One day [said Hazrat Inayat Khan] a person put some colours on a paper and showed it to me, saying, “People cannot understand this deep idea, but you will understand it. It is very deep: it has come from some clairvoyant source.”

I looked at it. There were many colours, that was all one could say. They were not even blending harmoniously with one another, they were only striking.

The person who had painted it looked at me and waited for my opinion. He said, “What do you think of it?”

So I said, “It is a picture of the end of the world.”

And he was very pleased with this answer.