Life Death and Beyond

The Happiness We’re Searching For man, he died second richest (after fellow entrepreneur Kerry Packer), with an estimated fortune of $650 million.” In this world, this is the very same story with almost everyone else. Here, before his death, every person stands, in his own mind, as ‘first’—the centre of his own universe. But death makes everyone ‘second’. Death conveys this message: that here, no ‘I’ has any real existence and that no person is the centre of the universe, no matter what they would like to think. Death tells us that real existence is God’s alone. Wise is the person who realizes this truth himself without death having to teach it to him. One who discovers this truth only when death strikes him is blind. The Happiness We’re Searching For Once, I visited a place in Rajasthan, along with the late Maulana Muhammad Taqi Amini (d. 1991). There, we met a man who lived on a farmhouse. He had inherited considerable wealth from his father. He had married a woman of his choice, and the two of them lived on the farm. On the face of it, the farmhouse seemed a lovely place. But inside, the man and his wife were a picture of utter misery. The couple had married out of choice and began a happy married life together on the farm. But after some years, they got bored of this sort of life. Maulana Amini and I spent a night and a day in the farmhouse, and during our stay I did not see them talk with each other even once. The farmhouse that was once a nest of joy had turned into a graveyard of gloom!