This site shares Life-affirming meditations
that heal misconceptions about Death.
Living beautifully and dying beautifully,
Embrace Death as Birth
into limitless Life Awareness.
Death is but a transition from this life to another existence
where there is no more pain or anguish .
That knowledge helps me ,
in my own losses and grief ,
to know that those I care for are okay .
That I will see them again .
And those I love now ,
I will look after when I am gone .
I will laugh with them and smile at them.
And if they didn’t believe in life after death ,
I would make funny faces at them and say ,
‘ Ha ha , we are here and okay . ’
I know that the only thing that really lasts forever
is love ,
and I will miss so much about the life I had
and the people I have lost.
Elisabeth Kübler-Ross
On Grief and Grieving:
Finding the Meaning of Grief Through the Five Stages of Loss
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
The aspect of life which most stirs my soul
is the ability to share in an undertaking,
in a reality, more enduring than myself;
it is in this spirit and with this purpose in view
that I try to perfect myself and to master things a little more.
When death lays its hand upon me
it will leave intact these things, these ideas, these realities
which are more solid and more precious than I;
moreover my faith in Providence makes me believe
that death comes at its own fixed moment,
a moment of mysterious and special fruitfulness
not only for the supernatural destiny of the soul
but also for the further progress of the earth.
Teilhard de Chardin
Hymn of The Universe
If you die in an accident, physically, it is painful
just before you lose consciousness of the physical plane
because your body has been injured.
But after you lose consciousness
it is very easy and natural.
It’s as natural as anything else in life:
making love, walking, running, swimming.
It is just another part of 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
How does the experience of life change
when we stop denying death?
Death, when present, brings us face to face with our mortality.
Now is the most important moment.
Our mortality seems to come to life.
There is more here, present, now, than we knew.
We were busy wanting tomorrow to come
or waiting for today to be over.
Death brings “today” in the door
and makes you shake hands.
Suddenly life is fuller, richer than before.
There is more imagination.
With death comes depth.
Gail Thomas
Healing Pandora
The Real does not die,
the unreal never lived.
Nisargadatta
They travel in dreamlands,
each wrapped up in his own dream.
What is remembered,
is but another dream –
Nisargadatta
The ego fights mightily
against the silence that could deliver it into wholeness.
The silence of death
leads to the silence of the Self.
“Die before you die,” say the Sufis.
The only way to this silence
is through the constant practice
of being the witness to all that the ego does.
Vicki Woodyard
Bigger Than The Sky
Dying is traumatizing
when it is happening in a place and time
that will not make room
for dying in its way of living.
It is not dying that is traumatic;
it is dying in a death-phobic culture that is traumatic.
Stephen Jenkinson
Die Wise: A Manifesto for Sanity and Soul
Did you know that the cross of Christian crucifixion
originated with the dawn of civilization as an ancient pagan ritual
designed to not offend ancient nature gods?
The first humans tried to keep death at bay
by elevating it on a cross to rise above their sacred earth.
After hundreds of years crucifixion lost its spiritual significance
and became an instrument of torture, punishment, and execution
when rediscovered by Alexander the Great,
who brought it back to Europe in 400 BC.
Then it was reinvented again by Rome,
again as torture, with suffocation occurring after several days.
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
Death is not an event; it is a process.
As the Book of Common Prayer tells us,
"In the midst of life we are in death."
These reminders of mortality are reporting the course of a battle
that has been in progress on the cellular level
since the moment we were conceived,
when life and death began together.
A gray hair comes to report
that one small portion of the field has fallen.
And time is on the other side.
As we enter our thirties or forties,
the pace of life seems to accelerate.
The reminders become more frequent,
more difficult to ignore.
There is nothing tragic about this.
Youth is passing,
and with it the pleasures of youth;
these messages come to remind us
that it is time to move on to another stage of life.
What is tragic is trying to stay behind.
Yama would say,
"You have finished with all this.
Why go through it again and again?
The experiments are over;
it is time to reflect and learn."
Eknath Easwaran
Essence of the Upanishads: A Key to Indian Spirituality
Life is a projection, life is a mirage;
Death is a projection, death is an illusion;
Birth is a projection, birth is a dream;
This very existence is a projection, this existence is a dream.
The taste of coffee is a projection, so even coffee is an illusion.
However contrived or fake it feels,
remind yourself of the illusory nature of samsara.
Ideas often feel fake until you get used to them,
but faking it is the best preparation
for the moment of death.
Dzongsar Jamyang Khyentse
Living Is Dying: How to Prepare for Death, Dying and Beyond
‘Grief for the death of a loved one is selfishness
and but retards the greater good the loved one should be enjoying.
Grief from a sense of loss
is really rebellion against the Action of a Law
that has seen fit to give another
greater opportunity for rest and growth,
because nothing in the Universe goes backward,
and all—no matter what the temporary appearance—
is moving forward to greater and greater Joy and Perfection.
Godfre Ray King
The Magic Presence
To fear death, gentlemen,
is no other than to think oneself wise when one is not,
to think one knows what one does not know.
No one knows whether death may not be
the greatest of all blessings for a man,
yet men fear it
as if they knew that it is the greatest of evils.
And surely it is the most blameworthy ignorance
to believe that one knows what one does not know.
Socrates
During that period you refer to as old age,
once again emotionally and psychologically
the individual is less bound by physical time.
He no longer, that is the whole self no longer,
makes available sufficient psychic energy
for the maintenance of the physical organism.
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.
Jane Roberts
The Early Sessions: Book 3 of The Seth Material
Life is a struggle,
but death is only a rest
for those who have gone through the struggle of life.
For those who did not live,
death brings nothing but fear.
For one who is alive,
death simply does not exist.
It is out of the struggles of life
that a restful death is earned.
It is earned through living.
Therefore, the one who dies a death that is earned
attains deathlessness.
Like a Jesus, like a Socrates.
Earn death –
that is the only essential challenge of life.
Osho
Love Letters to Life
The veil
is where the everyday illusion of separation
meets the divine truth of eternity and universal interconnection.
On Halloween, Samhain,
the "veil between the worlds" is at its thinnest,
and the dead can and do walk among the living.
Communion with the other side is not as difficult as you think.
It is just getting past the blocks you have to doing it,
and reawakening and remembering
the natural ability you have to connect.
Once you reawaken your natural ability —
the ability you had as a child—
you will be connected all the time.
The Hoodwitch
When you lose a loved one, you suffer.
But if you know how to look deeply,
you have a chance to realize that his or her nature
is truly the nature of no birth, no death.
There is manifestation
and there is the cessation of manifestation
in order to have another manifestation
The day my mother died, I wrote in my journal,
“A serious misfortune of my life has arrived.”
I suffered for more than one year after the passing away of my mother.
But one night, in the highlands of Vietnam,
I was sleeping in the hut in my hermitage.
I dreamed of my mother.
I saw myself sitting with her,
and we were having a wonderful talk.
She looked young and beautiful, her hair flowing down.
It was so pleasant to sit there and talk to her
as if she had never died.
When I woke up it was about two in the morning,
and I felt very strongly that I had never lost my mother.
The impression that my mother was still with me was very clear.
I understood then that the idea of having lost my mother
was just an idea.
It was obvious in that moment
that my mother is always alive in me.
If you can stop and look deeply,
you will be able to recognize your beloved one
manifesting again and again in many forms.
You will again embrace the joy of life.
Thich Nhat Hanh
No Death, No Fear: Comforting Wisdom for Life
Dedicated to Evert and Wendy
Godspeed, Evert
Our greatest fear is that when we die we will become nothing.
Many of us believe that our entire existence
is only a life span beginning the moment we are born or conceived
and ending the moment we die.
We believe that we are born from nothing
and that when we die we become nothing.
And so we are filled with fear of annihilation.
Birth and death are notions.
They are not real.
The fact that we think they are true
makes a powerful illusion that causes our suffering.
The Buddha taught that there is no birth, there is no death;
there is no coming, there is no going;
there is no same, there is no different;
there is no permanent self, there is no annihilation.
We only think there is.
When we understand that we cannot be destroyed,
we are liberated from fear.
It is a great relief.
We can enjoy life and appreciate it in a new way.
Thich Nhat Hanh
No Death, No Fear: Comforting Wisdom for Life
When you have overcome the fear of death
you will have overcome death itself.
Do not ever think that anyone overcomes death
until he has overcome the fear of death
, until he can agree within himself,
“Living or dead, I’m still alive.
Living or dead, I can never be separated from the love of God,
so it is not important to me whether I’m alive or dead
because dead or alive, I’m alive in God.”
In that kind of overcoming, death has no power;
there is then no sting in passing from human sight.
By that time you realize that everyone has to pass from human sight
at least to make room for someone else to come along.
But passing from human sight is no longer a tragedy;
passing from human sight is no longer a source of grieving.
Joel S. Goldsmith, Lorraine Sinkler
The Journey Back to the Father's House
A serving girl in the house in which Swedenborg was staying, Elizabeth Reynolds,
said that he had told her the exact date of his own death.
She said that he seemed as happy about it
as if he was ‘going on holiday or to some merrymaking’.
On the morning of the predicted day,
he was ill in bed, and visited by his friend Pastor Ferelius.
Realising that time was short,
Ferelius asked Swedenborg if he wanted to recant.
Was there anything, perhaps, that he wanted to confess to God?
Swedenborg raised himself up on his bed,
put his hand on his heart, and said,
‘As truly as you see me before your eyes,
so true is everything that I have written;
and I could have said more had it been permitted.
When you enter eternity you will see everything,
and then you and I shall have much to talk about.’
He died that afternoon, as predicted.
John Higgs
William Blake vs. the World
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.
John Abraham
How to Get the Death You Want: A Practical and Moral Guide
The death of the small self
cannot be accomplished in a lasting or effective way
if we deny or circumvent the fear of physical death;
yet working with small deaths
can loosen the intense anxieties that surround physical death.
There is a natural path between impermanence and death,
and if we remain unwilling to follow it through,
then we short-circuit the remarkable benefits of continuous dying.
To approach the finality of our bodies
while paying no attention to the mini-deaths of daily life
is like confusing diamonds with pebbles
and throwing them away.
Nothing endures but change,
and accepting this has the potential
to transform the dread of dying into joyful living.
Yongey Mingyur Rinpoche, Helen Tworkov
In Love with the World: A Monk's Journey Through the Bardos of Living and Dying
Our dread of physical death
makes us resist the very idea of dying every day.
We confuse the renewable deaths of our mental states
with the ultimate death of our bodies.
When we do this,
every form of death and dying looms on the horizon
as an inevitable nightmare,
something that we spend our lives wishing will not happen.
Actually, with some investigation,
we can learn that what we dread as a future event
is happening all the time.
Yongey Mingyur Rinpoche, Helen Tworkov
In Love with the World: A Monk's Journey Through the Bardos of Living and Dying
Jesus prays,
uncertain of the will of the Father,
and is afraid of death.
But once he knows what it is,
he goes to meet it and offer himself up.
Let us be going.
He went forth.
Blaise Pascal
Pensees
Dolphins, I learned from J. William Worden
of the Harvard Child Bereavement Study at Massachusetts General Hospital,
had been observed refusing to eat after the death of a mate.
Geese had been observed reacting to such a death
by flying and calling,
searching until they themselves became disoriented and lost.
Joan Didion
The Year of Magical Thinking
Unlike us,
the great Mahayana masters thought of birth
as a far greater hurdle to overcome than death.
Nagarjuna, the great Indian scholar and mahasiddha,
told his friend, the king,
that for a spiritual person,
birth is more disturbing and a much bigger issue
than death could ever be.
Why do spiritual people value death over birth?
Birth is the one event in life
over which we have absolutely no control.
We pop out of our mothers’ bodies
without having been consulted about anything.
We have no say about where we are born,
who our parents are,
the day and hour of our birth,
or if we should be born in the first place.
Every aspect is out of our hands.
At no stage in our lives
is the knowledge that we have been born
of any use whatsoever,
whereas the knowledge that death is inevitable
continually urges us to appreciate what we have right now.
Knowing that we must die
helps us make the most of life.
We can love and remain sane
simply because we know that death is imminent and certain.
It also prevents us from becoming desensitized
and numbed by worldly life.
Life is intoxicating and, for most of us,
thinking about death is the only method
that can truly sober us up.
Dzongsar Jamyang Khyentse
Living Is Dying: How to Prepare for Death, Dying and Beyond
The gross human mind thinks of death
as the final separation of body from mind.
A more precise description
is that death marks the end of a period of time.
We therefore experience a continuous stream of deaths
throughout our so-called lives.
The death of death is birth;
the death of birth is abiding;
the death of abiding is the birth of death.
Everything we experience
is simultaneously a death and a birth;
if we are subject to the phenomenon called “time,”
we are also subject to death.
Dzongsar Jamyang Khyentse
Living Is Dying: How to Prepare for Death, Dying and Beyond
Think about it!
How can you prove to yourself
that you are alive and that you exist?
What can you do?
One of the standard methods for making sure you are not dreaming
is to pinch yourself.
These days, people try to feel more alive by cutting their flesh, even their wrists.
Less dramatically, others go shopping,
or get married, or provoke a fight with their spouse.
There is nothing to stop you from trying all of these methods;
you can fight and cut and pinch to your heart’s content,
but nothing you do will prove, categorically,
that you are alive.
Yet, along with most other human beings,
you continue to fear death.
This is what the Buddha called “fixation.” Y
ou fixate on the methods you use
to try to prove to yourself that you exist.
Yet everything you imagine yourself to be
and everything you feel, see, hear, taste, touch,
value, judge, and so on is imputed—
meaning it has been conditioned by your environment,
culture, family and human values.
By conquering these imputations and your conditioning,
you can also conquer your fear of death.
This is what Buddhists describe
as freeing yourself from dualistic distinctions,
which requires very little effort and costs nothing.
All you have to do is ask yourself:
How sure am I right now that I am really here?
How sure am I that I am really alive?
Dzongsar Jamyang Khyentse
Living Is Dying: How to Prepare for Death, Dying and Beyond
Clock time slices up the timeless,
giving it beginnings and endings.
As a result, there is birth, aging, and death.
All of virtual reality,
from the atom to the human body to the universe,
is a timeless process frozen in time.
If you say, “I was born in 1961” or “The meeting starts promptly at three”
or “The big bang occurred 13.8 billion years ago,”
you are doing the same thing—
freezing a constant fluid process into a beginning,
which automatically brings a middle and an end.
Beginning, middle, and end are mental constructs.
What is the middle of blue?
What was the last thing that happened before time began?
When you wake up, being here is continuous—
actually, it has always been continuous,
until beginning, middle, and end were invented.
It will come as a great relief to ditch those concepts.
Not only will you find that you are living in the now,
but birth, aging, and death will become irrelevant.
Deepak Chopra
Metahuman: Unleashing Your Infinite Potential
Because your entire life—and the life of humanity—
is based on consciousness,
you too are unlimited.
You can stop buying into all the stories about birth, death,
and everything in between.
Knowing that you are unlimited
means that no story can limit your possibilities.
Deepak Chopra
Metahuman: Unleashing Your Infinite Potential
You see me apparently functioning.
In reality, I only look.
Whatever is done, is done on the stage.
Joy and sorrow, life and death,
they all are real to the man in bondage;
to me, they are all in the show,
as unreal as the show itself.
I may perceive the world just like you,
but you believe to be in it,
while I see it as an iridescent drop
in the vast expanse of consciousness.
Roy Melvyn
The Essential Nisargadatta
The whole fear about death has come
simply because you have no idea what it is.
You have formed ideas about everything.
But it does not matter what ideas you have formed about life,
when you are confronted with the moment of death,
you really do not know anything
.That is one space of life
which has remained uncorrupted by the human mind.
Everything else we have corrupted.
Whatever was supposed to be sacred,
all these things are hugely corrupted by human minds.
Love, relationships, God, Divinity--
everything they have corrupted
and twisted out whichever way they want.
Death is one thing that they are still clueless about--
though a lot of people would like to talk authoritatively about it.
They know they are going to heaven;
they are dead sure about it.
If they are so sure,
I don't see what they are waiting for!
They are doing everything not to go to heaven.
Why?
Sadhguru
Life and Death in One Breath
There is nothing wrong with death; it has to happen.
Only because there is death, there is life.
You need to understand that the moment you are born,
you have a death sentence upon you.
When, where, and how is the only question,
but you are on death row.
Your death is confirmed.
We do not know whether you will get educated or not;
we do not know whether you will get married or not;
we do not know whether you will know joy or not;
we do not know whether you will know misery or not;
but we know that one day you will die.
That one thing is guaranteed.
Sadhguru
Life and Death in One Breath
Fixating on the idea of a “good death”
can paradoxically prevent one.
If we think that our death will follow a prescribed order,
and that perfect preparation leads to a perfect death,
we will constrict the wonder of a mysterious process.
Surrender is more important than control.
A good death is defined by a complete openness to whatever arises.
So don’t measure your death against any other,
and don’t feel you have to die a certain way.
Let your life, and your death, be your own.
There are certain things in life that we just do our own way.
Andrew Holecek
Preparing to Die: Practical Advice and Spiritual Wisdom from the Tibetan Buddhist Tradition
The death of the individual is not disconnection,
but withdrawal.
The corpse is like a footprint or an echo,
a dissolving trace of something
that the self has ceased to do.
In another connection,
we say we are not born into the world,
but out of the world.
This statement is true,
because the eternity of the world
is at the base of our existence,
so the universe is ultimately our own created body.
Lama Surya Das
Richard Power
The Lost Teachings of Lama Govinda: Living Wisdom from a Modern Tibetan Master
The aspect of life which most stirs my soul
is the ability to share in an undertaking,
in a reality, more enduring than myself;
it is in this spirit and with this purpose in view
that I try to perfect myself and to master things a little more.
When death lays its hand upon me
it will leave intact these things, these ideas, these realities
which are more solid and more precious than I;
moreover my faith in Providence makes me believe
that death comes at its own fixed moment,
a moment of mysterious and special fruitfulness
not only for the supernatural destiny of the soul
but also for the further progress of the earth.
Teilhard de Chardin
Hymn of The Universe
Jesus did not see those who crucified him as evil.
He didn’t say from the cross:
I curse you all, you miserable, evil people, you rotten sinners.
I hate you all for killing me unjustly.
No, these were not the words found on the lips of Jesus in the Gospel accounts.
Instead he said, “Father, forgive them, they have no idea what it is they are doing.”
He didn’t even see his own murderers as malicious,
but simply as misguided and ignorant.
This great lesson was the true sacrifice of Jesus on the cross.
His death on the cross saves us
because it teaches us how to allow what is,
to accept what is and eventually to actually love what is.
This is more than a superficial, passive milk-and-water acceptance of fate—
it is a profoundly dynamic allowing,
a deep acceptance.
Ultimately, in loving what is,
we are loving God Himself,
we are loving our own true Self.
Francis Bennett
I Am That I Am
In the teaching of Ramana Maharshi and others,
there is mention of a fourth state
beyond the states of waking, dreaming or deep, dreamless sleep.
This fourth state, or turiya,
is in reality, not a state at all,
but is rather an idea or teaching
that points to the one reality of the pure, clear awareness
in which all the three states of waking, dreaming and deep sleep come and go.
The awakened person is always abiding in this state
that is not really a state at all.
States come and go,
but this awareness that is our true nature
has no comings or goings.
It is immutable, birthless, deathless.
All appears and disappears within it.
It alone remains.
This is living the awakened life.
Francis Bennett
I Am That I Am
Most interestingly, he quibbled with the idea
that death was something that lay ahead of us in the uncertain future.
“This is our big mistake,” Seneca wrote,
“to think we look forward toward death.
Most of death is already gone.
Whatever time has passed is owned by death.”
That was what he realized,
that we are dying every day
and no day, once dead, can be revived.
Ryan Holiday, Stephen Hanselman
Lives of the Stoics
The end of the world for a caterpillar is a butterfly for the master.
Death is resurrection.
We’re talking not about some resurrection that will happen
but about one that is happening right now.
If you would die to the past,
if you would die to every minute,
you would be the person who is fully alive,
because a fully alive person
is one who is full of death.
We’re always dying to things.
We’re always shedding everything
in order to be fully alive
and to be resurrected at every moment.
Anthony de Mello
Awareness
And it is so beautiful,
so indescribably beautiful
that only one thingcan be said about death:
it must be that experience multiplied by millions.
The experience of meditation multiplied by millions
is the experience of death.
And when you pass on you simply leave your form behind.
You are absolutely intact,
and for the first time out of the prison
of physiology , biology, psychology.
All the walls are broken
and you are free.
Osho
The Rajneesh Bible, Volume III
Those who know meditation, they know something of death--
that's the only way to know before dying.
If I am saying there is no more significant experience in life than death,
I am saying it not because I have died and come back to tell you,
but because I know that in meditation
you must move into the same space as death--
because in meditation you are no more your physiology,
no more your biology, no more your chemistry, no more your psychology.
All those are left far away.
You come to your innermost center
where there is only pure awareness.
That pure awareness will be with you when you die
because that cannot be taken away.
All these other things which can be taken away,
we take away with our own hands in meditation.
So meditation is an experience of death in life.
Osho
The Rajneesh Bible, Volume III
Remember that you are immortal,
and that you who go out of life will come back again,
strengthened by the rest in the invisible!
For a change of place is a rest of consciousness.
To those whose nerves are weary, wise doctors prescribe a change.
A rest in the invisible worlds is more refreshing
than a summer in the mountains.
Do not fear death.
I passed through death,
and I am more rested now than a strong man in the morning.
I would not go back to my old body.
When I want a body again
I shall build a new one.
I know the process of building,
having built so many before.
Elsa Barker
Last Letters From The Living Dead Man
Our true, essential being is utterly simple,
present moment consciousness of just being, or simple existence,
before we experience ourselves as existing as anything specific or particular—a
woman, a man, old, young, black, white or brown,
Christian, Buddhist, Jewish, atheist
. Hasn’t this simple I am been always here,
silently watching our many experiences and changing roles?
It was there when we were in a little baby body
gazing wordlessly out on the strange new world we suddenly found ourselves in
after the quiet, dark world of our mother’s womb.
The same I am will still be silently watching through these eyes
as we lie on our deathbed,
and it will look around at all the familiar things in our bedroom one last time
before we stop breathing and our heart stops beating.
When our busy, thinking, conceptual mind
that identified with all the temporal characteristics of this body
quiets down a little,
we can actually become conscious of this silent witness to our life,
the I am,
our most basic sense of simple presence here and now.
Francis Bennett
I Am That I Am
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