“O Man! Thou art toiling to thy Lord with toil, and thou shalt encounter Him.” Some commentators have said that there is a transposition here, so the meaning is this: O Man! Thou art toiling to thy Lord with toil, and thou shalt encounter Him when heaven is split open.” In other words, “O child of Adam! The Day of Resurrection is the day of uprising and upstirring, the day of decision and judgment. God's awesomeness and harshness and the resurrection's hardness and tremendousness will split open the heavens. In humility and submissiveness the heavens will come under and acquiesce to the Real's command, and so also the earths. On that day, O Adamite, you will see whatever you did in this world-the troubles you took and the good and the evil you stored away-and you will find a recompense appropriate to your own doing and speaking.” O indigent man! If you want not to have wasted your life and not to be disgraced before witnesses tomorrow at the greatest gathering place and most tremendous courtyard, then put into practice today the advice that the Pir of the Tariqah used to give to his disciples: “Yesterday passed you by in your ignorance, and you cannot know what you will find tomorrow. Take advantage of today, for this is where you are and where you can act. Then tomorrow there will be no regrets.” A man must be the owner of the present moment. The owner of the present moment is some- one whose occupation at the moment goes by with neither thought of the past nor reflection on the future. Reflecting on days past and pondering days future are to waste the moment. Anyone who recognizes his own present moment and accepts his moment will at once keep himself so busy with the religion that he will have no concern for yesterday and tomorrow. The great ones have said, “The Sufi is the child of the moment.” The man who is a Sufi, that is, in a state of “limpidness” [ṣafāÌ], is the child of his own moment, far from everything familiar to his nature. Ḥasan Baṣrī said, “I have found people who were chevaliers and generous with this world. They would give away the whole world without reminding anyone of the favor, but with their own present moments they were so stingy that they would not give one breath of their own days to their fathers or children.
