Genesis and Metaphysics

Why the world exists? Adam/Man?

"I was a hidden treasure; I loved to be known. Hence I created the world so that I would be known"

(Source Wikipedia). This prominent sentence out of the Hadith of the Prophet Mohammed is widely used in difference Sufi cosmologies. This cosmologies have some parallels to the creation myth in the bible, but rather put it a "scientific" language and talks about the stages of creation as a kind of genuine energies. 

Seen from a perspective as God as Great Engineer and Creator, the sentence means obviously, that God wanted to create something which can reflect his spirit and acknowledge his Greatness with all facets. Consequently he needed to create a being that  is able to understand his creation, but also some aspects of himself. It is said that you can't know God but you can get knowledge about his attributes, which are for instance collected in the Islamic tradition of the Names of God.

So according this, Adam or mankind could be 'the' reason for the creation. As is it also written in the Bible:  God said, “Let Us make man in Our image, after Our likeness, to rule over the fish of the sea and the birds of the air, over the livestock, and over all the earth itself and every creature that crawls upon it.” (Genesis 1:27,26)
When Adam has been created after His image he must be or become a being, who is able to reflect the spirit of God. Of course there are many scholarly discussions about the nature of Adam, in this article we follow the interpretations which can be related to Neo-Sufism and particularly Subud.  According Pakh Subuh, the name Adam means first and he has been created before anything else. 

"It is always said that Adam was the first man, who originated the human race. But, actually, the word `Adam' does not apply to a physical human being. The real meaning of Adam is the origin, the beginning of the beginning. Adam was without physical substance, without any physical form. In that state, Adam can be seen as something primordial, something part of God Almighty. This is actually the meaning of the name, Adam. Adam did not yet have the form in which he is pictured as being like a human being. Adam was concealed within the Power of Almighty God. That is to say, Adam still existed in the Power of the One Almighty God. In this state, at this time, Adam was perfect in his life. He could live unconditionally. This means that he had no limiting physical body and none of the five senses. Yet this being, Adam, was able to experience the full extent of his seeing, his hearing, his tasting, smelling, his feeling and his knowing" [4] . 

In this light, from an engineering perspective, that makes sense.  If an engineer wants to build a car he starts thinking about and designing first the car, and eventually later, other things as roads or gasoline stations. If the car would be an electric one, he doesn't need gasoline stations, but eventually charging stations. So the next question is how God created Adam out of nothing?      

Arcs of Descent and Ascent

When it comes to more precise - related to the involved energies - descriptions about how the creation process took place, probably the first writings are from the great Andalusian Sufi scholar Ibn al-Arabi.  Later on, rooted in different creation myth the Theosophist developed concepts about the seven rays, which are related to the cosmos, astrology, colors and so on.  Gurdjieff did describe an even more detailed view of the cosmos as ray of creation, witch relates more to musical harmony and mathematics.  

"The Arcs of Descent and Ascent, an ontological circle, are described in Neoplatonism, as well as in Islamic and Sufi cosmology, mainly inspired by the works of Ibn al-Arabi. In the Arc of Descent ("qaws al-nuzuli"), from unity to diversity, God creates successively the Intellect (Supreme Pen), the Universal Soul (Guarded Tablet), Prime Matter, Nature, the Universal Body (including the imaginal world) and the Earth. The Arc of Ascent ("qaws al-su'ud") is the way back to the Presence of God, the process of spiritual perfection.[1][2]

In ahadith attributed to Ja'far al-Sadiq, the sixth Imam of Shi'i Islam, the arc of descent is described as having seven stages. These stages have been commented on in Shaykhism.[3]" (Source Wikipedia)

Ibn Arabi'sontological circle seems to be more straightforward then Gurdjieffs complex theory. If ones replaces the stages or qualities of Ibn Arabi with more universal terms as described in the Life-Forces article a simple graphic would look like this:

When the simple terms are used for the stages of creation, one can see the first stage is called the sphere of the messengers. "Muslims believe that the first prophet was also the first human being, Adam(آدَم), created by Allah"[5]. From this point of view it makes sense, because it has been mentioned before, that Adam was the first of Gods creation.  

Genesis from a metaphysical viewpoint

From  a more scientific viewpoint, or if God would be seen as the eternal Engineer, the models need eventually some adaptions. It has been mentioned that Adam was created first, created as a spiritual not a human being. Consequently the Arc of Descent is not yet the physical world, but relates to the seven Heavens. So the creation of the physical way, knows as Big Bang would happen then after the creations of all the heavens. If we would describe the process analogue to an engineering process in the 21th, the engineers would certainly using sophisticated computer software and simulations to create such a complex product as an universe. Those software tools that are used for this kind of engineering are called Computer aided Engineering and Design, knows as CAE/CAD tools.  This tools are heavily used in the Automotive and Aerospace industries and allows the creation of virtual products long before the production begins.  This virtual products can be tested with mathematical models and the handling can be analyzed with virtual reality in an environment, which is similar to the one the real product have to sustain.  

Creation of heavens (Life -forces)

In this light the creation of the seven heavens is like creating a virtual world, which has more or less the same faculties of the physical universe, that starts to evolve after the Big Bang.  But the seven heavens are more than just a blueprint for the world, because they are completely woven into the fabric of the physical world. According Charons theory, each electron contains a bridge to the dark matter, which he defines as the eternal world. So the pattern of matter, that e.g is part of the earth, is constantly communicating with the other world and can store or receive information to or from the eternal world or heavens. 

Beside of the seven forces than form the universe there are two auxiliary forces involved, first the holy spirit and second the force or sphere of the angels. According Pakh Subuh, this two forces are Gods tools to communicate with his creation.     

Creation of the physical universe (Earth)

It is at the moment of the Big Bang when time and space starts to evolve. But, when before was neither time, nor space, how God could create the seven heavens each one after the other as in the Genesis described. For us humans this is almost impossible to understand, because our mind is attached to this world, what means without time and space a creation outside is unthinkable. Nevertheless, if one compares the seven days duration in the Genesis with the estimated 13.8 billionyears since the Big Bang happened, the former didn't take more than a blink of an eye.  
However, as it is quoted in the holy scriptures and proved by physic by the fact, that the universe sooner or later will collapse, after the Big Bang the ascending path to the creator or to the origin did start.

But not before evolution has reached the stage, where man has become a new species on earth, Adam and Eve were finally sent to earth to begin a life as a human being, for the first time endowed with a real human soul. The human beings before Adam & Eve, even they had same intellectual capacities, can not considered as human from a spiritual viewpoint, because they lack the ability to have a sense of Gods Power. So they would have been something in between human and animal and couldn't sense their mortality in a way we can.     

Human evolution

The human did start with Adam and Eve and is as well a part of the Genesis and the stories in the Bible. But seen from a more scientific viewpoint this story can be told in different too. In his monumental book "The Ever-Present Origin" the cultural philosopher Jean Gebser has described a different history of human evolution, which, in the context of this article, clarifies some details of human evolution. He tells us a story in where the human beings from the time of Adam down to the modern world have been dominated by different structure that follow each other. So the consciousness of man has been increased in each stage towards a more complete understanding of this world, but on the other with a weaker understanding of the origin, where we came from. 

Putting his theory in the context of this creation process shows, that the Cultural human evolution in general goes backwards down to the material level and only the messengers of God and the Saints are able to ascent to the origin of the creation.  Jean Gebser explains in his work 'The Ever-Present Origin'  how the 'cultural' human evolution took place from the age where higher forces where dominant until modern times, where it is the material life-force which dominates us. But because there is no real cultural progress or human evolution possible in this process, only the path of Conscious Evolution is possible, which has the potential to get mankind back to the origin. In Gebsers terms this stage is called the integral structure. It does mean, that man are able to integrate all the life-force below the human level and become human beings with both, the full understanding of this world, but also of the hereafter or our origin.