We are living in a world that is essentially free of time and space yet we are so unaware of it! Our conditioning is so stiffened that even though it isn’t far from our cognition our hard-wired beliefs and conditioning prompt us to refuse this truth.

From a universal perspective, there is constantly formation and transformation taking place. Observing these formations and transformations, man with his limited perception tools and five senses, in the ignorance of the time he was in, surmised that a period of darkness followed by a period brightness is one “day” and linked this to the rising and the setting of the Sun. 

Of course, at this stage the earth was still presumed to be flat so the idea was that the Sun rose from one side of this flat tray-like earth and set from the other side, rotating from beneath it to rise again, etc.

Then as time passed, a new group emerged who, based on the appearance and the disappearance of the moon, claimed a month was 28 days, and a period of twelve months was a year.

Then another group emerged and said, based on the revolution of the Sun there are 360 days in a year, and divided that into twelve to calculate the months. 

Hence the model became that of a Moon revolving around the people on earth and a concept of time based on the Sun.

However, when we look at this concept of time from a scientific, philosophical, and spiritual i.e. Sufi perspective, existence is an indivisible whole, therefore it is impossible to talk about fractions of time. In respect of this whole, there is only one single instance. Only in respect of the individual units of manifestations within this whole, the concept of relative time gains some validity. Hence, it becomes evident that what we call relative time is only a linear sequence of events.

Indeed, even though man in essentially free of time and space, due to his conditioning and his delusive assumption that he is the body, lives in a universe limited by his level of comprehension bound by time and space.

Why is it that even though through contemplation and meditation man can totally escape the limits of his known world, he tenaciously chooses to confine himself to the dungeon of his body inside a material world?

How was man and the universe created in the first place?

Before we go into all this, let us first have a look at what certain Muslim saints such as Muhyiddin Ibn al-Arabi, Ibrahim Hakki Erzurumi and Imam Aziz Nasafi have to say regarding the star signs and the planets in the solar system…