Dr Alexis Carrel was born in France in 1873. After his higher studies, he spent most of his career in the USA. In 1912, he won the Nobel Prize for Medicine. In 1935, he published a book titled Man, The Unknown. This book became very popular and was translated into different languages. A commentator remarked about it thus: “This book sums up much of his experience of man and his life seen from the purely scientific aspect.”
In this 312-page book, Dr Carrel failed to discover the truth about human life. Thus, he titled the book Man, The Unknown. As far as a man as a scientific being is concerned, Dr Carrel had discovered him to a great extent. However, why did he give the book the title that he did? Because of confusion. Dr Carrel discovered ‘man’, but his study could not tell him what man’s destination was. He felt that a known man was moving towards an unknown destination. Moreover, this was the actual reason for his lack of knowing the truth about man. In this sense, a more appropriate title for the book would have been Man’s Goal Unknown.
It is not the problem of Dr Carrel alone. It is a problem of all philosophers and thinkers. It may have appeared that man was, for them, something known. However, the destination of that ‘known’ man has remained unknown to them till the very end. This intellectual vacuum regarding man and his man’s destination has afflicted human beings for thousands of years. Speculation about man’s final destination only led people to be drowned in confusion. However, this is a life-defining question, and its immense importance demands finding a satisfying answer to it.
The fact is that philosophers and thinkers were (and still are) seeking man’s destination in this very world of today, while in reality, this destination does not exist here. Thus, they have been searching for this destination in the wrong place. Thus, it is hardly surprising that they failed to find it. This world is incomplete, while man’s nature leads him to seek a perfect world for himself. Man desires eternal life, while eternal life is not possible for anyone in the world before death. Man desires a world of unsullied joy, but in this world, there are different types of challenging conditions that act as barriers to making this world a joyful world. Man seeks an ideal world, but here he is fated to live in a non-ideal world. By birth, man is a perfectionist. He seeks a perfect world. However, after all the many efforts, he finds that achieving a perfect world is simply impossible here.
The fact is that, unlike what Dr Carrel suggests, the strange thing is not man as such. What is unknown is man’s destination—the ideal world that embodies man’s dreams, which are free of all contradictions and where a man can live with complete fulfilment forever.
The insoluble problem of man’s reality becomes solved when we study a man in the light of God’s scheme. That is to say, along with understanding man the creature, one must also understand was the purpose of man’s Creator—God—in creating him. This is the proper method and approach to this matter. When the issue is seen in this way, one discovers that the confusion or lack of clarity about man was only because people tried to understand man without considering God’s creation plan.
A machine is a created thing, not its maker. Similarly, man is a creature, not the Creator. To understand man’s reality, it is necessary to know the Creator’s creation plan. Without understanding the engineer's plan, one cannot explain the machine. Similarly, it is impossible to explain man without knowing the Creator’s plan to create man. Without keeping this creation plan before us, man’s life and significance remain entirely incomprehensible. However, after understanding God’s creation plan, everything becomes comprehensible. Everything falls into place.
The fact is that the Maker of this world has, following His creation plan, made a pair to this world. These two worlds form a pair. One member of this pair is the world where we live after birth— the planet Earth. The other pair member is the world where we go after death. In this way, man’s life has two parts: the pre-death and post-death periods. The Creator of a man blessed him with life, dividing it into two phases: the pre-death phase and the post-death phase.
The world before death has been made as a testing ground, and the world after death has been made for receiving rewards or punishment. Because the present world is designed for tests, everyone has been given freedom here. Here, everything has defects and limitations. It is as if this present world is a sort of an examination hall. Here, all those ‘things’ needed to ‘write’ the ‘examination’ are available, but the higher ‘things’ are not present. If a student wants to build an ideal world in the examination hall itself, he will surely face only despair and frustration. It is the despair and disappointment that those people face who seek to build an ideal world in this limited and temporary world of tests.
While we are in this examination hall—this life of ours on planet Earth—what must each person do so that they can obtain the perfect world they desire in the world after death? The answer to this question is that they must use their freedom with the Creator's intention.
For life after death, God has made a perfect world, Paradise. This Paradise is, in every sense, an ideal world. God will arrange for such people in this Paradise who are eligible to be settled there. In the present world, those who qualify themselves according to the Divine standards will be settled in the ideal world of Paradise in the Hereafter.
Now, who are these qualified people? These are the ones who, using their intellectual capacities, acquire the maarifah of God. Coming out of intellectual confusion, they discover the Truth. Abandoning the worship of anyone but God, they devote themselves to God alone. Despite possessing freedom, they let themselves willingly be regulated by Divine discipline. Faced with adverse conditions, they build in themselves a positive character. They relate with others in the same ethical way they want others to relate with them.
All these qualities are the criteria according to God’s creation plan for an individual to be eligible for being settled in eternal Paradise after death. Those people who fail to come up to this standard will be put into eternal Hell, where they will face nothing but deprivation, frustration, and sorrow forever. The case of the people of Paradise is the case of those who avail of the opportunities of the present world in the right way, while the case of the people of Hell is the case of those who misuse these opportunities.
It is said that an opportunity knocks on your door only once. Concerning the issue of eternal success, this saying is also perfectly true because no one will get this opportunity again. Those who lead their life on Earth in the right way will have won eternal success by finding entry into Paradise—man’s destination, while those who live their lives here wrongly will face eternal failure.
