Every soul shall taste death.(9) * Truly you will die [one day], and truly they [too] will die [one day], (10)

they made the contemplation of death fundamental to their spiritual journeyings, and dispelled the illusion of eternity, the source of worldly ambition. They imagined and conceived of themselves as dead and being placed in the grave. Through prolonged thought the evil-commanding soul becomes saddened and affected by such imagining and to an extent gives up its far-reaching ambitions and hopes. There are numerous advantages in this contemplation. The Hadith the meaning of which is,

“Frequently mention death which dispels pleasure and makes it bitter” (11) teaches this contemplation.

However, since our way is not the Sufi path but the way of reality, we are not compelled to perform this contemplation in an imaginary and hypothetical form like the Sufis. To do so is anyway not in conformity with the way of reality. Our way is not to bring the future to the present by thinking of the end, but to go in the mind to the future from the present in respect of reality, and to gaze on it. Yes, having no need of imagination or conception, one may look on one’s own corpse, the single fruit on the tree of this brief life.

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9. Qur’an, 3:185.
10. Qur’an, 39:30.
11. Tirmidhi, Zuhd 4; Qiyama 26; Nasa’i, Jana’iz 3; Ibn Maja, Zuhd 31; al-Hakim, al-Mustadrak iv, 321.