In a recent post to the Glimpses department, Sirkar van Stolk quotes Hazrat Inayat Khan as saying that in the afterlife we shall meet those whom we love—and also those whom we have hated. This may be startling to some; it seems to be a rather different view of what awaits us from what we often hear, and it deserves some thought.

Religious authorities have traditionally given the world a binary option: if we have lived a good life, we will go to a place of light and peace, perhaps with clouds and angels playing harps, and if we have wasted our opportunity in this world, we will be consigned to a place of endless pain and punishment. Often we are told to expect some form of judgment at the time of passing, to determine the appropriate destination. In ancient Egypt, for example, the soul was supposedly brought to a spiritual court where, before the assembled ranks of various gods the deceased person’s heart was weighed against a feather; if the heart was heavier than the feather, the soul was condemned, but if it was light, the soul was assured of eternal happiness. In other words our own heart will bear witness to us, and the consequences of our choices are inescapable.

What Hazrat Inayat describes is certainly in line with this concept; the only difference is that he paints the afterlife with more than just two colours. When the physical body falls away, he says, what persists is the mind, in the broad sense of ‘consciousness,’ and as it is then unencumbered by the denseness of the earth, whatever we have accumulated there, such as memories, attitudes and impressions, will be clearly revealed. The thoughts and opinions we had believed to be concealed will be in plain sight and each person will live in a world of his or her own making. As Hazrat Inayat tells us, if we have learned to find happiness for ourselves and for others, then happiness will await us, and if we have sown the seeds of poison, the fruits of those seeds will be our portion.

It is therefore quite understandable why we would see the ones we have loved, for they form a welcome part of our consciousness–but, welcome or not, the same is true of those to whom we have negative feelings. If we harbour bitterness toward someone, we keep that person present in our thoughts and feelings, and that presence will become evident in the other world.

The lesson should be clear: it is not for nothing that one of the fundamental principles of any spiritual path is purification—the removal of that which is out of place. If we do not want to spend eternity with whatever is unpleasant to us, then we must work right now to discard the unpleasant from our own heart and mind.