ADVANCED INTRODUCTION TO PARADISE
If man’s desires are taken positively, they can be the decisive factors for actions that help a person become eligible for Paradise.
Man is born with innumerable desires. He considers these desires among the most precious treasures of his life. He spends his whole life trying to fulfill them. Finally, every man discovers that he has failed to fulfill all his desires. Almost every person’s fate is that he is dissatisfied both before fulfilling his desires and after apparently fulfilling them. It is the condition of nearly every person.
It is because man’s desires are unlimited while this world is limited. This difference makes it impossible for a person to construct the world of his dreams. In this world, the fate of every person, who seeks to fulfill his desires, finally becomes a case of unfulfilled dreams. At the same time, human desires can also play a positive role. These desires are an initial introduction to Paradise. They inform us how joyful the world of Paradise will be, where all beautiful wishes will be fulfilled completely.
In the present world, the secret of success is desire management rather than the futile effort to fulfill all one’s desires. The present world does not exist so man can build Paradise here. It exists only so that, through righteous living, man can prove himself eligible for entry into Paradise in the Hereafter. If man’s desires are taken positively, they can be the decisive factors for actions that help a person become eligible for Paradise.
The story of almost every person’s life is the same—and that is, chasing after one’s desires and dying without fulfilling them. For the fulfillment of one’s desires, so many factors are needed, that to put them together is not within the power of man, even if he lives a very long life and all the wealth and power of the world come under his control. For example, a man can build a house but cannot stop an earthquake from happening and destroying it within seconds. A man can take great care of his body to make it physically strong, but he cannot change the compulsory law of death. Man can accumulate all sorts of pleasures and luxuries, but he cannot put an end to their limitations when deriving pleasure from them. Man can collect all kinds of objects of comfort, but he cannot change the law according to which man is susceptible to illness and accidents.
This experience proves that what is in man’s control is only action, not the results of his actions. Man has the freedom to act but he cannot perform the actions needed to build a new, ideal world. Only God, the Creator, can create a world. In such a situation, a person who engages in actions in the hope of thereby building an ideal world for himself in this world is only giving evidence of being unrealistic, and it is a fact that no positive result can be produced through unrealistic thinking.
If we keep this before us and reflect, we may realise that man should be willing to accept a fundamental division between himself and the Creator. He should recognise that engaging in action is man’s domain while producing its results is the Creator’s domain. In line with this, the period before man’s death is, for him, the period for action, while the period after death is the period of obtaining the result of his actions from God.
If man acknowledges this reality, he will simultaneously obtain two benefits. Firstly, his tension will get over forever. Tension is the name of the difference between action and its result. When this difference is eliminated, tension is automatically relieved. The second benefit of this would be that man would find a definite guarantee that if he leads a genuinely righteous life, after death, he will receive the desired result of his action in that he will become the owner of an ever-verdant garden of joy—eternal Paradise.
