Faculties for seeing God can be developed in this very world

Hadhrat Masih Mauood (AS)
Ahmadiyya Gazette, July 1994
The Holy Quran teaches us that salvation is a matter that is manifested in this very life as He has said:

`He who is blind in this world will be blind in the hereafter also. (17:73)
This means that a person takes with him from this world the faculties for seeing God and the means of eternal salvation. He has repeatedly indicated that the means of man's attaining salvation is eternal as God Himself is eternal. It is not that after a time He recalled that if men cannot attain salvation by any other means, He should bestow salvation on them by killing Himself. A person can be described as having attained salvation when all his passions are consumed and God's will becomes his will and he becomes so devoted to God out of love that nothing remains his and everything becomes God's. All his words and deeds and movements and designs should be for God and he should perceive in his heart that all his delights are now in God and that a moment's separation from God means death for him. He should be so inebriated with the love of God that everything beside God should be naught in his estimation. If the whole world should attack him with swords and should seek to separate him from God through fear, he should remain steadfast like a firm mountain. The fire of perfect love should flare up within him and he should hate sin. As other people love their children and wives and friends so that their love pervades their hearts, and the death of any of them distresses them so much as if it was their own death, that type of love and indeed a greater love should be generated in his heart for God, so much so that he should become like an insane person in the grip of that love and should be ready to endure every torment and every wound for the sake of that love so that God Almighty may be pleased with him.
When a person is overcome to this degree by his love of God, all his passions are burnt up by the fire of love and a great revolution takes place in his nature and he is bestowed a heart that he did not posses before, and is bestowed eyes that he did not have before, and he is so much affected by certainty that he begins to see God in this very world. That burning sensation for the world with which the nature of the worldly is afflicted like hell, is totally removed from him and he is bestowed a life of comfort and pleasure and delight. This condition of his is called salvation inasmuch as his soul falling upon the threshold of God with love and devotion finds unending comfort and the union of his love with the love of God transports him to a station of devotion which is beyond description.

(Article attached to Chashma Ma'rifat, 47-48)