With this post we begin a lecture by Hazrat Inayat Khan on the fundamental principle of the continuity of life. In the last paragraph below, the Master speaks of two ‘cords’ used by a swimmer, by which he apparently refers to some flotation device.

Beloved ones of God,

I would like to speak a few words on the question of the certitude of life in the hereafter. This is a question which occupies every mind. Sooner or later in life a person begins to think if there is such a thing as a continuity of life. There are many who by their pessimistic idea think that there seems to be nothing afterwards. And there are others who owing to their optimistic idea think: whether there is something or whether there is not something, it is just as well to think that there is something. Nevertheless this thought is most painful, when a person thinks that there will be nothing after death. And how many reasons he may have at the support in his belief, that belief itself is worse than death. There are some who through different phenomena wish to get the proof of the life in the hereafter. But they meet with ninety nine disappointments and perhaps one reality.

And when we come to the idea of the Sufi, his idea is that life lives, death dies. In other words: to life there is no death, and to death there is no life. But his way of attaining to the certitude of life is not only an intellectual one. Because a person may study all the philosophies, all the metaphysics all through his life which may in every way prove by reasons that there is the continuity of life, still this realization gained by the effort of mind will not give that feeling of certitude which one wishes to have.

The Sufi therefore practices that process through which he is able to touch that part of life in himself which is not subject to death. And by finding that part of life he naturally gets the feeling of certitude of life. It makes him more certain of life than of anything in the world. Because he sees in all things changeability and limitation. For everything that is composed is subject to be decomposed, everything born is subject to death. But he finds that life that was his self, and that was the real life, and all else that he knows about life, that begins to lose its importance.

And now you will say: in what way does he discover that life in him which was never born and will never die? By self-analysis, but according to what mystics know of self-analysis – to understand what this vehicle that we call ‘the body’ is to us, what relation we have to it. And by understanding what this mind, which we call mind, consists of. And then by knowing that: “Am I then, am I this body, am I this mind?” There comes a time when he begins to see that he himself is the knower of the body and the mind.

But to this realization he only arrives when the body and mind he can hold in his hands as his objects, which he uses for his purpose in life. Once he has done this, then the body and mind, these two things, become as the two cords which the person puts on himself in order to swim in the water, and there is no danger of drowning. The same body and mind which, at least in his thought, cause man mortality, the very body and mind then become the means of his safety from being drowned in the water of mortality.

To be continued…