Yes, what I saw was reality, not imagination. Just as the summer and autumn are followed by winter, so the summer of youth and autumn of old age are followed by the winter of the grave and Intermediate Realm. If there was a cinema which showed the events of fifty years in the future, the same as those of fifty years ago are shown in the present, and the people of misguidance and vice were to be shown their circumstances of fifty or sixty years hence, they would weep in horror and disgust at their unlawful pleasures and those things at which they now laugh.

When preoccupied with these observations in Eskishehir Prison, a collective personality which spreads vice and misguidance was embodied before me like a human satan. It said:

“We want to experience all the pleasures and joys of life, and to make others experience them; don’t interfere with us!”

I replied: Since you do not recall death and plunge yourself into vice and misguidance for pleasure and enjoyment, you should certainly know that due to your misguidance, all the past is dead and non-existent; it is a desolate graveyard full of rotted bodies. The suffering arising from those innumerable separations and the eternal deaths of those numberless friends inflicted on your head through the concern of your humanity and your misguidance, and on your heart if you have one and it is not dead, will soon destroy your insignificant drunken pleasure of the present. The future too, due to your unbelief, is a non-existent, black, dead, and desolate wasteland. And since the heads of the unfortunates who appear from there, sticking them out into existence while stopping by in the present, are struck off by the executioner’s sword of the appointed hour and thrown into non-existence, due to the concern of your intellect, it continuously rains down grievous worries on your unbelieving head, completely overturning your petty, dissolute pleasure.

If you give up vice and misguidance and enter the sphere of certain, verified belief4 and righteousness, you will see through the light of belief that the past is not non-existent and a graveyard that rots everything, but an existent, light-filled world which is transformed into the future and into a waiting-room for the