ভূমিকা

Shiavault - a Vault of Shia Islamic Books Ain-Al Hayat, The Essence of Life Chapter 5: The Objectives The First Objective: Good Deeds The purpose of these admonitions is to bring the attention of the human beings towards good deeds and stopping them from having unreasonable desires and wishes. There are four things that are the impediments for the good deeds of human beings: 1. Procrastination in doing good deeds The Satan misguides man to think that he has plenty of time.

Prayer can best be done when the person is old, he must spend the youth in enjoying the pleasures of the world. 2. Avoiding repentance (Tark al-Tawbah) The man will not repent and abstain from the wrong actions. He keeps living under the misconception that he has plenty of time to repent and reform, till death overtakes him. 3.

Avarice for accumulating wealth and riches When a person become totally oblivious of his gain or loss in search of wealth, it is natural that he forgets Allah and His Prophet (S) in the process. He will busy himself in running after the chimera of wealth day and night. He depends more on his own faculties to amass wealth totally forgetting that it is Allah who endows whatever a person possesses. 4.

The callousness of heart and forgetting about the Hereafter Amir’ul-Mu’mineen ‘Ali (as) has said that man has two traits that one should avoid cultivating: The first is doing things dictated by baser instincts, and the second, working under distant hopes ( Tool al-aml) . The baser instincts prevent a person from accepting the truths and the distant hopes make one forgetful of the transitory nature of this life in the world. One who works under distant hopes, is not on the right path.

The welfare of the people is in abstinence and firm belief. The cause for the downfall of a society is in its people having distant hopes and practice of parsimony. The Prophet (S) told to Amir’ul-Mu’mineen ‘Ali (as) that with callousness four things: spring: Coldness of the eyes, Selfishness, Excess of desires, and Wish to live longer in the world. The Prophet also said that with age two traits become more pronounced in men. The first is greed and the second distant hopes for the future.

The one remedy for these two aberrations is that one should always keep his death in view and realize that everything in the world is transitory. They should know that death is as much near the old as it is with the youth.