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What is Afterlife (Akhirah)?



An afterlife is a place where a person will be together with those who the person loves the most. If a person practices the love of the devil, the person will be together with the devil. If a person practices the love of good people, then the person will be together with good people. All of us have some love habit. Everyone has a daily habit of expressing love for something or someone. Every day we fill the cup of love drop by drop.

Love is the biggest and best proof of the Hereafter because the love that culminates in eternal separation is meaningless. Humans experience love and the state of being loved, only to be separated by distance, time, and death. So, that separation, is it temporary or eternal? According to some, it is eternal separation. According to others, it is the temporary separation that is followed by an eternal reunion.

When we look at the span of human life and life of the Universe, we see that human life is very short, i.e., (80 years)÷(13,700,000,000 years)=0.000000006. Thus, human life is disproportionately short. It is like the drop of water for a severely dehydrated person who walked for days in a scorching desert. During this laughably short life, humans make many emotional connections and depending on the strength of those connections, and we call them love, hate, indifference, etc. Love is a strong positive emotional connection. Hate is a strong negative emotional connection. Indifference is the weak emotional connection of either positive or negative type.

According to Nursi, the sources of love are four: pleasure, benefit, similarity, and perfection. Alcohol, tobacco, drugs, sugar, and fast food are not beneficial, but people love them because they bring pleasure. Physical exercise and dieting may not be pleasurable, but people love them for their benefit. Grandparents love their grandkids because they are similar to grandparents, and they carry their blood (genes, DNA). Finally, people love perfect things and ideas that have no visible or probable defects.

All these four kinds of love are ceased and stopped by death. Thus, the role of death is to turn the gaze of a person from the gifts to the Giver. Death means separation from the gifts, and therefore, death pushes the person to seek and search the source of the gifts, i.e., Giver. Behind the gifts and beyond the gifts, there is the Giver.

In the previous article (link), I argued that beauty is the desire for eternity. Eternity is the source of beauty, and beauty (pleasure, benefit, similarity, perfection) is the source of love. Thus, love connects the person to eternity through beauty. Another name for eternity is Afterlife or Hereafter or Akhirah.

I am neither interested nor invested in the debates about minutiae and trivia of Afterlife that many theologians, clerics, and common people like to indulge. They concentrate on the trees, and as a result, they miss the forest. Love is the reality. Beauty is the reality. Therefore, eternity is also reality.

A human being is homo sapiens (wise man) and homo amans (loving man) (Names for the human species, Wikipedia). Love is the primary attribute and property of the human. There is a relationship between love and time. We can visualize the graph that has a time on the horizontal axis and love on the positive vertical axis, and hate on the negative vertical axis. Next, points of birth and death can be put on the horizontal axis of time, as shown on the diagram.


At the moment of birth, a newborn baby starts her lifeline at the positive nonzero value of love because a newborn baby loves food (milk), warmth, comfort, care, mother, etc. Next, depending on the external circumstances and, later, the willpower of the person, the lifeline can proceed in the direction of love (positive slope) or the direction of hate (negative slope). Then, at the point of death, the lifeline does not stop, but it becomes invisible or inaccessible. This means eternity is the extrapolation of the lifeline between points of birth and death (2:167, 6:27, 7:53, 32:12, 42:44).

Some people may argue that lifeline ends at the point of death. However, inaccessible is not non-existent. Unintelligible is not unintelligent (Taleb, Antifragile). Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence (Taleb, Antifragile). Therefore, extrapolation of lifeline to eternity is possible, probable, and certain (Nursi, 10th Word).

Love and eternity have direct and deep connections. I tried to understand and explain some of them, but my intellectual and mental powers are low and limited. Nursi explained various connections to eternity in the Tenth Word.

I chose, and I am choosing extrapolation of lifeline to eternity, not the eternal cessation of the lifeline.

-İman isteyen münafık


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