“Die before you die, so that you do not die when you die.” – Sufi saying

– Many spiritual traditions speak of abandoning one’s old life, to begin separating the real from the unreal. The Fourth Way does not require abandoning external situations. In the Fourth Way, we work to minimize personality in favor of essence and to recognize our true nature through higher states.

We live in various worlds, some real and many unreal. What is unreal includes false personality, with its attendant negative emotions. At a later stage of spiritual progress, even ‘true personality’ must be subordinate to higher states, the apprehension of God.

The death of the body is a sloughing off of something relatively unreal. Rilke replied to a question about life after death. He replied, “I believe that nothing that is real can pass away, but that many people are not real.” 

Indeed, what do we possess that will not die?

Learning to not identify with passing things can create a basis for adhering to the real world. We need not relinquish the joy of living. Joy can come especially in what is fleeting: each moment that passes. Yet what are our dearest and deepest identifications? These make us hold to fixed positions and turn our gaze downward.

Is it possible to be present to what is real and unreal at the same time? To witness the outer disguise and inner truth at once? Are we capable of recognizing what calls to us from higher worlds? Are we able to abandon the myriad siren calls of the many ‘I’s in favor of a more real ‘I’ that does not falter?

From the Fourth Way’s descriptions of the ray of creation, we learn that we live within a scale of many worlds, higher and lower, often simultaneously. Dying to oneself is an awakening: climbing that ladder and creating a place within to hold the highest energies possible.

Rowena Taylor is one of the editors of FourthWayToday.org. See earlier articles by Rowena here: https://fourthwaytoday.org/author/rowena/.