Prepare for the Eternal Future

Prepare for the Eternal Future and so they enter the next phase of life—the post-death phase—bereft of real progress, where they will have to face nothing but utter loss. Man is also exceptional in having the concept of ‘tomorrow’. Everything else in the universe, including all animals, only live in the today, in the now. It is man alone who has an awareness of the tomorrow and who, making it his target, plans his life accordingly. In other words, while all other beings live in the present, man is unique in also living in the future. According to the Quran, those people are truly at loss who use their potentials only to acquire ephemeral material things and do nothing for building their future. Their life before death may, on the face of it, appear to be happy, but in the life after death they will be the ones to despair. This is because in the life after death the thing that will be of use will be one’s intellectual and spiritual progress, not material progress in the worldly sense. Every person has within him limitless desires. In the same way, every person also has within him limitless abilities, using which he can fulfil his desires to a limitless extent. But everyone ends up using only so much of his abilities as can provide him some temporary relief in the limited world before death. Finally, every human being takes along with him all his abilities and enters the eternal world after death, where he will suffer because in the pre-death period of life he did not make use of his abilities for the sake of this second period of his life, the life after death.