Sirkar van Stolk had the privilege of serving as a secretary to Hazrat Inayat Khan, and the following anecdote gives a glimpse of what such a position might imply.
In October 1924, Murshid was booked to give three lectures in Berlin, for which I had made the necessary arrangements many months beforehand through the German Professor of English Literature there. After the third lecture, the Professor came to me and announced that he wanted Hazrat Inayat Khan to give a fourth one in some other part of Berlin the following day. As Murshid had been extremely busy for some time with interviews and lectures, and I knew he was tired, I told the Professor that I was sorry he would be quite unable to undertake the extra commitment – especially as we had to to on to Stockholm almost immediately.
The Professor, however, was not accepting this. He went straight to Murshid himself and made the same request; and Murshid in his usual generous fashion, agreed to give the extra lecture. The Professor could not resist returning triumphantly to me to report his success; and sure enough, the following evening the hall was packed to the limit with many hundreds of people. The lecture by Murshid, however, was not all they heard! After it was over, the Professor, without any warning to me whatsoever, stood up and announced, “Mr. van Stolk will now give a talk on the Sufi Movement and the Sufi Message.”
This came as an appalling surprise to me, as I had not prepared anything, and did not feel in any case that my knowledge of German was adequate. I looked at Murshid in some desperation; but he did not appear in the least perturbed. He merely nodded at me, smiling, as if to say, “Go ahead.”
Even as he did so, my anxiety vanished. I suddenly felt perfectly confident. I was now consciously “tuning” my mind to his, opening myself for his inspiration to flow through me. For more than twenty minutes I spoke about the Sufi Movement and its Message, and the words came as easily as if I had put in hours of preparation. I felt I must indeed have been inspired by Murshid – in much the same way as had the disciple of another great teacher he had told us about, Shankaracharya.
Shankaracharya was a famous reformer of the Hindu religion. On one particular occasion, after he had given a brilliant lecture before a very learned audience, his hearers began to shower him with subtle philosophical questions. Instead of answering these himself, Shankaracharya turned to one of his disciples, a man who had been in the kitchen all evening and had not even been present in the lecture. Calling him onto the platform, he asked the young man to deal with the questions on his behalf. The cook, as everyone thought of him, then proceeded to give such wonderful replies that the whole audience marvelled; but in reality his success was due to the fact that his mind was so attuned to his Master’s that Shankara was able to inspire him with just the right solutions.