Many people will be familiar with the teaching that we should die before death. There is an appealing sort of mental neatness to this thought, that our (supposedly) worst enemy, death, can be defeated by dying. It is like seeing the villain in the melodrama brought low by his own evil machinations. But the thought alone is not yet the accomplishment. The sand is running through the hourglass, and to avoid an unpleasant surprise we should try to find out in time : how do we die before dying?

Hazrat Inayat Khan spoke about this teaching several times; the quote here from ‘The Alchemy of Happiness’ is one example. He commonly used the expression ‘to play death’ and ‘to play life,’ but ‘play’ is sometimes puzzling to the reader. What did he mean by that?

In order to rise above the conception of death, one should play death, and try to know what death is. And it is a great lesson to play death. What we do is a very false thing, for we play life when we are subject to death. If we played death it would be something real, and not a hypocrisy. It is through this that we shall discover life. For we experience death by playing life, and we experience life by playing death. What we call death is the death of this body, and if we attach ourselves to this body as our being, then it is death. 
– vol VI, The Alchemy of Happiness : ‘The Continuity of Life’

‘To play’ is a verb with various applications. One thread of its meaning is to depart from the serious or the real; children play games, and although the games sometimes end in tears, there is still a clear distinction between real life and the constructed world of the game. There is, of course, an educational aspect to children’s games; by following the rules, the players learn about themselves and about the way the world works. They may also recognize that there are layers of ‘reality,’ some of which may be more easily shared, some less so. This educational aspect is something to keep in mind as we unfold Hazrat Inayat’s teaching.

We also use the word ‘play’ in the theatrical sense. The whole drama upon the stage is called a play, and an actor might play a king one night, and the next night play a slave. We understand that the actor, although presenting both the slave and the king, in reality is neither. This sense was surely not far from the mind of Hazrat Inayat Khan, for in Vadan Gamakas, we find this saying :
The scriptures have called Him the Creator;
the Masons have called Him the Architect;
but I know Him as the Actor on this stage of life.

As long as we are identified with our body and our sensory experiences, we may think we are living, but we are in truth trapped in an illusion, for the body inevitably is mortal, and all that we take as the evidence of life – our vision, our hearing, our touch, the beating of our fleshly heart – may vanish in a moment. Thus our dream of life is wrapped in the arms of death. To awaken from this, we must stop playing ‘life’ and learn to play ‘death’, meaning we must learn how to withdraw our awareness from the transient, physical realm, and begin to discover real life.

There are mystical techniques for this withdrawal that the wise offer to the seekers of Truth, but these apart, one can begin to prepare oneself for the ‘play of death’ by doing everything possible to let go of the addiction to the material world. In the moment of any physical experience, one can mentally take a step back and remind oneself that it is temporary, that it will pass. It can also be useful to turn the experience inside out, so to speak, and consider its opposite – the harsh cannot exist without the soft, the sweet cannot exist without the sour, and so on. In this way, we change the role we are playing, and in time begin to play for real. This is the birth of indifference, and in Gayan Boulas there are these two sayings:
Indifference is the key to the whole secret of life.
Indifference and independence are the two wings which enable the soul to fly.