Chapter II: Patience and Gratefulness
Answer: Man is different from angel. There is not a single angel who possesses more than one quality. Each one of them has been assigned a special work. The following verse gives such an indication: There is none of us but for whom there is not an assigned work.' For this reason, there is no hatred, rancour or quarrel in them. Their works is like the work of our five organs.
Eye is to see but not to hear. Nose is to take smell and not to hear.
Angels are prone to divine service unlike a man who is prone to good and bad. They obey what God orders them to do and they glorify God night and day. Some of them always are engaged in bow, some in prostration some in standing. There is no rest in their works. They are gifts of God for men.
God says to men: 'Give up open and secret sins.' Man is not always cognisant of his secret sins-hatred, doing injury to others etc.
There are two gifts in each breath, one gift is that when a man gives out a breathy the burnt gas in heart comes out. If it does not come out he would be ruined. In taking breath, the life of air is stored up in heart. If breath is chocked up, his heart is burnt because of cutting of the life of air. In each of 24 hours, a man breaths one thousand times. There are ten moments in each breath. On account of this thousands of gifts come to your body in each moment. Now imagine what innumerable gifts come from God.
CAUSES OF MAN'S BEING UNGRATEFUL: Man cannot express gratefulness to God as he is not cognisant of God's gifts owing to his ignorance. He thinks that recitation of all praises due to God by tongue is sufficient to express gratefulness. He does not know that if he does his works according to the injunctions of God and if he fulfils the purpose of a thing for which it is created, he will be expressing gratefulness for the thing.
The first cause of his being ungrateful is that he does not consider some gifts as gifts as all are enjoying those gifts in common just as air water fire. If there is want of air for a moment, all will be destroyed. He who has got eye-sight will not be seen to express gratefulness for his eye-sight. When he becomes blind and then gets eye-sight, he expresses gratefulness. Once a man
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Vol-IV THE BOOK OF CONSTRUCTIVE VIRTUES 103
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