Dadu Dariya Tulsi

This is a deep and legitimate line of inquiry—and it’s important to keep one foot firmly in textual history and the other in careful analogy, especially when bringing in physics. I’ll do both, but I’ll clearly mark where we move from doctrine → interpretive metaphor.

PART I — How Kabir’s cosmology evolves

(Kabir → Dādū → Dariyā Sāhib → Tulsi Sāhib)

All four share the same vertical universe, but each sharpens a different edge.

1.

Kabir (15th c.) — the foundational rupture

Kabir introduces the decisive break:

Core structure

• Sat Purush / Anāmī – beyond time, beyond attributes

• Kāl Niranjan (Brahm) – lord of time, death, karma

• Three sons – Brahmā, Viṣṇu, Śiva

• Three worlds – physical, subtle, causal

Kabir’s emphasis

• Kāl is not evil, but binding

• Liberation is not refinement of samsāra, but escape beyond it

• Worship of gods = worship within time

Kabir’s key move:

Time itself is the prison.

This is revolutionary: bondage is not sin, but temporality.

2.

Dādū Dayāl (16th c.) — interiorization & ethical clarity

Dādū accepts Kabir’s cosmology almost wholesale, but shifts tone.

What stays the same

• Kāl = ruler of the three worlds

• Brahmā–Viṣṇu–Śiva = limited cosmic officers

• Sat Purush = only true refuge

What changes

• Less mythic narrative, more interior discipline

• Emphasis on:

  
  

  • vairāgya (detachment)

  • humility

  • non-sectarian devotion

• 
  

Dādū speaks less about how Kāl created and more about how Kāl traps:

Time distracts, delays, divides attention.

In Dādū:

• Kāl is experienced psychologically as restlessness and postponement

• Liberation is present-centered stillness

3.

Dariyā Sāhib (18th c.) — systematic metaphysics

Dariyā Sāhib is the most philosophically explicit.

His refinements

• Clear mapping of:

  
  

  • regions

  • sounds

  • consciousness-states

• 
  

• Kāl becomes:

  
  

  • ruler of causal law

  • manager of karmic accounting

• 
  

He makes a crucial clarification:

Kāl does not create ex nihilo —

he organizes vibration within limits.

This is important.

Kāl:

• rearranges

• governs cycles

• enforces repetition

Sat Purush:

• emanates being itself

4.

Tulsi Sāhib (19th c.) — bridge to modern Sant Mat

Tulsi Sāhib synthesizes everything and introduces technical vocabulary later used by Radha Soami.

Key developments

• Clear distinction between:

  
  

  • Kāl’s regions (up to Brahm)

  • Pure spiritual regions beyond Kāl

• 
  

• Nāma / Śabd becomes the sole method of ascent

• Kāl explicitly identified with:

  
  

  • mind

  • time

  • causality

  • desire

• 
  

Tulsi Sāhib’s decisive line:

Wherever there is time, there is death.

Where time ends, fear ends.

This locks the system.

PART II — Kāl as

Time

(not metaphor, but ontology)

In Sant thought:

• Kāl ≠ a being with a clock

• Kāl = temporality itself

• Birth, sequence, memory, anticipation → Kāl’s domain

This is strikingly modern.

Kāl rules wherever:

• events occur in sequence

• cause precedes effect

• identity persists through time

PART III — Relating Kāl to modern physics (carefully)

Now we shift registers.

This is analogy, not doctrine or proof.

1. Time in physics ≠ time in mysticism — but there’s overlap

Physics shows:

• Time is not absolute (relativity)

• Time emerges differently at different scales

• At quantum scales:

  
  

  • time symmetry breaks down

  • causality becomes probabilistic

  • observer participation matters

• 
  

Mystical traditions say:

• Time is not fundamental

• Time emerges with manifestation

• Beyond manifestation → timeless awareness

These are not the same claims—but they rhyme.

2. Kāl ≈ emergent time + causality

You could interpret Kāl as:

• the domain where time emerges

• the regime where:

  
  

  • entropy increases

  • systems decohere

  • observation collapses possibility into history

• 
  

In this view:

• Kāl is not a demon

• Kāl is the rule-set of manifested reality

3. Why liberation is “beyond Kāl”

Physics can describe:

• how time behaves

• where equations break

It cannot describe:

• why there is experience at all

Sant metaphysics claims:

• consciousness precedes spacetime

• time appears within awareness, not vice versa

Liberation = identity shifts from:

“I am a thing in time”

to

“Time appears in me”

That is not physics—but physics no longer forbids it.

PART IV — Where NOT to overreach ⚠️

Important guardrails:

❌ Do not say Kabir “anticipated quantum physics”

❌ Do not treat Nāma as a physical vibration

❌ Do not collapse metaphysics into equations

✅ Do say:

• Both question the fundamentality of time

• Both see causality as contextual, not absolute

• Both point beyond naïve realism

One-paragraph synthesis

Kabir inaugurates a cosmology in which bondage is not moral failure but immersion in time (Kāl). Dādū internalizes this as distraction and ethical entanglement; Dariyā Sāhib systematizes it as causal governance; Tulsi Sāhib formalizes it into a vertical metaphysics where liberation lies beyond temporality itself. When read cautiously, modern physics—by destabilizing absolute time and linear causality—creates conceptual space for understanding Kāl not as myth but as the regime of emergent order, within which consciousness appears bound, and beyond which Sant traditions locate the timeless Sat Purush.

If you want next, I can:

• compare Kāl vs Māyā vs Avidyā precisely

• place this next to Plotinus or Gnosticism

• or show how Shabd/Nāma functions as a non-temporal principle in these systems