being: i.e., that the apparent parts of existence are merely manifestations of a single real existence that is One and Unique, neither multiple nor divisible. The notion of either discreteness or continuousness is indispensable when we imagine multitudes, but with absolute Unity there would be no meaning to such conceptions. Therefore, Ibn al-Arabi’s concept of time is that it would be discrete if we approach it on the, ultimately imaginary, plane of apparent multiplicity, but in reality there is no such reality as time at all. The same perspective can be applied to space, but as we shall see in chapter V, this can be continuous or discrete relative to the dimension in which the observer is situated. So for example: theplane is itself continuous with relation to its inner dimensions but it forms one discrete instance with relation to the flow of time in the encompassing, which then appears internally continuous but discrete with regard to the encompassing outward time.