DR EBEN GOES TO HEAVEN: THE POEM

THE PROBLEM AND POETRY OF BIG QUESTIONS

Neurosurgeon Dr Eben Alexander’s bestselling and controversial Proof of Heaven  (published last October) describes experiences while in a coma induced by bacterial meningitis. According to science he should not have experienced anything because his cerebral cortex would have shut down. In short, theoretically, his claims to experiences of the beyond offer a challenge to materialist notions of mind and brain apart from which “consciousness” cannot exist. Sceptics like neuroscientist Sam Harris have dismissed Alexander’s evidence wholesale and as plain unscientific (For the crux of the argument see:
http://iands.org/news/news/front-page-news/888-eben-alexander-answers-skeptics-criticisms.html. )
It is of course easy to dismiss Eben’s and all  NDE experiences if one denies the existence (for which others would claim evidence) of any soul/subtle body/aura/body electric, or just “consciousness”, able to detach from the body at death and other times during life.

The longstanding doyen of NDE studies, Raymond Moody, has hailed Alexander’s evidence as exceptional and remarkable, but is it? Meanwhile some Christians have oddly, or just ignorantly, claimed the account contains nothing against received doctrine. If anything it might be said to challenge it and most belief systems on most points as regards the hereafter (it is overall perhaps closest to Buddhism in not demonstrating any clear notion of self even while it has a notion of deity Buddhism denies ). What we do have to reckon is that if the soul exists and can experience visions, then there can be visions both true and false just as there are good and bad dreams.

With the conflicting viewpoints in mind I composed the following skit. Readers of poetry should be sure to tune in on May 12th for some more poetry,longer and more substantial than the following and anything but skittish, namely THE HELL PASSAGE.

DR EBEN GOES TO HEAVEN

Doctor Eben went up to heaven
Not quite on a ladder of light.

First stop was a blackness of slime
Where, caught like a worm  in a hole,
He remained  an indefinite time.
There the filth of that place made its bubble,
And its stench wafted fully its smell
While faces made menace through gloom
And, like maybe a heartbeat, the world
Struck a rhythmic mechanical boom.

Then light in the darkness shone out
Grew and spun to the form of a tunnel.
Through this Eben  rose from his swamp
To find gardens and people like earth’s,
But also a woman or angel for guide
With whom he was able to ride
Through celestial scenes and then fly
On butterfly wings up to God.

She or It was a genderless god
Who uttered no words he could hear
His guide gave the sense: it was love
Since at core that is all that exists
(Though it’s evil gives growth and free will!).
God was most like a kind of bright void
Or again like a dazzling dark
And it seemed that God’s name might be OM …
(OMNI something wouldn’t God need to be?)

Eben learned, given practice and time,
To bounce like a ball up and down
Between  heavenly  gate and  earth’s muck
Till at last the gate was tight shut. He regretted
Returning to earth, to terrestrial limits and strife
It’s not like his home, nor like any real thing
Where bliss is denied  with the purpose of life…
….Or….where truth is obscured…..so say….

———————-11———————

Dr Eben went down to hell
It was obvious  from  the very smell.
Sulphurous Satan was back at his tricks
Transforming to light within the Styx.[1]

But New York needed its special story
It wants no heavens of average glory
Publishing circles came  for the kill
It’s heresy sells and not God’s will.[2]

However, beware all gross deception
Which teaches nothing of God’s election
Nor lets the God whose name is Word
Speak anything that can be heard.

And makes of God who’s infinite light[3]
A  force of being much less bright
Indeed a dazzle of darkness, scarcely more
For a soul to see than a muddy floor.

To test all the spirits was sage advice[4]
Too often a vision is merest device
For fiendish minds to spread confusion
Misleading the masses about salvation.

Beware of angels with information
“You can’t do wrong”, else what’s temptation?
While too much love without condition
Belongs with the flatteries of perdition.

Like claims from God there’s no separation,
Half true in its way since all damnation
Is existence through God, but only as fire
Nothing else to support either love or desire.

Moreover the idea’s plain infernal
That love’s the absolute universal
When selves won’t recall their personal being
To love and relate with any meaning.

Both easier and more hard than this
Are death and soul’s entry into bliss.
Let visions agree, doubt odd revelation[5]
Such merely serve truth’s deprivation.

---

[A lot of people seem to have been reading this Dr Eben poem and if you enjoyed it, fine, but it is basically a skit. There is more serious and accomplished poetry that I hope you might think worth looking at and/or supporting here or on Twitter etc in other, subsequent posts]

[1]  The Styx in myth and Dante’s Inferno is the river that separates the world of the living from Hades or Hell. Traditionally it is “the river of hate” – Whether or not it’s near a river, Eben’s wormhole is declared to be a region of menacing faces. The devil transforms to an angel of light (2 Cor 11:14).

[2] Allusion to “the big six” of publishing of which Eben’s publisher (Simon and Schuster) is one while another is HarperCollins, or Heresy Central itself for the range of serious distortions or denials of Christianity it regularly promotes. However the poet has personal issues going way back as regards the dealings of Schuster and Harper over prose rather than poetic material.

[3]  1 Tim 6:16 …”[God]…..who dwells in unapproachable light, whom no one has ever seen or can see”. The epistle’s author means the Creator, God the Father, not the Son, the Word who can be seen including as light”. Though they may have heard God, not even believers will have seen the Creator prior to the Last Things, unless possibly as an image within vision only, but not directly.

[4] 1 Joh 4:1, “….do not believe every spirit but test the spirits to see whether they are from God”.

[5] The Eben experience has many unique features. It’s hardly the “run-of-the-mill near-death experience literature” that Peter Sanford of Britain’s The Guardian had it, which is why for NDE researcher Raymond  Moody  it so remarkable and supposedly impressive. However, without suggesting all NDEs are true or that consistency is truth’s sole criterion in the matter, there is a certain level of agreement among a fair percentage of NDEs which cannot be ignored in assessment.

 

SHAKESPEARE THY NAME IS HYPOCRITE!

SHAKESPEARE THE CHEAT

I wish, alas, I’d never read and didn’t know the latest about Shakespeare. It is going to stick with me more than pornography sticks with some. And although I hope it’s wrong, I’m rather afraid it’s true.

New research would have it Shakespeare was not just dishonest, a regular tax dodger often before the courts, but a wealthy landowner who enriched himself hoarding supplies in times of known shortages and famine when the government was trying to support the people, selling food at inflated prices, and harrying the poor struggling under burdens of debt. See for example the news at:

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2301829/Was-Shakespeare-tax-dodger-Bard-ruthless-businessman-exploited-famine-faced-jail-cheating-revenue.html

The man it seems was plain dishonest in line with lit crit observations that have long wondered why a lot of the plays, especially the tragedies, seem to hinge upon lies and their effect. And then there’s Coriolanus  about the conservative fanatic who’s ready to deny the poor bread. Was this perhaps a literary recognition rather than a moral admission of guilt round a serious personal deficiency?

As the reports that research has uncovered refer to legal cases around the Warwickshire region, we are looking at the Stratford Shakespeare. This person’s identity and origins have long been contested by marginal scholarship on weak grounds, evidence which however more people may now want to believe because these new revelations leave such a nasty taste in the mouth. They do so rather as the great Wagner appals us with his fatally influential anti-Semitism and willingness to make love to the wives even of patrons and supporters. “Trust not in princes”…add great artists to that dictum!

TELL TALE SIGNS OF THE BARD’S DISHONESTY

I have long maintained I possess the true and working chart of Shakespeare, set for 23 April (Julian) 1564 at around 11.20 am with 19 or 20 degrees of theatrical Leo rising. This chart works for the life and it works now, making an awful lot of plausible sense of chart features one might not otherwise comment too closely if they raised questions.

Saturn in Scorpio this Easter has been loosely opposite (at 10 degrees) Shakespeare’s natal Taurus sun at 12 degrees. The last solar eclipse fell at 21 Scorpio afflicting by square to Shakespeare’s ascendant affecting how we see him. The next solar eclipse at 19 Taurus, due next month, will square this point more exactly. The last lunar eclipse in November was on 6 degrees of Gemini. This means it was almost to the minute of a degree at 6.47 Gemini on Shakespeare’s career/reputation sector Neptune, a promise that within 6 months we might see his reputation and career differently. We do.

This same Neptune rules Shakespeare’s eighth house of shared resources and taxes. It contains a Pluto (often present in the eighth sector of wealthy persons) and in affliction to his career section and Taurus sun’s ruling Venus (any immediate cash flow).

The eclipsed Neptune is natally almost perfectly opposite Uranus in Shakespeare’s fourth sector of family and background. Apart from saying, as we know is the case, that there could be something odd about the Bard’s last home or resting place which is something else covered by the fourth, it contains a promise that one day people might well have shocks about his background including about his father. John Shakespeare is not believed to have been particularly honest in local politics.

Shakespeare’s genius like that of many geniuses owes something to Gemini. His Neptune and Venus are both in that sign widely conjunct. But add to his more artistic, moralistic but also rather materialistic Taurus sun the magic of this Gemini conjunction, a conjunction in a sign with such a flair for words, and then throw in his Mercury (actual writing) in rapid Aries and you have someone who can pour out verbal magic without blotting a line as Ben Jonson noted.

But Gemini is light and dark like even Christianity born under the sign and which has produced saints and sinners to the max. Gemini is clever but has a touch of the trickster, criminal and the torturer about it -it’s the sign of the Marquis de Sade (Recall Shakespeare’s gory early Titus Andronicus)

Anything Libra tends to get entangled with law. Shakespeare with his Mars afflicted Moon in Libra seems to have done that on cue at the same time as his moon in Libra tends to hold up a mirror to reflect all he observes. Life and people just passed by and through the Bard and he reflected them exquisitely but he didn’t necessarily feel with them as much as he should. Plainly he could be just cold and ruthless.

AVE ATQUE VALE

I feel really disappointed, even sickened by these new and special revelations. Things that over the centuries moralists have questioned like affairs with dark ladies or young men have been safely disregarded, reasonably enough relegated to the life of artists. But taking bread from people’s mouths? ‘Tis damnable. How shall these hands be clean?

Shakespeare, I hope it’s all wrong and I’m wrong about you; but otherwise, frankly, I can only say I think you’re detestable. Genius isn’t enough and not all the perfumes of Arabia can save you. You’re a smooth talking, charming, wily, hypocrite. You didn’t just cheat the peasants, you have hoodwinked the world. You aren’t as bad as Jimmy Savile, of course, but you aren’t hugely better either. Away with you! You left your wife your second best bed, you denied your daughter education and you even wished to curse us in Jesus’ name if we dared so much as to look inside your tomb. But what else in God’s name might we find out about you?….What else might you be hiding?! (You even have asteroid LIE conjunct the rising at your birth! And it’s conjunct the theatrical Leo ascendant. Did your first known critic Robert Greene have it right about you right from the start when he accused you of being “a Tygers hart wrapt in a Players hyde”?).

I’m just glad that at this Easter time my mind has been more occupied with a poetic genius who was a Gemini and Gemini marked but who was poorer, far more honest and worthy of our respect, namely Dante. My next article this month will be about him. And next month, around mid May when Dan Brown’s Inferno is due to appear, I will have certain Dante linked revelations and surprises that go well beyond just the astrological. You might be very surprised. I hope you wouldn’t be disappointed because if so, I might want to know why.