Man, Realize the Reality
Just think this over for a few minutes: You are destined for an extremely long and unbroken lifespan. Death is by no means the termination of this life: it is the commencement of a new era. Death is simply the dividing-point between the two stages of our life. Take the farmer’s planting of a crop as an example. He invests his capital in it and cultivates it, until such times as the crop ripens and dries up. Then he harvests it so that he can use the grain and store it up for his year’s requirements. Harvest is the end of one phase in the crop’s development, during which time planting and cultivation had taken place. Before the cutting of the crop there had been only toil and expense, it is afterwards that he will enjoy the fruits of his efforts.
This is the case with our life also. In this world we are investing in and cultivating our afterworld crop. Each one of us owns a field that is either being cultivated or left barren. We have used a seed that is either productive or mediocre. After sowing our crop, we have either attended to it or neglected it. Either we have cultivated thorns, or else flowers and fruits have blossomed in our garden. We have either expended our energies on the improvement of our crop, or we have wasted our time in unnecessary and irrelevant occupations. The period of preparation of this crop lasts until death. The day of our death is harvest-day. When our eyes close on this world, they will open on the afterlife, and there, the crop that we have been busy cultivating all our lives will appear before us.
Remember that the person who does the farming is the one who does the harvesting, and he will reap only the crop that he has sown. Likewise in the afterworld, everybody will reap the harvest he had prepared for himself prior to his death. Every farmer knows full well that he will take as much grain to the granary as he has grown, and that the crop can never be other than the one he has sowed. Likewise, in the afterworld, man will be recompensed according to the nature of his efforts in the world. Death is the final announcement of the termination of the time allotted to him for struggle and endeavour, and the afterworld is the final place in which he will be able to experience the results thereof. After death there will be no further opportunity to struggle and it must be borne in mind that the afterlife will never terminate.
What a critical matter this is! If only man could come to a mature understanding of this before he died. Becoming aware of the truth only after death is too late, because his later realization will be of no avail. There is no time then to consider the gravity of one’s errors, no time for repentance and certainly no time for expiations.
Mankind is oblivious of his destiny, while time is pressing him with the utmost speed towards the harvesting of his crop. He is busily engaged in procuring paltry worldly profits, and considers himself worthily occupied, whereas, in fact, he is just frittering away his precious time. He has before him a superb opportunity to ensure a prosperous future for himself, but instead, he chooses to occupy himself with unimportant and trivial things. His Lord is calling him towards Paradise, a place of endless honour and bliss, while he, in his ignorance, is immersed in ephemeral and delusive pleasures. He reckons that he is saving, but in fact he is squandering. While constructing his worldly mansion, he is labouring under the illusion that he is building for his life: while in fact, he is erecting walls of sand that will crumble away to nothing.
Man! Realize what you are doing and what you ought to be doing.
