Hazrat Inayat Khan’s lecture concludes with a question and answer session in which he explains something about ‘playing death.’ The previous post is here.

Q. How can you rise above the conception of death?
A. As I have already said, that the most necessary thing is to play death, and to know what death is. And it is a great learning how to play death. For what we do is a very false thing, and that is we play life when we are subject to death. If we played death it would be a real thing, it would not be a hypocrisy. And it is out of that that we shall discover life. For we experience death by playing life, and we experience life by playing death. What we call death is a death of this body.

But if we attach ourselves to this body as ourselves, then it is death. A simple man asked a person: “How can I know that I am dead?” “Well,” the man said: “It is very easy. When your coat has become rotten and torn and worn out, then it is a death.” Of course, when the coat was worn out and torn, then this man was thinking that he was dead, and he was weeping bitterly. And some thoughtful person came and told him: “It is your coat that is torn. But how can you cry, you are still alive.” It is exactly the condition of the mystical idea. For the mystic the body is a garment. But it is no use realizing it intellectually. Because if one says intellectually: body is my garment – but then what am I, and where am I? And as I have said: by the meditative process one finds where one is and what one is. And therefore this does not remain as a belief, it becomes a faith, even greater than faith: it becomes conviction.

Q. In what way can we play death? How can we do it?
A. There was a king who thought that he would give up his kingdom, and he would become a mureed, that is to say to become a disciple of a Teacher, and to give up all the worldly things, and just go in the spiritual thought. And when he went to Bukhara under the guidance of a Teacher, the Teacher gave him the probationer’s work. The work was to sweep and clean the whole house where all the pupils lived, and to collect the garbage and to take it out of the village.

Of course, the pupils were very much in sympathy with this man, and they were very shocked for this man who used to sit on the throne and be a king – this is a thing which he was never accustomed to do. It must be a terrible thing for him! No doubt the Teacher, knowing the object that he had before him, could not do otherwise. He said: “He must do it, for he is not yet ready.” Once all the disciples went and they said, “Teacher, we are all in sympathy with this man, and we think he is so fine and so nice and so cultured, and we would so much like if you would relieve him of this duty.” And then they said to the Teacher, “It is a long time now; he must be relieved of it.”

The Teacher said, “We shall have a test.” One day when he was taking his garbage-pail outside of the town, somebody knocked against him and all was spilled on the ground. He looked back and said: “Well, it is not the days of the past, what can I tell you?” And when the report was brought to the Teacher he said, “Did I not say that the time has not yet come?” And next time a test was made again, after a little time. And when the same thing was done, this man looked at him and said nothing. The Teacher said, “Did I not say that the time has not yet arrived?” And the third time when he was tested he did not even look at the man who spilled his basket. He took all that was there in the basket and carried it along.

The Teacher said, “Now is the time, now he can play death.” All the teaching that Christ has taught, that, “If one will strike you on one side of the face, give the other side; if one will ask you to go one mile, go still further; if one asks you for your overcoat, give your cap also,” – when we think of it all, what is it? Is it not the teaching to play death? Therefore at any time if the Teachers of Truth have prescribed to their pupils any process of behavior with their fellow men, that process can be called nothing else but playing death. But one might think that it is very hard, it is very cruel on the part of the Teacher.

But the instructor had to go through the same cruelty once at a certain period in his life. But sometimes the greatest cruelty is the greatest kindness. It is hard, but the hardest path can be conquered by this. And if I were to speak about it in simple words it is in this way: how many times we take to heart unnecessary things, how many times we cause or we take interest in disharmony, which could just as well not have been avoided. How often we resist evil, which could just as well not have been resisted. This is all playing life, and what I have said before is playing death. When we play death, we arrive at life. When we play life, we arrive at death.

Q. Is it not sometimes to become insensible to the pain of others to just look at them and not share with them?
A. But I have said: playing with death is rising above sensible and insensible, because sensible and insensible has a certain stage. One can rise above that stage; then all is sensible. Besides, you can always find among those who play death or who have played death, they have been the most sympathetic and the most open to the pain of others. Because when they are playing death, automatically they are playing life too. And therefore although they are as dead to all the wrong things that come to them, they are alive to everything that can go from them to the others.

Q. May I ask, in what consists that state where at certain days and at certain hours one no longer feels one’s body, and only the thought is alive and awake?
A. It is a condition. As I say, any condition that automatically comes is not a normal thing, even if it be a high condition. But if it automatically comes it is not normal. The normal thing is to be able to experience any condition one wishes to. To be able to experience death, to be able to experience life, that is the right thing. The one who always experiences death and does not experience life, that is abnormal too.

Q. How to have a balance?
A. To have a balance one must do everything, from morning to evening, that is balanced.