Mysteries of the Spiritual Path: ep. 2 - Die Before You Die

The Sunnah of the Prophet ﷺ is to prefer the next world to this world, this is what it means to be raised in the training of Muhammad ﷺ. His is the path of true guidance towards God, for he had taught the path of meditation, which begins with death, stating “remember often the ender of pleasures”, which he meant death, for “death is a precious gift to the believer.” We are taught that "this world is a prison for the Believer", and that death is what frees us from its shackles. The spiritual path is thus encapsulated in the wisdom of the Sunnah to "die before you die."

Shaykh Umar Faruq Abdallah expands on its meaning, teaching about the different types of death which relate to the different aspects of the ego, each identified by its own color. As we pass through these gates of death, the shackles of the ego are released, and its prism through which we experience reality - the dunya - is shattered and we become free. It is through this unveiling that the secrets of Lordship [rububiyyah] are revealed to us as gnostic wisdom. Regarding the secrets of Lordship [rububiyyah], the Commander of the Faithful [Emir], Abdel Kader al-Jazairi wrote in his mystical treatise, a discourse with God, "Veil this symbol; and let the wall fall down on and bury this treasure, in order that only he will be able to extract it who has put his soul through severe trials and looked his death in the face."

As for the internal process of divine meditation, the remembrance of death is the descending of will, which is the process of negating the illusion of the material world through the piercing vision of the spiritual eye and seeing the impermanent nature of all things [huduth]; and the remembrance of Allāh is the ascension of will, which is by way of God Consciousness [taqwa] when the transcendent Light of God is becomes immanent within us thereby illuminating our hearts. Then, a person awakens to their true Self as a reflection of the purpose of our creation as the Divine Steward [Khilafatallah]. The true Self, which is asleep, awakens, as if emerging from beyond the interstice realm [barzakh].

The entry point into the imaginary realm [alam al-mithal] is barzakh. In its broadest definition a barzakh is that which separates two things, that which is neither one thing nor another. It is the dream world that partakes of both life and death, the image in the mirror that both is and is not the observer, the unperceivable instant between past and future, the dawn and the dusk when it is neither fully light nor dark, and the moon as it waxes and wanes in its cycle, forever in between the crescent and the void. As Chittick notes, it is that which stands between and separates two other things, yet combines the attributes of both. Within it are all possible things. He goes on to say, “Existence itself is a barzakh (a liminal state) between Being and nothingness.” Between the One, unchanging Being and the equally unchanging nothingness [‘adam] lies the barzakh of the ever-fluctuating existent things.

This interstice world stands as a mesocosm between the spiritual world and the material world. It is the “interworld”, as Henry Corbin calls it, the place where “psycho-spiritual events including miracles, spiritual ascents, and theurgical operations take place.” All spiritual traditions hold that the state between wakefulness and sleep is the entry point of the spirit realm.

This inbetween state pertains to the concept of sacred silence, which refers to the esoteric dimension of occultation [khalwat]. While this concept denotes “seclusion” and a condition of being alone, its esoteric dimension emphasizes something far more subtle. That in aloneness, one enters into a state of total freedom from interruption, not just from others but from oneself, from the thoughts of the lower self. That is to say, one has died from the lower self. The contents of consciousness do not arise, and so consciousness ceases. One stands on the precipice of the barzakh, which is none other than the horizon of the Heart. One finds oneself standing at the door of infinity, gazing into that Great Abyss.

The soul [nafs], which descended from its Source, can also ascend towards its Source again through the process of purification. Al-Ghazali says that “the soul itself is facing towards its Creator”. When the soul is liberated from materiality, which is to say that when materiality is removed from within the Heart, represented by idols, the false self dies. The soul is now able to return to Allāh through the ascending dimensions of the spirit of the cosmos [Rūḥ]. The Heart therefore represents the doorway into the cosmos, beyond this world and towards the Divine Presence itself.

Passage upwards through these ascending realities is only through the gate of death, which pertains to the secret of the Prophetic instruction as the basis of the spiritual path, “die before you die.”