The Universe cannot contain me, but I am contained within the heart of my faithful servant.
The creation as a reversal of entropy
The conventional scientific view of the creation of the universe is that it started as a singularity and then expanded out to form galaxies and time and matter as we know them. The singularity has zero entropy, it is completely ordered and the expanding universe is the natural tendency towards gaining entropy. This has been referred to as ‘time’s arrow’. With time we gain entropy and it appears to be one-way process.
In the ancient Greek creation myth this is reversed: the creation goes from disorder to order (a lowering of entropy):
In the beginning there was only chaos. Then out of the void appeared Erebus, the unknowable place where death dwells, and Night. All else was empty, silent, endless, darkness. Then somehow Love was born bringing a start of order. From Love came Light and Day. Once there was Light and Day, Gaea, the earth appeared.
This mirrors the story in Genesis:
In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.
And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters.
And God said, Let there be light: and there was light.
And God saw the light, that it was good: and God divided the light from the darkness.
And God called the light Day, and the darkness he called Night. And the evening and the morning were the first day.
And God said, Let there be a firmament in the midst of the waters, and let it divide the waters from the waters.
And God made the firmament, and divided the waters which were under the firmament from the waters which were above the firmament: and it was so.
And God called the firmament Heaven. And the evening and the morning were the second day.
Both these stories show a decrease in entropy, from chaos to, eventually, human beings. Zeus in the case of the Greek myth and Adam in the case of Genesis.
The story is told in a different way in the Quran but requires an essay in itself.
In the creation myths there is a decrease in entropy. Creation goes from complete disorder (chaos) through time to intelligence. The natural pull of the universe is to take us back to chaos. This pull is also the natural tendency of the mind to revert to mechanical thinking habits. When we are not aware of our thoughts we react in ways that have been conditioned in our minds.
The purpose of our creation is to make the journey from chaos to order. To decrease entropy.
In the story of Adam and Eve, Adam was created in paradise but was brought to Earth by temptation of the Devil (Shaytaan in the Quran). The journey of Mankind is the journey back to paradise but with understanding.
In the New Testament Jesus tells the story of the The Prodigal Son. The story is well known — there’s a summary and some comment here. But there’s an important aspect of this story that many commentators miss: Why did the father give more reward to the son had squandered his wealth and returned than to the son who stayed? The reason is that the son who had been out in the world and returned came back with understanding. Not only was he not going to go away again as he had ‘been there, done that’, but he had a better understanding of the created universe as a result. He had left paradise and returned with knowledge (in the Quran it calls this ‘Knowing the names’).
As a great teacher once put it:
Life is like golf. You get a hole in one on your first attempt and then spend the rest of your life trying to understand how you did it.
We exist in many dimensions
What we are aware of in this four-dimensional space-time continuum is only a small part of the reality of our existence.
We’re all familiar with slicing through three-dimensional objects and seeing a two-dimensional result. For example, imagine a three-dimensional cube passing through the surface of water (which is two-dimensional). If the cube passes face first we get the following results:
However, if the cube passes through corner first we get a different two-dimensional shape:
As the cube continues to pass through the shape changes:
Now imagine a four-dimensional object passing through our three-dimensional world. Actually, it doesn’t require too much imagination. Our lives are four dimensional in the sense that they stretch back in time to our birth and forward to our death. Each moment is a slice of this four dimensional ‘object’.
But now imagine something that exists in 9 or 10 dimensions being cut through 4 dimensions. This is our experience as human beings. What we call consciousness is a link to our existence in many more dimensions. In fact our existence is not due to Darwinian evolution (and I’ve examined this here) but is a result of a multidimensional ‘presence’ which is being observed in four dimensions.
Our relationship with other dimensions
So we can see the relationship between time and matter, but what is the relationship between our time-space continuum and other dimensions? One of the relationships that is apparent is metaphor. In fact, it could be said that the world was built on metaphor. Metaphor, not logic, is the natural language of the mind and our dreams are constructed from metaphor.
The sceptics would argue that human beings see patterns in everything, I would say that the universe is constructed from patterns.
And He shows you His signs. So which of the signs of Allah do you deny?
From The Quran (40:81)
For instance, water in dreams represents emotion and we talk about keeping our heads above water, or drowning in our sorrows. The depths of the ocean are symbolic of our deep subconscious. The surface of the water is like the surface of the mind. Our lives are a journey through metaphor. In fact it can be advantageous to understand events as if they were in a dream. In one sense we could say that we are living in a dream of God.
In the Bible it says that God created Mankind in his own image. In an interpretation of this we could say that just as God creates universes from nothing, we can create worlds from nothing in our dreams. In fact we have the potential to realise our own God-like quality and travel through this reality as if we were in a conscious dream.
What I call metaphor are patterns that repeat in different but related ways. Like a photo of an object that may be difficult to recognise when it is viewed from a different angle, or like the three dimensional object passing through a two dimensional plane, these are patterns in space time that repeat but in different ways. In spiritual circles these may be described as omens but omens are simply one example of this.
It could be said that this is the difference in thinking between the skeptic who requires ‘proof’ before they believe something, and the open minded person who looks and understands patterns.
Just as someone may experience signs of being unwell before they are diagnosed with a serious disease, or how there are aftershocks after a major earthquake, these signs project forward or back in time. I’ve discussed how the illogic of the argument of Darwinists that common characteristics in disparate animals is proof of evolution. In fact, these common characteristics are because of what I call metaphor. The characteristics extend beyond physical appearance into behaviour. People can exhibit cat-like, dog-like, lion-like etc. characteristics. In animals we see these behaviours in their extreme form but as humans we have the opportunity to step outside of the behaviour and become free in our actions.
Metaphor is used in prayer and ritual to draw on energies that exist in dimensions beyond the four that we experience. It is like plucking the E string of a guitar and the E string of an adjacent guitar resonates in harmony. So when we pray or perform certain rituals we are resonating with patterns that exist in dimensions outside of experience. We can resonate with the music of the spheres.
