one of the great hidden jewels of islam are something called hadiths and these
are the reported sayings , actions , approvals , disapprovals of muhammad the prophet of islam
and there are some marvelous hadiths i'm surprised they're not much more widely known and
exploited for their wisdom and their theology and i just want to share one of my favorite hadiths
and read some commentary on it by a well-known english convert to islam guy eaton who
i mentioned before died just a couple of years ago i'm going to read from his amazing book islam
and the destiny of man which has been responsible for converting many english people to islam and
it's going to read a bit of preamble and then he will cite the hadith and make some comments on it
and this is from chapter 12 other dimensions for islam as for christianity this life
is a preparation for what is to come but no one will seriously prepare himself
for something that appears to him unreal a fantasy a dream it is difficult enough for the young
to grasp in an entirely concrete manner the fact that assuming they survive they will eventually
be old people how much more difficult then for the human creature young or old to understand
that divine judgment heaven and hell will come as surely as tomorrow's dawn or yet more surely
since that dawn cannot come unless god so wills whereas the advent of physical death and all that
follows upon it represents the only infallible prediction we can make concerning our own future
the three monotheistic religions unlike hinduism for example are not altogether happy with the
image of dreaming as it applies to our present state of existence although this imagery is by
no means foreign to either islam or christianity it is often misunderstood since people readily
take it to mean that that life is less real than we take it to be whereas the intention
is to indicate that there are other possible states of experience so intense that in relation
to our everyday experience of this world they may be compared to wakefulness in relation to dreaming
there is a hadith recorded by a muslim which can scarcely be interpreted in any other terms
the man who had the pleasantest life in the world so we are told
will be dipped momentarily into hell on the day of resurrection he will then be asked son of adam did
you ever experience any good did anything pleasant ever come your way and he will reply no my lord
i swear it then the man who of all men had the most miserable life on earth will be dipped
momentarily into paradise he will then be brought before his lord and asked
son of adam did you ever have any misfortune did any distress ever come your way
and he will reply no my lord i swear it no misfortune has ever come to me and i have
never known distress it would be difficult to find a simpler or more striking illustration of
the different degrees of reality as experienced by a consciousness transposed from a lower one to
a higher one the same time it offers at least to those who are prepared to accept the possibility
that there may be states of experience more real than anything we live through here one answer to
the question as to how god can allow the innocent to suffer in this world if anyone were to awaken
from a bad dream full of fear and torment to find himself at home beside his beloved
sunlight streaming through the window a prospect of golden days before him and all his deepest
longings satisfied for how long would he remember the pain of the dream on the other hand if he were
to awaken from a dream of delight to find himself in all too in an all too familiar
prison cell awaiting the next session of torture at the hands of merciless inquisitors and
quite without hope dream pleasure would melt away in moments whether it be sweet or sour
reality takes precedence over dreaming and the greater reality takes precedence over the lesser
uh there's an extraordinary chapter in guidance book and uh inspired by an extraordinary hadith
which uh clearly as the quran says as well that the next life the hereafter is much more real than
this life and you even find uh people who are live in this world testifying to that from experience
famously in so-called near-death experiences people who have clinically died and who in some
sense pass on to the other realm and they when they're brought back they testify that their
experience of that reality was far more real and acute and fantastic in its intensity and its sheer
reality than anything they experience on this earth they see colors they've never seen here
before and they see things they've never seen on this earth so i think those people maybe have a
a brief glimpse into the hereafter but obviously they come back
so just want to share uh that hadith and the uh amazing commentary by a guy in his book
islam the destiny of man which i do recommend i don't agree with everything he says in the book
it comes from particular sufi perspective which i don't always find uh i don't always doesn't always
sit comfortably with me but um much of what he says is absolutely brilliant and expressed
with great insight and wisdom and eloquence there we go till the next time