THE TWO COURSES

Peace of mind can be obtained only through the remembrance of God. The Quran tells us clearly: ‘Surely in the remembrance of God, hearts can find comfort.’ This non-acknowledgement or ingratitude is against human nature. This fundamental failure, consciously or unconsciously, is the root cause of tension and stress. In the present-day, man has come up with unnatural solutions for the problems of stress, i.e. expressing gratitude to the things that he has been given, instead of to the Giver of these things. So, people may be thankful to their family and friends, to their computers and their jobs, to the trees and the rivers, but how many are genuinely thankful to the Giver of all these things—God? Just as the powerful feelings of hunger and thirst, man also possesses the strong emotion of expressing gratitude to his benefactor. By his very nature, man cannot accept something useful without acknowledging the giver. Whenever he is bestowed with generous gifts, his whole personality wants to cry out in gratitude to the giver. No person is bereft of this quality. All that man has in this world is a gift from the Creator, the Giver of all bounties. Be it man’s own being or everything outside of him― the ‘life-support system’; everything that man has is a unilateral gift from God. This being the case, man’s nature desires to fully acknowledge the Giver of all these blessings. Among these gifts are those that man receives directly—for instance, oxygen, water and sunlight. And there are those that he gets indirectly. These are things that man has produced through the use of intelligence gifted to him by God, by using the discoveries and resources of nature that God has created—for instance, all sorts of consumer goods. All these gifts demand that man should acknowledge and thank their Giver—God—with his full heart and mind. But in line with self-invented philosophies, man willingly grabbed these gifts, but abandoned the Giver of them all. This was an enormous blunder. The result is that a basic demand of human nature—the need to acknowledge and express gratitude to the Giver—remained unaddressed. This is an issue of internal contradiction or conflict for a man. In the present age, almost every person is living with this contradiction. The present-day phenomenon of tension and stress is a direct result of this same inner contradiction. It is a fact that peace of mind can be obtained only through the remembrance of God. The Quran tells us clearly: ‘Surely in the remembrance of God, hearts can find comfort.’ (13: 28) o