Time Chest

The purpose of this book is to explain the mystery of time in a modest language away from any complex mathematical formulation or hefty philosophical pondering. All the new conceptions about time and creation are extracted from the "Single Monad Model of the Cosmos" developed by the author, based on Ibn al-Arabi's theory of the "Oneness of Being". The details of this cosmological model, and all associated principles and consequences, have been published in three-volumes book series that described this revolutionary view of time and its philosophical and ontological foundations, comparing all that with the concluding results of modern scientific theories.

This issue of Chest Medicine Clinics focuses on Interventional Pulmonology, with topics including: Flexible bronchoscopy; Radiology for mediastinal lymph node station in lung cancer diagnosis and staging; Lung cancer screening; Early lung cancer detection; Palliative care and interventional pulmonology; Anesthesia for flexible and rigid bronchoscopy; Mediastinal and pulmonary pathology: Specimen collection and processing; Bronchial Thermoplasty: A nonpharmacological therapy for severe asthma; Bronchoscopic lung volume reduction; Malignant pleural effusion: From diagnostics to therapeutics; Intrapleural therapeutics; Percutaneous dilational tracheostomy; Tracheobronchial stenosis and Tracheobroncho malacia: diagnostic and therapeutic dilemmas; Pediatric interventional pulmonology; The Business of Bronchoscopy: How to set up an Interventional Pulmonology Program; Bronchoscopic therapies for peripheral lung malignancies; and Bronchial Thermoplasty: A nonpharmacological therapy for severe asthma.

Ibn Arabi is the only scholar who was able to formulate a unique cosmological model that is capable of explaining our observations as well as many phenomena in physics and cosmology, and even solve some perplexing modern and historical riddles in science and philosophy such as the EPR paradox and Zeno paradoxes of motion. Moreover, the Single Monad Model explains for the first time in history the importance of the “week” as a basic unit of space and time together. This prodigious theory is based on the notion of the intertwining days where Ibn Arabi shows that at every instance of time there is indeed one full week of creation that takes place in the globe. Since its publication in 2008, this book has triggered an overwhelming response, and I hope this expanded edition will help promote further Ibn Arabi's wisdom that is still buried in his multitudes of books and treatises.Ibn 'Arabî is one of the most prominent figures in Islamic history, especially in relation to Sufism and Islamic philosophy and theology. In this book, we want to explore his cosmology and in particular his view of time in that cosmological context, comparing his approaches to the relevant conclusions and principles of modern physics whenever possible. We shall see that Ibn 'Arabî had a unique and comprehensive view of time which has never been discussed by any other philosopher or scientist, before or even after Ibn 'Arabî. In the final two chapters, we shall discuss some of the ways his novel view of time and cosmology may be used to build a complete model of the cosmos that may deepen and extend our understanding of the world, while potentially solving some of the drawbacks and paradoxes in the current cosmological models of modern physics. As we discuss in the opening chapter, there is no doubt that time is one of the most important issues in physics, cosmology, philosophy and theology, and hundreds of books and articles have been published in these fields. However, none of these studies have fully developed Ibn 'Arabî's unique view of time in its cosmological dimensions, although his conception of time is indeed central to understanding, for example, his controversial theory of the 'oneness of being'. One possible reason for this relative neglect is the difficult symbolic language he usually used. Also, he didn't discuss this subject at length in any single place in his extant works--not even in chapters 59, 291 and 390 of the Futûhât whose titles relate directly to time--so we must piece together his overall cosmological understanding of time from his scattered treatments in many works and different contexts within his magnum opus, the Futûhât, and other books. Therefore this book may be considered the first comprehensive attempt to set forth all the relevant dimensions of time in Ibn 'Arabî's wider cosmology and cosmogony. To start with, Ibn 'Arabî considers time to be a product of our human 'imagination', without any real, separately existing entity. Nevertheless, he still considers it to be one of the four main constituents of existence. We need this imagined conception of 'time' to chronologically arrange events and what for us are the practically defining motions of the celestial orbs and other physical objects, but for Ibn 'Arabî, real existence is attributable only to the actually existing thing that moves, not to motion nor to time (nor space) in which this motion is observed. Thus Ibn 'Arabî distinguishes between two kinds of time: natural and para-natural, and he explains that they both originate from the two forces of the soul: the active force and the intellective force, respectively. Then he explains that this imaginary time is cyclical, circular, relative, discrete and inhomogeneous. Ibn 'Arabî also gives a precise definition--drawing on the specific usage of the Qur'an and earlier Arab conceptions of time--of the day, daytime and night, showing how these definitions are related to the relative motions of the celestial orbs (including the earth), where every orb has its own 'day', and those days are normally measured by our normal observable day that we count on the earth.