It is impossible to practice disappearance into God – it can happen to you, but it will not work to cause it by some efforts or special subterfuges. You can strive toward God, search for His Truth, pray to Him, but – until there is a certain readiness – nothing special will occur with you. Even a high degree of necessity does not always mean a person’s readiness for changes. But when it is present – everything happens even without your requests. And what is more: you must remember that to desire to receive something is one thing, but to be prepared for it is something else entirely.
Some sources describe the state of internal fana as non-being, explaining that the mystic simultaneously may be present and not present in himself. That is, his being becomes multi-leveled, and I have also written a fair amount about this. On the whole, this description is acceptable, but it comes earlier than when the stage of internal fana begins. I would say that fana ends that disappearance which begins much earlier. The presence with half absence in which the Sufi lived previously begins to change to a kind of interim state. This is neither presence nor absence in its pure form. It is a state. In which everything seems to be there, but there isn’t that part or center in a person which manages everything. Moreover, along with the loss of internal separation, even after merging with infinity, it becomes more and more difficult to describe this state. He is not the witness of action, but is not its source, either. He is not in action, but he is not in inaction, either. He does not witness anything, because everything that is done and occurs is immediately perceived by the Consciousness of the Sufi, and there is no process of becoming aware. And in the field of his Consciousness, there is no center from which something could be made aware. He could carry out actions seemingly from himself, but even so, a large part of them are directly or indirectly inspired by the Presence of God, and then the Sufi is both a doer and non-doer simultaneously. It is not within my power to describe this state in more detail without distorting its essence.
The stage of internal baqa beings even before the end of the stage of external fana. The same thing occurs with both external fana and baqa, so there is nothing to be particularly surprised at here. The disappearance of one’s own will proceeds to a certain degree parallel with the acceptance and following of the Will of God, and on the whole, this is logical. The receiving of the attributes of God may occur even then, when the stage of disappearance in Him itself has not yet come to completion. Then a person begins to live in the presence of God, which is even more difficult to describe – if not entirely impossible. But as it is said, that is a completely different story.