6.3 The Universal Body
According to Ibn al-Arabi, similar to the human body, the body of the cosmos was first prepared for the breath of the divine Spirit. However, in quite opposite to the spirit which is described as “light”, as we will explain in section 4, the body, in its ultimate meaning, is pure darkness which is nothing but the preparedness or the readiness for the acceptance of light, or life, that is about to be breathed into it. It is the possible non-existence that is about to become existing. In this sense, and as Ibn al-Arabi declares in the same chapter 371 that we quoted many times in chapter IV: “the real, universal, natural body (of the cosmos) is the form of the Cloud, that is a form of the potential Nature, which was manifested in the forms (of all objects) that shall appear therein, and there is no rank above it other than the rank of Lordship” [III.21.34]. In this sense we can say that the abstract initial body of the cosmos is the divine foreknowledge according to which the cosmos shall be created, and when this creation started to take place it followed that prototype and took the same shape that was already designated in this primordial Cloud that is sometimes called by philosophers as “chaos”; some sort of unformed matter, the cosmos then appeared in this chaos when Allah breathed into it of His own Spirit [15:29, 32:9, 38:72].
Therefore, the Universal Body of the cosmos is an abstract form that alone has no physical reality or material existence. The material objects and the physical reality of the cosmos are introduced only after the spreading of divine Spirit in it. It can be noted here that this important result is now well appreciated in modern physics under the quantum view of matter, where everything is ultimately reduced into vibrations and fields, including all corporeal particles. So in more physical terms, the Universal Body is void, or pure nothingness, which is expressed in terms of complex-time geometry as
, which means that both the inner and outer levels of time are null.