Memphian Paul Corson recently released a new book, Regaining Paradise: Forming a New Worldview, Knowing God, and Journeying Into Eternity, that may have even more appeal for people searching for a way to deal with uncertainty in these strange times. Corson spent his career assisting those confronted with loss and the possibility of death. As a pharmacist, he helped establish a protocol for the treatment of HIV/AIDS, he received the Philadelphia Hero Award for his contributions in supporting AIDS survivors, and his work has been used nationwide to comfort those who have suffered great loss. We spoke with the author about spirituality, mortality, and his new book.
Memphis magazine: Tell me a little bit about yourself.
Paul Corson: In humility, what makes the three otherworldly visions even more remarkable was that my parents were atheists. To cite an example, when I was nine, upset by the death of one of my aunts, I asked my father, what happens at death? He responded, “This place is all there is,” followed by, “Dead is dead.”
Yet memorably, at age ten, after finishing my homework, I kissed my parents good night, went up a flight of steps and entered my bedroom. On entering my room, these words clearly registered in my mind, “The places on either side of the blinds are very different from each other." This was the first time in my young life that I heard “voices” of this sort.
This marked the beginning of the vision experience. I walked to the blinds that had been open to close them for the night. But as I looked through the blinds I saw the night sky filled with stars. I focused on the dark space that was between the stars and was profoundly moved. I realized I was looking into infinity! There are no walls out there that are limiting. What I was looking into was never-ending. In the same second, my consciousness self was pulled into the vast never-endingness, and I realized that this infiniteness was infinitely powerful: that ultimately my parents and I came from this power. I understood the meaning of the words that entered my mind when I walked into my bedroom; the space inside my room is enclosed, while the space beyond it is infinite.
I was led by the same power to experience more wondrous things during this vision. I told no one of these happenings and had no other visions for 40 years. But then I had a series of two otherworldly visions that were every bit as remarkable: After being taken through a number of steps, I was guided to enter the white light of heaven.
I shared my transcendent experiences with Gregory D. Alles, a former chairman of the Philosophy and Religious Studies Department at Western Maryland College (McDaniel College since 2002). I also shared my experiences with Sister Margaret McKenna, who is an international speaker on non-violence with a Ph.D. in divinity from the University of Pennsylvania. After considering all aspects of my descriptions, both found my experiences credible. The sister called me a “modern-day prophet,” and as a result of Gregory Alles’ review, my experiences were featured in the “Transcendence” section of the Philadelphia Inquirer in an article called “Shedding Light on Visions of the Divine Light.”
I am a pharmacist by profession. In 2000, I received the Philadelphia Hero Award for my service to the HIV/AIDS community. I came to live in Memphis in 2010, drawn by an opportunity to work in one of the hospitals.
MM: What made you want to write the book?
PC: Five years passed after I had entered the Light without incident. Then, in 1988, by chance I read an article by Gregg Easterbrook in The Atlantic, “Are We Alone?” The article’s focus was the SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) project. Easterbrook declared that if we made contact with an extraterrestrial civilization that had met God and was willing to tell us what it had learned, “human society would shake to its foundations.”
Easterbrook’s declaration affected me on a deeply personal level, which at first was puzzling. Then I realized that I could provide part of the knowledge people were seeking. While I had not met God, my journey into the white light had taken me closer to the creative, causative force than most individuals had gone. This understanding encouraged me to begin writing about my transcendent experiences.
MM: Would you talk a little bit about the research process?
PC: I did not set up an outline for the book; I merely extended my story, which developed in a natural fashion. I used the Internet to flesh-out information about a number of the subjects that were developed in the book. I also drew information from books that I had read, such as The Elegant Universe by Brian Greene.
MM: Would you talk about the concept of the “inner angel”?
PC: Regaining Paradise asserts that we are not mindless, soulless, individuals without free will, which is what materialists, including the majority of scientists, would want us to believe. Rather, we are infinitely more, as wonderfully described by poet William Wordsworth: We are not born “in utter nakedness, But trailing clouds of glory do we come From God, who is our home, Heaven lies about us in our infancy.
The “inner angels” reside deep in our glorious core whose voice, though faint, can be heard if we listen beyond the chatterings of those who promote themselves without the constraint of decency.
From my perspective, the angels teach, as did Jesus, that we are our thy brother’s (and sister’s) keepers, and that we should take actions that are consistent with the common good.
MM: Thinking about the Smoot quote about a “simple, symmetric” universe, if one expects to find the driving isn’t that one would find?
PC: This is Smoot’s response in full context: Joel Achenbach of the Washington Post asked George Smoot, a Nobel Prize winner in physics, whether he thought our most basic questions about the universe (for example, what accounts for the absolutely necessary 25 perfect cosmic fine-tuned conditions at the Big Bang) would ever be answered. Smoot replied, “It depends on how I’m feeling on any particular day. But every day I go to work, I’m making a bet that the universe is simple, symmetric, and aesthetically pleasing, a universe that we humans, with our limited perspective, will someday understand.”
My response to Smoot’s quote: The key word here is “symmetry,” which infers unity. Unity, or symmetry, according to Smoot, would lead to understanding “our most basic questions about the universe.” Probably the most basic question scientists have about the universe is explaining how it suddenly appeared from nothingness 13.7 billion years ago with all the necessities required for life to form.
The often given response by materialists that somehow the universe was able to create itself is laughable and irresponsible.
In Regaining Paradise, I describe how the universe was created and how it is constantly being sustained by the infinite force, God, due to the symmetry (the fundamental unity) between the creative divine energy with our energy. I refer to this condition as supracosmic (otherworldly) symmetry. This creative energy animates us every second of our lives. It’s the energy that leaves our eyes at death.
MM: Is there anything else that you would like to add?
PC: A group of atomic scientists, after evaluating the conditions of the world, have published in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists that they’ve moved the Doomsday Clock from two minutes to midnight to 100 seconds to midnight, which is the Apocalypse. This is the closest we’ve been to midnight since the inception of the clock in 1947, when it was set at seven minutes to midnight.
It’s time to be honest because time is running short. It’s apparent that the Judeo-Christian worldview upon which our beliefs, attitudes, and actions are based, has, taking everything into consideration, failed to inspire us enough to act. We have possibly three or four decades left to alter the path we are on. Trust the scientists who have made that dire prediction.
To change to another path requires us to be motivated. We would have to recognize that one rarely travelled path can inspire us to realize that we are far more than a physical individual.
Thunderclaps should sound because knowing who we truly are is vital to building a safer, saner, more peaceful and loving world. The ancient Greeks understood this. They etched this message in stone on the archway that led into their most sacred place on Earth, the Temple of Apollo at Delphi: “Know thyself and thou shalt know the universe and god.”
Knowing yourself as regards to who you truly are, simply requires that you recognize that your every feeling and every thought, mundane or that of genius, that registers in your mind, was ultimately not due to flashing neural energy in the brain being channeled to higher neural networking systems, but rather from a place beyond the universe. Because the living second that you’re experiencing cannot be caused by materiality and its accompanying force fields. The conservation laws that are the most fundamental laws in the universe absolutely forbid your experiencing first person awareness solely from matter alone. Those laws also forbid physical matter from being the cause of your spaceless, weightless mind, which is not reducible into smaller components, unlike material objects.
You may be sensing what I am suggesting: That we actually are — a miracle. Take note that a miracle is described as being something that cannot be explained through the workings of nature. A miracle is something that was brought about by a force that is beyond the universe—an infinite creating force.
This is what the Nobel laureate Max Planck, the father of quantum mechanics, had to say about the infinite force: "I can tell you as a result of my research about atoms this much: There is no matter as such. All matter originates and exists only by virtue of a force. … We must assume behind this force the existence of a conscious and intelligent mind."
