Die before you die is a Sufi teaching that has more to do with life than it does with death.
Sidebar: We don’t need to teach dead people how to be dead. Right? They’re pretty good at it already.
The teaching “Die before you die,” is more about how to live than it is about actually physically dying. This is a teaching that is also present in Buddhism, and if you do some research, you’ll find that there’s a lot of Christian commentary on this as well.
This is a series where we examine all the different aspects of “die before you die.” What does it mean? How do we be in this state where we have died before we physically die, which is talking about a state of freedom.
In 2016, I was diagnosed with inflammatory breast cancer, which is really bad. It comes on very suddenly, so it was a huge shock. Inflammatory breast cancer is not like a regular cancer at all; there’s no tumor. They don’t know what it is, but it acts like a cancerous virus that spreads really fast and is very deadly.
Being diagnosed with this is not good news at all. The biggest thing about inflammatory breast cancer is that you need to get diagnosed very quickly because it moves so fast. I live in a small town with small-town doctors, and I did not get diagnosed quickly. So, by the time I actually got into care, I was staged at 3D, which is really bad.
The interesting thing about it is that it wasn’t just about me. This is the first thing we need to understand in “Die before you die”: there is nothing about any of us that is just me, an individual, all by myself. We’re all intricately connected in so many different ways.
Cancer itself seems to be a modern disease reflected by the toxic nature of our environment, coupled with the toxic nature of our society. Of course, they intertwine together— toxic society creates a toxic environment. Then, the toxic environment makes people sick, and you go around and around getting more toxic. This toxicity has become like an entity itself, because it almost feeds on itself, just the way that cancer does, right?
So when we get any of these modern illnesses it isn’t just you getting it; we’re all part of this massive human experience that’s going on. These things come both from outside of ourselves and from inside of ourselves. There’s really no separation between the outside of us and the inside of us.
So, this is the perfect analogy for “Die before you die.” In this Sufi teaching what dies is not the real physical you; what dies is the ego, your sense of separation. The Sufis call it the nafs.
The teaching itself, actually, is completely false. It is misstated because the ego isn’t alive; it has no life of its own. So it can’t die. It feels like it has life, and it also feels like it has fear of death. But the nafs are not alive. They’re not like a virus or a cancer that gets you. Your sense of separation, your ego, those nafs, are completely your imagination, your projection of things.
So, what dies in “die before you die” is something that’s not even alive at all. Things that are all not alive really can’t die. But that’s semantics. It’s a beautiful saying, and it’s useful for us to gain wisdom in how to be a human being by looking directly at the statement “die before you die.”
What actually ‘dies’ is your projection of your being into things outside of you. I like to think that the easiest way to see it as false, and therefore drop it, is to realize that it’s not something that you’ve created. The nafs, our sense of separation, is taught to us in our culture from a very, very, very young age.
This series will also tie into the wisdom that comes to us from native traditions. Wisdom that is starting to bloom forth from native wisdom keepers around the globe. It’s going to be an interesting balance to look at these two things.
On the one hand we have our totally toxic society. Toxicity that that feels like it’s self-perpetuating. Toxicity that is self-perpetuating.
On the other hand, here are treachings from native societies that teach people from the day that they’re born how they’re intricately connected to everything. They teach how easy it is to fall into illusion, how easy it is to fall into thinking we’re separate.
We’ll also bring in brain science because one of the reasons we fall so easily into separation is because our brains are just so smart. We are able to take this thing over hear, and this thing over there, and that thing and put it together into a story that makes them related. We are so capable of creating visions and illusions of what we think the world is like and then believing that this illusion is true.
Native traditions have a long history of how to manage a human being, with this brilliant mind, and keep us in balance because there are sides of ourselves that can go out of balance and back into balance. There’s always an inner core of mysticism that is naturally in balance.
So, we’re going to be exploring all of these things with this “Die before you die” teaching. tying little threads of how it relates to my experience of being diagnosed with this terrible cancer.
Just for your information, about 10 years before I was diagnosed, the survival rate of inflammatory breast cancer was 0%. By the time I was diagnosed, it had gotten up to about 20%. There was an inflammatory breast cancer research facility down in Houston, Texas, which is where I went, that had brought it up to about 40%. I don’t know what the rates are now, but it was a very, very dire diagnosis. It was very sudden… and just to jump to the end, I didn’t die, go tell!
Most importantly, it was nothing that I did that made me live. It was also probably nothing that I did that made me get it in the first place. So, we have a big journey ahead of us to work through all of these things.