We live our lives as a temporary manifestation. We come into creation through the joining of a sperm and an egg. We gestate in our mother’s womb for a period of time, and then we are born as a baby. This baby is then in need of constant care in order to survive. It cannot make it on its own. Finally, we grow in our earlier years, our teenage years, our twenties, and we become adults. Then we get older and everything begins to dissipate. Our strength
dissipates, our hair falls out or changes color, our bones begin to creek, things do not work as well as they used to. We get older and older and older, and weaker and weaker and weaker, and eventually we pass. It is not like some of us pass and some of us do not, everyone passes. This is the term of a life.
In order to understand our lives we have been told by the saints, and the qutbs (enlightened beings), the friends of God, and the prophets, that we need to know that what we do in our lives has an affect on us in the afterlife. It is explained to us that we are not just the body. There is more to us than our body. There is a part of us that has been put into us by God, which has the same eternality as God has. This part that comes from God, returns to God. In order to make this journey of return, we need to be pure. We need to detach from all that is illusion, we need to detach from all of that which is temporary in
nature.
During the span of our lives we need to begin to understand what it is that is temporary in nature, and what it is that is permanent in nature. This takes some doing, this takes some understanding, because in many ways we are susceptible to the hypnotisms and the magnetisms of the illusory world, and we are drawn into the illusory world, and held in place by the illusory world. An incorrect image of what is actually going on has been engrained in us, and we believe it to be true. We believe the stories that we are told about life. We, in some inexplicable way, even though it is self-evident that this life is temporary, do not live it as if it is temporary. We live it as if our lives have no end, and will continue forever. What happens next is not usually at the forefront of the consciousness of most of us.
Holy men have come to try and change our perspective, to try and make us understand that this temporary existence that we are in is just that, a emporary existence, a temporary manifestation, that there is a permanence to our being that is other than our body, and other than the things we relate to in this world.
