ADVANCE INTRODUCTION TO PARADISE
If man’s desires are taken positively, they can be decisive factors for actions to 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. To fulfil them, he runs about his whole life. Finally, every man discovers that he has failed to fulfil 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. In this world, the fate of every such person finally becomes a graveyard of unfulfilled dreams. At the same time, human desires can 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 desires will be fulfilled completely.
In the present world, the secret of success is desire management rather than the futile effort to seek to fulfil all one’s desires. The present world does not exist for building Paradise here. It exists only so that, through righteous living, man can prove himself eligible for entry into Paradise. If man’s desires are taken positively, they can be decisive factors for actions to help a person become eligible for Paradise.
Almost every person's life relates just to one story—and that is, chasing after one’s desires and dying without them all being fulfilled. For the fulfilment of all 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 into 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 comfort objects, but he cannot change the law according to which man is susceptible to sickness 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 cannot perform the steps needed to build a new, ideal world by himself. 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 realize that man should be willing to accept a fundamental division between himself and the Creator. He should recognize 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. Moreover, 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 obtain the desired result of his action in such a way that he will become the owner of an ever-verdant garden of joy—eternal Paradise.
