Thank you, Alexander, for doing som home work on this part of Islamic mysticism. I really appreciate the quotes. I should do this for the 8 gates of Islam.
In Koran 65:12 I find it interesting that it is written that the heavens (pardis/paradise) are like earth, so we would interpret these domains as believed to be material in nature, and not necessarily immaterial. So, we should ask whether we are even discussing the same subject.
In my experience in the immaterial domains begin in apparently material domains, but I know that they are simply an illusion due to the subject retaining the habit of a physical body and the material world.
In Koran 71:15 I do like the reference to the 7 heavens are in layers, beause that was my exprienec of the immaterial domains.
and in surya 41:12 these layers of paradise are whole universes. Again this has been my experience of the immaterial domains that on their level they appear as infinite, and they do have something like "laws" that "rule" their existence.
I am not sure of the reference in this surya to "lamps." It reminds me of Aladdin's lamps which comes from the Thousand and One Arabian Nights, which comes from the Thousand and One Nights or Scheherazade, whi was a wife of a the Kalif Shahryār.
Wiki has a prety good discussion of this Anciant Islamic collection of stories.
One Thousand and One Nights (Arabic: أَلْفُ لَيْلَةٍ وَلَيْلَةٌ, ʾAlf Laylah wa-Laylah)[1] is a collection of Middle Eastern folk tales compiled in Arabic during the Islamic Golden Age. It is often known in English as the Arabian Nights, from the first English-language edition (c. 1706–1721), which rendered the title as The Arabian Nights' Entertainment.[2]
The work was collected over many centuries by various authors, translators, and scholars across West, Central and South Asia, and North Africa. Some tales themselves trace their roots back to ancient and medieval Arabic, Egyptian, Indian, Persian, and Mesopotamian[3] folklore and literature. In particular, many tales were originally folk stories from the Abbasid and Mamluk eras, while others, especially the frame story, are most probably drawn from the Pahlavi Persian work Hezār Afsān (Persian: هزار افسان, lit. A Thousand Tales), which in turn relied partly on Indian elements.
If our audiance recalls, Aladdin's lamp is a magical oil lamp that when rubbed causes a spirit to coe out and grant the wishes of the one who stroked it. So, it is a reference to spirit beings. Traditionally in Islam and many other cultures references to spirits is terrifying and reminds me of how Asian Buddhists refer to kasina, which to them are ghosts that are represented as sherical lights, and they are treated with a great deal of fear.
In my experience of traveling out of body the beings I encounter are disembodied, but in most cases in the lower domains they are people who are asleep and dreaming, but some of these beings are arguably dead. These interactions can become quite negative and therefore frightening when the contemplative becomes self-aware, which can trigger a violent reaction from the others in that domain. It should serve as a reminder to the contempaltive that one should move to higher domains where one will find one is welcome.
