Can You Make a Comparison Between Lives with and Without Belief?
One day a number of bright young people came to me, seeking an effective deterrent to guard themselves against the danger arising from modern worldly life, youth, and animal desires. As I had previously told other young people who sought help from the Risale-i Nur, I also said to them:
Your youth will definitely disappear and if you do not restrict yourselves within the limits of the lawful, it will be lost. Rather than its pleasures, it will bring you suffering and calamities in this world, in the grave, and in the Hereafter. If under the Islamic discipline, you use the blessings of youth in gratitude, chastely and uprightly, and in worship, it will in effect remain perpetually and be the cause of gaining eternal youth.
As for life, if it is without belief, or if belief, because of rebelliousness, is ineffective, it will produce pains, sorrows and grief far exceeding the superficial, fleeting enjoyment and pleasure it brings. As an intelligent, thinking being, man is (in contrast to animals) intrinsically connected to the past and the future, as well as to the present time. He derives both pain and pleasure from them. Whereas, since the animals do not think, neither the sorrows arising from the past nor the fears and anxieties concerning the future, spoil their present pleasure. But if man has fallen into misguidance and heedlessness, sorrows arising from the past and anxieties about the future, mar his particular pleasure, diluting it with pains. Especially if it is an illicit pleasure, then it is like an altogether poisonous honey. This means that, with respect to enjoyments of life, man is a hundred times lower than the animals. In fact, for the misguided, heedless people, their whole life and existence, their whole world, consists in the day in which they find themselves. According to their misguided belief, all of time past and all past worlds have gone to non-existence. Their intellects, which connect them to the past and the future, produce darkness for them. Accordingly with their lack of belief, the future is also non-existent for them. The separations that become eternal because of this non-existence continually darken their lives.
By contrast, if they build their lives upon belief, then through the light of belief, both the past and the future will be illuminated and acquire existence. Like the present time, they provide, through belief, exalted spiritual pleasures and lights of existence for their spirit and heart.
This article has been adapted from Risale- i Nur Collection.