Building This World, or Preparing For the Hereafter?
If you look about you, you will see that everyone (including probably yourself, too) seems frantically busy with something or the other. People are so caught up doing things that they do not seem to have the time to listen to or think about anything else. They know of just one way of using their time and other resources—and that is, to spend it on seeking to achieve the numerous worldly goals they have set for themselves. People’s busyness is geared simply to one thing. And that is, to make their little worlds as nice as possible. By and large, they are concerned only with worldly progress.
Death, however, is a bold rebuttal of this worldview. Everyone has to die one day, and so all the worldly wealth you have accumulated will one day be snatched from you. You will have to leave behind forever the little world that you have spent all your energy, time and other resources in building. You will be taken towards such a world for which you possess nothing at all if you did not adequately prepare for it while in this world.
Every person who is born into this world very soon starts thinking in the same worldly terms as the people around him. Like them, he, too, gets entangled in all sorts of materialistically oriented pursuits. Because of this, materialistic thinking has become a part of the continuing flow of human history. This sort of thinking has become such an integral part of cultural traditions that it seems almost impossible for anyone to be able to think free from it.
It is here that man’s real test takes place. If you want to be truly successful in life, you must extricate yourself from this conventional way of thinking and begin to think for yourself. You must separate yourself from traditional culture and thinking and form your opinions based on reality. If you do this, you will at once realize that the real issue for us human beings is not this worldly progress, but, instead, preparation for the eternal Hereafter. Our real task is to prepare while in our pre-death period for the post-death period of our lives. We must work on developing ourselves in such a way that in the eternal life that will unfold after death we will be considered to be successful.
