Every now and again someone asks me what I would do when I enter paradise. The only answer that I can give them his that I never think about things like that. This confuses them.
The dunyah is a state of being wherein we are immersed into a state of partial reality. Our perceptions of reality are limited and distorted by the archetypes of our minds and personalities. Jenna / paradise is a state of being wherein we are immersed in an uncontaminated reality. The veils / barriers between us and Allah no longer dominates our perception of reality. Our own state of being similarly transformed.
I do not believe that any human language has the vocabulary to describe this. Quranic Arabic is the most eloquent linguistic framework to describe this, but its sublimity and multiple levels of contradictory meaning are, more often than not, incomprehensible to human beings. By default, the human mind lacks the capacity of the conceptual framework to encompass this. A good analogy of this is expecting the chimpanzee to understand quantum physics, or a cat to appreciate the full beauty of Beethoven’s 9th symphony.
This is why I avoid giving thought to paradise. Any mental imagery conjured in an effort to extrapolate it can never do proper justice to the reality.
This brings up another question.
Science teaches that energy cannot be created or destroyed, only converted into another form of energy. I do not find this contradicts my own humble understanding of my religion. If human consciousness is an extremely advanced organized and subtle form of energy, this suggests two possibilities that do not necessarily contradict each other.
One is that consciousness and sentience are the product of a process (I do not believe that this process is biological anymore then I believe that a television set is the source of the signals and programs that are sent to it).
The second is that if it is a form of energy that comes from a source, it cannot be destroyed through the process of physical death.
Taking this step further, we could apply the idea of quantum entanglement to the phenomenon of human consciousness. This may not be as far-fetched as it sounds because the kind of energy that consciousness displays in how it manifests and operates may be measurable through the paradigms of Newtonian, relativistic, and quantum physics.
I believe that the scholars and mystics of ancient and modern religions had little or no vocabulary to describe these phenomena except through the language of mysticism and poetic metaphor. This however does not negate the existence of the phenomenon they were attempting to perceive and describe (did the Higgs-Boson particle exist before the boys and girls at CERN discovered it in 2012? Yes).
This is why I refuse to acknowledge the apparent contradiction between religion and science. I believe that the only time they are in conflict is when one or the other is doing something that it shouldn’t be doing (this, almost always because of human hubris and ego).
Which of course brings us to the idea of goodness and decency. Sometimes what people call “karma” is the result of the aforementioned quantum entanglement phenomenon. All events of the universe are intertwined with each other. It is impossible, really, to separate any one event or phenomenon from the rest of the universe. An act of what is called “goodness” is simply a conscious and sentient being harmonizing his or her free will with the rest of the universe. But this can also be seen has an act of love and beauty, which is an important and integral part of reality, indispensable to Islam.
But what do I know? I’m just a musician.