Page 18 - Deep Thinking

16 DEEP THINKING

and their university professors do not think about it either.
Let us try to make you think over this a little. Let us assume that a
person, having lost his memory, tries to learn about his surroundings by
asking questions of everyone around him. This person would first ask
where he is. What would he think if he was told that beneath the ground
he stands on lies a globe of boiling fire and that these flames could gush
out of the earth's surface in the event of a strong earthquake or a volcanic
eruption? Let us go further and suppose that this person was told that this
world is simply a small planet and it floats in an infinite dark void called
space and that space contains even greater dangers than those beneath the
earth’s crust. For example, meteors weighing tons freely move around in
space. There is no reason why they should not alter their courses, perhaps
because of some gravitational influence from another planet, and collide
with the earth.
Surely, that person would not be able to forget, even for a moment,
the risky situation he is in. He would investigate how people lead their
lives in such an environment to which they hang on by the skin of their
teeth. He would realize that a flawless system has been brought into being.
The inside of the planet on which he lives contains great danger, yet very
delicate balances prevent this danger from harming people, except in
unusual circumstances. The person who realizes this understands that the
earth and all creatures on it live and continue their existence in safety only
by the will of Allah, owing to the flawless balance He has created.
This example is only one of millions, even billions of examples upon
which people need to ponder. Giving another example will be useful to
help us understand how heedlessness affects people's faculty of thought
and restrains their intellectual capacity.
People know that the life of this world passes away and ends very
rapidly, yet still, they behave as if they will never leave this world. They
act as if there is no death in the world. This, indeed, is a kind of spell car-
ried over from generation to generation. This has such a strong effect that
when someone talks about death, people immediately close the subject for
fear of breaking the spell on them and facing the reality. People who have