Page 221 - Matter: The Other Name for Illusion

holds materialist views, could be made terribly uneasy by this situation. It is
truly disappointing and crushing for such people to understand that they
confront only an illusion of all the things they desire and all the people they
assume to have absolute existence. When they understand the truth, they will
see that they have spent all their lives chasing illusions, and wearing

themselves out in vain with their desires. They will see that they wasted their
energies in denying the truth. They will be truly saddened by that, and even
humiliated.
They will also suffer grave disappointment in the hereafter from assuming
that all such illusions were truly real.

Those are the people who have lost their own selves. What they
invented has abandoned them. Without question they will be the
greatest losers in the hereafter. (Surah Hud: 21-22)

Yet, the fact that everything is an illusion, that God is all that truly exists,
is a source of great joy to anyone who accepts God as his only friend and
protector, and who genuinely loves Him.

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O Objection: "Is the end of this world of perception nothingness? Can
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R Reply: One of the things that prevent people from thinking about this
subject is that they are frightened of remaining in complete nothingness. When
they consider the implications of this, they realize that they can never know the
original of what they think they touch. However, nothing apart from the will
of God can remove any of the causes that He has created to test us in this
world. These causes will continue to be created until the moment of our death.
We will continue to undergo such tests as feeling the hardness of a table,
seeing our blood when we cut our hand, pain, suffering, fear and sickness. The
fact that we live in a world of nothing but perceptions will not do away with
our close connection to such causes. Even when we die, there will still not be
nothingness. As God has revealed in the Koran, we will begin a new life of
different dimensions and causes. There is no reason to think that we will end
up in nothingness. Since God has created human beings in this environment
which tests us, He will continue to provide us with perceptions. That is in fact
what He reveals in the Koran. When our perceptions in this world cease,
Replies To Objections Regarding The Reality Of Matter 219