“Life Is a Dream Interpreted By Death”
By
Sumit Paul, New Age Islam
12 November 2022
I'm a voracious reader, reading and ruminating
all the time. There're famous thoughts and quotes by literary greats that keep
coming back to the solitude of my sphere of musings and making me intrinsically
happy.
One such
thought is the great Persian poet and mystic Khaqani's ' Life is a dream
interpreted by death, ' from his Persian tome, ' Tohfat-al-Eraaqayn'.
Though one may bracket it with the Bard of Avon's famous ' Life is a tale, told
by an idiot, ' from his tragedy ' Macbeth, ' Khaqani's thought is far more
profound than that of Shakespeare.
Sahir wrote
so poignantly, “Ik Pal Ki Palak Par Hai Thahri Hui Ye Duniya/ Ik Pal Ke
Jhapakne Tak Har Khel Suhana Hai " (the world rests on the eyelid of a
moment/ it all looks so lovely till it blinks).
Life can be
understood and lived well only through the understanding of death. This is Zen
wisdom, wisdom of an unrippled mind that can view Life and Death with
equanimity, equipoise and equilibrium.
It's
worthwhile to mention that though Khaqani never relinquished Islam in the usual
sense of the abnegation of faith, he remained a Doubting Thomas and had
reservations about afterlife (Aaqibat), heaven, hell, angels and Roz-e-Hashr
( the Day of Judgement).
So, his
perceptions of death were not coloured by the volubility of spirituality and
irrationality of the scriptures. Life is a journey. Death is the final
destination of it. Here, I dare add the word ' interrupted ' to Khaqani's
quote: Life is a dream interpreted and interrupted by death.
The recent
mishap in Gujarat's Morbi contextualises this. So many happy humans were
swallowed by death. All their dreams got aborted before one can say Jack
Robinson. Dreams of nearly 140 unfortunate people got interrupted in a moment.
Such mishaps provide insights into life's conundrum. In one of his absorbing
stories, India-born famous Pakistani Urdu raconteur Intizar Hussain wrote, “Prose
of life is ambushed by tragedies and poetry of life is punctuated, nay
punctured, by death.”
Once the
fear of death vanishes, we see life sans its coverings of religious rubbish and
all things become obvious. We tend to be fearful of death because we associate
it with esoteric beliefs and a host of nebulous fears. Once this veneer of
fears is removed, life and death seem just the two sides of the same coin.
We must get
rid of the fear of death by freeing it of the incertitude that encircles it and
finally overwhelms human life and existence.
Never
believe what your Jaggi, Ravishankar or even Rumi tell you about death and
weave a picture of celestial and ivory-tower(ish) romanticism around it.
They're all very big and full-time liars and impostors.
Death is a
desirable hiccup that softly deletes you from the page of life. Death is,
therefore, a welcome change. To quote John Keats from his ' Ode to a
Nightingale, ' “I’ve been half in love with easeful Death." I relate to
Keatsean poetic desire to depart. Do you too?
------
A regular columnist for New Age Islam, Sumit Paul
is a researcher in comparative religions, with special reference to Islam. He
has contributed articles to the world's premier publications in several
languages including Persian.
URL: https://newageislam.com/spiritual-meditations/life-dream-death/d/128381
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