It is six in the morning, yet the sunlight feels as though the sun were already at its peak. My body is drenched in sweat, and my forehead is so wet with drops that it looks like the steam condensed on the lid of a pot of boiling water.
I do not know whether there is emptiness inside my body or not, but perhaps because of the heat, my whole being feels like a cauldron of boiling water or blood. It seems my body has turned into a sponge, soaked and wrung out by the hot winds of thought.
A human being is ungrateful from the moment of birth. He complains about the heat, and when winter comes, he complains about the cold. He shows impatience even though he knows that the Creator does not love the impatient.
The birds, with eyes half-closed, sit quietly beneath the deep green leaves of the trees. They are patient and content. They do not complain, whether it is hot or cold or any other season. All such conditions belong to the inner state of a person, and the inner state depends on thoughts. If there were no thoughts, the entire world and all its charms would lose meaning.
I am a human being. There is joy in my eyes, but the glow of youth has faded. My eyebrows are white. My back is not yet bent, but I must press my hands on the armrests to rise. My walk is still steady, yet the pride in my stride is gone. The days of walking the earth with confidence have ended. Childhood was buried in youth, and youth was buried in old age.
Even if I wished it, I could not bring them back from the graveyard of the past. What is strange is that the needs are still the same as they were in childhood and youth. When I drink water, it quenches my thirst. When I eat bread and rice, I gain strength. I do not consider myself old, yet people remind me of it with their respectful tone. When I board the bus, even though I am not tired and can stand throughout the journey, passengers say, “Baba ji, please sit here.” And even when I refuse, they take my hand and make me sit. Their polite behavior makes me realize that I have grown old.
This feeling begins when black hair starts turning white.
Once, three friends and I sat together. One said, “I am sixty years old.” The second said, “I am fifty-eight.” Happily, I said, “I am one short of seventy.” The first friend said thoughtfully, “My friends, let us reflect on what we have lost and what we have gained.”
The first said, “I have gained everything in life. I grew up, enjoyed youth, built a house, married, had children, and now play with my grandchildren.”
The second said, “Animals, birds, even insects do all this. What you have done makes you no different from them.”
When my turn came, I fell silent. It hurt me to be compared to beasts. I withdrew into myself and saw two worlds: one beautiful, the other dark and frightening. I stepped toward the beautiful one, but the ugly one blocked my path.
The ugly world lifted its tangled hair and glared at me with red, furious eyes. Terror gripped me, and I burned completely. My once fair skin blackened and shriveled. I saw myself as hideous and grotesque. I trembled in fear of my own reflection. A mist of impurity covered my delicate feelings. Every cell of my being became heavy like stone. When I tried to take another step, my foot felt as if it weighed a mound.
I called out to my heart for help.
My heart guided me and said: “The ugly and terrifying world you see is the impurity your soul has gathered over a lifetime.” I cried out, “Do not associate me with that impurity!”
My heart said: “No one is forced into impurity. When a person first sets foot on the earth, he is as beautiful as a flower and as innocent as a bud. A flower has fragrance because it does not cover its pure thoughts with impurity. A person becomes ugly when he piles filth upon his pure and delicate thoughts.”
My heart told me: “O forgetful man, you call yourself human, yet you do not know that not a single act of life exists outside the circle of thought. You are one short of seventy years old, and in all those years, you have entertained one hundred forty-five million fifty-six thousand six hundred thoughts. That is your life. Can you say that even one of your 145,056,600 actions was done without thought?”
Never. Certainly never. Without thought, you cannot drink water, nor eat bread or rice. You do not even know what thought is or where it comes from.
O man trapped in limited awareness, the world is neither beautiful nor ugly. It becomes what your thoughts make it. Everything is within you. When the human within you turns away, you become filled with ugliness and filth.
Trembling, weak, and in a faint voice, I told my friends:
“My dear friends, listen. Whoever comes into this world brings nothing and takes nothing. Human life is merely a record of thoughts in which meanings appear as beautiful or ugly.”
فَمَن يَعْمَلْ مِثْقَالَ ذَرَّةٍ خَيْرًا يَرَهُ
وَمَن يَعْمَلْ مِثْقَالَ ذَرَّةٍ شَرًّا يَرَهُ
‘Whoever does an atom’s weight of good will see it,
and whoever does an atom’s weight of evil will see it.’
(Surah Az-Zalzalah, 99:7-8)
By Khawaja Shamsuddin Azeemi, RA from Book: Death and Life