The Story of Human Life

The Story of Human Life The human body consists of many tiny cells. At each moment, the body’s cells are dying, in vast numbers, and new ones are taking their place. Our digestive system is like a cellmanufacturing factory. This factory is continuously supplying the body with nourishment to create new cells. In this way, our body is kept intact. Because of this, it so happens that every few years we receive, as it were, an entirely new body, while our spiritual being, our inner core, remains the same, without any change. Hence it is said that personality is changelessness in change. A person repeatedly makes the folly of ignoring the unchangeable part of his personality—his soul—and of being concerned solely with the perishable part—his body. Because of this, most people are not properly prepared for death when it arrives and for the life that follows death. When, after spending some time on Earth, an individual dies, his perishable part is destroyed, along with all its embellishments, and his true self—his soul—enters the post-death phase of life without having made the necessary spiritual progress. This is the case with most people. It is this event that is characterized as human beings’ failure in the Quran. It is really a terrible failure—that being born with many great potentials, a person generally misuses or underutilizes them and has to face the consequences of this in the post-death phase of his life. Humans have the unique capacity for conceptual thought. It is a capacity that is not found anywhere else in the vast universe. That is why it is said, “Man is a thinking being”. Seen in this way, man’s personality, it can be said, consists of his non-thinking body and his thinking soul. Those people who use their potentials only for sense-pleasures may apparently serve their bodies, but they do nothing for their soul, the thinking part of their being. They waste the predeath part of their life on their material development, but they do not do anything for their intellectual development.