This site shares Life-affirming meditations
that heal misconceptions about Death.
Living beautifully and dying beautifully,
Embrace Death as Birth
into limitless Life Awareness.
Being able to raise the dead
is a deep fascination for most people.
For them, that is the ultimate test of someone’s spiritual powers.
Most people are living like the dead anyway
because they are unconscious of many things within themselves.
If people are living unconsciously,
it is as good as death.
So, in a way, the whole spiritual process
is about raising the dead.
In that sense, raising the dead is my work,
but that is not what people are asking about.
They are very interested in knowing
if I can make a corpse come alive again.
This is a very immature desire...
Sadhguru
Death; An Inside Story - A Book For All Those Who Shall Die
He whom we think we have lost,
has only been sent on ahead.
Seneca
Most people, it is affirmed,
find the transition and the awakening on the other side
more natural than they had expected,
and they soon become aware
that they are in a real world among real people,
and are as much alive as ever they were on earth.
"The spirit body is as actual, and real to the spirit," says one communicator,
"as the old earth body appeared to me,
and its environments are as palpable to its perceptions—
it has simply passed from one plane of conscious existence to another."
The invisible has become visible,
and the formerly visible things invisible.
A.P. SINNET, ANNIE BESANT
WHAT HAPPENS AFTER DEATH
All individuals die.
Only those
Who are no longer individuals
Live forever.
Wu Hsin
In the Shadow of the Formless
A dying man cannot lose anything:
death is going to shatter everything.
It is better you drop your consolations by your own hand
and die innocently,
full of wonder and inquiry,
because death is the ultimate experience in life.
It is the very crescendo.
Osho
The Art of Living and Dying: Celebrating Life and Celebrating Death
You may think your individual life began in 1900 something, 1890 or 1880 something,
but it never did.
True, you may have become aware of it at that particular time,
and that awareness constitutes your present experience.
But as you meditate now,
you are going to learn the true meaning of immortality;
you are going to learn
that long before you became consciously aware of this world,
you were alive,
living fruitfully and harmoniously
just as you will live eternally and immortally
after what is called “the passing” from this plane of existence.
Joel S. Goldsmith
Conscious Union With God
May you be at peace;
the peace that comes to all of us
from accepting that we have done the best we could in our lives;
the peace of knowing that you were loved
and have freely given your love to others;
the peace of letting go of the body that sustained you
but must be left behind;
the peace of moving into the fullness of your communion
with the God you know.
Henry Fersko-Weiss
Caring for the Dying: The Doula Approach to a Meaningful Death
Reading to a dying person may help them to relax
and put them in touch with the spiritual dimension of their being.
Many people want passages of scripture, the Psalms,
or other spiritual material read to them.
It may remind them of beliefs they hold about the dying experience
and what happens afterward.
This can reassure a person
as the approach of the unknown looms larger and larger.
It may also help the person to hold on to the values and beliefs
that have guided them in life
and that they believe will still serve them in dying,
at the moment of death,
and during what may lay beyond this life.
Henry Fersko-Weiss
Caring for the Dying: The Doula Approach to a Meaningful Death
Often when someone we love dies
and we are not there at their bedside
to hold their hand and say a final goodbye
we feel as if we have failed both them and ourselves.
But hospice staff who have seen many deaths
say that although many people in their care
seem able to postpone their time of departure
until they have had a chance
to say a final goodbye to the people they love,
others choose a moment when they are alone
to take their final leave.
So it's worth remembering
that this may have been their choice.
Elizabeth Fenwick
The Art of Dying
All Buddhists encourage everyone to prepare for death while they are still alive.
But it is never too late.
Mind at the moment of death
is the clearest it has ever been
and becomes clearer still once the body is dead.
So if you can attract a dying person’s attention moments before they die—
make them look at you and listen to what you have to say—
the chances of them grasping what is happening
and what is about to happen
are very good indeed.
Dzongsar Jamyang Khyentse
Living Is Dying: How to Prepare for Death, Dying and Beyond
He is drawn to human life,
to human beings in the intense vibration of union.
There is sympathy here—
perhaps the sympathy of past experience
with the souls of those whom he now contacts,
perhaps only sympathy of mood or imagination.
Be that as it may, he lets go his hold upon freedom
and triumphantly loses himself in the lives of human beings.
After a time he awakes,
to look with bewildered eyes upon green fields
and the round, solid faces of men and women.
Sometimes he weeps, and wishes himself back.
If he becomes discouraged, he may return—
only to begin the weary quest of matter all over again.
If he is strong and stubborn,
he remains and grows into a man.
He may even persuade himself
that the former life in tenuous substance was only a dream,
for in dream he returns to it,
and the dream haunts him and spoils his enjoyment of matter.
After years enough he grows weary of the material struggle;
his energy is exhausted.
He sinks back into the arms of the unseen,
and men say again with bated breath that he is dead.
But he is not dead.
He has only returned whence he came.
Elsa Barker
LETTERS FROM THE AFTERLIFE
Everything that happens to us in life and death
depends entirely on our accumulated causes and conditions.
As each of us will experience physical death
and the dissolution of the body’s elements quite differently,
our journeys through the bardos will be unique.
Therefore, any and all descriptions of dying, death and the bardos
can only ever be generalizations.
Nevertheless, once the process of dying has begun,
to have a rough idea about what is happening
not only goes a long way towards allaying our worst fears,
it also helps us face death calmly and with equanimity.
Dzongsar Jamyang Khyentse
Living Is Dying: How to Prepare for Death, Dying and Beyond
Why must death be the topic of study?
Because NonDual requires it.
To be in your life and simultaneously not be attached to your life
is where NonDual Reality resides.
Being in your life is already a challenge,
but it is an even greater challenge to not be attached to your life,
to experience that nothing is really about you
in the way that you believe you are.
That is the holy grail of NonDual
Liam Quirk
The NonSense of NonDual
For Christians,
one’s last thought should be the sober commending of one’s soul to God,
not a blissful “Aaaaah …”
Montaigne’s own experience apparently included no thoughts of God at all.
Nor did it seem to occur to him
that dying inebriated and surrounded by wenches
might jeopardize a Christian afterlife.
He was more interested in his purely secular realization
that human psychology, and nature in general,
were the dying man’s best friends.
And it now seemed to him
that the only people who regularly died as bravely as philosophers should
were those who knew no philosophy at all:
the uneducated peasants in his local estates and villages.
“I never saw one of my peasant neighbors
cogitating over the countenance and assurance
with which he would pass this last hour,” he wrote—
not that he would necessarily have known if they did.
Nature took care of them.
It taught them not to think about death
except when they were dying,
and very little even then.
Philosophers find it hard to leave the world
because they try to maintain control.
So much for “To philosophize is to learn how to die.”
Philosophy looked more like a way of teaching people
to unlearn the natural skill that every peasant had by birthright.
Sarah Bakewell
How to Live:
Or A Life of Montaigne in One Question and Twenty Attempts at an Answer
If you don’t know how to die, don’t worry;
Nature will tell you what to do on the spot, fully and adequately.
She will do this job perfectly for you;
don’t bother your head about it.
“Don’t worry about death” became Montaigne's most fundamental,
most liberating answer to the question of how to live.
It made it possible to do just that: live.
Sarah Bakewell
How to Live: Or A Life of Montaigne in One Question and Twenty Attempts at an Answer
Coming to terms with the moment of death
is important for every human being.
Thinking about mortality is something that most of us avoid and fear,
which impacts the way that we live.
Even if you’re a person who doesn’t believe in reincarnation,
finding peace with the fact that you’re going to die
is incredibly important for everyone.
Of course for Buddhists who do believe in reincarnation,
it’s especially important
because at the moment of death the course elements,
afflicted emotions, and habitual tendencies have dissolved,
and it’s a very special opportunity for practice.
But I don’t think that it’s necessary for anyone
to have any particular belief system
to want to face death peacefully and courageously.
Allison Choying Zangmo
In addition to ancient spiritual teachings,
dramatic evidence obtained from out-of-body explorations
provides a new perception of death and dying.
The ultimate journey and destination of soul
is not a simple predestined event that we must endure,
but a highly creative process.
At death we are not powerless victims,
but rather interactive participants
in a wondrous and natural transition of consciousness.
Let us awaken to a new vision of death and dying.
William Buhlman
The Secret of the Soul
The reason why you lower your levels of aliveness
is because in death there is safety and tremendous security.
Though people are afraid of death,
they are always seeking it,
courting it in many ways,
because death is such a relief.
They do not have the courage to simply step into it,
but they are courting it all the time.
They want it,
because that saves them from all the turmoil and struggle of life.
Sadhguru
Don't Polish Your Ignorance...It May Shine
One of the best ways to prepare for death
is to acknowledge that we really are going to die.
We are falling in the dark
and have no idea when we will hit the ground.
Buddhist scholar Anne Klein says, “Life is a party on death row.
Recognizing mortality means we are willing to see what is true.
Seeing what is true is grounding. It brings us into the present.”
We all know that we’re going to die.
But we don’t know it in our guts.
If we did, we would practice as if our hair was on fire.
Andrew Holecek
Preparing to Die:
Practical Advice and Spiritual Wisdom from the Tibetan Buddhist Tradition
What would you do if you had six months to live?
What would you cut out of your life?
What would you do if you had one month, one week, one day?
The Indian master Atisha said,
“If you do not contemplate death in the morning,
the morning is wasted.
If you do not contemplate death in the afternoon,
the afternoon is wasted.
If you do not contemplate death in the evening,
the evening is wasted.”
The four reminders remove the waste.
Andrew Holecek
Preparing to Die:
Practical Advice and Spiritual Wisdom from the Tibetan Buddhist Tradition
It is well for you also to bear in mind the Universality of Life.
All of the Universe is alive, vibrating
and pulsating with life and energy and motion.
There is nothing dead in the Universe.
Life is everywhere,
and always accompanied by intelligence.
There is no such thing as a dead, unintelligent Universe.
Instead of being atoms of Life floating in a sea of death,
we are atoms of Life surrounded by an ocean of Life,
pulsating, moving, thinking, living.
William Walker Atkinson:
A Series of Lessons in Raja Yoga
When I came to in my body it was dreadful, so dreadful….
The experience had been so beautiful
that I didn’t want to come back.
I had wanted to stay there…
and yet I came back.
From that moment it was a real struggle
to live my life inside my body,
with all the limitations I experienced at the time….
But later I realized that this experience was in fact a blessing,
for now I know that the mind and body are separate
and that there’s life after death.
Pim van Lommel
Consciousness Beyond Life: The Science of the Near-Death Experience
The individual, of his own accord,
without suggestion but through direct experience,
begins to know, rather than believe,
that he does survive physical death.
It doesn’t make any difference
what he does during his physical life,
what he believes;
he will go on after his physical body dies.
Survival beyond physical death is not a belief system,
but a simple fact as natural as being born.
Robert Monroe
Far Journeys
If a diagnosis of a mortal illness changes the way you live,
then you haven’t been living the way you should.
Garth Callaghan
Quote from Art of Dying Magazine, Volume III
The “true facts” are that you exist in this life
and outside it simultaneously.
You are “between lives” and “in lives” at once.
The deeper dimensions of reality are such
that your thoughts and actions not only affect the life you know,
but also reach into all of those other simultaneous existences.
What you think now is unconsciously perceived
by some hypothetical 14th-century self.
The psyche is open-ended.
No system is closed, psychological systems least of all.
Your life is a dreaming experience
to other portions of your greater reality which focus elsewhere.
Their experiences are also a part of your dream heritage.
Jane Roberts
The Nature of the Psyche: Its Human Expression
We often hear statements like:
“Death is the moment of truth,”
or “Death is the point when we finally come face to face with ourselves.”
And we have seen how those who go through a near-death experience
sometimes report that as they witness their lives replayed before them,
they are asked questions such as, “What have you done with your life?
What have you done for others?”
All of this points to one fact:
that in death we cannot escape from who or what we really are.
Whether we like it or not, our true nature is revealed.
But it is important to know that there are two aspects of our being
that are revealed at the moment of death:
our absolute nature,
and our relative nature—
how we are, and have been, in this life.
Sogyal Rinpoche
The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying
The dawning of the Ground Luminosity, or Clear Light, at the moment of death
is the great opportunity for liberation.
One master describes the luminosity or Clear Light as
“a state of minimum distraction,”
because all the elements, senses, and sense-objects are dissolved.
What is important is not to confuse it with the physical light that we know,
nor with the experiences of light that will unfold presently in the next bardo.
Though all our confusion dies in death,
instead of surrendering and opening to the luminosity,
in our fear and ignorance we withdraw
and instinctively hold onto our grasping.
This is what obstructs us from truly using this powerful moment
as an opportunity for liberation
Padmasambhava says:
“All beings have lived and died and been reborn countless times.
Over and over again they have experienced the indescribable Clear Light.
But because they are obscured by the darkness of ignorance,
they wander endlessly in a limitless samsara.”
Sogyal Rinpoche
The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying
There is no death,
but only the visible becoming invisible.
It is the nature of consciousness
that the invisible again becomes visible,
which is called as rebirth.
It is not an action of any individual.
The consciousness doesn’t have the trouble of coming and going.
You should know your deathless nature.
You should develop inner faith about your immortality.
Let your consciousness know that it is neither visible nor invisible,
but only due to it, things are seen.
This doesn’t involve any activity,
but it is only making consciousness aware of itself.
Shri Nisargadatta Maharaj
Self-Love, The Original Dream
But you would ask me: Why do things change?
Why does particular matter force itself to other forms?
I answer you—there is no mutation that seeks another being,
but rather another mode of being.
Understand that everything is one, but not in the same mode.
Everything we see in difference in bodies…
is nothing else than a diversity of appearances of the same substance;
a transitory, mobile, corruptible appearance
of an immobile, stable, and eternal being.
All things are in the universe,
and the universe is in all things—
we in that, that in us;
and, therefore, all things concur in a perfect unity.
You see by this, then,
that we ought not to torment our spirit,
for there is no thing by which we ought to become vexed.
Death is but a stage in this process.
Giordano Bruno
(1548-1600)
from “Death Is Not Possible in the Infinite Universe”
Jacques Choron: Death and Western Thought
….when Death unlocks the door for him,
he knows the country into which he emerges,
having trodden its ways at his own will.
And at last he grows to recognise that fact of supreme importance,
that "Life" has nothing to do with body and with this material plane;
that Life is his conscious existence, unbroken, unbreakable,
and that the brief interludes in that Life,
during which he sojourns on Earth,
are but a minute fraction of his conscious existence,
and a fraction, moreover, during which he is less alive,
because of the heavy coverings which weigh him down.
For only during these interludes (save in exceptional cases)
may he wholly lose his consciousness of continued life,
being surrounded by these coverings
which delude him and blind him
to the truth of things,
making that real which is illusion,
and that stable which is transitory.
Annie Besant
Death— And After?
By the period you call old age
the inner attention is already escaping.
The strong focus of psychic energy
needed to maintain the splendid physical image-organization
is no longer given.
The main focus of the whole self has already begun to stray,
and the energies used in necessary pattern organization for the physical plane
are already being returned,
taken from their attention to physical matters,
and becoming more attuned to the whole self
from which they were originally delegated.
Man is aware subconsciously
of a heritage for which he ever seeks,
and yet which for many reasons
he cannot grasp while in the physical state.
Jane Roberts
The Early Sessions: Book 3 of The Seth Material
Remember,
only that which you can take with you when you leave the body is important.
That means, except meditation, nothing is important.
Except awareness, nothing is important,
because only awareness cannot be taken away by death.
Everything else will be snatched away,
because everything else comes from without.
You will be taking with you
only whatsoever awareness you have attained.
Awareness is your only real wealth.
Osho
The wisest beings with whom I have made contact in this lifetime
all assure me that a soul leaves the physical plane
neither a moment too early nor a moment too late.
For most of us on Earth
who so strongly identify with our own bodies and personalities,
this is hard to accept.
If we have not listened deeply enough inside ourselves to know differently,
we consider length of life an asset,
which makes it difficult to be with the dying
without trying to keep them alive.
Ram Dass
Walking Each Other Home: Conversations on Loving and Dying
Grace, calm, a patient acceptance of what’s to come:
These are all qualities that can be cultivated,
and when they are, death is a test we will not fail.
Our fault is not that we fear death
but that we don’t respect it as a miracle.
The most profound subjects—
love, truth, compassion, birth and death—
are equal.
They belong to our destiny but also to our present life.
Deepak Chopra
Life After Death
It is quite possible to remain in connection, after death,
with people who one was close to during life,
but only through an emotional affinity which one had with them then.
An intense connection is formed as a result of such affinity.
After death one lives together with the living;
but also with those who have already died
with whom one had a connection during life.
This is how one must imagine the life after death,
which continues in this way for years.
It is a life in which the soul chiefly lives
through everything which it wills and desires and longs for
in connection with its felt and willed memories of the life that is past.
Rudolf Steiner
Life Beyond Death
Life and death are not two opposing forces;
they are only two ways of looking at the same force,
for the movement of change is as much the builder as the destroyer.
The human body lives because it is a complex of motions,
of circulation, of respiration, and digestion.
To resist change,
to try to cling to life,
is therefore like holding your breath –
if you persist you will kill yourself.
Ramesh Balsekar
Let Life Flow
To most people, death remains a hidden secret,
as eroticized as it is feared.
We are irresistibly attracted by the very anxieties we find most terrifying;
we are drawn to them by a primitive excitement
that arises from flirtation with danger.
Moths and flames,
mankind and death—
there is little difference.
Sherwin B. Nuland
How We Die: Reflections on Life's Final Chapter
To the average man
death offers one means of ridding himself of the thing called body,
but to the spiritual man
the new salvation makes it possible to ascend above it.
Not in the sense of material measurement,
but simply rising to a mental state where he sees
everything perfect and harmonious, here and now,
and recognizes that he is already in the Kingdom of Heaven.
When he has reached this state
there is no need to dispose of matter,
for the material concept has disappeared of its own self.
Walter C. Lanyon
The Joybringer
We are so much attached to our own feeling , to our individual existence.
For us , just now, we have some fear of death,
but after we resume our true original nature,
there is Nirvana.
That is why we say,
“ To attain Nirvana is to pass away. ”
“ To pass away ” is not a very adequate expression .
Perhaps “ to pass on, ” or “ to go on, ” or “ to join ” would be better.
Will you try to find some better expression for death?
When you find it,
you will have quite a new interpretation of your life.
Shunryu Suzuki
Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind
One realizes that they are and always will be,
and therefore lives in the now.
One knows that they cannot be injured or destroyed —
that they exist in accordance with Law (and that Law is Good).
One seeks no explanation, knowing that as the time comes,
they will progress through matter,
discarding sheath after sheath in its unfoldment,
attaining greater and greater degrees of knowing.
One sees Death and Life as one.
One sees Death as Birth.
One loses all its fear of Death, knowing it as it is.
One sees behind the hideous mask of Death,
the beautiful face of the radiant creature — Life.
These and other experiences come to the Soul when it awakens.
William Walker Atkinson
Nuggets of The New Thought
Life takes on a new meaning
when one reaches the borders of Spiritual Consciousness,
and takes a few steps beyond the borders.
Words cannot convey the idea —
it must be experienced to be comprehended.
One becomes conscious of having always existed — existing now —
and being intended for existence forever.
One does not reason out these things — one knows them,
just as before one had felt that they existed at any particular moment.
The “I Am” has taken on a new meaning — has apparently grown,
although one knows that they have not really grown,
but that one for the first time has arrived at a stage of consciousness
capable of recognizing themselves as they are.
One knows that they are in but the borderland of the Cosmic Knowing —
and that beyond lie regions of marvelous beauty
which in turn will be traveled.
One sees endless phases of existence
opening up to the vision.
William Walker Atkinson
Nuggets of The New Thought
In ancient Egypt,
to capture and mummify dangerous animals
like hundreds of crocodiles who served as messengers
from this world to the next
demonstrated the ancients’ reverence for death.
And did you know that a tribe in Africa
hangs the skull of the deceased over their doorway
and consults the dead regularly?
From the study of death,
my students and I learned a lot.
John Abraham
How to Get the Death You Want: A Practical and Moral Guide
Of course I do not think about death and dying all the time.
Nor does anyone.
La Rochefoucauld commented:
“One can no more look steadily at death than at the sun.”
At the same time we must not neglect one of the essential realities of life,
in ignoring death.
People tend to build up fears about topics hidden from them,
and these fears grow to be worse than the realities.
Death is a biological reality, a cultural phenomenon,
a spiritual event, an economic reality and a psychological process.
The topic is taboo in our society,
making it important to address the reality of death
seriously, realistically and helpfully.
We sorely need an objective and comprehensive kind of education
informing our understanding of death.
John Abraham
How to Get the Death You Want: A Practical and Moral Guide
I believe wholeheartedly in assisted death.
Not assisted suicide for depression.
Depression is a treatable, reversible condition.
Suicide is inappropriate, except in untreatable, unbearable suffering.
Death is not treatable or preventable.
Death can be easy or it can be utterly, devastatingly miserable.
It can be totally destructive of all dignity, privacy, and autonomy,
much less comfort. We have all seen it.
I fully respect the right of individuals to their own beliefs and end-of-life wishes.
I do not condone the imposition of personal religious beliefs
on someone who does not share the same convictions.
I believe it to be morally, ethically, humanely, and mercifully unconscionable
that a dying person must accept prolonged suffering
if that individual does not wish it.
This sometimes is justified by the myth
that physical and emotional suffering at the end of life can be controlled.
We all know that this is often not possible.
Sometimes we resort finally to medicating the individual into a semiconscious state.
And just what is the point of that?
Two months ago, I was diagnosed with advanced myelodysplastic syndrome.
My estimated survival time is 4 to 6 months,
which I suspect is optimistic.
At my age, 73, and general medical condition,
bone marrow transplant is not an option.
Chemotherapy might offer a few months of extended existence,
at the risk of spending it all sick from adverse effects.
I have opted for palliative care in hospice.
I will eventually die of anemia or infection of some sort.
And there is the rub.
What sort of death will it be?
I personally opt for as easy as possible.
John Rowe III, MD, Medford, Oregon
Journal of the American Medical Association
Also published in:
John Abraham
How to Get the Death You Want: A Practical and Moral Guide
Death is now the result of the will of the soul.
Eventually it has to be the result
of the united will of the soul and the personality,
and when that happens,
there will be no fear of death.
Ponder on this.
Alice A. Bailey
Discipleship in the New Age
The person you think is going to die is not the person you are now
Who you are now is impossible to lose –
and this will be true at all future moments at which you exist.
You fear death because you imagine your self to be a static thing
which will continue unchanged (amid an ever-changing world)
until the dreaded moment at which your brain stops working.
But it is logically impossible for you –
the feeling of being one brain in the present – to die.
And what else can you ever be
except the feeling of being one brain in the present?
Death only marks a limit to what new experiences can arise
based on the memory chain that a brain has access to.
David Darling
Zen Physics, The Science of Death, the Logic of Reincarnation
The act of dying is like falling asleep,
the effect of dying is to forget all about being one particular person,
and the sequel to dying is the gradual laying down
of new memories in a new brain,
which will define another particular person.
What is crucial is that, from the subjective point of view,
although one set of memories (and life circumstances)
is completely replaced by another,
and one brain by another,
there is no cessation of experience,
of consciousness, of being.
One story ends and,
in the wink of an eye as felt from within,
another story begins.
David Darling
Zen Physics, The Science of Death, the Logic of Reincarnation
No one who has experienced death ever mourns the death of anyone.
Neale Donald Walsch
The Complete Conversations with God: An Uncommon Dialogue
You think that life on Earth is better than life in heaven?
I tell you this,
at the moment of your death you will realize the greatest freedom,
the greatest peace, the greatest joy,
and the greatest love you have ever known.
Shall we therefore punish Bre’r Fox
for throwing Bre’r Rabbit into the briar patch?
Neale Donald Walsch
The Complete Conversations with God: An Uncommon Dialogue
Every man is related to the dead,
as shown by clairvoyant consciousness.
When the young—children or juveniles—pass through the gate of death,
it is seen that the connection between the living and the dead
is different from that of older people,
those dying in the twilight of their life.
There is a decisive difference
. When we lose children,
when the young are apparently taken from us,
they do not really leave us at all,
but remain with us.
This is seen by clairvoyant consciousness
by the fact that the messages we receive on awakening
are forceful and vivid when the dead concerned died as children or young people.
The connection between those remaining behind and the dead
is then such that we can only say
that a child or young person is not lost at all;
they really remain present.
Rudolf Steiner
Earthly Death and Cosmic Life
There’s no such thing as dying.
You just go on to a different stage of your life.
Dying is pleasant.
If people are worried about it,
tell them to go to a place in the river that has a deep pool.
Tell them to dive down to the bottom of the pool.
And then, at the bottom push up vigorously with their feet
and come plunging up to the surface.
Tell them it is like that.
Dolores Cannon
Between Death and Life: Conversations With A Spirit
Dying is the most important thing you do in your life.
It’s the great frontier for every one of us.
And loving is the art of living as a preparation for dying.
Allowing ourselves to dissolve into the ocean of love
is not just about leaving this body;
it is also the route to Oneness and unity
with our own inner being, the soul,
while we are still here.
If you know how to live and to love,
you know how to die.
Ram Dass
Walking Each Other Home: Conversations on Loving and Dying
You have created a society in which it is very not okay to want to die—
very not okay to be very okay with death.
Because you don’t want to die, you can’t imagine anyone wanting to die—
no matter what their circumstances or condition.
But there are many situations in which death is preferable to life—
which I know you can imagine if you think about it for even a little bit.
Yet, these truths don’t occur to you—they are not that self-evident—
when you are looking in the face someone else who is choosing to die.
And the dying person knows this.
She can feel the level of acceptance in the room regarding her decision.
Have you ever noticed how many people wait until the room is empty before they die? Some even have to tell their loved ones—
“No, really, go. Get a bite to eat.”
Or “Go, get some sleep. I’m fine. I’ll see you in the morning.”
And then, when the loyal guard leaves,
so does the soul from the body of the guarded.
Neale Donald Walsch
The Complete Conversations with God: An Uncommon Dialogue
The best dying practice, the best way to die,
is to have already ‘made real the wisdom mind of the buddhas’ within oneself. Enlightened practitioners have already before their deaths,
reached the highest levels of Western developmental psychology,
through their spiritual practices, and their service to all life.
The body is no longer a sarcophagus,
imprisoning the consciousness within flesh,
bone and the material world; it is a tool merely.
Consciousness does not exist within the body;
it is the reverse case for the highly evolved:
body exists within consciousness.
These highly evolved ones are able to consciously dissolve the physical elements
drawn together to form the vehicle of manifestation:
they may choose not to leave behind a dead container
for others to disintegrate using burning (the best way) or burial.
Sogyal Rinpoche tells of one instance of many,
the death of Sonam Namgyal, in Tibet in 1952.
He asked that his body be wrapped and left undisturbed for a week.
In that time, the lamas, monks and family
noticed the mass in the wrappings shrinking.
When unwrapped for burial, only his hair and nails remained.
Great rainbows (and other phenomena)
mark the assumption of the Body of Light or the Rainbow body, by such saints.
Susan Elizabeth Shore
Death, Our Last Illusion: A Scientific and Spiritual Probing of the Life Beyond Death
As the Tibetan Book of the Dead teaches,
the dying should face death not only calmly and clear-mindedly
but with an intellect rightly trained and rightly directed,
mentally transcending, if need be, bodily suffering and infirmities,
as they would be able to do had they practiced efficiently
during their active lifetime the Art of Living,
and, when about to die, the Art of Dying.
But in the Occident,
where the Art of Dying is little known and rarely practiced,
there is, contrastingly, the common unwillingness to die,
which, produces unfavourable results.
As here in America,
every effort is apt to be made by a materialistically inclined medical science
to postpone, and thereby to interfere with, the death-process.
Walter Evans-Wentz
Quote from:
Susan Elizabeth Shore
Death, Our Last Illusion: A Scientific and Spiritual Probing of the Life Beyond Death
Two conditions must exist in order to classify a death as a suicide.
1. You must be aware of what you are doing—
that is, you must be making a conscious choice to die.
2. You must be making the choice to die for the purpose of escaping,
rather than completing, your life.
Neale Donald Walsch
Home With God
Is death to be understood as within, or outside of, human life?
It is said, often enough, that death is a "part of life."
But what does that phrase, almost a cliche, mean?
It has been explored much less than it should be.
That exploration inexorably leads to perhaps the most troubling problem of all—
how we are to find meaning in death,
if there is any meaning to be found.
Daniel Callahan
The Troubled Dream of Life: In Search of a Peaceful Death
Death is our eternal companion.
It is always to our left, an arm’s length behind us.
Death is the only wise adviser that a warrior has.
Whenever he feels that everything is going wrong
and he’s about to be annihilated,
he can turn to his death and ask if that is so.
His death will tell him that he is wrong,
that nothing really matters outside its touch.
His death will tell him,
I haven’t touched you yet.
Carlos Castaneda
Journey to Ixtlan
Jung tells us that from the perspective of the Self—
which he defined as our entire psyche, including the conscious, unconscious,
and ego, as well as a self-regulating center—
death is understood not as an end, but rather as a transformation.
From the broader, more holistic point of view of the Self,
death is seen as an initiation into a new life, one we cannot yet imagine.
This way of understanding death—
as a transformation rather than an end—
can also be found in the sciences.
Albert Einstein’s first law of thermodynamics asserts that
energy cannot be created or destroyed;
it can only be changed from one form to another.
Following this model, the elements that once made our body
are recomposed after our death, into other structures or organisms.
As astronomer Carl Sagan poetically noted,
we ourselves are “made of star stuff,”
which is to say that the matter that makes up our physical bodies
was “forged in the bellies of distant, long-extinguished stars.”
Joanna Ebenstein
Memento Mori: The Art of Contemplating Death to Live a Better Life
Death is just infinity closing in
Jorge Luis Borges
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