water) is just a concocted mental imagination...

water) is just a concocted mental imagination, he concluded that the principality and reality is exclusively for the existence. According to that natures (quiddities) are conventions of our mind and what is really there is just ‘‘being’’ or ‘‘existence’’.[^1] In other words, among all concepts and mental images, the only concept that can describe the external world and can genuinely represent the reality outside our mind is the concepts of ‘‘being’’.

Therefore, the key to know the universal laws and rules that can govern the universe is the universal principle of asalat al-wujud (The reality or the principality of existence). The general structure of philosophical knowledge of the world is based on this principle, from which the universal philosophical laws governing the world have to be derived. The most important philosophical principles of cosmology derived from asalat al-wujud are as follows: A.

Unmixed graduation (hierarchical structure) of being (tashkikul wujud) According to asalat al-wujud, the differences that we understand among things in the world are all rooted in their ‘‘being’’ and can have no root other than the reality of being. Therefore, all things in the world differ in ‘‘being’’, just as they share ‘being’.

The reality of being [in contrast to the concept of being] is a reality that admits differences and multiplicity of types, and every type of being is a level of being which is different from other beings in intensity or weakness, and unlimitedness or limitedness. Different types of being differ from each other in that one is weaker, that is, more dependent and more needy of causes and conditions to be existed and the other is more intense, that is, more independent and less needy.

The differences of being in degrees of dependence on and need for the other which is the same as the difference in weakness and intensity is the source for all differences and varieties in the world. The peak and the most intense being is the self-independent being, which is absolutely free from need, that is, the eternal self-necessary being. The self-necessary being has no need for any cause or condition and is the absolute being and enjoys the ultimate existential actuality.

All other levels of being are manifestations of self-necessary being, on whom they entirely depend.