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*This transcript was automatically generated by AI and may contain errors. *
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In the name of Allah, the most gracious, the most merciful. So Omar asked me another question. Does it seem, has it ever seemed to you that life is unreal? He said it seems to me sometimes life is unreal. Like what we are doing now, you walk here and it doesn’t seem real, it seems unreal. It’s one of these, really think about it. It’s absolutely clean, pure air. The phone can’t capture it, capture it. Just now what I’m seeing flights of geese and duck. I know they are my lads because I’ve seen them before. If you can catch them, I’ll show you to them, show them to you. No, they are gone. Okay. So there are lots of them up in the distance there. Geese, ducks, and as I said they are mallrads. I know that because I’ve seen them before. And if you look through there, there’s a picture. Can’t be very good with this distance, but all those dots that you’re seeing, lots of dots. These are all ducks and geese. So, very beautiful. This water is clean and pure. This is actually drinking water for the city of Holyoke. So it’s clean, clean, pure water. Unpolluted, unpolluted air. When we are getting information about the pollution index in Delhi, for example, which I don’t even know how anyone in Delhi does not have respiratory problems. Most likely they have. And then somebody sent me something from Pakistan that’s more than double that. Which is in the sense because of farm fires, they burn the stubble of the crop. So they plant wheat and after harvesting the dry stalks and crop are there. So they set it on fire to clean the fields. And that creates this huge phenomenal amount of smog and smoke in the air, which is the killer. So none of that. Here we are walking through this park, which is four lakes surrounded by forest and different kinds of trees in the forest. You saw my, I did remind us my khatiras from before, which showed the same forest in fall. All those colors, of course, are gone now. We just have the greens and browns and of course the dry trees. I’m coming up here to some mallards, which I will show you closer about Pinchada. So does it look unreal? Of course it looks unreal. And so my response to Omar was, yes, it looks unreal. And what if you look at it from not so much philosophy, but from the lens of Islam, the religion, the Quran. The Quran tells us that this life is unreal. Because Allah swt said, And that’s it. Weirdly, the life of this world is nothing but deception. It is deceiving, it’s deception. What looks positive is not positive. What looks negative is not negative. The one who looks strong is not strong. The one who looks weak is not weak. The one who looks as if he or she is immensely successful and powerful, they are not. They are hugely unsuccessful. They are just waiting to be punished, to get to the place where they will be punished. And there is no doubt that this punishment will come, because that is the promise of Allah. Allah does not leave anybody unrewarded for what they do, whether that reward is good or bad, depends on the individual. And so it is deceptive, very deceptive. And this is what deceives us. This is the whole reason why. I’m just thinking Allah, I’m saying that, for example, why would a Muslim, who knows that Allah swt has declared war on the one who deals with interests, any form of interest, why would a Muslim still take an interest-based loan? Why would a Muslim not just take an interest-based loan, but try to justify it for himself and for others by giving all kinds of ridiculous explanations and arguments about it and saying how it was prohibited then, it’s not prohibited now, and how these times are different, those times are different, as if Allah swt is subject to any of this stuff that we talk about. Why would you do that? Because you are deceived. Because you are deceived. Why would we say, look at somebody, I don’t know how to take names, but look at somebody who does something good in one area, something clever, something smart. But if you look at their life, their life is like a cesspit. Literally, it’s like standing on top of a cesspit, a pit in which the refuse from latrines is poured in. I mean, and you say this is the person. This person is a cesspit. This person is the, because in a cesspit, the biggest lumps rise to the top. And that’s what we have made of society. So we say we are the most advanced, the most educated, we are the most prosperous, and blah, blah, blah, all the superlatives that ever existed on the face of the planet. We don’t read any history. Just the stupidity of that statement doesn’t strike us. All we need to do is to read some history. And we don’t need to read ancient history. Go back a few decades and you find how stupid this statement was because there were others who made exactly a similar kind of statement. And today they are six feet under, pushing up the grass, and no one to even mourn or regret their passing. So, you know, my point is that that’s the reason why they say in history, nations that, two nice quotes, nations that don’t learn from their history are condemned to repeat it. And the second one is that the only thing you learn from history is that you learn nothing. Doesn’t have to be like that, but it is. So, imaginary. So, does this life look as if it’s imaginary? Yes, it does. And as I said, it is imaginary in many ways. Now, having said that, we are not spectators, right? We are not spectators. We are in the drink. Like here, we are in that water. Life wise, we are in that water. Now, if you’re in the water, you’ve got two choices. You swim and one day you will get to the site and you can walk up and walk away with your life intact. Or you can choose not to swim and you can say, well, you know, I’m a fish. You’re not a fish, you’re fish food because you will die. And that’s the issue with life. So, life may seem to be unreal, but we are participants in it. Whether you like it or not, we are players. There’s no spectators in life. And if I’m a player in life, then I better learn the game. I better learn the rules of the game and I better learn how to play by those rules because I’m not the rule maker. I’m not the rule changer. I’m the player. And the one who will decide if I won the game or lost the game is the owner of the game. It’s not me. So, I can’t kick a ball into my own goal and say, oh, fantastic. I scored a direct hit. That’s right. You scored a direct hit, all right, but where? And that’s the issue with life. So, Allah has given us the choice of what we want to do with this life. So, if it seems unreal, yes, but what we need to do is to make sure that we don’t treat it as unreal. It is real. It is very real for us. And we need to take the right choices. Allah, in His great mercy, didn’t leave us to guess. He didn’t leave us to figure out what to do. Allah, gave us the choices and told us, showed us the path through His Kitab and through His Nabi, sallallahu alayhi wa sallam, and said, so we know this is the path that leads to Jannah. This is the path that leads to Jahannam. Allah said, say, the truth is by Allah. The truth is your Allah. And the one who wants to believe can believe. The one who wants to disbelieve can disbelieve. Obviously, if you disbelieve and if you insist on disbelieving, then your destination cannot be the same as the one you are going to go to. Your destination cannot be the same as the one who believes. And you try to live a life of obedience. If you see here now, here is one of the creatures of Allah. That’s a squirrel. And the squirrel is doing what squirrels do at this time, which is he is burying nuts. He is burying basically acorns, oak nuts. There you see he digs and buries. Now this is a huge lesson as far as we are concerned, because here is a squirrel who picks up an acorn, which is food for it, but he doesn’t eat it. He might even be hungry, but he doesn’t eat it. He digs a hole and buries the acorn. Because the squirrel knows that these beautiful, beautiful days that we are facing just now and we are enjoying thoroughly are going to go away. Last night the temperature fell to minus 2. So I saw my bird baths and the water that I leave for the birds frozen solid. So we are already seeing frost. And the squirrel knows that. The squirrel knows that the time will come when all of this will be covered in ice and snow. And that is when I am going to need food. So the squirrel is burying the food, keeping the food in a nice safe place, so that when the weather changes, she or he, I don’t know which one it is in this case, will have the fruit that she needs or he needs. So the sense of akhirah, sense of something which is beyond what is visible, is there even in animals and birds? Squirrels, on a side note, squirrels don’t always remember where they buried those oak seeds. And that is how oak trees grow, planted by squirrels. And America is full of them, of oak trees planted by squirrels. Because the squirrel buried the acorn and forgot where it was. I’m going to go up this little elevation here and try to show you a picture of a very large flock of geese, which is there on that water. I hope I can see it. So imaginary life, imaginary life, see that’s beautiful, it’s absolutely fabulous color of this. Okay, there we go, let me see now if we can show you this thing. It’s not the greatest picture obviously, but I guess that’s the best we can do, given the circumstances. Ask Allah swt to help us to learn the lessons and to always, always, always remind ourselves that this life is a test. Does it appear unreal? Yes, because it’s a simulation, it’s a test. And that’s the reason why Allah swt also gave us Istighfar and Tawba. He gave us an eraser in our hand while we are writing our paper. You can also erase if you write something wrong, erase it. Make sure that when this paper is submitted to the examiner, that it only has good in it. That it only has things that you really wanted the examiner to, you want the examiner to look at, and to examine you on and to reward you on. That is the choice we have. Wasallallahu ala nabiyyil kareem wa ala alihi wa sahbihi wa nabiyyil naim bi rahmatul kareem.
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