No one has seen God and lived. To see God we must be non-existent.
Hazrat Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan
Related Material by Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan
Compiled by Wahiduddin Richard Shelquist – wahiduddin.net
There is a Hadith which says: ‘Mutu kabla an tamutu’ [ Arabic: موتوا قبل أن تموتوا ], which means, ‘Die before death.’ A poet says, ‘Only they attain to the peace of the Lord who lose themselves.’ God said to Moses, ‘No person shall see me and live.’ To see God we must be non-existent.
What does all this mean? It means that when we see our being with open eyes, we see that there are two aspects to our being: the false and the true. The false life is that of the body and mind, which only exists as long as the life is within. In the absence of that life the body cannot go on. We mistake the true life for the false, and the false for the true.
( from the Sufi Message Series, Volume VII – In an Eastern Rose Garden: The Freedom of the Soul 1 )
As Life unfolds itself to us the first lesson it teaches is humility; the first thing that comes to our vision is our own limitedness. The vaster God appears to us, the smaller we find ourselves. This goes on and on until the moment comes when we lose ourselves in the vision of God. In terms of the Sufis this is called fanaa [ Arabic: فناء, self-effacement, passing away of the small self, dying before death. Note, our tendency in US English is to pronounce this word ‘FAH-nuh’, but the emphasis is actually on the 2nd syllable ‘fa-NAAH’ — Muiz ], and it is this process that was taught by Christ under the name of self-denial. Often people interpret this teaching wrongly and consider renunciation as self-denial. They think that the teaching is to renounce all that is in the world. But although that is a way and an important step which leads to true self-denial, the self-denial meant is the losing oneself in God.
The first lesson of the mystic is, “Thou art, and not I.” It is not only complete surrender to God, it is self-effacement. And what does the symbol of the cross explain? That “Thou art, not me, my hands are not for me, my feet are not for me, my head is not for me, they are all Thine.” The saying of the [Hadith], “Die before death,” does not mean suicide, it means the death of the “I”, the separate self.
( from “Supplementary Papers (aka Dutch Papers), Mysticism VI” [unpublished] )
Commentary by Murshid S.A.M. (Sufi Ahmed Murad)
Samuel L. Lewis
It is the human mind which determines human existence. When one rises above the mind-mesh, existence continues but one does not. That is to say, the life in God is the non-existence of human life. So long as we exist as self we remain below the mind-mesh; in the life above the mind-mesh there is no self as we understand it.