I have a question and it is that when one dies and the soul leaves the body, does it actually get to a point where it meets Allah or is it kept waiting until the Day of Judgment? You know meeting Allah is something which is generally erroneously visualized by us because there is so much difference between the nature of God and the nature of everything else. There is nothing like Him. The Creator and the creation belong as if to two different worlds.
So when you talk of meeting, you always consider meeting in the normal human values. But in that case, where does the… I’m coming to that, I’m coming to that. Now meeting Allah, even in this world, is witnessed differently by various people at various stages of spiritual development. For some, meeting Allah is just maybe by dreams, they are shown some dream and that dream comes true or some important moments appear in one’s life where they are deeply moved by love of Allah and so on. So this is the ordinary experience. But meeting Allah is different with, for instance, in case of prophets who begin to live with Allah all along and they remain in His presence.
So they have already met Him. Yet they do not see Him like you see other things, they do not touch Him like you touch other things. Allah is not a palpable quantity. So the difference between this meeting and that meeting is immense, isn’t it? If you proceed in the same direction and gain further consciousness and the people of the lower stages are lifted to a higher stage and begin to live constantly in the presence of Allah after their death and the prophets are promoted to still higher stage, comparatively that would be a meeting, wouldn’t it?
As compared to the earlier stage, many more steps will have been taken in the direction of closeness to Allah, that is a consciousness which is made much clearer than before. For instance, sometimes you see very clear dreams, so clear that you feel that it is the daytime, and sometimes from dream you wake up in dream and then you find that, oh now it is day, previously it was dream. And when you wake up again, then you see the difference. In that case, I mean, there’s two types of… Get up, get up and talk to me. Why are you getting up like old people, with big troubles, huh? Lack of exercise. Lack of exercise? Yes. So you better come and have exercise here, personally. Inshallah, any moment now.
There’s two types of dreams, one which comes from the shaitan, one which comes from Allah. Both have the same quality of dreaminess about them. Yes, but, I mean, the shaitan, he promises people with dreams of a better way of life. No, what I mean to say is, I’m talking of a different thing altogether. Yes, I understand your point. Here, I agree that the dreams shown by Allah have a very special quality about them. There is no gain saying that. But still, as far as the dreams go, they are dreams. And the dreams of shaitan can be of very disturbing nature and very murky quality. Dark and full of, you know, confusion and things. Yet they are dreams.
So waking up from a dream is a phenomenon common to both. When you wake up from a godly dream, still you realize suddenly that that was a dream, and now it is not a dream. And suppose you are given a higher consciousness suddenly by Allah, and you wake up to realize that that was a dream, your life on earth. And now you have come to see things. That can happen or can’t it? The different steps in consciousness are so obviously observed by us in the stages known to us as previous to mankind.
Every animal stands at a different consciousness. If suddenly an animal is promoted in consciousness to the higher state, you will think that the previous consciousness was just a dream. Like some people who wake up to the rarities of life, like Neil Durk did once, they begin to see things in the same ways. Once he said, This was proven only at the time of death. It was a dream that I saw, that I heard. That, oh woe to us, that only at the time of death we came to realize that it was only a dream that we had seen, not a real life that we had passed. It was just a tale we have gone through.
So that is what he means by various levels of consciousness, what I mean by various levels of consciousness. In his terminology, a Sufi who begins to travel towards Allah, at the end suddenly realizes that all his past life has been a dream. So when you talk of meeting Allah after death, everyone would meet him differently because everyone would be at a different stage of consciousness. Meeting Allah, as applied to the prophets, is a completely different phenomena of intensity. And meeting Allah by an ordinary person is a completely different phenomena, again in intensity, of a lowest order. And some people would rise up blind. They could neither see him here, nor would be able to see him there, as the Holy Quran tells us.
So this is a lot of, you know, darkness, and unfortunately a period of complete despondency for them. This is why it’s important for people to act righteously here, because as I explained earlier, here has been explained by the Holy Quran with an analogy of that of the childbirth in the uterus. And it says that you are here like a child is being born in the process of being developed in the uterus. And so will you rise again.
Now what is important about it, there are so many things, but one of the things which I want to point out is this, that in the uterus what you lack to gain, after birth you never gain that. For instance, if you are born blind, that blindness cannot be cured. If you are born with some disability, that is called congenital disability. Every doctor would immediately say, no, nothing doing. So this is the difficulty about certain people, those who are totally blind to the realities of God. Hard-hearted people. According to the Holy Quran, they will rise up as blind, they will be born blind in the next world. They are the most unfortunate people. So the sinners, ordinary sinners, have some moments of goodness. So they may be likened to a boy, a born baby, who is born with defective capabilities.
So they can develop, of course. But a person who is deprived of certain gifts at the childbirth, that person is the most unfortunate person. So that is important. Such people will not gain consciousness. I am not talking of those. And about them, it is said elsewhere in the Holy Quran, that they will not be returned to Allah. While in essence everyone will be returned to Allah. So that verse has been always a verse of complexity, an enigma for many people. That at other places the Holy Quran says, everyone will be returned to Allah. And in this particular verse about some people, Allah Ta’ala tells us that they will not be returned to Allah.
That means they will be without capabilities to feel closer to Allah, even after being given the new life. And in that sense, in essence, they will remain away from Allah. Otherwise everybody is going to return back to Allah, physically, spiritually.
