Prepare for the Eternal Future

An enormous blunder we make is ignoring the unchanging part of ourselves—our souls—while doing everything we can to pander to the changing part of ourselves—our bodies. We devote all our attention to catering to what is temporary in us while we think and do nothing about the welfare of our eternal aspect, our souls. Because of this, when after a limited span of time people die, their temporary bodies get destroyed forever, along with all their many achievements and material possessions, while their eternal being or soul must now face the post-death stage, bereft of all the material prosperity that they may have achieved while on Earth. It is this that the Quran refers to as man’s failure. It is the most terrible form of failure that man is born with great potentials but misuses them, or does not use them at all, and then has to pay the price for this in the postdeath period of life that carries on forever. Man is unique in his capacity to think. In the enormous universe only man is capable of conceptual thinking. Seen in this way, man’s personality has two components: the non-thinking body, and the thinking soul. Those people who use their potential only within the material sphere may seem to make their nonthinking component of their life very attractive and alluring, but they do nothing at all for the progress of the thinking sphere of their life. In other words, they spend their entire life before death pandering to their bodily or physical desires but they completely ignore their intellectual and spiritual development. When death overtakes such people, they die the death of animals. They have wasted their life beautifying their bodies,