The Everlasting Garden of Eden

Recently, Harvard neurosurgeon Dr. Eben Alexander visited heaven. Really. Maybe you’ve read about it. One morning in 2008, after he experienced severe headaches, Dr. Alexander’s entire brain cortex shut down. The cortex, according to Dr. Alexander, is “the part of the brain that controls thought and emotion and that in essence makes us human.” What makes the Doctor’s experience so interesting is that his brain was being monitored as he lay in a coma. He goes on to say, “the neurons of my cortex were stunned to complete inactivity by the bacteria that had attacked them, my brain-free consciousness journeyed to another, larger dimension of the universe: a dimension I’d never dreamed existed and which the old, pre-coma me would have been more than happy to explain was a simple impossibility. Brief, wonderful glimpses of this realm are as old as human history. But as far as I know, no one before me has ever traveled to this dimension (a) while their cortex was completely shut down, and (b) while their body was under minute medical observation, as mine was for the full seven days of my coma.”  Newsweek ran a story called “Heaven Is Real.”  This is quite a relief!

When I was ten years old, I had a near death experience. I was having my tonsils removed, and a cruel nurse (I fought with her as she forced a gas mask over my mouth and nose) overdosed me with ether (revenge?).  Ether was discarded as an anesthetic not long after my experience because so many folks died under its influence. The next thing I knew, I was looking down at the operating table where folks were busy.  Then I found myself traveling through a spiral tunnel toward a bright light. There was a pulsing, humming sound, which I remember thinking sounded very much like the old refrigerator in the house I lived in at the time.  What was our refrigerator doing in this tunnel I wondered?

I now understand that the humming was the sound current, the nam, the OM or “word” as it is called. When I reached the light at the end of tunnel, all I could experience was intense brightness. Because I didn’t really have eyes, the brightness didn’t bother me at all. I felt a wonderful presence and I  remember thinking, “this must be Jesus” (my family were big church goers at the time) although the presence could have simply been your common, everyday, celestial being.  I felt so peaceful in the glow of this wonderful loving presence, and then I heard, without ears, its message very clearly. “It’s not time yet.”  I understood that I had more work to do; more life to live.  The next thing I knew, I was waking up two days after the operation in a recovery room, being shot up with penicillin, which in those days was administered for everything but hiccups. From bliss to pain.

So, it turns out that, not only do doctors get special parking spots on earth,  drive the latest and most expensive cars and enjoy expensive and exclusive country club memberships, they also get the full near death tour!  Demigods are among us. No wonder it is sometimes said that God likes to play doctor every now and again!

Let us hope that Doctor Alexander’s experience, by adding  to the hope of a better world beyond, does not encourage further neglect of this one. This as always been a bit of a problem hasn’t  it? Getting into the celestial realm has  been useful and profitable for the priestly toll keepers who guard the roads to the afterlife, but the idea that things are so much better “up there” has not been an encouragement for us to take care of things “down here.”

In any case, Dr. Alexander’s voyage au ciel is a wondrous thing indeed, and it will undoubtedly make his upcoming book a fabulous best seller.  But since we are still here on this plane, we might want to pay a little more attention to this world.  I can speak from experience, as one who was refused early entry to the celestial realm, that there can sometimes  be a bit of a wait until we move onto the next plane.

The big question for us is not, “is there paradise,” but, “how can we make the world we live in now a kinder and more compassionate place?” How can we transform a species so ignorant that its members believe that killing each other is a viable form of diplomacy, or an acceptable and condoned religious experience, into lovers of their fellow man?

We will have to create an absolutely new paradigm, a new way of being in the world; no small task.  At this point we seemed doomed to repeat history. Like all those preceding it, the 20th century was all about war.  There was never a moment in which simultaneous wars were not being waged, and the 21st has kicked off with the continuing carnage of legalized homicide.  Our mythology is filled from the very beginning with bloodshed.  For this reason, Joseph Campbell in his essay Mythologies of War and Peace,  gives up any hope of peace on earth. He quotes Oswald Spengler who says “Man is a beast of prey.” Campbell continues: “that is simply a fact of nature. And another such fact is this: that throughout the animal kingdom beasts of prey, when compared with their vegetarian victims, are in general not only the more powerful but also the more intelligent. Heraclitus declared war to be the the creator of all great things.” And so forth. I wonder what Dr. Alexander’s celestial tour guide would have to say about this? Campbell seems to have us  lashed forever to the mast of war. He describes war as a grim and inescapable ritual and seems strangely satisfied and smug about it, as if having an explanation for horror makes it acceptable.  Well then, is there any hope for mankind? Yes, because according to Wikipedia, Campbell also believed that “if myths are to continue to fulfill their vital functions in our modern world, they must continually transform and evolve because the older mythologies, untransformed, simply do not address the realities of contemporary life, particularly with regard to the changing cosmological and sociological realities of each new era.”

If the world is constructed around beliefs that, with  time and use, eventually evolve into mankind’s subconscious operating system and mythology, it seems that by questioning old beliefs and replacing them with  new ones we are empowered to create positive change. In NLP terms, this is like changing the neural paths of humanity, and it seems that what the world needs is such a massive re-frame. With this in mind, there are two interesting re-frame possibilities we might consider.

Re-frame one: We are still in the  garden of Eden, we have simply fouled it.  To re-frame our perception of our environment,  the physical container for all life, we can embrace the idea that we are actually still living in the everlasting garden of Eden;  that we are here as stewards for ourselves and future generations, not as ravenous consumers and destroyers.  It has been amply proven  that everything we need is here and more. To return to Eden, we need to share what we have, while letting go of greed and accumulation as our guiding principals. Oops, there goes out cultural raison d”etre! It is amazing that we have not yet figured out that the religion of mammon, of materialism, does not bring happiness! It does bring perpetual war and famine and real poverty for millions, and  spiritual poverty for the masters of war, the so called “one per cent.” Pursuing this insanity (doing the same thing over and over and expecting a  different result) we are fouling our nest. We must move in exactly the opposite direction.

Re-frame two: We will never change anything from the top down. No government, institution, religion, or space being is going to save the day. We, individually, are the only one who can change the world by being what we want others to be, by acting as we want others to act toward us; by developing our awareness, taking personal responsibility for our life and letting go of blame and judgment; by recreating our inner world as a kind, merciful, peaceful, self honoring, terrain and, when all this is done, by taking compassionate action in the world. We can not hand off this responsibility to others. Our business is not to change those who are married to greed, power and consumption. Who knows if this can even be done? It looks doubtful. But, we can tilt the balance of human endeavor away from  them. We can take our marbles and go home. When our personal  world changes, we change the world. The micro informs the macro. The more of us who become kind and compassionate the more the world shifts that way.

There were three wonderful things that Dr. Alexander was told by his celestial tour guide that, through embracing consciousness, we can experience  in our everlasting garden of Eden.