“I am The Omnipresent/Ubiquitous/Universal Tree … with roots and branches…”

Qidam is the seed of all things. Qidam is the infinite past, or realm of actualities free of all potentialities and probabilities. Everything in Qidam is actual i.e. has no potentiality to become, it just is. And it is so actualized and certain that it has the feel of the past, since all things in past are actual and exact since they already happened. There are no potentialities in the past, it either happened or not.

Our universe, here, is a universe of potentialities. Flip a coin, it is either Head (H) or Tail (T). No event has any certainty for its outcome.

 

 

 

Q: How did the universe of Qidam (Infinite Past) free of all potentialities, link to our fully potential-probabilistic present universe?

If you could imagine flipping a coin in Qidam there are no discernible outcomes. Head (H) and Tail (T) are one and the same i.e. had you flipped a coin you would have got both H and T at the same time since you could not tell them apart.

 

 

 

As you move away from Qidam i.e. become closer to the present moment, little by little two outcomes become almost discernible. If you flip a coin here then there are two outcomes, H and T and both happen at the same time.

 

 

 

 

 

Move more and more towards this present moment and H and T become more discernible and yet one and the same thing.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

There arrives a time, quite close to the present moment, when suddenly there are two distinct outcomes to the flipping of the coin i.e. H and T and there are now two different entities as the outcome of the flipping.

 

 

 

 

Imagine all the events in the cosmos going through the same process all those branchings assemble to a tree:

 

 

 

And this tree, of course, is Omnipresent or Universal.

At the end of the book Ibn Arabi calls this Omnipresent Tree another name Insan Al-Kulli which can have two meanings:

1. Omnipresent Human Being
2. Omnipresent Eye

Omnipresent Human Being
All potentialities in our universe is caused by the appearance of human beings i.e. exit of man from Qidam (Infinite Past) into the present moment. It is the nature of the human essence that causes all the potentialities in the universe. Thus the said tree is really the structure of human presence in this world, connecting Qidam to present moment.

Omnipresent Eye
Our vision and for that matter all our senses operate in the past i.e. immediate past. What you see of the words in this sentence appeared few micro seconds ago to your eyes but it takes a bit of time to transfer and process in the brain to understand. Therefore your eyes are always viewing the past! Consequently you are looking backwards along the branches towards the trunk/root of the said tree whenever you look! So this tree is really a structure attached to your eye, an extension of your biological eyes.