Page 61 - The Truth of the Life of This World

faces a quite nasty end. On the other hand, you – or rather, your soul –
will leave this body as soon as you breathe your last. The remainder of you
– your body – will become part of the soil.

Yes, but what is the reason for all these things happening?
If Allah willed, the body would never have decayed in such a way. That
it does so actually carries a very important inner message in itself.
The tremendous end awaiting man should make him acknowledge that
he is not a body himself, but a soul "encased" within a body. In other
words, man has to acknowledge that he has an existence beyond his body.
Furthermore, man should understand the death of his body which he tries
to possess as if he is to remain eternally in this temporal world. However
this body, which he deems so important, will decay and become worm-
eaten one day and finally be reduced to a skeleton. That day might be very
soon.
Despite all these facts, man's mental process is inclined to disregard
what he does not like or want. He is even inclined to deny the existence
of things he avoids confronting. This tendency seems to be most apparent
when death is the issue. Only a funeral or the sudden death of an imme-
diate family member brings this reality to mind. Almost everybody sees
death far from himself. The assumption is that those who die while sleep-
ing or in an accident are different people and what they face will never
befall us! Everybody thinks it is too early to die and that there are always

years ahead to live.
Yet most probably, people who die on the way to school or hurrying
to attend a business meeting shared the same thought. They probably
never thought that the next day's newspapers would publish news of
their deaths. It is entirely possible that, as you read these lines, you still
do not expect to die soon after you have finished them or even enter-
tain the possibility that it might happen. Probably you feel that it is too
early to die because there are many things to accomplish. However, this
is just an avoidance of death and these are only vain endeavours to
escape it:

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