Surat An Nur (24)
Ayah 39-40
Those who do not believe
Their deeds are like a mirage in a desert
The traveler in the desert who is thirsty
will think it’s water
Until he comes to the mirage and realizes
that it was nothing
And then he finds God
And sees his own destiny in the same
instant.
Or, the person who denies the truth is as
if in the darkness of a dark ocean,
Covered by high, dark waves,
Which are covered by clouds, depths of
darkness, layer upon layer
and if he stretches his hand he can hardly
see it.
And if he doesn’t find God’s light he will
never have light.
When I
was eleven years old, in the fifth grade, I had an experience that I remember
as vividly today as when it happened. I
was standing in front of my class at school, reading a book out loud, and I
fainted. I left my body and hovered
above my teacher and the other students as they scrambled to get water and
revive me. I had other out of body
experiences as well. I used to have
flying dreams. Except they didn’t feel
like dreams, they felt real. It was
exhilarating. I would fly out the window
of my bedroom, sometimes over the Blue Ridge mountains toward my Grandma’s
house, sometimes to places I didn’t know.
I could swoop and dive and change directions, but I could never get
anywhere. I never landed, I just
flew. I wanted to land, but I didn’t
have that much control. I stopped having
those dreams many years ago, until I went to Medina. I’ve shared this story with some of you before. The day we arrived in Medina, at our hotel
beside the prophet’s mosque, Osama went to pray and I lay down on the bed to
rest. The next thing I knew I was flying
up a minaret, above the spiral staircase, and then out of the opening at the
top, into a sky that sparkled with colors more beautiful than anything on
earth, toward a brilliant light. And
there was child riding on my back, a boy child, laughing in sheer utter delight
and joy in sharing the experience with me.
When I came out of it, I tried to place the child – he felt completely
familiar, and yet he wasn’t anyone of my family or friends. And then I thought of the Prophet, and it
felt right. Now, call this experience
what you will – a dream, a hallucination, a vivid imagination. All I can say is it felt real. And it was, along with circling the Kaaba,
the highlight of my Umrah.
I share
these stories to let you know that these experiences, and others, are why I
believe in what people write and say about Near-Death-Experiences – so-called
NDEs. These are experiences that people
have had when their brain activity – that which is centered in the neo-cortex,
the seat of our conscious awareness, has stopped for a period of time – they
become brain dead - but they then come back to life. Reports of these kinds of experiences have
multiplied in recent years, possibly due to advancements in medical science
that allow us to bring people back from cardiac arrest, drug overdose, severe
bacterial infections, etc.
Dr.
Eben Alexander was a renowned academic neurosurgeon who had an NDE in 2008 when
he contracted an extremely rare form of bacterial meningitis that shut down his
neocortex and put him in a deep coma for a week. His doctors had advised his family to remove
life support – he should have died. But
he shocked them by coming back and regaining full mental capacity within a few
weeks. He came back, but was profoundly
changed by his encounter with the hyper-reality of the spiritual realm. He wrote a book about it, Proof of Heaven, published 2012. A former atheist, Dr. Alexander has become an
active advocate for a blending of science and spirituality.
In his
writing, he now starts with this quote from Albert Einstein:
“Try
and penetrate with our limited means the secrets of nature and you will find
that, behind all the discernible concatenations, there remains something
subtle, intangible and inexplicable. Veneration for this force beyond anything
that we can comprehend is my religion. To that extent I am, in point of fact,
religious.”
–
Albert Einstein (1879–1955)
Dr.
Alexander writes, “Together, science and spirituality will thrive in a
symbiosis offering the most profound insight into fundamental Truth, yielding
unimaginable power. The keystone is in global progression of individual
conscious awakening. Many in both the
scientific and religious (or spiritual) realms must denounce their addiction to
prejudiced, divisive, dogmatic beliefs, in order to open our awareness to this
synthesis of understanding Truth. By probing deeply into our own consciousness,
we transcend the limitations of the human brain, and of the physical-material
realm. The spiritual realm is real.
Seamless blending of science and spirituality will occur.”
Alexander is hardly the only one researching
and publishing in the area of NDEs and paranormal phenomenon. Bernardo Kastrup a computer engineer who
specializes in artificial intelligence and reconfigurable computing, and has
worked in some of the world's foremost research laboratories, including the
European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) and the Philips Research
Laboratories, published an article this spring (Scientific American Blog, March
2017) on Transcending
the Brain, in which he describes cases of damage to the brain
that are associated with enriched consciousness or cognitive skill. These
include cases of choking, cardiac arrest, and physical damage to the
brain. “In a recent study, CT scans of
more than one hundred Vietnam war veterans showed that damage to the frontal
and parietal lobes increased the likelihood of “mystical experiences.”15
In an earlier study, patients were evaluated before and after brain surgery for
the removal of tumors, which caused collateral damage to surrounding tissue.
Statistically significant increases in “feelings of self-transcendence” were
reported after the surgery.16”
New brain mapping technologies have shown that
enriched consciousness and heightened cognition happen when measurable brain
activity stops. In other words, the
experiences are happening beyond the realm of the physical brain.
References
15. Cristofori,
I. et al. 2016. “Neural correlates of mystical experience.” Neuropsychologia
80: 212-220.
16. Urgesi,
C. et al. 2010. “The Spiritual Brain: Selective Cortical Lesions Modulate Human
Self Transcendence.” Neuron 65: 309-319.
van Lommel,
P. et al. 2001. “Near-death experience in survivors of cardiac arrest: a
prospective study in the Netherlands.” The Lancet 358 (9298): 2039-2045.
In another
new book, The Self Does Not
Die, 2016, the authors, Titus Rivas, Anna Dirven and Rudolf H. Smit,
analyze over 100 cases of NDEs. These
experiences included extrasensory perceptions beyond the patients’ immediate
bodily environment, telepathy where either the NDEer had a telepathic
experience in relation to someone else, or alternatively, where someone had a
telepathic awareness of the NDEer, out-of-body experiences, healing in NDEers
that is inexplicable by current medical science, paranormal psychic abilities,
such as after-death communications (ADCs), extrasensory perception (ESP),
psychokinesis (PK) and precognitive dreams after NDEs. They conclude by
pointing out that materialist explanations for such phenomena are illogical and
inadequate. The Self Does Not Die offers significant empirical support
to the emerging scientific view that consciousness is fundamental in the
universe, and that the soul exists and does not depend on the physical brain
for its conscious expression.
These
empirical data refute the production model, which states that the brain
produces consciousness out of physical matter. Rather, the filter model (i.e.,
that the brain serves as a receiver of primordial consciousness) is far more
reasonable in accounting for all the available evidence. Sooner or later, the
sheer frustration with the ongoing inadequacies of materialist pseudo-explanations
will nudge the prevailing western paradigm towards the deeper truth, as it is
objectively represented in this remarkable book.
Spirituality and Science strengthen each
other. But, as Dr. Alexander points out,
they cannot be conceived of as complementing each other as long as we cling to
either purely materialist, empirical, fact-based explanations, or pure
religious dogma.
The filter model of the human brain as a
receiver of primordial consciousness complements the schema in Shahab Ahmed’s
book, “What Is Islam?” (Princeton
University Press, 2016) Ahmed defines
Islam as:
Meaning-making for
the self in terms of hermeneutical engagement with Revelation to Muhammed as
Pre-Text, Text, and Con-Text – that is, with the entire phenomenon and matrix
of Revelation, rather than just the Text of Revelation (p. 405).
In other words, for Ahmed, Islam is not
just the Revelation of the Quran (Text), it is also the greater Reality from
which the Quran was revealed (the Pre-Text), and the human understanding and
culture that has developed from understanding both the Quran and that Greater
Reality (Con-Text).
Ahmed describes Pre-text of Revelation as
follows:
The Text of the
Revelation requires as its premise an Unseen Reality or Truth that lies beyond
and behind the Text of the Revelation-in-the-Seen and upon which the act, the
Text and the Truth of Revelation are contingent. This is Unseen Reality is ontologically prior
to and … larger than the textual product of the Revelation: it is the source of Revelation. The act and text of the Muhammadan Revelation
together represent a single historical instance and enactment of this lager and
prior dimension of the reality of Revelation – which I will here term the
Pre-text of Revelation. (pp346-7)
Ahmed goes on to define Text as follows:
The Truth of the
Text of Revelation is only the Revelatory Product: as such, it is but an expression in the
here-and-now of this world of the Truth of the Pre-Text of Revelation. That the Quran/Text of the Revelation is true
but does not encompass all the Truth of the Unseen Pre-Text of Revelation is accepted
by all Muslims. Indeed, the Quran does
not even claim to possess all the Truth of the Unseen made available in the
Seen, saying for example, ‘On Earth are signs for the sure; just as there are
within your own selves: do you not
see?’” p 347
Ahmed’s concept of Pre-Text is strikingly
similar to Dr. Alexander’s description of “Primordial Consciousness.” Ahmed proposed that it is possible to access
the Pretext without reference to the Text of Revelation. By this definition, one could argue that Dr.
Alexander and other NDEers experienced the Pretext directly through their NDEs.
What I see, what I am proposing, is that
Ahmed’s new and compelling understanding of the phenomenon of Revelation can be
seen as being validated by research now being conducted on the phenomenon of
NDEs. Eben Alexander and the many other
people who have had Near Death Experiences might be understood as having somehow
directly experienced the Pre-Text, the Primordial Consciousness. This is the Reality confirmed in Quran as being
more Real than the life of this Earth.
Quran refers to our earthly existence as but a mere reflection of the
Greater Truth of Allah. Quran also tells
us that when we die, this life will seem to have been but an instant.
If we accept that NDEers are experiencing
the Pre-Text, or Primordial Consciousness directly in our time, and that they
are sharing with us hints about the nature of Reality beyond death that we do
well to consider, we are forced to ask ourselves, does the Text of Muhammed’s
Revelation – the Quran – still have relevance for us today? Of course, for Muslims who believe that the
Revelation of Prophet Muhammed, pbuh, was a miracle in itself, the answer must
be yes. But how? The Revelation of Prophet Muhammed was a very
different phenomenon than the NDEs of today.
First of all, it resulted in language – a text, the Quran – that was and
still is the vehicle through which the Prophet and his followers could gain
insight into the broader Truth that is Allah.
But second, Quranic Revelation is in large part very different in tone
than the experiences reported by those who have had NDEs. The later talk about love and beauty beyond
imagination – almost exclusively. The Quran
is filled with language of justice and punishment for those who do not accept
the Truth of Revelation and commit evil deeds without remorse.
From Quran:
Surat Al-An’am [6]
Ayah 60
And Allah causes
you to be as dead at night, and knows what you do in daytime; and brings you
back to life each day so that your term will be fulfilled. In the end, you return to Allah, and you will
understand all that you were doing in life.
Ayah 70
And leave to
themselves those who have been beguiled by the life of this world, and made
play and passing delights their religion, but remind them that every human
being is held by whatever wrong they have done, and shall have no protection
from Allah, none to intercede, none to accept any ransom offered. These are those who will be held by the wrong
they have done; for them there is to come a draught of burning despair, and
grievous suffering awaits them be cause of their refusal to acknowledge the
truth.
How can we understand this difference in
tone, if we accept the premise – which I do – that both phenomenon are
real? Maybe the dire warnings in Quran
were needed for that time and those people, and our time engages a different
experience of PreText – Consciousness – Allah/God. Or maybe the people who have negative Near
Death Experiences don’t share them because they don’t want to believe they were
true. Or maybe those who destroyed their
connection to Allah as Creator never did come back – never became NDEers.
I have to admit that I struggle mightily
with the idea of judgment from an All Loving God. I know I’m not alone in this. However, I have to admit that it is
comforting to be reassured by Divine Text that evil does not go unpunished. I can understand that denying the Truth of
Divine Light would preclude a soul from access to it, condemning that soul to immersion
in the energy of destruction rather than creation. And I can understand that being stuck in
destructive energy would feel as the sometimes graphic language of Quran
describes it.
This is all food for thought. I conclude by saying simply that reading
about NDEs and thinking about them in terms of Ahmed’s proposed definition of
Islam has given me new ways to engage with the Text of Quran – and much to
think about.
Oh Allah, inspire us always to new levels
of understanding your Reality, and protect us from misunderstandings. We pray that you guide us rightly, enlighten
us and forgive us when we go astray.
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