Kirkus Reviews
This final installment of a trilogy endeavors to demonstrate in the language of modern physics how multiplicity emerges from divine oneness.
Attempts to explain the relationship between the diverse phenomena humans experience and the possibility of an underlying metaphysical oneness date back to ancient cosmology. Yousef (Duality of Time, 2018, etc.) argues that humans’ perceptions of both phenomenal multiplicity and continuity are mirages, the emanations of an irreducible ontological unity: a single monad, the expression of absolute divine unity. People experience the world as they do because they only view it from an “imaginary time dimension,” a perch from the outside that can’t possibly exist if the universe is truly one. At the heart of this book is the postulation of “nested symmetries,” five kinds that account for the “apparent dynamic multiplicity of creation.” Oneness of God is “conceived” as an “abstract point beyond geometry.” Normal symmetry applies to the physical world governed by the laws of classical mechanics, specifically the elements of space and time understood in Euclidean terms. Super-symmetry denotes the relation between the physical and psychical, which is essentially identical to Quantum Field Theory’s matter/antimatter couplet. Hyper-symmetry refers to the connection, explored in quantum mechanics, between particles and waves and, by extension, the appearance of continuous space. And ultimate symmetry explains how the curved space of contemporary physics can be generated from Euclidean geometry’s “homogenous” space. Underlying these threads is the divine Principle of Love, the original source of motion that explains the universe’s longing to continuously return to a state of harmony. Yousef is at his best providing historical accounts of physics, both ancient and modern—he is especially deft in detailing ancient cosmology—and the theoretical problems that persist within them. But his writing can be exasperatingly dense (“Although the things might outwardly seem to be continuously existing in their evolution, nothing is ever repeated the same twice, since their elementary microscopic components are always created anew in different forms, that may still resemble the perished ones, but they are not themselves”). Furthermore, his fusion of science and Islamic revelation is really just a translation of the latter into the terms of the former. For example, he simply identifies energy particles with “spirits.” This then becomes a springboard to a lengthy discussion of the kinds of spirits, including angels, that exist.
An ambitious but unconvincing argument involving ancient gnostic theology.