SPIRIT OF ISLAM JULY 2O18

42 Spirit of Islam Issue 67 July 2018 M OST people want to live long, till a ripe old age. Yet, everyone has to die some day or the other. We all dream of doing many things but death stops us in our tracks and carries us away. Why does this happen? Why is it that we want to live long, but yet death arrives, suddenly and without our permission, and blots out all our dreams? Every person asks this question and has tried to find an answer to it. We all want to know why we have to die. We all seek answers to existential questions about life and death. We can get some clues about the answers to these questions from modern scientific discoveries about DNA. Every person has a certain DNA. Your DNA is a complete encyclopedia of your personality. It contains information about many things, big and small, related to your personality. If you decode this DNA, you will find that it is much bigger than the most voluminous encyclopedia. Yet, intriguingly, the DNA does not contain information about one major aspect of our personality. If you study someone’s DNA, you can get an idea of everything about him except for one thing. And this one thing is when precisely this person will die. This, then, is nature’s announcement to the effect that man is an eternal creature, a creature that will never die. Man has eternal life. Death does not put an end to him. Among all living beings, it is only man who has a conception of ‘tomorrow’. Animals live only in the present moment, in ‘today’. No animal has a conception of ‘tomorrow’. Because they have a limited or lower-level consciousness, animals are born in ‘today’ and they also die in the same state. But man is an exceptional creature in this regard. He is the only creature who has an understanding of ‘tomorrow’. To properly appreciate the import of this point, bear in mind that human beings have unlimited ambitions, and that they die with many of their ambitions remaining unfulfilled. In this sense, every man is a case of unfulfilled desires. In the whole of the cosmos, man is the only such creature. No other creature suffers from this painful dilemma. AFTER DEATH Life Hereafter Among all living beings, it is only man who has a conception of 'tomorrow'.