In “The Conference of the Birds”, there’s a story of a man walking up to a gravedigger, after a funeral. The gravedigger appears to be in his mid- to late-seventies. The man asks “How long have you been working here?” The gravedigger answers “ever since I was a very young man.” And the man then asks “In burying all these bodies, what is the most astonishing thing you’ve learned?” The gravedigger says “After putting all these people into the earth, the most astonishing thing that I have learned is that I haven’t changed; that I have gotten no insight from all of the people that I’ve buried; that I haven’t begun to understand the reality of this existence.”
Quite simply, in the Sufi maxim “to die before death is the Sufi way of life” means to live our life by taking ourself out of the equation of existence. To take ourself out of the raison d’etre, the reason for being, of the things that we do. To remove ourself in the contemplation of what it is that we do. To remove the motive that we bring to things from the things that we encounter and the things that we do. To become transparent, not just to the rest of the world, but to become transparent to ourselves. To be without being. To be without needing except for the most basic of fundamental needs to sustain our entity.
