Is the Duty of the Human Life Restricted to Living an Easy Life?

 

Certainly, the capital of life and human faculties was given to man to spend on the duties mentioned above. If this is so, then, O my foolish carnal self and O my friend full of desires! do you think that your life’s duty is restricted to living an easy life according to the requisites of modern corrupt civilization and gratifying your carnal desires? Those delicate senses and abilities, those sensitive faculties and organs, those well-ordered members and systems, and those inquisitive senses and feelings were included in the “machine” of your life—our body.  Do you suppose it was in order that you should use them only to satisfy the low desires of your base, carnal self? Rather, they were included in your body and made a part of your nature for the following two basic aims:

First, they should make you feel all the varieties of the bounties of the Real Giver of Bounties and urge you to offer Him thanks. So, you should feel them and perform the worship of thanking Him in return for them.

Second, they should make known to you and urge you to experience each sort of all the manifestations of the Divine Sacred Names manifested in the universe. So, you should experience and know them in order to believe.

It is through achievement of these two basic aims that a man can gain human perfection and become a true human being.

A parable to understand that man was not given his human faculties only to earn his worldly life through them:

Someone gave one of his servants twenty pieces of gold, telling him to buy himself a suit of clothes made out of a particular cloth. The servant went and bought himself a fine suit out of the best quality of the cloth, and put it on.

The same person gave another of his servants a thousand pieces of gold, and putting in his pocket a piece of paper with some things written on it, sent him to do some trade. Now, anyone with any sense would know that that capital was not for buying a suit of clothes. Since the first servant had bought a suit of finest cloth with twenty gold pieces, of course these thousand gold pieces were not to be spent on a suit. Assume the second servant did not read the paper in his pocket and, imitating the first servant, gave all the money to a shopkeeper for a suit of clothes. Assume further that he got a suit of the worst kind of cloth, one fifty times worse than his friend’s.  For sure his employer would reprimand him severely for his utter stupidity, and punish him angrily.

O my carnal self and my friend! Come to your senses! Do not spend the capital of your life and your vital potentials on material pleasures and this transient life. Otherwise, although you are fifty times superior with regard to the “capital” than the most developed of animals, you will fall fifty times lower than the lowest.

 

This article has been adapted from Risale- i Nur Collection.