Life Death and Beyond

their energies only to acquire something that turns out to be less than their ideal. To understand this difference between the seeker and the sought is the greatest wisdom. One who understands this difference can realistically plan his life and course of action and then arrive at the plane of success. Such a person will never live in tension. How to Overcome Anguish? Ratan Singh (b. 1927) was a famous Urdu novelist. During a conversation, his interviewer, Rehana Sultana, asked him which of his stories he considered as his representative story. He replied, “I am yet to write my representative story”. In his famous book Gitanjali, the Bengali poet-writer Rabindranath Tagore said this about himself: “I have spent many days stringing and unstringing my instrument while the song I came to sing remains unsung.” This feeling is found among almost every litterateur. What is the reason for this? The reason is that a human being is by nature an idealist. A person seeks to express his feelings in words in an ideal way. But this isn’t possible. This is because the words he has are less than ideal for the purpose. On account of this sort of contradiction—between a person’s nature as an idealist and the non-ideal reality of this world—most people live in a sort of anguish, and they also die in that state. The only place for a person to quench this thirst, to get over this anguish, is Paradise. If a person is a true seeker and