7.2.4  The Four Quantum Fields

Allah then mentioned in the above verse that He made from “water” everything living. So again, the normal outward meaning is correct that the life of all animals is dependent on normal molecular water. However, if we take the literal ontological meaning of “everything”, as all entities in the world, and the abstract meaning of “living” as “moving”, so Allah caused all things to move, after they were absolutely constant entities in the divine foreknowledge, as we explained in chapter VI (section 8.5).

The reason why Allah described that this living is initiated from “water” is because the realvacuumis (like) water, because it is created internally at the speed of light, without any outer time, which is literally like an ocean providing the ground state of matter since the physical particles are its excitations in the outward level of time, that are described by, as we have seen in chapter V. This means that particles are created internally at the speed of light in the inner realdimensions, and they are moving externally at the imaginary velocityin the outer time level. So when this imaginary velocity tends to zero, which corresponds to absolute zero temperature, we will end up in what is called Bose-Einstein condensate, which under certain conditions becomes a super-fluid, which is the absolute meaning of “water”.

In the same abstract sense, the state ofis “air”, because we do not observe it although we are immersed in it; and this is actually the dark energy that is balancing the effect of gravity on large scales, as we shall see further in section 2, while dark matter is the inert state of waterthat is thevacuum. This also has far more interesting meanings that needs many books to introduce, but it suffices to mention here that the psychical states and all kinds of abstract knowledge or information are the physical objects of this anti-world, but they are invisible for us because we are in different time dimensions, although we are continuously interacting at every instance of time.

This subject, as we can see, opens up many gates to whole new sciences that are completely describable in terms of genuinely-complex time-time geometry, from which we can obtain the four fundamental states:,,, and. From these four states we get all the fundamental quadratic origins that we described in IV (and particularly Figure 4.9), including the four fundamental divine Attributes and the four elements of Nature, as summarized in Table 7.1.

Table 7.3: The divine quadratic origin of the four elements in Nature.

However, the classical four elements: earth, water, air, and fire, which the Sumerians employed to explain the complexity of nature, can be interpreted as the four condensation levels of aether, or quintessence, that is the background space which is created dynamically in the inner levels of time, as we explained in chapter IV. These four elements, together with their quintessence, are the five levels of time that correspond to the various possible degrees of freedom, or dimensions, starting from the metaphysical onenessand up to the three dimensions,, andof physical multiplicity that is dynamically evolving through the outer time, where earth, or physical mass, is exhibited. So in total we have four levels of dynamic existence in time:,,, and, which become seven when considering the two opposite directions of each one of the three physical spatial dimensions:,, and. From these seven levels of time come the seven days of the week, while the seven heavens and seven earths are their corresponding two extreme states, which correspond to vacuum and void, from whose superposition all the states of matter are composed.

Philosophers took various opinions as to which one of the four elements was created first, or whether they were all created from a fifth essence [I.138-9], and Ibn al-Arabi affirms that water was the first to be created. The source of confusion is because it is not clear what is meant by “water”, and also the other three elements. Of course, it is impossible for the normal molecular water, composed of hydrogen and oxygen:, to be the source of all other elements, but it is indeed the super-fluid field described by, which is the flatspace from which all elementary particles emerge as excitations in the imaginary time, and then condense and combine into atoms and molecules to form the various states of matter, including the molecular water, as well as heavier and lighter elements and compounds.

Ibn al-Arabi explains all this in a profound discussion, in chapter 295 [II.274-9] of the Meccan Revelations, that contains other useful information on the various subjects tackled in this chapter as well as many topics in chapter IV, while also introducing some of the concepts that we will talk about in the coming chapter about Alchemy. It is next to impossible to provide any full accurate translation of this particular chapter of the futuhat, since it contains many bolted sentences and symbolic poetry which is very difficult to interpret even by the most specialized scholars who have studied Ibn al-Arabi for years. Therefore, we will provide a summarized and somehow rough translation in the following long quote:

When Allah created the Roaming Spirits ... and He designated one of them, that is the First Intellect, which was the first creative existent; and after that, without any time intermission, the (Universal) Soul was emanated from it. This Soul is the Tablet in which is written the entities of all the beings in this Lower World, (and all what is going to happen) till the day of resurrection; that is Allah’s fore-knowledge of his creation. ... Therefore, the Soul was less luminous than the Pen, that is the Intellect, so it is like a Green Emerald (while the Intellect is like a White Pearl). Then, from this Soul, the essence of Chaos was emanated, which was absolutely dark, without any light (thus it is sometimes called: the Black Bead), and Allah made the (abstract) state of Nature (with its four elements) between the Soul and this Chaos, as an absolute state, not yet physically created.

As Allah established the logical reasons and rules (that governs the world), thus He spread the world between light and darkness, due to the ruling of manifestation and veiling (of His divine Names), thus He determined how (and when) all things start and finish according to certain destinations. All things have beginnings and endings, due to His Names: the First and the Last. Accordingly, Allah gave to this Soul an active force (and an intellective force, as we explained in chapter IV) from which Allah created the Universal Body in the essence of Chaos, ... and the first shape this body took was the circular shape, which is the most perfect shape; it is like letter alif with regard to the rest of letters (see section 2.6.3 in chapter IV)... and the first shape that appeared after the circle was the triangle. Then from the equilateral triangle, all shapes in all kinds of bodies can be infinitely generated, but the best and most perfected shape is the hexagon.

Then Allah held the form of this First Body in Chaos, according to the state of Nature that was determined between the Soul and Chaos, otherwise this Body would not exist and would not be held in Chaos; so (the state of) Nature is like the toolbox for the Soul, from which it can make all kinds of forms in Chaos. Therefore, the Universal Body appeared in Chaos by the tool of hotness, and life appeared in it by the accompany of hotness and moistness, while its form was held via coldness and dryness. (Consequently) Allah made this Body like a Chair (with four legs), and created for it four actual holders (which are the fundamental forces) in this Lower World, and other four effective holders which shall combine with the previous four in the Hereafter Day, so they will become eight.... (since as we showed in Chapter VII of the Single Monad Model that the Day of the Hereafter will start a new spatial dimension as the world is expanding.)

(then Ibn al-Arabi mentions many interesting facts about the structure of the world, and its anti-world, how the zodiac and constellations came to exist, how the stars were formed, and he described their motion, speaking also in some details about how motion is the result of Love as we shall describe in section 4)

Then Allah created the element of water, which was the first to be created amongst the four elements, but we mentioned the earth first because of its lowness, so actually water was created first and what condensed out of it formed earth, and then what became thin was air, and what was thiner formed fire, which is the sphere of aether. ... These elements came to exist in Scorpio, and Allah estimated for each zone a certain duration, with some overlapping, but they all together have a duration that we call the age of the world, and when this time is over, things return back as they have started, and so on, endlessly; so there is never any end for its essence, but the forms are never repeated again, so the creation is ever new. ... The world is created anew at every breath, without any repetition whatsoever.

When all these elements found the required fertile environment that became ready for the appearance of physical creation, as the effect of the hotness of fire ignited the moistness of air and water, from which smoke started to elevate to the higher orbs until it formed dense clouds that accumulated and mixed together, until Allah split that into seven heavens, and as a result of the sparks that were produced and burned the humid clouds, the planets (stars) were formed and the skies were lit just as the house is lit by the lamp. [II.274-9]

Then after that Ibn al-Arabi mentions some more details about the formation of life and animals, and he then says in the conclusion that the first person to teach these sciences was the prophet Idris, peace be upon him, who is the Biblical Enoch, and the same known Hermes Trismegistus, the purported author of the Hermetic Corpus and other sacred texts that are the basis of Hermeticism, including Alchemy, as we described in section 1.3 above.

In recent years, some theories suggested that vacuum is a kind of superfluid, or Bose-Einstein condensate, although its microscopic structure is unknown, but some initial scientific models were formulated that could explain the four known fundamental interactions in terms of this superfluid vacuum. According to this approach, the background superfluid is assumed to be essentially non-relativistic whereas the Lorentz symmetry is considered as approximate description valid only for small fluctuations. The fluctuations of vacuum superfluid become relativistic objects at small momenta, and non-relativistic at large momenta. Other models consider vacuum to be strongly-correlated quantum Bose liquid whose ground-state wave-function is described by the logarithmic Schroedinger equation. In this case, the relativistic gravitational interactions arise as the small-amplitude collective excitation mode, whereas relativistic elementary particles can be described by the particle-like modes in the limit of low energies and momenta.

Advocates of superfluid vacuum theories claim that they provide mass generation mechanism that replaces or alters the electroweak Higgs one, because masses of elementary particles can arise as a result of interaction with the superfluid vacuum, similarly to the gap generation mechanism in superconductors.