BASICS OF ISLAM :
Cycle of life .Part1
Q: Why does one creature's life depend on the death of another? Just as day replaces night, spring follows winter, and autumn takes the place of summer, death follows life. The Creator, Who governs everything, does nothing in vain. He creates the most beautiful and intricate beings out of the lowest, seemingly unpromising, materials. Since it is the very nature of His creativity to bestow freshness and novelty continually upon His creation, and since He sets on and motivates everything to mature and develop, risings and settings necessarily succeed each in this world.
Before going further into the subject, let's define death.
Death is not a final exhaustion of nature, an annihilation that operates of itself, or a total extinction into a void. Rather, it is a transformation, a change of place, state, and dimension; a completion of service, a release from its burden, to attain peace and ease.
For every living thing, it is a sort of retreat or transition to its own essence and truth. For this reason, death is as desirable as life. It is as pleasing as meeting friends, and a blessing as great as acquiring immortality.
Materialists who do not grasp death's meaning and truth always see it as horrifying and so compose gloomy odes to it. All such people have seen and felt the same things about death, and have made the same complaints about it.
Since death is a separation from life and the living, it affects our minds and those sentiments that make us human. It is impossible to deny such an influence, to silence the heart in the face of death. Death arouses considerable tumult in our hearts and minds, though it may be short-lived. Belief in the Resurrection causes all such sorrows to be forgotten, for it is like presenting a kingdom to a person who has lost everything, or assuring a person about to be hanged of eternal life and happiness.
According to those who understand the real meaning of death, death is no more than a release from service, a change of abode, and a journey to where most of one's friends have already gone. Those who do not understand this see only its horrifying surface meaning: death as an executioner, a gallows, a bottomless pit, a dark passage into the void.
When believers begin to experience death, the beauties and rewards of Heaven begin to appear before them. When unbelievers, who are deprived of this pleasure of faith, think of death, they begin to feel the torment and fire of Hell that they nurture within their conscience. Their suffering is not just limited to their own feelings, for in their hearts they also feel the grief and suffering of all those with whom they share interests, pleasures, and concerns. Their suffering and loss of happiness increases the burden of grief for whoever regards death as a final end.
Believers consider death a release from service and life's burdens and hardships, and know that everything continues to exist in other realms (in its identity as form and idea). Thus, they view death as an advancement, a perfection, an acquisition of a higher essence and nature. Since death carries the fruit of eternal existence and bliss, it is also a great blessing and a Divine gift.
However, every advancement and perfecting, every blessing and acquisition of it, must pass through preparatory stages:
close examination molding purifying Spiritual progress and the subsequent advancement to higher levels comes only through such trials and purifications. For example, crude ores perish in the purifying furnace before they yield the pure metal. Until the ores are processed in this way, they continue to exist in soil and rock, without the metal ever being tested and then presented in its true form.
If we accept this analogy, we can understand that while death appears to be a cessation, a passing into extinction or nothingness, in reality it is a passing into a higher, more elevated mode of being. When every non-sentient particle appears to move with an eager animation toward its apparent extinction, it actually is running toward the perfection prescribed for it. When oxygen and hydrogen atoms combine, they die in their separate identities only to be reborn as water, which is essential to the vitality of all living forms. Thus we can say that death is a changing of place and form, not an end or extinction. From the tiniest particles to the greatest compounds within the universe, all changes, transformations and decompositions result in what is most beautiful, fresh, and excellent. That is why we define death as the movement of beings to a higher mode rather than as their extinction.
