In his book Memories of a Sufi Sage, the Dutch mureed Sirkar van Stolk (1894-1963) provides very interesting accounts of his experiences with Hazrat Inayat Khan, and also gives some short summaries of his teachings on certain points. The following offers Hazrat Inayat’s view of what we sometimes call the ‘after-life.’
For immortality and life after death Hazrat Inayat Khan had quite definite, almost pictorial explanations.
“In point of fact, mortality is only our conception; immortality is the reality,” he says. “Death comes to what the person knows, not to the person himself… The soul is life, it never touches death. Death is its illusion, its impression.”
As for life after death: “The condition of the next world is very much like the condition of the dream world… All that exists on the earth plane has its existence on the higher planes too… Here on earth we have two states, the waking state and the dream. There, the only reality will be the dream. That will be our day, uninterrupted by any intervening night… And this day will last for ever – that is to say, until our individuality is merged in the Divine consciousness.”
He describes how the soul, in that “bright daylight,” sees itself “living as before, having the same name and form and yet progressing. Before the soul now is a world, a world not strange to it, but which it had made during its life on the earth… The atmosphere of that world will be the echo of the same atmosphere which one has created in this. If one has learned while on earth to create joy and happiness for oneself and for others, in the other world that joy and happiness surrounds one, and if one has sown the seeds of poison while on earth the fruits of these one must reap there, that is where one sees justice as the nature of life.”
Very few on earth, he observes, know that while they live on the earthly plane they are “collecting something on the higher plane.” The mind is the world that man makes and “in which he will make his life in the hereafter, as a spider weaves his web to live in.”
It is hard, he adds, to conceive of the greatness, facility, convenience, comfort and possibilities of the next world.
Do our dreams come true in the hereafter? To this he replies: “There are objects which remain unfulfilled in one’s lifetime on earth, they are accomplished on the further journey in the spirit world. For nothing that the human heart has once desired remains unfulfilled.… If it does not come while the soul is on the earth-plane it comes to the soul in the spirit world.”
Does one see all those one has known while on earth? “Yes, especially those whom one has loved most, or hated most.” The connection between those who have passed on and those who are still on earth remains intact, he explains: “as long as the link of sympathy is there.”