A Strange Deprivation
If you give a one rupee coin to someone and tell him that somewhere ahead there is a heap of ten million such coins and that if he runs quickly he can obtain all that money, what do you think he will do with the one rupee coin that you have given him? He will forget about it and run after the ten million rupees!
The issue of this world and the Hereafter is somewhat similar. This world is an introduction to the Hereafter. Here, people obtain an initial recognition of those blessings and joys that God has arranged for in their full form in the Hereafter. This is in order that man can understand the whole from the part, that he can gauge the ocean from a drop.
If someone truly realizes what this world is, for him it will seem like the one-rupee coin mentioned above. He will leave aside this small joy and rush after the much bigger one. Forgetting this world, he will run towards the Hereafter. On the other hand, someone who does not understand the true nature of this world will take it to be everything. Forgetting the Hereafter, he will remain completely drowned in the things of this world.
The sun exists in order to introduce to man the life of the Hereafter that is filled with light. But on seeing the sun, man starts taking the sun itself for a deity. The beauty of flowers and trees is in order to convey to people the beauty of the Hereafter. But man takes them to be the ultimate things and wants to create a paradise for himself amidst them, here in this world. The delights of this world exist in order to make people desire the joys of the Hereafter. But man so loses himself in these worldly joys that he forgets the Hereafter.
A person who loses himself in the deceptive pleasures of this world, has lost his Hereafter. When he will reach the Hereafter and see its eternal joys, his heart will turn into a graveyard of regret. How foolish he was, he would tell himself, that for the sake of false comforts, he lost all the real comforts; that for the sake of false joys, he lost all the real joys; and how, being deceived by false freedom, he caused himself to be deprived of true freedom.
