Third Note

O heedless Said! You have illusions and see the exceedingly temporary world as undying and permanent. When you look around yourself at the world, you see it as stable to a degree, and constant. Since looking with the same view you also consider your own transient self to  be  constant, you only take fright at Doomsday. You are only frightened at that as though you were going to live till then.3

Use your reason! You and your personal world are perpetually subject to the blows of death and decline. Your illusion and sophistry resemble this comparison: if you have a mirror and hold it up to a house or a town or a garden, their images will appear in it. If the mirror is moved the tiniest amount or the smallest change occurs to it, the images become confused and distorted. The fact that the actual house, town or garden outside the mirror continue and are constant is of no avail to you, for the house in the  mirror  in your  hand  and  your  town and  garden are only in the  scale and proportions which the mirror gives you.

Your life is the mirror. The support and mirror of your world and its centre is your life. Every minute it is possible that the house, town, and garden will die and be destroyed, their condition is such that any minute they may collapse on your head and your doomsday will come. Since it is thus, do not burden this life and world of yours with loads they cannot raise and support!

Fourth Note

Know that it is generally the practice of the All-Wise Creator to return important and valuable things exactly the same. That is to say, renewing most things in similar form in the alternating of the seasons and changing of the centuries, He returns the things of value and  importance exactly. This law of divine practice is seen to be mostly unvarying in the resurrections of the days, years, and centuries.

In consequence of this constant law, we say: since according to the agreement and  testimony of science, man is the most perfect fruit of the tree of creation, and among  creatures is the most important, and the most valuable, and since a human person is equivalent to a species of the other animals, it may be surmised with certainty that  at the supreme resurrection, each human being will be returned exactly the same, with his body and all his attributes.

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3   See, al-Ghazali, Ihya’ ‘Ulum al-Din, iv, 64; al-‘Ajluni, Kashf al-Khafa’, ii, 368.