In Search of a Satisfactory
Explanation of Human Life
The famous American Christian preacher Billy Graham was once on tour when he got a message from a wealthy man. The man wanted Billy Graham to meet him immediately. Billy Graham changed his programme and went to meet him. When he got to the man’s house, the man told him, “You see, I am an old man. Life has lost all meaning. I am going to take a fateful leap into the unknown. Young man, can you give me a ray of hope?”
This isn’t the story of just one rich American man. Rather, it’s the story of just about every human being. Almost every person, rich or poor, ‘big’ or ‘small’, is, towards the end of his life, afflicted with this feeling. Every person wants to build a world of his dreams for himself. He spends all his life for this purpose, until the last moment of this short life of his arrives and he departs from this world in the regret that he failed to obtain what he wanted to.
Why is this so?
In this vast universe, a human being is the only creature who nurses in his heart innumerable desires. Is it that we have these desires only that they shall never be fulfilled and that we should be buried in the graveyard of our desires and depart from the world?
In every person’s mind there is an entire world of dreams. Is it that this beautiful world exists only so that our dreams remain mere fancies and never come true?
Every person cultivates a garden of desires and hopes in his breast, but hardly anyone experiences the joy of entering this beautiful garden. Why is there this contradiction in us? Why is there no such contradiction among all the other creatures in the universe? Plants and animals do not experience this contradiction at all. Why is it only a human being who does?
The reason for this is that there is a big difference between a human being and the rest of the universe. A person’s life consists of two phases—the pre-death period of life, and the post-death period of life. In contrast to this, all other creatures in the universe experience just one phase of life—i.e. they come into existence and then, one day, they disappear. They take birth and then die and are extinguished forever.
The fact of the matter is that much that a person desires to obtain in the first phase of his life has actually been kept for him in the second phase of his life. The things that he will get in the second phase of his journey he will never get in the first phase. The reason for this is that there is a special law of Nature for a human being, one that doesn’t apply to other creatures in the universe—and that is, that a person’s life is based on the principle of action and compensation or recompense. In the pre-death phase of his life, he must engage in actions, while in the post-death phase of his life he will reap the consequences of the actions that he had done in the first phase.
It is absolutely essential to understand this law if we want to understand the reality of human life. It is only after understanding this law that our life can become truly meaningful and we can lead it in the right way. This law provides perfect answers to all our questions about life. After knowing this law one can get a fully convincing and satisfactory explanation of human life.
According to this law, the world before death is the stage for a person to sow seeds of action and the world after death is the stage where he reaps the harvest of his actions. A person should spend his life in this present world engaging in actions that will bear him a rich harvest in the post-death phase of life, instead of uselessly wasting it in seeking pleasures here. If we spend the present phase of life in the right way, in the world after death we can hope for a place in Paradise, where one can obtain everything good that one desired in the present world but couldn’t get.
