Seyyed Hossein Nasr - Eternal Life is Like What?

hussain eternal life is the promise of most religions what is eternal life like in islam you know robert this is an aspect of islamic teachings which is very much misunderstood in the west and sometimes unfortunately deliberately because the quran uses a very sensuous language to describe paradise for example there are animals and plants in the islamic paradise and in fact the english english word for paradise comes from the old persian word pardis which means garden and which is in the arabic form for those means paradise in arabic so it's very interesting that the very words are shared between arabic and english but with two very different meanings islam identifies first of all paradise with the garden not that it was simply an abstraction of the gardens of babylonia as some people say but the goddess of babylonia were reflections of paradise it's the other way around and islamic gardens so famous in spain and india we're always consciously reflections of the paradisal garden and then there's the question of sexuality that is the presence of huri's or uh which was entered into the english language of maidens and also men for women and all kinds of things like that which are then cons we're considering the middle ages that proving that islam was not spiritual and it was very sensuous now of course after that i don't mind by the way after the sexual revolution of 20th century lesser christians made of that but let's take uh this description uh sexuality sexual union is the most powerful experience that we have on the external sensor level in this world there's no doubt about it eating nothing compares to it but it's limited it is limited first of all by all the legal elements by our own physical capabilities by emotional relations and a thousand and one things that we all know about now take all those limitations away the heart of the experience of sexual union is a paradisal experience that's why everybody's after it it's the kind of seeking after the lost paradise now the language that use is used in the quran for paradise must be understood symbolically the thousands of books written in arabic persian other islamic languages about the me what the meaning of these is uh the great mystics who fasted for 50 years they were not they didn't want to go to paris just about to have a heavenly meal or meet a beautiful maiden that already gone beyond all these lower drives of the of the self but they understood these in their symbolic aspect uh you know when you're very hungry very really hungry the first bite you eat is almost like eating god if they're gonna use a hindu term it's a it's really a spiritual experience i said because you don't get a stomachache if you eat too much and you get fat and all of the limitations of our terrestrial existence come into play now these descriptions are paradise which involve what's called that is the feast the paradisal feast of fruit paradisal fruit and so on and so on and then uh as i said the sensual sexual ass descriptions are not meant to simply lower the value of paradise but to elevate it and to show that everything that's pleasurable in this world everything that we enjoy is really a reflection of a paradisal experience the other one is very very important and that if these things have laws against them it's precisely because of the limitation that is imposed by our earthly condition for example it's not what many christians think that in islam lewdness is just all over the place in fact muslims are much more strict about these matters obviously the christians on the one hand from for this side on the other hand from the other side but uh it means that the limitations that are put by the divine law by social customs and so forth we fast the whole month of the year the ramadan just ended we fasted for a whole month from dawn to dusk which is not an easy matter or sunset all of these are to cut the soul away from attraction to the lower reflections of these realities and have the soul gaze upon the real reality itself that's what paradise is and even within paradise there are levels the quran refers to that explicitly and is developed very fully by ibn arabia at the great islamic mystics at the levels in paradise the highest paradise uh is called the paradise of the gardener and not the garden paradise of the essence in which every single concept and idea unlimited form of existence is transcended it is even we are beyond the paradisal state in the ordinary sense in the islamic paradise do we lose our personality and merge into some cosmic consciousness that some religions teach first of what is really metacosmic consciousness uh secondly this is a very difficult question to answer because there is a kind of swimming in the ocean of divinity and therefore being drowned in that ocean but still retaining something of what we are and it's this expression very difficult to describe that meister eckhart formulated this beautiful expression fusion without confusion and uh therefore on the highest level we go beyond the i thou relationship and therefore we transcend what we usually identify as our eye in a sense we reach an essence which transcends this first and primal duality between i and thou as martin buber said in his famous book to transcend that into the divine unity but it's always what you might call it by unity that is there is not total annihilation in the ordinary sense because by some great mystery which is not possible to understand simply mentally and rationally we're given the power to be conscious of our own nothingness and divinity well i don't know if that's good or bad i i i love the idea of some beatific paradise but i'm not sure that that wouldn't at least speaking humanly get old get boring after a while i like to do things that's because uh our ordinary consciousness is rooted in time and it's very hard for us to conceive of that which transcends time i always say this to my student why is it that uh when you're dating the girl that you love very much four hours passes one minute and you don't have at all to worry about about time but when she breaks up with you one hour is like 10 days so we have a actually an inward experience of time it's true we have clocks and atomic clocks and this and that that's the only that's the only it's only one of the meanings of time we have this inner experience of time and we have the possibility of transcending time even in this world in high forms of meditation and spiritualization so the very question of getting bored or things becoming old do not exist and this alone this uh sort of uh force within the soul that wants to act is turned inward and has no desire to act externally because it doesn't seek its own profession through acting outwardly and so these christians that we make of the traditional descriptions of paradise they are based on our lack of experience of those realities and from an islamic point of view how how ultimately real and significant in the islamic philosophy is paradise ultimately only the real is real and that's what i'll call the unity of being this very daring expression islamic metaphysics which says there's only really one being ultimately now the paradise says as well as the purgatories and the hills and earth and all of the heavens in between are relatively real ultimately only the ultimate israel

Channel: Closer To Truth

Views: 9,576

Rating: 4.3595166 out of 5

Keywords: closer to truth, robert lawrence kuhn, Seyyed Hossein Nasr, Eternal Life, life after death, afterlife, islam afterlife, muslim afterlife, philosophy of religion islam

Id: 4rNXzjwug9M

Length: 9min 20sec (560 seconds)

Published: Tue Mar 02 2021