Let’s remember what Muhammad (saw) said:
“Do not curse time (dahr)[1], for time is Allah.”
Time (dahr) is an infinite, limitless moment!
When Allah wishes to observe an expression of His Names, He merely wills for them to manifest.
“Verily, when He wills a thing, His Command is, ‘Kun - be’ (He merely wishes it to be), and it is (formed with ease)!” (Quran 36:82)
That is, His very thought of a thing is the act of manifesting that thing. The minute it’s thought of, it’s already done.
There are no such concepts like the past and the future for Allah!
Whatever meaning He wishes to manifest, he shapes an appropriate form in an appropriate dimension, and experiences that meaning through that form.
Where?
Not within, nor without.
The emanation of a form, and the experience of a particular meaning, occurs through the revelation of the inherent meanings of the form.
Hence, the meanings and conditions, that become explicit through the form, are what compose the form in the first place. The form’s experience of its meaning is the result of the environment, conditions, and events that cause it to be.
All of this is created within the Knowledge of the One.
Actually, all seemingly animate and inanimate beings are nothing more than names in the realm of His Knowledge.
Their apparent presence is only of a hypothetical nature, based on being ‘acknowledged’ in His Knowledge.
In other words, existence is a trust given unto us. The illusion, that we exist outside of Allah, is due to certain names or labels that we are given.
Like assigning a label ‘x’, to a hypothetical data in an algorithm. It doesn’t have a substantial existence of its own, but because we say ‘x’ we assume x exists, whereas in reality it is only a hypothetical figure.
In actual reality, only Allah exists.
According to whom?
According to He who observes his creation through the eyes of those who have ‘conquered’ (fath) their true essence, by attaining the High Station of Sainthood (Wilayat-i Kubra) at the consciousness level of The Pleasing Self (Nafs-i Mardhiyya).
Thus, all ‘things’, that we affirm to be existent, are nothing more than the forms of His Names created in His Knowledge. Things don’t exist independently.
When evaluated from the Realm of Knowledge, everything that supposedly exists, according to our senses, turns out to be nothing more than ‘forms of knowledge’.