Welcome to Death Knells
The Death of Fearing Death
This site shares Life-affirming meditations
that heal misconceptions about Death.
Living beautifully and dying beautifully,
Embrace Death as our Birth
into limitless Life Awareness.
that heal misconceptions about Death.
Living beautifully and dying beautifully,
Embrace Death as our Birth
into limitless Life Awareness.
Insight perceives that the veil or illusion
is not over, or on, the manifested form like a mist over a mountain,
but the veil is a delusion over consciousness,
distorting the vision to report
sickness instead of health;
lack instead of abundance;
death instead of life.
In divine Science
we do not have to remove sickness, sin, and death
from the manifested form or body,
for they are not there.
Lillian DeWaters
The Word Made Flesh
All of you went through the reading of your life after death.
In elder times it was called Judgment Day.
It is Judgment Day, except that it really isn't a judgment.
It is to refresh your memory on what you did.
Understand that you are a being that is transpersonal but still personal.
You are a being that has transmuted out of a fleshy body.
You have gotten out of the garment.
Where there was such a delay
in the Spirit working through the body to create reality,
because you are living in a body that is mass to mass here,
now you are more in your own domain as a spiritual entity.
You are actually vibrating
in a kinder realm than this realm.
Ramtha
Changing the Timeline of Our Destiny
The question is often asked:
"Why does a man know nothing of those experiences
which lie beyond the borders of birth and death?"
Not thus should we ask, but rather:
"How may we attain to such knowledge?"
The entrance to the Path is opened by right meditation.
This alone can revive the memory
of events that lie beyond the borders of birth and death.
Everyone can attain to this knowledge;
in each of us is the faculty of recognizing and contemplating for ourselves
the truths of Mysticism, Theosophy, and Gnosis;
but the right means must be chosen.
Rudolf Steiner
The Way of Initiation or,
How to Attain Knowledge of the Higher Worlds
I am dying
You are dying
It has been this way
Since birth
To be free from death
Wu Hsin says
Look to what you were
Before this birth.
Wu Hsin
An Interlude in Eternity:
The Non Dual Teachings of Wu Hsin
A person has died.
During his lifetime for [one] reason or another
he did not concern himself with spiritual science.
The one who remains behind on earth
can know by means of spiritual science
that the deceased has a burning thirst for spiritual science.
Now if the one who remains behind
concerns himself with thoughts of a spiritual nature
as if the dead were there with him,
he performs a great service to him.
We can actually read to the dead.
That enables the gulf that exists
between the living and the dead to be bridged.
By reading to the dead
we can enter in immediate connection with them and help them.
The one who has avoided spiritual science
will continue to feel the anguish of longing for it
unless we help him.
We can assist him from the earth
if such a longing is at all present.
By this means the living can help the dead.
Rudolf Steiner
We are all expecting death, and death is forever –
but at the same time we live in a society
in which grief may be medicalised, even pathologised,
and we often are ill-equipped to progress through it.
It’s no wonder so many of us don’t slow down for grief,
no wonder we march on,
listless and uncertain, thirsty and unsatisfied.
The traditional outlets for bereavement
that existed a few generations ago (counselling by a priest or pastor,
public exhibition of mourning, community-supported funerals
and the comfort of the funerary rituals themselves)
no longer seem plausible to many.
Though we continue to reflect upon and so to tweak ritual traditions
for weddings, christenings and other celebrations,
the fact that we don’t usually take time
to reflect on death until it happens to someone we love
may leave us struggling to get by on autopilot.
Brandy Schillace
Death's Summer Coat
Seneca 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
Lives of the Stoics
Let us prepare our minds
as if we’d come to the very end of life.
Let us postpone nothing.
Let us balance life’s books each day. . . .
The one who puts the finishing touches on their life each day
is never short of time.
Seneca
Ryan Holiday
Lives of the Stoics
Rather than continuing to avoid death,
or to fear it,
what if we changed our perception?
Might we conceive of death, instead,
as the winding down of life’s frantic clock –
and dying as a means of coming to terms with our identities,
our loved ones,
ourselves?
Brandy Schillace
Death's Summer Coat
Instead of realizing the nature of man
to be that actual experience of beingness
- the sense of being alive, or being present (I Am) -
man has been conditioned to regard himself as a body,
a physical volume "bounded by a skin in space,
and by birth and death in time."
The fact of the matter
is that man is an intrinsic, though infinitesimally small,
part of the manifested universe.
He is a pattern in a movement of convoluted evolution
which began millions of years before the isolated event called "birth"
and will continue long, long after the singled out event called "death".
Ramesh S. Balsekar.
Final Truth: A Guide to Ultimate Understanding
Death is precisely the proof that in reality there is no death,
that Death is a Maya, an illusion.
Herein lies the great difference between the life from death to rebirth
and our life here from birth to death.
For as you know, no man can with ordinary physical means of cognition
remember his own birth.
No one can prove his own birth by personal experience,
for he has not seen it himself.
One’s birth is something which cannot be seen
by the human eye here in physical life.
It lies before the time which we can remember.
Birth is never included in our recollection.
Death, however stands before our spiritual vision
as the greatest, most significant, living and perfect event
in our life between death and rebirth.
For death is precisely the means
by which we retain our Ego-consciousness after death.
And just as little as it is possible in physical life
to remember our birth,
is it necessary and self-evident in the life between death and rebirth,
that the great moment,
when the spirit separates from the body should,
during the whole time we pass in the spiritual world,
always stand before our psychic-spiritual gaze.
Rudolf Steiner
The moment of death is of extraordinary significance.
Death is something which most distinctly has two totally different aspects.
Regarded here from the physical world
it certainly has many sad aspects, many painful sides.
But we really only see death here from the one side;
after our death we see it from the other.
It is then the most satisfying and most perfect occurrence
that we can possibly experience,
for there it is a living fact.
Whereas here
death is a proof of how frail and transitory the physical life of man is --
when seen from the spiritual world death is actually a proof
that the spirit continually wins the victory over everything non-spiritual,
that the spirit is ever the life,
the eternal, ever-unconquerable life.
Rudolf Steiner
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 however
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
No play can go on forever.
Individual focus cannot be intensely maintained indefinitely.
Neither can the vibrant, almost fanatical focus of the self
within the limitations of one field
continue indefinitely.
By adulthood the trance, the intense focus, is strongest.
It is after this period that the trance little by little weakens its hold.
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 conscious ego
with which you are familiar
cries out its bewilderment,
for has it not always sensed immortality?
Jane Roberts
The Early Sessions: Book 3 of The Seth Material
When you die,
you don’t go anywhere;
your soul is simply vibrating at another frequency.
Deepak Chopra
Ask Deepak About Death and Dying
Once we meet death and keep it near,
it ceases to threaten us,
ceases to be alien.
Death, when embraced,
can be the means to healing
and to progressing through grief for the living.
It can also be our greatest means of connection.
Brandy Schillace
Death's Summer Coat
My best friend’s mother, a breast cancer patient,
tried repeatedly to talk about the looming possibility of her own death,
only to be told that she should not speak of it.
It is a strange irony:
the last thing we are supposed (or allowed) to do
when preparing to meet death is talk about death.
Can you imagine the inverse?
We would not plan for the birth of a child
without addressing the subject of labour?
Major events demand adequate preparation –
more than that, they require solemnity, significance.
These make up our cultural rituals,
and rituals have enormous power.
Brandy Schillace
Death's Summer Coat
Body is Consciousness,
life is Consciousness,
death is Consciousness too.
When death-Consciousness comes to meet body-Consciousness
where is the cause for sorrow?
Just as water can be calm or in movement as ripples,
Consciousness can also be at rest or in movement.
The man with wisdom makes no distinction
between sentient matter and insentient matter.
What is observed as body and what is regarded as notion,
the perishable and the imperishable,
thoughts and feelings -
all are manifestations
in the infinite Consciousness.
Ramesh S. Balsekar
Final Truth: A Guide to Ultimate Understanding
All our feelings have significance
only in relation to their relative opposites.
While the human individual abhors pain and discomfort,
he would never be able to understand, let alone appreciate,
pleasure and comfort by themselves.
And yet, in his abysmal ignorance
he forgets this basic fact of life
and strives with all his might for pleasure without pain,
and life without death.
Ramesh S. Balsekar
Final Truth: A Guide to Ultimate Understanding
Cicero once said
that to philosophize is to learn how to die.
So the Stoics instruct us wisely
not only in how to live,
but in how to face the scariest part of life:
the end.
They teach us, by example,
the art of going out well.
Ryan Holiday
Lives of the Stoics
People wonder whether death is a painful process,
such as in the case of cancer victims.
Cancer, which produces a lot of pain,
is a process of life which results in death,
but death itself is not painful.
Death itself is blissful.
You don’t need any counseling.
You intuitively know what’s going to happen.
Death is like a meditation, a samādhi.
That’s why it’s called mahā (great) samādhi.
A Hindu is prepared from childhood for that mahāsamādhi.
Remember, pain is not part of the process of death.
That is the process of life,
which results in death.
Satguru Sivaya Subramuniyaswami
Merging with Siva
One great peculiarity about man
is that he individually feels that he is never going to die
and goes on through life planning and building
as though he were going to live forever and ever.
The fear of death is a natural instinctive reflex.
We encounter it sometimes daily, once a month,
or at least once a year when we come face to face
with the possibility of obliteration of our personality
and of leaving the conscious mind.
The fear of change or fear of the unknown
is an ominous element in the destiny of a human being.
The study and comprehension of the laws of reincarnation
can alleviate this fear
and bring an enlightened vision of the cosmic rhythms of life and death.
It is a simple process,
no more fantastic, shall we say,
than other growth problems we experience daily.
A flower grows, blossoms and withers.
The seed falls to the ground,
is buried in the earth,
sprouts and grows into a plant and a flower.
Satguru Sivaya Subramuniyaswami
Merging with Siva
It seems that actually relating with the dying person is very important,
to provide the whole ground of dying.
Death is no longer a myth at that point.
It is actually happening:
“You are dying. We are watching your dying.
But we are your friends, therefore we watch your dying.
We believe in your rugged quality
of leaving your body and turning into a corpse.
That is beautiful.
That’s the finest and best example of friendship
that you could demonstrate to us:
that you know you are dying
and we know that you are going to die.
That’s really beautiful.
We are really meeting together properly and beautifully,
exactly at the point.
It is fantastic communication.”
Trungpa Rinpoche
The most helpful person
is one who is comfortable with death,
with groundlessness, and with not knowing.
Like a strong rider on a frisky horse,
this is someone who can ride on top of whatever’s happening
without being thrown by it and without trying to fix it.
Expect the unexpected.
Learn to appreciate silence and uncertainty.
Death is unsettling because it is foreign.
This is what’s meant by groundlessness.
Trungpa Rinpoche said that groundlessness means
that ground is unknown to you.
You just don’t know what’s going on,
but you’re okay with that.
It’s your stability in the midst of such instability
that brings the most benefit.
Steadiness naturally attracts and soothes others--
especially when they’re losing it.
They will take refuge in your presence and peace of mind.
Andrew Holecek
Preparing to Die:
Practical Advice and Spiritual Wisdom
from the Tibetan Buddhist Tradition
The concept of a good death
can put unbearable pressure on dying people and caregivers,
and can take us away from death’s mystery
and the richness of not knowing.
Our expectations of how someone should die
can give rise to subtle or direct coerciveness.
No one wants to be judged for how well she dies!
Joan Halifax
When it’s time to leave this body, this illusionary tangle,
Don’t cause yourself anxiety and grief;
The thing that you should train in and clear up for yourself
There’s no such thing as dying to be done
It’s just clear light, the mother, and child clear light uniting,
When mind forsakes the body, sheer delight!
Gotsangpa
The immortal is the reality;
the mortal is the unreality.
During each period of earth life,
reality thus dwells in unreality,
to be liberated from it temporarily by death
and permanently by illumination
Manly P. Hall
Secret Teaching of All Ages
death is a nothing jumbo
Charles Bukowski
Run With The Hunted
I hear a good many pretend that they are going to die;
or that they have died, for aught that I know.
Nonsense!
I'll defy them to do it.
They haven't got life enough in them.
They'll deliquesce like fungi,
and keep a hundred eulogists mopping the spot where they left off.
Only half a dozen or so have died since the world began.
Do you think that you are going to die, sir?
No! there's no hope of you.
You haven't got your lesson yet.
You've got to stay after school.
We make a needless ado about capital punishment,
--taking lives, when there is no life to take.
Memento mori!
We don't understand that sublime sentence
which some worthy got sculptured on his gravestone once.
We've interpreted it in a grovelling and snivelling sense;
we've wholly forgotten how to die.
Henry David Thoreau
It seems as if no man had ever died in America before;
for in order to die you must first have lived.
I don't believe in the hearses, and palls,
and funerals that they have had.
There was no death in the case,
because there had been no life;
they merely rotted or sloughed off,
pretty much as they had rotted or sloughed along.
No temple's veil was rent,
only a hole dug somewhere.
Let the dead bury their dead.
The best of them fairly ran down like a clock.
Franklin,--Washington,--
they were let off without dying;
they were merely missing one day.
Henry David Thoreau
Remember that if there is a link of love
you will certainly meet again,
and that nothing that is good, or beautiful, or true,
can ever be lost.
On this plane
we often see our friends or our dearly loved ones go away
to live in a distant country
knowing that we shall not see them again for several years--
and death is really nothing more than this.
Emmet Fox
The Emmet Fox Reader
Where there is a strong sense of bereavement;
or where the survivors are left in tragic circumstances,
the dead person will of course suffer acutely.
As a matter of fact, the so-called dead
are very sensitive to our thoughts
for a considerable time after they have passed over to the other side,
and for this reason excessive grief is to be deprecated.
It saddens them and prevents their focusing their attention
as they should upon the new life which they are starting.
Of course, it seems very hard to tell people not to grieve
when one whom they have dearly loved passes out of sight;
but the fact remains
that excessive grief is bad for both parties.
Emmet Fox
The Emmet Fox Reader
I often like to think that our map of the world is wrong,
that where we have centered physics,
we should actually place literature as the central metaphor
that we want to work out from.
Because I think literature occupies the same relationship to life
that life occupies to death.
A book is life with one dimension pulled out of it.
And life is something that lacks a dimension
which death will give it.
I imagine death to be a kind of release into the imagination
in the sense that for characters in a book,
what we experience
is an unimaginable dimension of freedom.
Terence McKenna
If an ordinary man, when he is about to die,
could only see the five elements of consciousness as void;
the four physical elements as not constituting an ‘I’;
the real Mind as formless and neither coming nor going;
his nature as something neither commencing at his birth
nor perishing at his death,
but as whole and motionless in its very depths;
his Mind and environmental objects as one--
if he could really accomplish this,
he would receive Enlightenment in a flash.
He would no longer be entangled by the Triple World;
he would be a World-Transcender.
He would be without even the faintest tendency towards rebirth.
Huang-Po
On the Transmission of Mind
The dreams of those about to die
often involve dream structures
that already prepare them for future existence.
In fact, towards death
a great dream acceleration is involved
as new probabilities are considered --
a dream acceleration
that provides psychic impetus for new birth.
Jane Roberts:
The Nature of the Psyche: Its Human Expression
(A Seth Book)
You read yourself in too-narrow terms.
Much of the pain connected with serious illness and death
results because you have no faith in your own continuing reality.
You fight pain
because you have not learned to transcend it,
or rather to use it.
You do not trust
the natural consciousness of the body,
so that when its end nears --
and such an end is inevitable --
you do not trust the signals that the body gives,
that are meant to free you.
Jane Roberts:
The Nature of the Psyche: Its Human Expression
(A Seth Book)
Your life seems synonymous with your consciousness.
Therefore it appears
that your knowledge of yourself grows gradually,
as your self-consciousness develops from your birth.
It appears, furthermore,
that your consciousness will meet a death
beyond which your self-consciousness will not survive.
You may think longingly and with an almost hopeful nostalgia
of the religion of your childhood,
and remember a system of belief that ensured you of immortality.
Yet most of you, my readers,
yearn for some private and intimate assurances,
and seek for some inner certainty
that your own individuality
is not curtly dismissed at death.
Jane Roberts:
The Nature of the Psyche: Its Human Expression
(A Seth Book)
Time destroys all that it creates,
and the end of every temporal sequence is,
for the entity involved in it,
some form of death.
Death is wholly transcended
only when time is transcended;
immortality is for the consciousness
that has broken through the temporal into the timeless.
For all other consciousnesses
there is at best a survival or a rebirth;
and these entail further temporal sequences
and the periodical recurrence
of yet other deaths and dissolutions.
Aldous Huxley
The Divine Within
The wave
does not need to die
to become water.
She is already water.
Thich Nhat Hanh
My wife proved to be an excellent psychic intermediary
and was easily controlled by discarnate intelligences.
In answer to her doubts concerning the right of “disturbing the dead”
these intelligences asserted
that a grievously wrong conception existed among mortals
regarding the conditions prevailing after death.
They stated that there is in reality no death,
but a natural transition from the visible to the invisible world,
and that advanced spirits are ever striving
to communicate with mortals
to enlighten them concerning the higher possibilities
which await the progressive spirit.
But death - the freeing of the spirit from the body -
is so simple and natural
that a great majority do not, for a longer or shorter period,
realize the change.
Carl August Wickland
Thirty Years Among the Dead
This is a world of time,
where all things begin and end.
Although death appears to be,
there is none.
Those who remain, experience their death;
but to themselves they do not die.
Instead, they are restored to life
in a young body with nothing missing.
There they will get older and eventually die,
to be instantly restored . .
again unaccountably new . .
Neville
What happens after death
is so unspeakably glorious
that our imagination and our feelings
do not suffice to form even an approximate conception of it.
The dissolution of our time-bound form in eternity
brings no loss of meaning.
Carl Jung
Embrace your grief.
For there, your soul will grow.
Carl Jung
Tell your friend that in his death,
a part of you dies and goes with him.
Wherever he goes,
you also go.
He will not be alone.
Krishnamurti
Find out what it means to die -
not physically, that's inevitable -
but to die to everything that is known,
\to die to your family, to your attachments,
to all the things that you have accumulated,
the known, the known pleasures,
the known fears.
Die to that every minute
and you will see what it means to die
so that the mind is made fresh, young,
and therefore innocent,
so that there is incarnation not in a next life,
but the next day.
Krishnamurti
The actual truth is that there is no death.
When a person seems to die,
all that happens is that he leaves his body here
and goes over onto the next plane,
otherwise unchanged.
He falls asleep here
to wake up on the other side
minus his physical body
(which was probably more or less damaged)
but enriched with the knowledge
that he has not really died.
This is the story of what we call “death,”
and in most cases it is easier than being born.
Emmet Fox
The Emmet Fox Reader
I want to take away all your consolations before you die.
If you can die innocent,
your death will have a tremendous value.
Put aside your knowledge because it is all borrowed.
Put aside your God because it is only a belief,
and nothing more.
Put aside the idea of any heaven or hell
because they are only your greed and your fear.
Your whole life, you have remained clinging to these things.
At least before you die, gather courage –
now you have nothing to lose!
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
In Love with Life:
Reflections on Friedrich Nietzsche's Thus Spake Zarathustra
Birth is okay and death is okay,
if we know that they are only concepts in our mind.
Reality transcends both birth and death.
Thich Nhat Hanh
Every farewell is a death.
Yes, every farewell is a death.
In the train that we call life
We are all chance events in one another’s lives,
And we all feel sorry when it’s time to get off.
Fernando Pessoa
A Little Larger Than the Entire Universe
The insect that hurls itself into the flame
does not really wish to die
but desires to return in a different form.
It wishes to be reconfigured by the flame.
And so death is everywhere.
Death is not what destroys creatures but,
when it is properly conducted,
only transforms them.
There is a profound connection between everything in external nature.
The butterfly is formed from light,
but first the light has to be made into thread
by taking up earthly matter to form a cocoon.
All animal creatures are created out of light,
as is the human being.
In truth it is light
that creates a new human being in the mother's body,
makes it possible for a human being to develop
from and through light.
We can see therefore
that the butterfly arises from light
that is first captured and internalized.
Rudolf Steiner
Butterflies: Beings of Light
I want you to open up those barriers
that you have erected within yourselves.
Forget the cringing selves
that you sometimes are and remember,
instead, accept the magic essence of your own being
that sings even now through your fingertips.
That is the reality which you are seeking.
Experience it fully.
Do you need an old dead thing like me
to tell you what life is?
Jane Roberts,
Seth Speaks
In the presence of death,
you feel the passing of wings.
Deepak Chopra
It’s been shown
that death rates rise significantly after Christmas,
and the same spike occurs
after mortally ill people have a birthday.
The implication is
that when someone is dying,
she can postpone her time of death
until after a day she wants to live to see.
Deepak Chopra
Reinventing the Body, Resurrecting the Soul:
How to Create a New You
For "death" occurs
only because the consciousness has to depend on an external world
with which it enters into communication through the physical sense organs.
When these physical sense organs fail,
every relation to the environment ceases.
That is to say, the man "has died."
However, when his soul is so far advanced
that it does not receive
the influences of the outside world through physical instruments,
but receives them through the images
which the soul creates out of itself,
then it will have reached the point
where it can regulate its intercourse with the environment independently,
that is, its life will not be interrupted against its will.
It has become lord over birth and death.
Rudolf Steiner
Cosmic Memory
I always found my deaths highly educational.
It was always a lesson between lives
to trace the thoughts and events that “led to a given demise.”
None of my deaths surprised me.
I felt during the process the inevitability, the recognition,
even a sense of familiarity:
“Of course, this particular dying is mine and no other.”
And I accepted even the most bizarre circumstances then,
feeling almost a sense of perfection.
The life could not be finished properly without the death.
There is a great sense of humility,
and yet a great sense of exaltation
as the inner self senses its freedom when death occurs.
All my deaths were the complement of my lives,
in that it seemed to me that it could not be otherwise.
Jane Roberts
Seth Speaks
If only my life were an oxcart
That creaks down the road in the morning,
Very early, and returns by the same road
To where it came from in the evening . . .
I wouldn’t have to have hopes, just wheels . . .
My old age wouldn’t have wrinkles or white hair . . .
When I was of no more use, my wheels would be removed
And I’d end up at the bottom of a ditch, broken and
overturned.
Or I’d be made into something different
And I wouldn’t know what I’d been made into . . .
But I’m not an oxcart, I’m different.
But exactly how I’m different no one would ever tell me.
Fernando Pessoa
A Little Larger Than the Entire Universe
When I die, my son,
Let me be the child, the little one.
Pick me up in your arms
And carry me into your house.
Undress my tired and human self
And tuck me into your bed.
If I wake up, tell me stories
So that I’ll fall back asleep.
And give me your dreams to play with
Until the dawning of that day
You know will dawn.
Fernando Pessoa
A Little Larger Than the Entire Universe
The only tragedy there is in the world
is unwakefulness and unawareness.
From them comes fear,
and from fear comes everything else,
but death is not a tragedy at all.
Dying is wonderful;
it’s only horrible to people
who have never understood life.
It’s only when you’re afraid of life
that you fear death.
It’s only dead people who fear death.
But people who are alive
have no fear of death.
Anthony de Mello
Awareness
Many think the most important question in the world is:
“Is there a life after death?”
Wrong!
Nobody seems to be grappling with the problem of:
Is there a life before death?
Yet my experience is
that it’s precisely the ones who don’t know what to do with this life
who are all hot and bothered
about what they are going to do with another life.
One sign that you’re awakened
is that you don’t give a damn
about what’s going to happen in the next life.
You’re not%2