Cat and the Mirror

The following two texts contain excerpts from two separate books that attempt to understand the universe. The first is William Chittick's Imaginal Worlds, which conveys the philosophy of Ibn Arabi, and the other is Stephen Hawking's famous A Brief History of Time; Schrödinger's well-known cat is also a thought experiment derived from this subject. These days I am reading Ian Almond's book comparing Ibn Arabi and Derrida, but if I had the material, I would write a book comparing the Shaykh al-Akbar (the Greatest Master) with theoretical physicists. 

The cosmos is simultaneously identical with God and different from God. In Ibn Arabi's terminology, it is huwa la huwa—"He/not He." This paradox becomes intelligible through the notion of barzakh, an intermediary reality that joins two domains without being reducible to either. The imaginal realm exemplifies this condition perfectly. Like a reflection in a mirror, it is neither the object nor the mirror, yet neither can it be divorced from them. Thus every existent thing stands between identity and difference, simultaneously revealing and veiling the Divine Reality. The world is therefore best understood not as God and not as other than God, but as "He/not He." 

William Chittick -  Imaginal Worlds: Ibn al-ʿArabī and the Problem of Religious Diversity 

"We could still imagine that there is a set of laws that determines events completely for some supernatural being, who could observe the present state of the universe without disturbing it. However, such models of the universe are not of much interest to us mortals. It seems better to employ the principle known as Occam's razor and cut out all the features of the theory that cannot be observed. This approach led Heisenberg, Erwin Schrödinger, and Paul Dirac in the 1920s to reformulate mechanics into a new theory called quantum mechanics, based on the uncertainty principle.

"In this theory particles no longer had separate and well-defined positions and velocities. Instead, they had a quantum state, which was a combination of position and velocity. ... Quantum mechanics therefore introduces an unavoidable element of unpredictability or randomness into science." " 

...

"Einstein objected to this very strongly, despite the important role he had played in the development of these ideas. Einstein was awarded the Nobel Prize for his contribution to quantum theory. Nevertheless, Einstein never accepted that the universe was governed by chance; his feelings were summed up in his famous statement 'God does not play dice.'" 

...

"Although light is made up of waves, Planck's quantum hypothesis tells us that in some ways it behaves as if it were composed of particles: it can be emitted or absorbed only in packets, or quanta. Equally, Heisenberg's uncertainty principle implies that particles behave in some respects like waves: they do not have a definite position but are 'smeared out' with a certain probability distribution. The theory of quantum mechanics is based on an entirely new type of mathematics that no longer describes the real world in terms of particles and waves; it is only the observations of the world that may be described in those terms. There is thus a duality between waves and particles in quantum mechanics: for some purposes it is helpful to think of particles as waves and for other purposes it is better to think of waves as particles." 

Stephen Hawking - Brief Time of History