The Greatest Problem
When the realization of God reaches its ultimate limit, it manifests itself as fear of God. One who fears God becomes desirous of Paradise in its totality and along with this, he is fearful of his fate if God does not give him Paradise. This is the highest level of realization.
Human life is a continuum of consciousness. Man’s existence is a living existence and coincidently he is conscious of being a living entity. His consciousness is enhanced in having sensitivity. Man is an aware person in the perfect sense and is moreover, highly sensitive in the fullest sense. As a result of these attributes of man, whenever he has a good experience, he is very happy and whenever he has any bad experience he is very disturbed. Both these feelings of pleasure and pain are found to an extreme degree in human beings.
Man has inherited these two qualities by birth. This should result in making man a very great seeker of Paradise, going greatly in fear of hell-fire. This is because after death every man is going to find a place either in eternal Paradise or in eternal hell. Paradise is eternally a place of happiness and comfort, while hell is eternally a place of sorrow and regret. In consequence of his deeds, man is inevitably going to reach one of these two destinations. This being so, every human being must be greatly concerned about this. It is, however, very strange that man in this gravest of matters has become an example of this tradition of the Prophet, which has been thus expressed: “How strange it is that people are not desirous of a thing as precious as Paradise, and how strange it is that people are not trying to save themselves from such a horrible or fearful place as Hell.” (Sunan al-Tirmidhi, Hadith No. 2601)
There is nothing negative about the fear of God. The truth is that when the realization of God reaches its ultimate limit, it manifests itself as fear of God. The fearful person becomes desirous of Paradise in its totality and along with this, he is always fearful of what his fate will be if God does not give him Paradise. This is the highest level of realization.
