In this opening, we would like to discuss a beautiful narrative of the first successor of the Prophet, Imam Ali, about the mortality of this world and the eternity of the hereafter. He said:
عجبت لعامر دار الفنا، و تارک دار البقا؛
I wonder about the builders of the mortal house and the negligent of the remaining house (1)
If we pay attention to the above narration, we will realize that humans and their desires and blessings are perishable, and in the same way, one day the galaxies and the solar system will also be destroyed. And according to the above narration, humans are improving and building a world that is about to be destroyed. So in another narration, Imam Ali said:
Indeed, the world is suffering and destruction, lesson and transformation, and one of the signs of its destruction is that it strings its bow and puts an arrow in it, and targets the living with the arrow of death and the healthy people with the arrows of disease; And one of the signs of its difficulty is that a person collects what he does not eat (that is, the wealth that he has collected goes to his heirs after his death and he cannot use it himself) and builds something that he does not live in (i.e. with death, he will no longer stay in his house that he has destroyed) and one of its advices is that sometimes you see the rich as poor and sometimes the poor as rich, and there is no distance between these two except blessings that disappear and sorrow that descends. One of its transformations is that desire surrounds man; but before reaching his dream, suddenly death snatches him away! (2)
But humans have left the hereafter which is eternal and they don’t take any luggage for the hereafter in which they are permanent. If a fetus in the mother’s womb does the opposite; it makes the hands, feet, eyes, ears, and mouth in the previous world, i. e. the mother’s womb and used them in this world, sobeit that tool is not used in the womb. For example, Is the foot useful in the mother’s womb, that is, can you walk there? Either the eyes are used or the mouth is used? In fact, the fetus prepares the tools and equipment used in the next world or outside the mother’s womb.
The instance of the mother’s womb is like our world and the afterlife is like the world outside the womb. We should build our hereafter like a fetus with faith in God, Prophet, Ahl-ul-Bait and Resurrection and carry a baggage so that like some fetuses who were born with incomplete tools and suffer punishment, let us not enter hell by not building the tools of the hereafter, i.e. faith and righteous deeds.
source:
1- al-Sharīf al-Raḍī , Nahj al-Balagha , نهج البلاغه ت حسون , p. 802, maxim 121.
2- translation of Al-Burhan fi tafsir al-Qur’an, volume 6, p. 708.
3- http://www.andisheqom.com/ derived rom the article ‘the World and the Wordly’
