The Story of Human Life
Human beings are actually eternal beings. But their life is divided into two periods. One period, a very small portion of their life, is the pre-death period. The remaining portion of their life is the post-death period, which never ends.
In the universe, except for a human being every single thing or entity is under the law of nature. They function exactly as is decreed for them according to the law of nature. The case of us humans is different. An individual human being is, exceptionally, a free being. He charts his future based on his own free will. He can use his freedom responsibly, or he can misuse it. He can avail of the many opportunities he is provided with. But, equally, he can foolishly waste them.
This fact is expressed in the Quran in different ways. For instance, the Quran (95:4-5) says: “We have indeed created man in the best of mould, then We cast him down as the lowest of the low.”
This is, as it were, a warning for human beings, inviting him to reflect on his present and his future. It means that God created us with great potentials and possibilities, but by under-utilizing them, we make ourselves the worst case of failure.
A human being’s personality is a dual one. An individual consists of body and soul (or mind). Both have their own characteristics. A person’s body is not eternal, while his soul is. Unlike the body, the soul is a non-material reality. It is above and beyond physical laws, in contrast to a person’s body, which is subject to physical laws and continuously undergoes decay.
The human body consists of many tiny cells. At each moment, the body’s cells are dying, in vast numbers, and new ones are taking their place. Our digestive system is like a cell-manufacturing factory. This factory is continuously supplying the body with nourishment to create new cells. In this way, our body is kept intact. Because of this, it so happens that every few years we receive, as it were, an entirely new body, while our spiritual being, our inner core, remains the same, without any change. Hence it is said that personality is changelessness in change.
A person repeatedly makes the folly of ignoring the unchangeable part of his personality—his soul—and of being concerned solely with the perishable part—his body. Because of this, most people are not properly prepared for death when it arrives and for the life that follows death. When, after spending some time on Earth, an individual dies, his perishable part is destroyed, along with all its embellishments, and his true self—his soul—enters the post-death phase of life without having made the necessary spiritual progress. This is the case with most people.
It is this event that is characterized as human beings’ failure in the Quran. It is really a terrible failure—that being born with many great potentials, a person generally misuses or underutilizes them and has to face the consequences of this in the post-death phase of his life.
Humans have the unique capacity for conceptual thought. It is a capacity that is not found anywhere else in the vast universe. That is why it is said, “Man is a thinking being”.
Seen in this way, man’s personality, it can be said, consists of his non-thinking body and his thinking soul. Those people who use their potentials only for sense-pleasures may apparently serve their bodies, but they do nothing for their soul, the thinking part of their being. They waste the pre-death part of their life on their material development, but they do not do anything for their intellectual development. So, when death overtakes such people, they die like animals. Having spent their life catering to sensual pleasures, they enter the next phase of life only to face torment and regret.
Another unique characteristic of a human being is that, unlike all other creatures, he has a concept of ‘tomorrow’. In the universe, all other creatures live only in ‘today’. It is only we humans who possesses consciousness of the future and who, making the future his concern, can plan for it. It can be said that while all other creatures live only in the present, human beings live in the future.
People who waste their potentials only for acquiring the things of ‘today’—the life of this world—and do nothing for their ‘tomorrow’—the life after death—are victims of a grave error. Such people may seem to be very happy and prosperous now, but in the life after death, they will be an example of the worst sort of deprivation. This is because in the life after death what will prove to be of use is one’s intellectual and spiritual development, not one’s material progress.
Human beings possess unlimited desires. Along with this, they have enormous abilities, using which they can fulfil many of their desires. People generally use only so much of their abilities as can give them some temporary pleasure in the limited world before death. Not having used these abilities for their spiritual development, when they die, they enter a world for which they have not prepared themselves. Hence, they will be doomed to live there without relief and comfort.
Given this, the realistic way for an individual is for him to plan his life in such a way that he uses his abilities in the best possible way, so that he can gain felicity and success in the eternal post-death period of his life. He should save himself from living in such a way that in the Hereafter all that he may have to say for himself is: “I was a case of misused opportunities.”
In both the pre-death and post-death period of life the principle of success is just one. And that is, to make oneself a spiritually prepared person. In conventional materialistic terms, a prepared person is someone who has acquired professional education, who is popular among people, who talks well, who hankers after immediate gain, and so on. But a spiritually prepared person is someone who is appropriately prepared for the life after death, having spent the opportunities that he has received in this world on his spiritual and intellectual development.
Only such a person will have any value in the world after death. This person, using his intellect, discovers the truth. He stands firm in his conviction amid a jungle of doubts. He has made God his sole concern. He has quashed his ego and is devoted to God. He remains steadfast in positive thinking even in negative conditions. He leads a principled life, saving himself from opportunism. Free from hatred, he has a deep concern for human welfare. Despite having freedom, he submits to God.
