Welcome to Death Knells
The Death of Fearing Death
This site shares Death Knells to misconceptions about Death.
Living beautifully and dying beautifully,
Death is fearlessly embraced as the Birth of new Life awareness.
Living beautifully and dying beautifully,
Death is fearlessly embraced as the Birth of new Life awareness.
Ten residents slipped away from their retirement community one Sunday afternoon
for a covert meeting in a grocery store cafe.
They aimed to answer a taboo question:
When they feel they have lived long enough,
how can they carry out their own swift and peaceful death?
The group gathered a few months ago to meet with Dena Davis,
a bioethics professor at Lehigh University
who defends “rational suicide” —
the idea that suicide can be a well-reasoned decision,
not a result of emotional or psychological problems.
Davis, 72, has been vocal about her desire to end her life
rather than experience a slow decline because of dementia,
as her mother did.
Seniors pay six figures to move into the bucolic campus,
which includes an indoor heated pool,
a concert hall and many acres of wooded trails.
They are guaranteed housing, medical care,
companionship and comfort for the rest of their lives.
“We are saying, thank you very much,
but that’s not what we’re looking for,”
Lois said of her group.
Carolyn, a 72-year-old member of the group,
said they live in a “fabulous place” where residents enjoy “a lot of agency.”
But she and her 88-year-old husband
also want the freedom to determine how they die.
Public opinion research has shown shifting opinions
among doctors and the general public
about hastening death.
Nationally, 72 percent of Americans
believe that doctors should be allowed by law
to end a terminally ill patient’s life
if the patient and his or her family request it,
according to a 2018 Gallup poll.
“It seems to me t
hat there must be an awful lot of people in America
who think the way I do,” Davis said.
“Our beliefs are not respected.
Nobody says,
‘Okay, how do we respect and facilitate the beliefs of somebody
who wants to commit suicide rather than having dementia?’ ”
excerpts from the Washington Post article:
As seniors go into twilight years, some of them privately mull ‘rational suicide’
click above to read full article
Not as the world gives,
do you give, 0 Lover of souls.
What you give you do not give away,
for what is yours is ours also if we are yours.
And life is eternal and love immortal,
and death is only an horizon,
and an horizon is nothing save the limit of our sight.
Lift us up, strong Son of God,
that we may see farther;
cleanse our eyes that we may see more clearly;
draw us closer to yourself
that we may know ourselves
to be nearer to our loved ones who are with you.
And while you prepare a place for us,
prepare us also for that happy place,
that where you are we may also be for evermore.
a St. Benedict prayer...
Learn to experience
that those who have passed through the gate of death
have only assumed another form.
Having died,
they stand before our feelings
like those who, through life circumstances,
have traveled to distant lands,
whither we can follow them only later.
We have therefore nothing to bear
but a time of separation.
Rudolf Steiner; Christopher Bamford:
Staying Connected :
How to Continue Your Relationships With Those Who Have Died
It is neither necessary nor advisable
to pursue events, identities or relationships
that may have existed in previous lives.
After all, it is all now.
We don’t think it important to remember details of our childhood years,
to wallow in happy or unhappy nostalgia.
Why pursue the remembered residue of what has already come and gone?
Now is the only time,
and for the spiritual seeker,
past life analysis or conjecture is an unnecessary waste of useful time and energy.
The present now is the sum of all prior thens.
Be now.
Be the being of yourself this very moment,
and that will be the truest fulfillment of all past actions.
Satguru Sivaya Subramuniyaswami.
Merging with Siva:
Hinduism's Contemporary Metaphysics
While some sects of Hinduism
teach that liberation comes only upon death,
most embrace the state of jīvanmukti,
liberation in which the advanced soul
unfolds its inherent perfection while alive.
It is said of such a great one that
“He died before he died,”
indicating the totally real, not merely symbolic,
demise of the ego.
Satguru Sivaya Subramuniyaswami.
Merging with Siva:
Hinduism's Contemporary Metaphysics
We must regain the understanding
that we are not on earth just to build things
in the physical universe during our physical existence.
We must understand that during our whole existence
we are connected to the whole world.
Those who have passed through the gates of death
want to work with us on the physical world.
This working together only appears to be a physical collaboration,
for everything physical is only an outer expression of spirit.
Materialism has alienated human beings from the world of the dead.
Spiritual science must help us make friends again with that world.
The time must come
when we no longer alienate ourselves from the dead-
for it is our alienation
that prevents them from spiritualizing the physical world.
Rudolf Steiner; Christopher Bamford. Staying Connected
: How to Continue Your Relationships With Those Who Have Died
What’s the last gift you’re going to give your family?
In a sense, it’s knowing how to die.
Staying alive is not necessarily the goal.
Dennis McCullough
By initiation into the Mysteries
and a certain process known as operative theology,
the law of birth and death is transcended,
and during the course of physical existence
that part of the spirit which is asleep in form is awakened
without the intervention of death—the inevitable Initiator--
and is consciously reunited with the Anthropos,
or the overshadowing substance of itself.
This is at once the primary purpose
and the consummate achievement of the Mysteries:
that man shall become aware of
and consciously be reunited with
the divine source of himself
without tasting of physical dissolution.
Manly P. Hall:
The Secret Teachings of All Ages
At birth
only a third part of the Divine Nature of man
temporarily dissociates itself from its own immortality
and takes upon itself the dream of physical birth and existence,
animating with its own celestial enthusiasm
a vehicle composed of material elements,
part of and bound to the material sphere.
At death this incarnated part awakens from the dream of physical existence
and reunites itself once more with its eternal condition.
This periodical descent of spirit into matter
is termed the wheel of life and death...
Manly P. Hall:
The Secret Teachings of All Ages
Jupiter, being the Demiurgus and fabricator of the material universe,
is the third person of the Creative Triad,
consequently the Lord of Death,
for death exists only in the lower sphere of being over which he presides.
Disintegration takes place so that reintegration may follow
upon a higher level of form or intelligence.
The thunderbolts of Jupiter are emblematic of his disintegrative power;
they reveal the purpose of death,
which is to rescue the rational soul
from the devouring power of the irrational nature.
Manly P. Hall:
The Secret Teachings of All Ages
No person’s body is the center of the world.
Yet, the world seems to be experienced from such a referential center.
The body is only a physical instrument.
When the world is experienced subjectively,
it is not known by the body, but via the body.
When one takes one's stand as an object,
one is constrained by birth and death.
When one's stance is as subjectivity,
one enjoys no such constraints.
As such, when one understands that one is the subject to every object,
one transcends birth and death.
Wu Hsin:
Solving Yourself
When I stand by the stream and watch it,
I am relatively still,
and the flowing water makes a path across my memory
so that I realize its transience in comparison with my stability.
This is, of course, an illusion
in the sense that I, too, am in flow
and likewise have no final destination--
for can anyone imagine finality as a form of life?
My death will be the disappearance
of a particular pattern in the water.
Alan W. Watts:
Cloud-hidden, Whereabouts Unknown
When you are dying and coming to life in each moment,
would-be scientific predictions about what will happen after death
are of little consequence.
The whole glory of it is that we do not know.
Ideas of survival and annihilation are alike based on the past,
on memories of waking and sleeping,
and, in their different ways,
the notions of everlasting continuity and everlasting nothingness
are without meaning.
Alan Watts:
The Wisdom of Insecurity
Death is the epitome of the truth
that in each moment we are thrust into the unknown.
Here all clinging to security is compelled to cease,
and wherever the past is dropped away and safety abandoned,
life is renewed.
Death is the unknown
in which all of us lived before birth.
Alan Watts:
The Wisdom of Insecurity
You ask me to describe the true Self to you.
What can be said?
It is That out of which the sense of the personal ‘I’ arises
and into which it will have to disappear.
Ramana Maharshi
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.”
Joel S. Goldsmith:
The Journey Back to the Father's House
I thought that death meant we would be separated.
In our blend, you shared my thoughts of my impending death
and knew that I was leaving.
I told you I would try to stay as long as I could,
but you, dear soul mate of mine,
courageously let me go and watched
as I walked peacefully into the Light.
We both somehow knew, on an unconscious level,
that this was part of our pre-life agreement.
Since that day, we have never been apart.
You accepted this new awareness with conviction,
and, although there are still times
when you cry out for me to come back physically,
you are becoming more and more aware
that a physical body isn’t necessary
for communication between our worlds.
Walda Woods: Conversations with Tom:
An Adventure in After-death Communication
We are only what we are outside the notion of 'time',
unborn, undead,
and so blazing with 'light'
that we are Enlightenment Itself.
Wei Wu-Wei. Posthumous Pieces
How can we be born?
What we know as 'life' is a thousand million births,
and as many deaths.
How can we die?
What we know as 'death' is a million deaths,
and as many births.
Wei Wu-Wei. Posthumous Pieces
All I'm saying is,
there is no need to be afraid of death.
Death is like deep sleep and means peace!
That's what death really is-it means peace.
But the ego doesn't know that,
and that is why the ego is afraid.
The ego thinks it is enjoying the peace in deep sleep,
but the peace in deep sleep exists
because there is absence of the ego.
And death is simply a longer deep sleep.
Oh, yes.
Ramesh S Balsekar. Who Cares?!
Deep sleep by itself is enjoyable
and is wanted so much because in deep sleep the ego is not there.
It is not that the ego enjoys deep sleep.
No, the ego does not enjoy deep sleep,
because in deep sleep the ego doesn't exist.
There is peace in deep sleep.
There is no ego enjoying any peace in deep sleep.
In fact, the peace you have in deep sleep
really means the absence of the ego.
The ego is absent in deep sleep,
so why be afraid of the absence of the ego permanently?
Ramesh S Balsekar. Who Cares?
You identify yourself as an object and say, "I am this,"
and therefore you are afraid.
In any case this body is going to die sometime, isn't it?
It's not going to live forever.
This body is going to die
just as all these bodies sitting here are going to die,
as all bodies have been dying for thousands of years.
I repeat, it's something that has been going on for thousands of years,
and will continue to be.
Why bother about it?
Why say, "I'm going to die"?
A body is going to die,
of course it's going to die.
Sometime it's got to die.
So accepting that the body that was born is bound to die
and that there is no "you" to die ...
Ramesh S Balsekar. Who Cares?!
The spiritual world in which man dwells between death and rebirth
has its own special conditions of existence;
conditions which we can scarcely observe in our ordinary earth-life,
and which sound paradoxical when they are given to us as a conception of life.
Above all, it must be borne in mind
that a man who wishes to experience such things consciously,
must acquire what might be called a feeling of unity
in common with all things in existence.
It is one of the necessary demands
for the continuation of man's spiritual evolution
from the present time,
from this disastrous present time,
that he should gradually develop this feeling.
Rudolf Steiner:
Earthly Death and Cosmic Life
In the moment of your birth,
a part of the Consciousness that is you
focused itself into your physical body,
and your first relationship began:
the relationship between the physical you and the Non-Physical You.
We would like you to understand:
both the Non-Physical and physical aspects of you exist at the same time.
Most people acknowledge that some aspect of them existed prior to their physical birth,
and most believe that after their physical death,
they will again be Non-Physical,
but something quite different from that is occurring:
You are extensions of Source Energy,
and when you became physically focused,
your Non-Physical aspect did not cease to be.
In fact, your Non-Physical aspect began to expand
because of the existence and experience of your physical aspect.
Esther Hicks;Jerry Hicks:
The Vortex: Where the Law of Attraction
Assembles All Cooperative Relationships
Before you focused a part of your Consciousness into the physical body
that you now recognize as you,
you were an intelligent, clear, happy, nonresistant Consciousness
eager for this new experience into which you were emerging.
Before your birth, the only relationship you experienced
was your relationship with your Source;
but since you were, at that time, Non-Physical,
and therefore nonresistant,
you experienced no discernible separation,
and therefore no discernible "relationship,"
between you and Source.
You were Source.
Esther Hicks;Jerry Hicks:
The Vortex: Where the Law of Attraction
Assembles All Cooperative Relationships
But he is born among sleeping people,
and, of course, he falls asleep among them
just at the very time when he should have begun to be conscious of himself.
Everything has a hand in this:
the involuntary imitation of older people on the part of the child,
voluntary and involuntary suggestion,
and what is called ‘education’.
Every attempt to awaken on the child’s part is instantly stopped.
This is inevitable.
And a great many efforts and a great deal of help are necessary
in order to awaken later
when thousands of sleep-compelling habits have been accumulated.
And this very seldom happens.
In most cases, a man when still a child
already loses the possibility of awakening;
he lives in sleep all his life
and he dies in sleep.
Furthermore, many people die long before their physical death.
P. D. Ouspensky:
In Search of the Miraculous
For Self-knowledge,
you have to make offering of your body identity.
Thereafter, the Self is free of the body.
Then, end of the body becomes blissful.
Nisargadatta Maharaj
The knower of consciousness has no death.
He drops his body in a blissful state.
Nisargadatta Maharaj
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 word mortal means “subject to death.”
Its root word, mer, means “to die.”
The word matter means “that which occupies space,
a specific substance, or something of importance.”
Its root word is mater, which means “mother.”
That which is subject to death seeks substance.
That which is always in a state of dying needs mothering.
An ensouled culture would recognize that things matter
because they mother our dying.
The things of the world,
known through the feminine mater,
offer substance, nurturing, and care to our continual dying.
We embrace the things of the earth
because of their mothering quality.
Gail Thomas:
Healing Pandora
By accepting the inevitable, Seneca suggests,
we deprive death of its sting.
Happiness does not consist in keeping what we’ve got
but in enjoying it to the full even as it vanishes.
James Geary:
The World in a Phrase
DEATH is an acronym...
Departing Earth Arriving True Home..
Cynthia Clayton
Very many of the learned from the Christian world
are astonished when they find themselves after death in a body,
in garments, and in houses, as in the world.
And when they recall what they had thought about the life after death,
the soul, spirits, and heaven and hell,
they are ashamed and confess that they thought foolishly,
and that the simple in faith thought much more wisely than they.
Emanuel Swedenborg:
Heaven and its Wonders and Hell
MORE RANGE
We are friends with the one who kills us,
who gives us to the ocean waves.
We love this death.
Only ignorance would say,
Put it off a while,
day after tomorrow.
Do not avoid the knife.
This friend only seems fierce,
bringing your soul more range,
perching your falcon on a cliff of the wind.
Jesus on his cross, Hallaj on his--
those absurd killings hold a secret.
Submit to love without thinking,
as the sun this morning rose recklessly
extinguishing our star-candle minds.
Rumi: The Big Red Book
Death is only apparent absence of life,
otherwise there is no such thing.
The word only indicates the absence of the presence of life.
To think of death as such is senseless.
There can never be any such presence,
for phenomenally it is only an absence.
'Life' is a concept extended in space-time,
and as such it is only an image in mind.
Conceptually also it is the absence of 'death'
which-as we have seen-is the absence of 'life'.
Evidently, therefore, there is no such factuality as 'life',
nor any such factuality as 'death'.
Nor can there be any factual entity
such as a 'liv-er' of life
or a 'dy-er' of death.
Wei Wu Wei
Posthumous Pieces
I find it really useful
to ask people to assume that, in the moment of death,
everything you think you are no longer exists.
It’s over.
It’s finished.
Your perceptions and your memories, your history, your attainments –
finished.
In that there is the possibility of meeting oneself as nothing,
as ‘no thing’.
That is freedom.
Everything that we are burdened by
is some kind of attachment to who we are:
I’m a man, I’m a woman,
I’m enlightened, I’m unenlightened,
I’m famous, I’m not famous,
I’ve made it, I haven’t made it.
In death it’s all over –
you’re nothing.
And that is freedom.
Gangaji
The attempt to escape death
is essentially the attempt to escape from being nothing.
That’s why we fear death:
it’s literally a plunge into nothingness.
And nothingness cannot be known.
And the mind operates in the realm of the known.
We fear what we don’t know.
What we know, what we understand, we can control.
And what death shows us is that there is no control.
Death and illness have a funny way of showing us
that there is something else going on here,
something that’s beyond our control.
So that’s why we spend our lives –
and we don’t recognise that we’re doing it, of course –
trying to escape from the realisation
that we are nothing.
Jeff Foster
Should we bet on infinite life and endless consequences to our actions?
Pascal would argue that our answer must be a resounding “Yes!”
We might as well assume that there will be a future continuity
our personal consciousness, however changed,
however disembodied or re-embodied,
however connected or disconnected
we remain to the “self” we experience in this life.
If we make that bet on our own future lives,
then we will prepare in whatever way we can
to assure that we continue in a good way,
in a better embodiment and environment.
We will become truly responsible for our thoughts and our acts.
Even though we may not remember the previous-life self
who made those preparations, we certainly will want to enjoy the results.
If our bet is misplaced,
and our preparations have no effect
because we actually do enter oblivion at death,
we will simply not exist to regret having made them.
Robert Thurman:
Infinite Life
...it is unnecessary to commit suicide
through grief for the dead;
for the more you love
the more glad you should be
that the object of your affection
has passed into so desirable a state as death.
Ambrose Bierce:
The Land Beyond the Blow
Just because we do not perceive something,
it is not correct to say it does not exist.
It is only our notion of being and non-being
that makes us confused.
It is our notion of being and non-being
that makes us think something exists
or something doesn’t exist.
Notions of being and non-being
cannot be applied to reality.
Thich Nhat Hanh:
No Death, No Fear
Take the time to look deeply into yourself
and recognize that your nature is the nature of no-birth and no-death.
You can break through to freedom and fearlessness this way.
This method of practice will help us to live without fear,
and it will help us to die peacefully without regret.
You are what you are looking for.
You are already what you want to become.
Thich Nhat Hanh:
No Death, No Fear
The True Self
is the self that existed before the division of heaven and earth
and before one’s father and mother were born.
This self is the self within me,
the birds and the beasts,
the grasses and the trees and all phenomena.
It is exactly what is called the Buddha-nature.
This self has no shape or form,
has no birth, and has no death.
It is not a self that can be seen with the aid of your present physical eye.
Only the man who has received enlightenment is able to see this.
The man who does see this
is said to have seen into his own nature and become a Buddha.
Takuan Soho: The Unfettered Mind:
Writings from a Zen Master to a Master Swordsman
You exist in time, but you belong to eternity.
You are a penetration of eternity into the world of time.
You are deathless,
living in a body of death.
Your consciousness knows no death, no birth.
It is only your body that is born and dies.
But you are not aware of your consciousness;
you are not conscious of your consciousness.
And that is the whole art of meditation:
becoming conscious of consciousness itself.
Osho
Love will teach you how to die;
love is the first lesson of death.
Death is the crescendo of love, the highest peak.
Those who know how to love know how to die.
Their death is not an end; it is a beginning,
it is a birth, it is a moving into the divine.
It is transcending the human and entering the superhuman.
It is transcending the mortal and entering the immortal.
Death is a portal, a door.
Osho
The Crescendo of Love
The end was still unknown.
After years the tiny boat might reach the other side,
all obstacles triumphantly circumnavigated,
to be swept up joyfully in the Demiurgus's arms
and crammed inside his jacket.
Or the wind would take him,
twirl him and overset him.
Water would soak his body,
and with a rapturous rush of cold
he would go down into the unimagined depths.
His vanishing would be so swift and silent
that scarcely anyone would notice.
The evening would draw in;
supper would beckon;
passers-by would saunter past,
lighting their pipes as the last rays of sun faded across the water.
His body would go on falling through the blue deep,
softly, like paper.
He had once told a small boy, watching with him,
that this would be his favourite of all deaths.
Ann Wroe: Being Shelley:
The Poet's Search for Himself
BIRTHLESS AND DEATHLESS
The Spirit within me is Birthless and Deathless;
It was not born and It cannot die.
I have no fear of death, for I perceive that
Death is an illusion and not the Truth.
I was born of the Spirit, and I live in the Spirit,
And shall continue to live in and by the Spirit.
The Spirit within me lives forever.
Ernest Holmes: The Science of Mind
It is logical to suppose
that we pass from this life to the next
in full and complete retention of all our faculties.
Some think that death robs us of the objective faculties,
and that we pass out in a purely subjective state;
but we are unable to follow the logic of such an assumption.
To suppose that the objective faculties die with the brain,
is to suppose that the brain thinks and reasons.
This is proved to be false through the experience of death itself;
for, if the brain could think, it would think on and on forever.
No; the brain does not think;
the thinker thinks through the brain, perhaps;
but of itself, the brain has no power to think or feel.
Detach the brain and it will not formulate ideas, nor work out plans.
THE THINKER ALONE CAN THINK.
Ernest Holmes:
The Science of Mind
If throughout the day we are engrossed in thoughts connected with material life,
if our mind is directed only to what is going on in the physical world and can be achieved there,
if we have given no single thought to the spiritual worlds before passing into sleep
but often bring ourselves into those worlds by means quite different from thoughts,
then we have no nourishment to offer to the dead.
Many people regard it as childish
to occupy themselves with thoughts about the spiritual world
but thereby they deprive souls after death of needed nourishment.
Rudolf Steiner
In a certain sense the souls of the dead too need nourishment;
not, of course, the kind of nourishment required by human beings on the earth,
but of the nature of spirit-and-soul.
By way of comparison,
just as we on the earth must have cornfields
where the grain for our physical sustenance ripens,
so must the souls of the dead have cornfields
from which they can gather certain sustenance
which they need during the time between death and a new birth.
As the eye of clairvoyance follows the souls of the dead,
the souls of sleeping human beings are seen to be cornfields for the dead.
For one who has this experience in the spiritual world for the first time,
it is not only surprising but deeply shattering
to see how the souls living between death and a new birth
hasten as it were to the souls of sleeping human beings,
seeking for the thoughts and ideas which are in those souls;
for these thoughts are food for the souls of the dead
and they need this nourishment.
Rudolf Steiner
The unknown reality:
Much of reality is unknown
simply because your beliefs close you off from your own knowledge.
The reaches of your own consciousness are not limited.
Because you accept the idea of a straight-line movement of time,
you cannot see before or after what you think of as your birth or death,
yet your greater consciousness is quite aware of such experience.
Ideally it is possible not only to remember “past” lives,
but to plan future ones now.
In greater terms,
all such lives happen at once.
Your present neurological structure makes this seem impossible,
yet your inner consciousness is not so impeded.
Jane Roberts/Seth:
The “Unknown” Reality, Volume Two
Your consciousness
triumphantly rides above those deaths
that you do not recognize as such.
In your chosen three-dimensional existence,
there is a time when you, as a consciousness,
decide that death will happen,
when in your terms
you no longer bridge the gap of minute deaths not accepted.
Jane Roberts/Seth:
The “Unknown” Reality, Volume Two
...the body dies often,
and as surely as you think it dies but once in the death you recognize.
On numerous occasions it physically breaks apart,
but your consciousness rides beyond those “deaths.”
You do not perceive them.
The stuff of your body literally falls into the earth many times,
as you think it does only at the “end of your life.”
Jane Roberts/Seth:
The “Unknown” Reality, Volume Two
When we die
we simply move from one world into another.
This is why in the inner meaning of the Word, “death”
means resurrection
and a continuation of life.
Emanuel Swedenborg: Our Life after Death
When someone’s body can no longer perform
its functions in the material world in response to the thoughts and emotions of its spirit,
which come to it from the spiritual world,
then we say that the individual has died.
This happens when the breathing of the lungs
and the pumping motion of the heart have ceased.
But in fact that person has not died at all.
He or she is only separated from the physicality
that was useful to that individual in the world.
The essential person is actually still alive.
I say that because it is not our bodies that make us human,
but our spirits.
After all, it is the spirit inside us that thinks;
and thought, along with emotion, makes us human.
Emanuel Swedenborg: Our Life after Death
While we are living in our bodies,
each one of us is, with respect to our own spirits,
in a community with other spirits even though we are unaware of it.
We are not visible as spirits in our spiritual communities
while we are living in the world,
because we are thinking on the physical level.
However, if our thinking is directed away from our bodies
we are sometimes visible in our communities
because we are then in the spirit.
When we are visible,
it is easy to tell us from the spirits who live there
because we walk along deep in thought,
silent, without looking at others, as though we did not see them;
and the moment any spirit speaks to us, we disappear.
Emanuel Swedenborg: Our Life after Death
Death is defined by Webster
as "cessation of all vital functions without capability of resuscitation."
This, like all definitions derived from sense observations, is quite incomplete.
It gives us no idea of the relation
that death bears to its polar opposite, life;
and no idea of the process through which life passes
in order to appear absent in that which has "cessation of all vital functions."
Following this to a final analysis,
we find that we must understand life
before we can apprehend that appearance of its absence
in a form called death.
Charles Fillmore
As one goes higher on the spiritual path,
he attains a humility and a complete freedom from worldly fear.
Almost with the first spiritual experience,
the fear of death disappears
because in the realization of life eternal,
it becomes of relative unimportance
whether he lives on this plane or on that.
No one attains spiritually
while a fear of death remains in consciousness.
Joel S. Goldsmith:
A Parenthesis in Eternity
Strangely enough,
there is no resistance to birth
which ushers in most of mankind’s troubles.
Then, why should there be a resistance to death,
which in most cases is an end to many of our problems?
Joel S. Goldsmith:
A Parenthesis in Eternity
Our true nature
is the nature of no birth and no death.
We do not have to go anywhere
in order to touch our true nature.
The wave does not have to look for water
because she is water.
We do not have to look for God,
we do not have to look for our ultimate dimension or nirvana,
because we are nirvana,
we are God.
Thich Nhat Hanh:
No Death, No Fear
The fear of death ingrained in most humans
will give the war against death an irresistible momentum.
As long as people assumed that death is inevitable,
they trained themselves from an early age to suppress the desire to live for ever,
or harnessed it in favour of substitute goals.
People want to live for ever,
so they compose an ‘immortal’ symphony, they strive for ‘eternal glory’ in some war,
or even sacrifice their lives so that their souls will ‘enjoy everlasting bliss in paradise’.
A large part of our artistic creativity,
our political commitment and our religious piety
is fuelled by the fear of death.
Once people think (with or without good reason)
that they have a serious chance of escaping death,
the desire for life will refuse to go on pulling the rickety wagon of art, ideology and religion,
and will sweep forward like an avalanche.
Yuval Noah Harari:
Homo Deus
If we each start to think more clearly
through our own belief lens about our fear of death,
and as we open ourselves to understanding more
about other people’s beliefs about death,
we will naturally develop more compassion for others.
The perceived threat to our survival
that triggers the “fight or flight” response in us will subside.
Our own fears about death
will no longer get in our way to feel and think more clearly,
not only about ourselves but also about others.
Kelvin H. Chin:
Overcoming the Fear of Death
You are not of this world.
You are not of perishable flesh and blood.
You are not both good and evil.
You are not intended to experience death, but only life.
When you come to yourself,
you see who you are, and seeing this,
you naturally see what body you have,
what universe you live in, what power you make use of,
what mind you utilize and what life you are living, feeling and experiencing.
With such transformation of sense and view
there also appears a corresponding transfiguration of body and affairs.
Lillian DeWaters: I Am That I Am
Ego Death
You need not eliminate the wrong ‘I’.
How can ‘I’ eliminate itself?
All that you need to do is to find out its origin and abide there.
Can the ego ever agree to kill itself?
If you seek the ego
you will find it does not exist.
That is the way to destroy it.
How can anything that does not exist be killed?
Ramana Maharshi
There is neither birth nor death.
There is only life, beginningless, endless.
Life is there before birth,
otherwise, who will be born?
It is also there after death,
otherwise, who will have died?
Birth is not the beginning of life,
and death is not the end of life.
Birth and death are events that happen within life.
Osho
Love Letters to Life
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
Every day,
every hour reveals how we are nothing,
and brings new arguments
to convince those who have forgotten their fragility;
it compels those who have contemplated eternal things
to look toward death
Seneca: How to Die
Q. You mean that the Beat people want to lose themselves?
A. Yeah. You know, Jesus said to see the Kingdom of Heaven you must lose yourself . . . something like that.
Q. Then the Beat Generation loves death?
A. Yeah. They’re not afraid of death.
Q. Aren’t you afraid?
A. Naw . . . What I believe is that nothing is happening.
Q. What do you mean?
A. Well, you’re not sitting here. That’s what you think. Actually, we are great empty space. I could walk right through you . . . You know what I mean, we’re made out of atoms, electrons. We’re actually empty. We’re an empty vision . . . in one mind.
Q. In what mind—the mind of God?
A. That's the name we give it. We can give it any name. We can call it tangerine . . . god . . . tangerine . . . But I do know we are empty phantoms, sitting here thinking we are human beings and worrying about civilization. We’re just empty phantoms. And yet, all is well.
Q. All is well?
A. Yeah. We’re all in Heaven, now, really.
Q. You don’t sound happy.
A. Oh, I’m tremendously sad. I’m in great despair.
Q. Why? A. It’s a great burden to be alive.
A heavy burden, a great big heavy burden. I wish I were safe in Heaven, dead.
Q. But you are in Heaven, Jack. You just said we all were.
A. Yeah. If I only knew it. If I could only hold on to what I know.
Paul Maher, Jr. Empty Phantoms:
Interviews and Encounters with Jack Kerouac .
Often we ought to die but don’t wish to,
or are dying but don’t wish to.
No one is so naïve as not to recognize that he must die at some point,
yet when he approaches that point he turns back, trembles, pleads.
But wouldn’t a man seem to you the greatest of all fools,
if he wept because for a thousand years previously,
he had not been alive?
He’s just as great a fool if he weeps
because he won’t live for a thousand years to come.
It’s just the same:
you won’t exist, just as you didn’t exist;
neither past nor future is yours.
You were thrust into this brief moment;
how long will you prolong it?
Why weep?
What are you looking for?
Your efforts are wasted.
Seneca: How to Die
The deathbed scene is not fully in this world.
And although I am not religious,
hospice work has awakened me to a spiritual dimension of life.
Everyone who works with the dying long enough
must have some awareness of these experiences.
I believe the spiritual experiences of dying people
somehow leak out and pervade the area around them.
If you step into that area with the right temperament,
you will receive, I feel, a sense of the sacred
in the presence of the dying.
A hospice psychologist’s experience featured in…
Paul Perry: Glimpses of Eternity:
Sharing a Loved One’s Passage from this Life to the Next
Few of us think about the process of death.
In fact, many people in our youth-dominated culture
intentionally avoid the subject of death as much as possible.
In the world of medicine, the death of a patient
is often looked upon as a failure of modern science.
Of course, those of us who have had out-of-body and near-death experiences know better.
We know from firsthand experience that after we die,
we continue to exist and flourish in a higher vibratory dimension of reality.
We know with certainty
that death is an essential transition of consciousness.
William Buhlman: The Secret of the Soul
We have not yet “died” to the greatest fear of all,
the fear of death.
It is this fear that makes illnesses so frightening.
If there is such a thing as becoming immune to the fear of death,
then we would have demonstrated living eternally,
and I do not mean by that staying on earth forever.
We all will have to make a transition,
but the time for that transition
is when we have served our purpose on earth,
and while we might look forward to the transition,
we no longer look forward to death.
In losing the fear of death,
we are set free from most of the diseases of this world,
and with even a partial movement into that state,
we are not the same person we were before.
No longer are we fearing outer conditions and circumstances.
We have moved into still another degree of consciousness.
Joel S. Goldsmith: Living Now
Death is a natural transition of consciousness
to our higher-vibrational energy body.
At the moment of death,
we experience the transfer of our consciousness
from our dense outer vehicle (the physical body)
to our more subtle (astral) energy body.
We are immortal as soul,
so death is the ultimate illusion.
William Buhlman:
Adventures In The Afterlife
If every day does not add knowledge, wisdom, power,
the ability to live life and the capacity to love,
we have already died.
Let us not hold ourselves or others in bondage
to breathing without a purpose or goal.
Rather let us seek the far country.
Death is really not the end of life,
but rather the beginning of the rebirthed life.
Rejoice to see it,
and bless the traveler on his new journey.
Release the departing traveler
and give him as a Godspeed a flower lei of happy memories
and a benediction as he migrates to the promised land,
the far country–
Joel S. Goldsmith: Man Was Not Born to Cry
Maybe our physical death is just sort of a ‘milestone’ for a particular lifetime --
and then we go into a transition stage.
We go ‘on vacation’ between lives.
This is what I think happens.
This is what I have some recollections of.
We go on vacation.
Some in our culture may want to call it “Heaven.”
You can call it whatever.
Any label works.
The folks who are ‘minding the store on the other side’
don’t care what we call it,
and they will use whatever term we like to make us feel comfortable,
because I think it’s just a comfort zone to hang out in, so to speak.
And then we can choose to stay there or not.
We can come back into physical form in another lifetime if we want.
Kelvin H. Chin: Overcoming the Fear of Death:
Through Each of the 4 Main Belief Systems
Even if we don’t achieve immortality in our lifetime,
the war against death is still likely to be the flagship project of the coming century.
When you take into account our belief in the sanctity of human life,
add the dynamics of the scientific establishment,
and top it all with the needs of the capitalist economy,
a relentless war against death seems to be inevitable.
Our ideological commitment to human life
will never allow us simply to accept human death.
As long as people die of something,
we will strive to overcome it.
Yuval Noah Harari: Homo Deus
In the twenty-first century
humans are likely to make a serious bid for immortality.
Struggling against old age and death
will merely carry on the time-honoured fight against famine and disease,
and manifest the supreme value of contemporary culture:
the worth of human life.
Modern science and modern culture
have an entirely different take on life and death.
They don’t think of death as a metaphysical mystery,
and they certainly don’t view death as the source of life’s meaning.
Rather, for modern people
death is a technical problem that we can and should solve.
Yuval Noah Harari: Homo Deus
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
I am not suggesting we create a new Art of Dying
to make death somehow perfect.
Perfection is not a goal of art;
it is an ambition of technology and science.
Arts are improvised out of the limited, imperfect materials at hand.
A modern Art of Dying
will not make the end of every life painless,
but it can make it bearable, shared,
and even, in its own way,
beautiful.
Katy Butler: The Art of Dying Well:
A Practical Guide to a Good End of Life
In the years I’ve spent listening to hundreds of people’s stories
of good and difficult declines and deaths,
I’ve learned one thing:
people who are willing to contemplate their aging, vulnerability, and mortality
often live better lives in old age and illness,
and experience better deaths, than those who don’t.
They keep shaping lives of comfort, joy, and meaning,
even as their bodies decline.
They get clear-eyed about the trajectory of their illnesses, so they can plan.
They regard their doctors as their consultants, not their bosses.
They seek out medical allies who help them thrive,
even in the face of disappointment and adversity,
and they prepare for a good death.
But those who give up their power,
hoping only to postpone death
and never facing where things are heading,
often ride the conveyor belt to its ultimate destination:
a high-tech hospital room.
And there, in a place where success is defined as not dying,
they die.
Katy Butler: The Art of Dying Well:
A Practical Guide to a Good End of Life
During my father’s last days,
I sat alone for hours in that clean but generic hospice room,
holding his hand, bereft of the “habits of the heart,”
long practiced by my ancestors,
that could have made his dying a more bearable
and sacred rite of passage.
We live in a time when advanced medicine wards off death
far better than it helps us prepare for peaceful ones.
We feel the loss.
Many of us hunger to restore a sense of ceremony, community,
and yes, even beauty, to our final passage.
We want more than pain control and a clean bed.
We hope to die well.
Katy Butler: The Art of Dying Well:
A Practical Guide to a Good End of Life
Brief is man’s life
and small the nook of the earth where he lives;
brief, too, is the longest posthumous fame,
buoyed only by a succession of poor human beings
who will very soon die
and who know little of themselves,
much less of someone who died long ago.
Seneca: On The Shortness of Life
“What man can you show me who places any value on his time,
who reckons the worth of each day,
who understands that he is dying daily?
For we are mistaken
when we look forward to death;
the major portion of death has already passed.
Whatever years be behind us
are in death's hands.”
Marcus Aurelius: Meditations
Just as apples when unripe are torn from trees,
but when ripe and mellow drop down,
so it is violence that takes life from young men,
ripeness from old.
This ripeness is so delightful to me that,
as I approach nearer to death,
I seem, as it were, to be sighting land,
and to be coming to port at last after a long voyage.
Marcus Aurelius: Meditations
No one can ever be dehypnotized as long as he is judging by appearances
because the human mind with which he is judging
is a state of hypnotism.
In looking out from our eyes,
we are looking out from a state of hypnosis
in which our eyes are always going to see
babies being born and old people dying;
our ears are always going to be hearing
about sin, disease, death, lack, and limitation.
The only way to be dehypnotized
is to quiet the physical senses,
to be still inside,
and then spiritual awareness reveals the truth of being
that enables us to see
that which is not visible,
to hear that which is not audible,
to know that which is not knowable with the human senses.
Joel S. Goldsmith:
The Joel Goldsmith Reader
You wish to live;
well, do you know how to live?
You are afraid to die.
But come now: is this life of yours anything but death?
Gaius Caesar was passing along the Via Latina,
when a man stepped out from the ranks of the prisoners,
his grey beard hanging down even to his breast,
and begged to be put to death.
"What!" said Caesar, "are you alive now?"
That is the answer which should be given
to men to whom death would come as a relief.
"You are afraid to die; what! are you alive now?"
Seneca: Letters from a Stoic
You are not the victim of the world you see
because you invented it.
You can give it up as easily as you made it up.
You will see it or not see it, as you wish.
While you want it you will see it;
when you no longer want it,
it will not be there for you to see.
A Course In Miracles
Dolores: People are so afraid of dying. Can you tell me what it is like when it happens?
Spirit: Well, when I’m in the body it feels heavy.
It pulls on me. It’s just uncomfortable.
But when you die it’s a lifting of weight. It’s relaxing.
People carry all those problems around.
And it’s like they are carrying around a weight
because they are heavy and laden with all these other things.
When you die it’s like tossing them out the window and it feels good.
It’s a transition.
Dolores Cannon: Between Death and Life:
Conversations With A Spirit
If you die in an accident,
it is painful just before you lose consciousness of the physical plane.
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
The ideal of the Good Death,
as our ancestors defined it,
was a natural death free of medical flailing.
It did not require experts.
It took place at home and was neither sudden nor lingering.
Just as we do now, our ancestors hoped
to die in a familiar place among close friends and family;
to be safe and gently cared for in their hour of need;
to have their last words heard and treasured;
to express their love and forgiveness
and to hear that they were loved and forgiven in turn.
The impulse for the Good Death may be bred into our bones:
it was once so strong that soldiers on Civil War battlefields
did their best to re-create it symbolically,
propping photographs of their mothers or sisters on their chests
as they died far from home.
Katy Butler:
Knocking On Heaven’s Door
There is attraction for the sense objects because of your body-identity.
That goes away with your conviction of being as light,
and then there is no birth and death for you.
Being self-luminous, you see things in your own light.
But you still believe that you are your body, which sees.
Mohan Gaitonde: Self-Love, The Original Dream:
Shri Nisargadatta Maharaj’s Direct Pointers To Reality
Dying in peace
pertains to the months, weeks, and days of our demise,
during which we likely will seek and manage medical treatments
to obtain their benefits without getting dragged into dying situations
we wish to avoid.
Dying in peace
means peacefully living our waning days
with the assistance of compassionately offered and sensibly applied medical treatments--
no more and no less.
Bart Windrum:
The Promised Landing: A Gateway to Peaceful Dying
That we so want a peaceful death makes plainly evident
how sacred our dying time is for each of us—and for our loved ones.
And how elusive dying in and at peace has become for most of us.
Although we might luck out and die without strife,
doing nothing other than taking a final breath,
today’s world is so undersupportive and overcontrolling
and dying is so overmedicalized,
that assuming we will just luck our way out is foolish at best.
Bart Windrum:
The Promised Landing: A Gateway to Peaceful Dying
When the moment of death arrives,
and a chorus of wailing wells up by his side,
his soul will laugh at its own fear.
For in that instant,
the rich person will realize he has no gold;
the clever person will know he has no more schemes.
Yahiya Emerick: The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Rumi Meditations
It is very important to send our thoughts and feelings
to a loved one who has died and is now in the spiritual worlds.
Our thoughts must not contain yearnings to have the departed back with us,
as this complicates his life in the spheres in which he must now enter.
What we need to send to the spiritual worlds is not the suffering we endure
but the love we bear towards the departed.
Spiritual research has shown that feelings of love give wings that bear the dead up,
whereas longings like: “Oh how I wish you ere still with us”
create obstacles in his path.
Rudolf Steiner
For Gandhi, the art of dying was very often a public act
and an act of publicising one’s will to be free.
There is something revealing in the parallel that Gandhi established
between the struggle for freedom and the art of dying.
In a speech at a meeting of the Congress in Bombay in August 1942,
he invited his fellow freedom fighters to follow a new mantra:
“Here is a mantra, a short one, that I give to you.
You may imprint it on your hearts
and let every breath of yours give expression to it.
The mantra is ‘Do or Die.’
We shall either free India
or die in the attempt;
we shall not live to see the perpetuation of our slavery...
He who loses his life will gain it,
he who will seek to save it shall lose it.
Freedom is not for the coward or the faint-hearted.”
Ramin Jahanbegloo
www.thehindu.com
…a Swedish oceanographer told his son
that as he faced death, he would be sustained
“by an infinite curiosity as to what was to follow.”
Emily K. Abel: The Inevitable Hour
This is an essential experience of any mystical realization.
You die to your flesh and are born into your spirit.
You identify yourself with the consciousness and life
of which your body is but the vehicle.
You die to the vehicle
and become identified in your consciousness
with that of which the vehicle is but the carrier.
That is the God.
Joseph Campbell
The language of the dying is not static;
it is a language of movement, of platforms, tickets, passports and maps,
visitations and greetings, entrances and exits.
A language of arrivals and departures.
They will often ask if their bags are packed
or if there is a full tank of gas in the car.
They repeat themselves, asking if the train is on time;
asking if you will be coming with them.
You must enter this as you would enter a foreign land;
signs will be of little help.
You must see what they see.
It is never planes they wait for;
rather, they pull away slowly from the earth--
the fields of fall rye rolling as far as the eye can see.
Eve Joseph: In The Slender Margin:
The Intimate Strangeness of Death and Dying
Is it an effort for the consciousnesses
that are already on the other side
to greet the consciousness that is newly over
in a form that will be recognised?
Consciousness creates form.
Consciousness can create any form it wishes.
Therefore consciousness creates the form that it is aware,
telepathically you might say,
will be acceptable to the newly arrived “soul."
Any image can be created.
David and Jean Ingman
www.realityandyou.com
“Death is a stripping away of all that is not you.
The secret of life is to “die before you die” --
and find that there is no death.”
Eckhart Tolle
Humans!
We think life goes on forever.
We think everything will remain more or less the same,
there’s always time to get to everything.
We stumble briefly upon moments to enjoy this life,
in between the distractions and the annoyances.
The stupid bullshit that keeps us off balance;
our birth family, drama, politics, conflict.
The nonsense that pulls us from the things we love.
A twig snaps and we spin around to realize
70 years whooshed by like a second.
“Whooops,” we’ll say, “How can that be?
What has happened here?”
Trying to remember the things we used to love about each other,
but our memory fails
and we’ll stare absently into the distance,
wondering about everything we must have once experienced
now lost to time--
Why do we horde useless memories,
rather than horde the things we really care for?
Why do we spend our time on nonsense?
Utter nonsense.
I went about my business
as if there was so much time remaining.
Left when I should have stayed,
didn’t pick up the phone when I should have talked for hours.
Couldn’t I see the countdown ticking?
The crowd chanting the last of it.
Didn’t we stop to consider the game was almost over?
We thought we’d get endless innings of overtime.
Sam Rosenthal
When we cannot contemplate the moment of death,
beyond the portal of death,
then our ego-consciousness after death is in the same case
as our physical ego-consciousness here upon the earth when we are asleep.
Just as we know nothing of our physical ego-consciousness when we are asleep,
so we know nothing concerning ourselves after death
if we do not constantly have before us the moment of death.
It stands before us
as one of the most beautiful and loftiest moments.
Rudolph Steiner
Throughout the time between death and a new birth
We have an ego-consciousness that not only resembles but far exceeds
that which we have here during our physical life.
We would not have this ego-consciousness
if we could not look back incessantly, if we would not always see --
but from the other side, from the spiritual side --
that moment in which our spiritual part extricated itself from the physical.
We know that we are an ego only because we know that we have died,
that our spiritual has freed itself from our physical part.
Rudolph Steiner
Here, on earth,
death has a terrifying aspect
only because we look upon it as a kind of dissolution,
as an end.
But when we look back upon the moment of death
from the other side,
from the spiritual side,
then death continually appears to us as a victory of the spirit,
as the Spirit that is extricating itself from the physical.
It then appears as the greatest,
most beautiful
and significant event.
Rudolph Steiner
How can we be free of the fear of death?
We are afraid of death and focus our minds on it.
We are hypnotized by our fear of it.
However, the true question is about life, not death.
Before we understand who dies,
we need to understand who lives.
It is too soon to understand death,
but we can understand life.
Life is present right now.
So, who is alive?
When we find out what life is,
we may also discover that there is no death.
After all, who is there to die?
Francis Lucille:
The Perfume of Silence
All suffering is based on the notion that death is bad.
Whether we are aware of it or not,
suffering is about the fear of death.
People are willing to suffer a great deal of physical pain
rather than die.
The belief that we are subject to death is the cause of suffering
and this suffering prevents us from truly living,
because instead we live a life based on this false belief.
This belief projects us into the past and future.
It is incompatible with happiness.
Understand that there is no death.
Francis Lucille:
The Perfume of Silence
Death destroys our identity
only to permit us a surer access to it--
a reconstitution;
for death has no meaning
unless we accord it all the attributes of life.
E. M. Cioran:
The Temptation to Exist
No one greets death’s arrival cheerfully
except those who have long prepared themselves for it.
Seneca: How to Die
Death -- the Inevitable Initiator
At birth
only a third part of the Divine Nature of man
temporarily dissociates itself from its own immortality
and takes upon itself the dream of physical birth and existence,
animating with its own celestial enthusiasm
a vehicle composed of material elements,
part of and bound to the material sphere.
At death
this incarnated part awakens from the dream of physical existence
and reunites itself once more
with its eternal condition.
Manly P. Hall:
The Secret Teachings Of All Ages
Learning to die is hard.
It takes practice.
There is no royal road, no first-class lane.
Learning to die demands daily cultivation of detachment
and daily reminders of mortality.
It requires long communion with the dead.
And since we can’t ever really know how to do something
until we do it,
learning to die also means accepting the impossibility
of achieving that knowledge as long as we live.
We will always be practicing,
failing, trying again and failing again,
until our final day.
Yet the practice itself is the wisdom.
In the words of Zen master Dōgen:
“To practice the way single-heartedly is, in itself, Enlightenment.”
Roy Scranton: Learning to Die in the Anthropocene:
Reflections on the End of a Civilization
In Emptiness
there is no form, sensation, perception, mindful conduct,
or consciousness; no eyes, ears, nose, tongue, body, or mind;
there is no shape, smell, taste, sense of touch,
or objectification; there is no realm of sight,
much less a realm of consciousness;
there is no ignorance nor any ending of ignorance,
much less is there any old age and death,
or any ending of old age and death.
William Scott Wilson:
The One Taste of Truth: Zen and the Art of Drinking Tea
When death thoughts are conscious, most people--
fitness buffs and stamp collectors alike--
say they will exercise more
because the health and longevity benefits of exercise
flush death thoughts from awareness.
However, once death thoughts are unconscious,
only those who base their self-esteem on fitness
respond to unconscious death thoughts
by saying they would work out more regularly.
Sheldon Solomon; Greenberg, Jeff Greenberg; Tom Pyszczynski:
The Worm at the Core: On the Role of Death in Life
By filling each moment with meaning--
whether you are rich or poor, famous or unknown,
well-traveled or homebound--
you will weave together a life filled with meaning.
Then when Death arrives
you will be ready to dissolve effortlessly into the light.
Embrace Death and you will find meaning in Life.
Karen Wyatt, MD. The Tao of Death:
The Secret to a Rich & Meaningful Life
Life and Death are both realities of this existence.
The Way of Death teaches
that they are actually two sides of the same coin.
The few travelers who understand the Way of Death
are able to live Life fully
while also embracing the reality of physical Death.
They don’t fool themselves or hide from the truth.
Because they are free of expectations and fear
they flow through the ups and downs of life
with ease and harmony.
Karen Wyatt, MD. The Tao of Death:
The Secret to a Rich & Meaningful Life
Your life and your identity and your consciousness
will still be here ten thousand years from now,
but in a different form.
You will not be gone:
only your form will change.
That this is true is evidenced by the fact
that when you came into this world,
you weighed six, seven, eight, nine, or ten pounds,
but that form has been changing ever since.
The child-body is not that of the adult-body,
and the body of the aged i
s not the same as the body of the adult;
but the individual is the same,
the life is the same,
the Soul is the same,
the consciousness is the same.
Only the outer form changes.
Joel S. Goldsmith.
The Contemplative Life
When an individual is awakened to the fact
that life is indestructible,
destructible, immortal, and eternal,
he cannot fear death;
and once he no longer fears death,
he cannot know death.
No one can experience anything
that is not a part of his consciousness,
and when death is no longer a part of consciousness,
he cannot die.
Joel S. Goldsmith.
The Contemplative Life
Neither life nor death can separate me from God.
I am in the presence of God,
and as long as I am in the presence of God,
it matters not whether I am what the world calls alive or dead.
I cannot be separated from the life of God,
the love of God,
the consciousness of God,
from the God-being Itself.
Joel S. Goldsmith.
The Contemplative Life
According to the definition given by the International Association for Near Death Studies,
an NDE is an experience that occurs with some people
who have a near-death episode,
whereby the person is pronounced clinically dead,
is very close to death, or is in a situation
where death is quite likely or even expected.
Many NDErs have stated that the term near death is incorrect
because what they experienced was being in death
and not just near it
(and indeed many are clinically pronounced dead by doctors).
Only a relatively small number of people
report negative NDEs that involve fearful situations and feelings.
In all cases, people report the experience to be hyper-real,
even more real than earthly life.
Ziad Masri: Reality Unveiled
To suppose that the objective faculties die with the brain,
is to suppose that the brain thinks and reasons.
This is proved to be false through the experience of death itself,
for if the brain could think,
it would think on and on forever.
No, it is not the brain that thinks.
The thinker thinks through the brain perhaps,
but of itself the physical brain has no power to think or feel.
Detach the brain and it will not formulate ideas nor work out plans.
THE THINKER ALONE CAN THINK!
It is not merely pleasing and satisfactory to suppose
that we pass from this life to the next,
in full and complete retention of our faculties:
it is logical…
We are not going to attain immortality--
WE ARE NOW IMMORTAL!
Our contention is not that the dead live again,
but that the living never die.
Ernest Holmes: The Science of Mind
The plane upon which we are now living with its form of matter
is probably but one of innumerable planes,
each having its own matter with its corresponding form.
“There are celestial bodies and bodies terrestrial.” ...
“There is a natural body and there is a spiritual body.”
The “resurrection body,” then,
will not be snatched from some Cosmic Shelf,
as the soul soars aloft.
It is already within
and we may be certain that it will be a fit instrument
for the future unfoldment of the soul.
If this is true,
and if remembrance links events together,
in a continuous stream of consciousness and form,
then the future body will resemble this one,
except that it will be free from disease, old age,
or whatever hinders a more complete flow of the Spirit.
It would seem, then,
that we have a spiritual body now,
and need not die to receive one.
We now remember the past,
and have outlived many physical bodies during this life.
So it looks as if we were already immortal
and need not die to take on immortality.
Ernest Holmes: The Science of Mind
We are not content with the thought
that immortality is merely the result of one’s life and work,
which he has left behind;
for instance, that he immortalizes himself in his offspring --
we still ask “ What of the man ? ”
Man, then, if he is to have an immortality worthy of the name,
must continue as he now is beyond the grave.
DEATH CANNOT ROB HIM OF ANYTHING IF HE BE IMMORTAL !
Ernest Holmes: The Science of Mind
Man is immortal;
therefore he must die endlessly.
For life is a creative idea;
it can only find itself in changing forms.
Rabindranath Tagore
If we believe that there is disease and death,
we can experience them.
Passing from sight is part of the mesmeric influence.
Those who are born must die;
those who believe in birth
must believe in death,
for they are those who have not been able
to see that this human picture is really immortal,
eternal, and spiritual,
but that it is seen falsely
through the belief in two powers.
Joel Goldsmith: The Joel Goldsmith Reader
According to the Unity of Mind,
thought is everywhere present,
and so long as it persists it will remain present.
What is known in one place,
may be known in all places.
Time, space and obstructions
are unknown to Mind and thought.
It follows, that anyone tuning into our thought,
will enter into our stream of consciousness,
no matter where we are and no matter where he may be.
If we still persist after the body shall have suffered physical death
(and we are convinced that we shall)
this law must still hold good,
for past and present are one and the same in Mind.
Time is only the measure of an experience,
and space, of itself,
is not apart from, but is in, Mind.
Ernest Holmes: The Science of Mind
With the first touch of spiritual light,
all fear of death disappears,
because that light reveals that there is no death
and that the experience of passing from this plane of life
to what is called the next is not really a death:
it is just another experience
like our birth;
it is a passing from one phase of life to another.
In other words,
life never had a beginning;
therefore our coming into this world
was but a coming forth from another phase of life.
Joel S. Goldsmith
The Contemplative Life
When you know who You are,
you will instantly recognize
that death has nothing to do with you,
but until that time,
you will hold opinions about death
as you hold opinions about life.
Make friends with death.
Dying can be the most exquisite experience of a lifetime .
Pat Rodegast: Emmanuel’s Book III
To help someone die in peace,
remind yourself— and him--
that he is going Home,
that he is leaving illusion
and moving back into truth.
You have all experienced dreams
that you knew were not the usual sleeping dreams.
You have gone somewhere wonderful,
soft, loving, joyful, and lighted.
Believe those dreams.
Encourage your dying friend
to believe in his own dreams.
They are visits Home.
Pat Rodegast: Emmanuel’s Book III
Prior to the rising of self-consciousness,
there were no wants.
Now there are wants;
you all want to know about death.
Why inquire regarding what happens after death?
We remain unclear on what is going on right now.
Let us clarify that first.
Wu Hsin: Solving Yourself
All individuals die.
Only those
Who are no longer individuals
Live forever.
Wu Hsin:
In the Shadow of the Formless
Today, I woke before daylight
to an invitation from Death.
Like my Aztec ancestors,
I welcome it with the gratitude of a warrior
who has fought well
and wishes for a safe homecoming . . .
and a long rest.
Don Miguel Ruiz:
The Toltec Art of Life and Death: A Story of Discovery
To those who dragged through life
the heavy load of a diseased or defective organism,
the shedding of their burden of flesh
can only be a subject for thankfulness and rejoicing.
To all it will be a gain.
For if we are to believe
the assurances of those who have passed through the great experience,
we shall find the ethereal body
an infinitely free and more perfect medium of expression
than the body of flesh.
A.P. SINNET, ANNIE BESANT:
WHAT HAPPENS AFTER DEATH
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
Some people can’t wrap their heads around death.
And these people leave a mess after them.
Did they think they were immortal?
The difference between death cleaning and just a big cleanup
is the amount of time they consume.
Death cleaning is not about dusting or mopping up;
it is about a permanent form of organization
that makes your everyday life run more smoothly.
Margareta Magnusson: The Gentle Art of Swedish Death Cleaning:
How to Free Yourself and Your Family from a Lifetime of Clutter
Doesn’t individuality necessarily have some eventual end?
Is there a time when all blends into one?
Yes.
But there is never a time
when one blends into nothingness.
Pat Rodegast: Emmanuel’s Book:
A Manual for Living Comfortably in the Cosmos
Life and death
should not be considered as opposites.
It is closer to the truth
to speak of dying as an entrance
rather than an exit.
What the doorway of death offers
is a resurgence of tremendous vitality,
for you are entering from what could be described
as a watered down version of life
into the thing itself,
the vitality of the primary reality.
Pat Rodegast: Emmanuel’s Book:
A Manual for Living Comfortably in the Cosmos
It is hard for us to be with a dying person
until we learn how to see what is eternal,
so we can be there together as souls.
It’s simple, but it’s not easy.
A dying person needs you to be fully there,
just being, listening for what is needed
with love and kindness
but not trying to impose ideas of how to die.
Just being “ a loving rock, ”
appreciating that you’re here,
that you’re two human beings on the edge of the mystery,
and that you can share your truth together.
You are not your roles.
You are two souls.
This is it.
Ram Dass--Walking Each Other Home:
Conversations on Loving and Dying
Love— the Creative Energy of the Universe--
gives rise to everything
and then draws it back again
with perfect timing.
This is the Way of Death.
Love breathes life
into material form
and nurtures, teaches, and protects it,
asking nothing in return,
until life dissolves once again into Love.
Knowing that your life
is just a single breath of Love,
cherish everything
cling to nothing.
The Way of Death
whispers in your ear:
“There is only Love.”
Karen Wyatt MD: Tao of Death:
The Secret to a Rich & Meaningful Life
When you encounter death,
when you see it face - to - face ,
when you don’t avoid,
when you don’t dodge,
when you don’t escape,
when you don’t create a cloud around you --
when you face it, encounter it,
the fact of death --
suddenly you become aware that death is life.
The deeper you move into death,
the deeper you move in life
because opposites meet and mingle;
they are one.
Osho
Awareness: The Key to Living in Balance
"Personality is suspended upon a thread
from the nature of Being, " declares the secret work.
Man is essentially a permanent and immortal principle;
only his bodies pass through the cycle of birth and death.
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:
The Secret Teachings Of All Ages
The initiates of old
warned their disciples
that an image is not a reality
but merely the objectification of a subjective idea.
Images of the gods
were nor designed to be objects of worship
but were to be regarded merely as emblems or reminders
of invisible powers and principles.
Similarly, the body of man
must not be considered as the individual
but only as the house of the individual,
in the same manner that the temple
was the House of God.
Manly P. Hall:
The Secret Teachings Of All Ages
To the ignorant
the body is supreme
and they are incapable of realizing
the immortality that is within them.
Knowing only the body which is subject to death,
they believe in death
because they worship that substance
which is the cause and reality of death.
He who through the error of attachment
loves his body,
abides wandering in darkness,
sensible and suffering the things of death,
but he who realizes that the body
is but the tomb of his soul,
rises to immortality.
Manly P. Hall:
The Secret Teachings Of All Ages
If you die,
you may be dying as far as your body is concerned,
but your mind continues.
Immediately after death,
the mind starts dreaming.
The time between one death and another birth
is used in dreaming.
Once you die
all the pressure of bodily reality and objective reality
disappears.
The mind is free to dream.
Osho: Dancing In The Breeze
“The thing to do when you’re impatient
is to turn to your left and ask advice from your death.
An immense amount of pettiness is dropped
if your death makes a gesture to you,
or if you catch a glimpse of it,
or if you just have the feeling
that your companion is there watching you.”
don Juan
Carlos Castaneda: Journey To Ixtlan
That night the lama sat in meditation and ceased breathing.
His heart stopped and bodily functions failed,
although he did not manifest the full signs of death.
This is the practice of tuk-dam,
when a yogi retreats to the heart in death meditation.
He sat like this for three days
without manifesting the signs of death.
Then his head fell to one side
and the death process was complete.
Such is the death of an accomplished yogi.
Glenn H. Mullin: Living in the Face of Death
Death is not like a person.
It is rather a presence.
But one may also choose to say that it is nothing
and yet it is everything.
One will be right on every count.
Death is whatever one wishes.
don Juan
Carlos Castaneda: Journey To Ixtlan
Death is only release into dreams;
it can only be bad if one’s dreams are bad.
Dorothy Bryant:
The Kin of Ata Are Waiting for You
Death is not there, it is a lie--
but it appears very real.
It only appears very real, it is not.
It appears so
because you believe too much
in your separate existence.
It is in believing that you are separate from existence
that you give reality to death.
Drop this idea of being separate from existence,
and death disappears.
Osho
The Book of Wisdom
I know now the whole mistake
lies in looking upon death as the end of "activity"
(with a renewal at some indefinite date),
whereas as a matter of fact
it is an incident only,
though a very important one,
in a continuous life.
Your feelings, your memory, your love,
your interests and ambitions remain;
all you have left behind
(and even that one cannot at first realize)
is the physical body,
which proves to be merely the covering of the spiritual
to enable it to function in a material world.
Man truly is a spirit and has a body,
not vice versa.
Claude’s Book
L. Kelway-Bamber channeling her deceased son, Claude
Penetrating the place where heaven and earth have not divided
and yin and yang do not reach,
directness will attain success.
The true self
is the self that is prior to the division of heaven and earth,
before your parents conceived and gave birth.
This self is the self that is in all animate things,
birds and beasts, grasses and trees.
This is what is called buddha-nature.
Therefore this self is self that has no shadow or form,
no birth or death.
It is not the self that is seen by the present physical eye.
Only enlightened people can see it.
Those who have seen it
are called people who have seen nature
and realized buddhahood.
Zen Master Takuan (1573-1645)
Thomas Cleary: Soul of the Samurai:
Modern Translations of Three Classic Works of Zen & Bushido
As soon as we are born, we are dead.
Our birth and our death are just one thing.
It’s like a tree:
when there’s a root there must be branches.
When there are branches there must be a root.
You can’t have one without the other.
It’s a little funny to see how at death
people are so grief-stricken and distracted,
and at birth how happy and delighted.
It’s delusion;
nobody has ever looked at this clearly.
I think if you really want to cry,
it would be better to do so when someone’s born.
Birth is death, death is birth;
the branch is the root, the root is the branch.
If you must cry, cry at the root;
cry at the birth.
Look closely:
If there were no birth, there would be no death.
Can you understand this?
Don’t worry about things too much;
just think, “This is the way things are.”
Ajahn Chah
Koshin Paley Ellison and Matt Weingast. Awake at the Bedside:
Contemplative Teachings on Palliative and End-of-Life Care
As people approach death,
their mental receptivity and sensitivity can dramatically increase.
As their hearts and minds
are in some sense less contained by their bodies,
their minds can become almost atmospheric.
Entering a dying person’s room
can sometimes feel like walking straight into that person’s mind.
What we bring into the room --
our thoughts and feelings --
can have a tremendous impact, positively or negatively.
Kirsten Deleo, Koshin Paley Ellison and Matt Weingast:
Awake at the Bedside:
Contemplative Teachings on Palliative and End-of-Life Care
It is real and deep wisdom
to learn to look at things in terms of manifestation.
If someone who is very close to you has passed away
and you define him or her as non-existing,
you are mistaken.
From nothing cannot be born something.
From no one cannot be born someone.
From something you cannot become nothing.
From someone you cannot become no one.
That is the truth.
If the person who is close to you
does not manifest in the form that you are used to seeing or perceiving,
that does not mean that he is non-existing.
It does not mean that he is no longer there.
If you look deeply,
you can touch his or her presence
in other forms of manifestation.
Thich Nhat Hanh: No Death, No Fear
The angel of death
can teach us to live every day as if it is the last day of our lives,
as if there may be no tomorrow.
We can begin each day by saying,
“ I am awake, I see the sun.
I am going to give my gratitude to the sun and to everything and everyone,
because I am still alive.
One more day to be myself.”
That is the way I see life,
that is what the angel of death taught me --
to be completely open,
to know that there is nothing to be afraid of.
Don Miguel Ruiz: The Four Agreements:
A Practical Guide to Personal Freedom
Death is not the biggest fear we have;
our biggest fear is taking the risk to be alive --
the risk to be alive and express what we really are.
Just being ourselves is the biggest fear of humans.
Don Miguel Ruiz: The Four Agreements:
A Practical Guide to Personal Freedom
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
The Post - Mortem Realms are expansive and diverse,
offering a vast spectrum of possible environments and experiences
through which an individual may integrate the lessons of his or her physical life
and begin to acclimatize once again to life in the non - physical realms.
Where a person goes upon death
and what he or she experiences depends on a variety of factors,
the most important of which is that person’s overall state of consciousness and energy.
The Post - Mortem Realms are themselves organized along an energy gradient
that stretches from energy states close to those of the physical world
to those that are equivalent to those found in the higher - order worlds.
There is no reward and punishment system to this organization.
A person goes to the level and environment
most suited to his or her wellbeing,
one that is resonant with his or her basic energy state
and conducive to further growth, integration and wholeness.
Because of principles of affinity,
the new arrival in the non - physical realms
will most likely be with people of similar mental and emotional states.
David Spangler: Subtle Worlds: An Explorer’s Field Notes
This is my attitude about death.
Laugh!
Let laughter be your attitude about death.
It is a cosmic lie created by man himself,
created by the ego, by self-consciousness.
That’s why in nature no other animal, bird, tree is afraid of death.
Only man, and he makes so much fuss out of it…
his whole life trembling.
Death is coming closer,
and because of death he cannot allow himself to live totally.
How can you live if you are so afraid?
Death creates fear.
And who is the culprit?
God has not created death,
it is man’s own invention.
Create the ego,
and you have created the other side of it—death.
Osho. The Book of Wisdom
If I am one with existence, how can I die?
Existence was there before me
and will be there after me.
I am just a ripple in the ocean,
and the ripple comes and goes,
the ocean remains, abides.
Yes, you will not be there--
as you are you will not be there.
This form will disappear,
but the one who is abiding in this form will go on abiding,
either in other forms or ultimately in formlessness.
Osho. The Book of Wisdom
Death is not there, it is a lie--
but it appears very real.
It only appears very real, it is not.
It appears so because you believe too much in your separate existence.
It is in believing that you are separate from existence
that you give reality to death.
Drop this idea of being separate from existence,
and death disappears.
Osho. The Book of Wisdom
I saw the death phobia that permeates our time
brought to bear upon dying people in the name of caring for them.
And I saw that as a culture
we have a withered psychology of coping and accepting
where we might once have had a mythology and a poetry
of purposed, meaningful dying.
This poverty was the constant companion and chimera
of almost every dying person I worked with.
I discovered that few wanted to die well,
fewer still, wisely.
Most didn’t want to die at all,
and they spent their dying time refusing to do so.
Stephen Jenkinson: Die Wise:
A Manifesto for Sanity and Soul
Medicine has come,
in its working research, and often clinical agenda,
to look upon death
as a correctable biological deficiency.
This stance has thus introduced
into the practice of medicine and public attitudes
a profound and often destructive self-contradiction.
We have been left fundamentally uncertain
whether death is to be accepted as part of life
or rejected as a repairable accident.
Daniel Callahan. The Troubled Dream of Life:
In Search of a Peaceful Death
Many people experience after death
a natural desire to reconnect with their loved ones and friends,
to let them know they’re really still alive and OK.
Even after some time has passed,
they may still wish to help those they have left on earth,
if only to mitigate the grief they may feel.
And if the newly dead person has wronged people on earth,
he or she may seek ways of making amends.
It takes time for a person who is now disincarnate
and learning to adjust to the vaster reality of the subtle worlds
to begin to think beyond their individuality
and into attunement with the larger wholes of which he or she is a part,
thereby experiencing himself or herself
as part of planetary life and beingness --
unless, of course, this person has already been accustomed
to thinking and attuning in this way while in a physical body.
David Spangler: Subtle Worlds:
An Explorer’s Field Notes
Set the intention to create a different relationship with the concept of death,
and understand that the way you have been taught to view it is not necessarily the truth.
As you come to understand that all things in this physical existence are transient,
that they will ebb and flow with the tides,
and that nothing in the physical can be fully grasped and anchored in place,
you will more easily make peace with the nature of all things,
people, and experiences in your life as they flow through you.
Every experience, every person, and every challenge
presents the opportunity for divine expression and connection,
especially in the death of a loved one,
who passes into the true divine essence of their soul
as they transition back to their original state
and shed the heaviness of the physical being .
Mike Dooley: Channeled Messages from Deep Space:
Wisdom for a Changing World
Ultimately, your life will be measured by what you gave,
not what you received.
Don’t hold out on the rest of us--
we need you to contribute.
Spend your life building a body of work you will be proud of.
Engage today with urgency and diligence.
Plant seeds every day that will yield a harvest later.
Tomorrow is only an unfulfilled wish,
so live and work as if today is all you have.
If you do, you will be able to lay your head down each night
satisfied with your work, and in the end,
you will die empty of regret,
but full of satisfaction for a life well lived.”
Todd Henry: Die Empty
Challenging situations serve a higher purpose
that extends beyond any pain or suffering
that ensues in the earthly experience;
it is what the individual does to respond to those circumstances
that creates the path to unfold before them.
And if that path includes the opportunity or probability
of what may be judged as an untimely, violent, or otherwise disturbing demise,
please be assured that the aspect of the soul
that chose that particular incarnation
has agreed to that demise,
and it has not experienced the loss of its life
as something that was beyond its control,
no matter how that death appears to the outside world.
Mike Dooley: Channeled Messages from Deep Space:
Wisdom for a Changing World
Everything that happens to us
is intended to help us forward in our development,
and is capable of doing so, if we will only take it in the right way
and try to learn the lesson which it is meant to teach.
Since this is true - - and those who have probed most deeply
into the mysteries of life and death know that it is - -
to grumble or to repine at suffering
is manifestly not only to waste much force uselessly,
but also to take an entirely inaccurate and foolish view of life,
and to lose what is designed as an opportunity.
C. W. Leadbetter:
The Hidden Side of Things
We fall into the world caught between two necessities,
compelled to live, born to die, and reconciling them
has forever been one of our most challenging puzzles.
The pieces just don’t fit together.
But while dying may be the easiest thing in the world to do,
it’s the hardest thing in the world to do well --
we are predisposed to avoid, ignore, flee, and fight it till the very last hour.
We are impelled in our deepest being to struggle against it .
Roy Scranton: Learning to Die in the Anthropocene:
Reflections on the End of a Civilization
Learning to die as an individual
means letting go of our predispositions and fear.
Learning to die as a civilization
means letting go of this particular way of life and its ideas of identity,
freedom, success, and progress.
These two ways of learning to die
come together in the role of the humanist thinker:
one who is willing to stop and ask troublesome questions,
the one who is willing to interrupt,
the one who resonates on other channels
and with slower, deeper rhythms .
Roy Scranton: Learning to Die in the Anthropocene:
Reflections on the End of a Civilization
A proverb says that man’s extremity is God’s opportunity.
We cannot find release
until we have known the real extremity of our situation,
and see that all striving for spiritual ideals is completely futile --
since the very seeking thrusts them away.
Yet why should it surprise us?
Hasn’t it been said again and again that we must die to come to life,
that heaven is always on the other side of the Valley of the Shadow of Death --
the valley of which physical death is merely a symbol --
where the helpless corpse,
bound hand and foot in its winding sheet,
is just a figure of the death in which we live so long
as we mistake it for life?
Where do we go from here?
We do not.
We come to an end.
Alan W. Watts:
Become What You Are
The end-of-life gate before us is rusted from disuse.
This rusted gate may take some effort to open.
It may squeak and squeal, and so may we.
We might not like everything we encounter
as we step through into a space we’ve purposefully avoided
for most, if not all, of our lives.
We may need to occasionally take a mental and emotional breath,
find our equilibrium,
as we traverse the place.
It’s a place known by an anti-name:
death denial.
And traverse it we must;
one step doesn’t get us very far.
Bart Windrum: The Promised Landing:
A Gateway to Peaceful Dying
A culture that denies death
is a barrier to achieving a good death.
Overcoming our fears and wild misconceptions about death
will be no small task,
but we shouldn’t forget how quickly other cultural prejudices
—racism, sexism, homophobia--
have begun to topple in the recent past.
It is high time death had its own moment of truth.
Caitlin Doughty: Smoke Gets in Your Eyes:
And Other Lessons from the Crematory
Death is not the tragedy that it appears to be,
and the soul being does not carry with it any memory of suffering.
All pain is temporary,
and death, in whatever way it occurs,
is a peaceful and beautiful experience for the soul
as it transitions to its natural state.
When death is sudden and violent,
the soul is assisted in that transition
so that it is nurtured
and carried into the peaceful state of nonphysical being.
Mike Dooley: Channeled Messages from Deep Space:
Wisdom for a Changing World
I have always found
that the people who have quite genuinely died to themselves
make no claims of any kind to their own part in the process.
They think of themselves as lazy and lucky.
If they did anything at all,
it was so simple that anyone else could do the same--
for all that they have done is to recognize a universal fact of life,
something as true of the weak and foolish as of the wise and strong.
They would even say that in this respect
there is some advantage in being weak and foolish,
for the possession of a strong will and a clever head
makes some things very difficult to see.
Alan W. Watts:
Become What You Are
Death to oneself
is the improbable source
of a way of life so new and so alive
that it feels like having been born again.
In this metaphorical sense,
the ego dies on finding out its own incapacity
to make any difference to itself that is really important.
Alan W. Watts:
Become What You Are
Many people who have had a near-death experience
report that they underwent a “life review” in which they saw, as if watching a movie,
all of their covert and overt actions,
their expressed and suppressed sentiments,
their public and private thoughts,
and their conscious and unconscious attitudes.
They saw who they were and how their thoughts, words, and deeds
affected everyone and everything in their lives.
Afterward, they typically describe having a greater understanding
about themselves and a desire to do a better job of living from then on.
And as a result, they perceive new possibilities
and better ways “to be” in any opportunity.
Having seen themselves from a truly objective point of view,
they clearly know what they want to change.
Recognition is like having a life review every day.
Since you have all of the equipment in your brain to notice who you are being,
why not do this before you die,
and, in effect, be reborn in the same life?
Joe Dispenza: Breaking the Habit of Being Yourself:
How to Lose Your Mind and Create a New One
In a world subject to change,
the traditional attitude toward death
is like a bulwark of inertia and continuity.
It has by now been so obliterated from our culture
that it is hard for us to imagine or understand it.
The ancient attitude in which death is close and familiar
yet diminished and desensitized
is too different from our own view,
in which it is so terrifying that we no longer dare say its name.
Thus, when we call this familiar death the tame death,
we do not mean that it was once wild and that it was later domesticated.
On the contrary, we mean
that it has become wild today when it used to be tame.
The tame death is the oldest death there is.
Philipp Aries: The Hour of Our Death
It will never feel comfortable
to sit so close to others ’ grief.
Working in the face of death will always feel profound,
numinous and sometimes overwhelming –
that’s why we work in teams.
But you will be able to recognise that you are offering something vital,
transformative and even spiritual:
the opportunity for individuals to meet or to watch death
with an awareness that is lost if we fail to be truthful.
The dreadful reality,
told with honesty and compassion,
allows patients and their families to make choices based on truth,
instead of encouraging the misleading,
hopeless quest for a medical miracle that promotes futile treatment,
protracts dying and disallows goodbyes.
Focus not on saving life at any cost,
but on enabling goodbye.
Sometimes, in the end,
it’s all we have to offer .
Kathryn Mannix: With the End in Mind:
Dying, Death, and Wisdom in an Age of Denial
Healthcare advances can only remediate us up to a point;
beyond the point of saving us to live ‘ well enough ’
there is a point of futility.
Here, technology is deployed in a new deathbed ritual
that is a triumph of denial over experience.
The death rate remains 100 per cent,
and the pattern of the final days, and the way we actually die,
are unchanged.
What is different is that we have lost
the familiarity we once had with that process,
and we have lost the vocabulary and etiquette
that served us so well in past times,
when death was acknowledged to be inevitable.
Kathryn Mannix: With the End in Mind:
Dying, Death, and Wisdom in an Age of Denial
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
When the water returns to its original oneness with the river,
it no longer has any individual feeling to it;
it resumes its own nature,
and finds composure.
How very glad the water must be
to come back to the original river!
If this is so,
what feeling will we have when we die?
Shunryu Suzuki:
Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind
When you do not realize that you are one with the river,
or one with the universe,
you have fear.
Whether it is separated into drops or not,
water is water.
Our life and death are the same thing.
When we realize this fact
we have no fear of death anymore,
and we have no actual difficulty in our life.
Shunryu Suzuki:
Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind
I’ve had a lot of people pass away in my life.
I guess it’s all a matter of how you deal with your mortality--
and recognizing that you are mortal.
I’m trying to see what a gift life is
and how quickly it can be extinguished,
without any warning.
Timothy B. Schmit
There are some species of creatures on your planet
that resonate with higher divine energy
and therefore have the capacity of self-awareness
on a different level of frequency than others.
These creatures have the energetic power of discernment
and are more aware of their own free will and connection.
They do not suffer the fear of death
quite so much as humans,
as they have a higher awareness of death
as part of the natural life cycle,
and so even though they have a will to live,
they also have a natural understanding of the need to die,
and sometimes will choose death
when it appears to be beneficial to others of their species.
This involves a complex thought process
that is not available to most other species of being.
Mike Dooley: Channeled Messages from Deep Space:
Wisdom for a Changing World
Is there, then, any doubt that for hapless mortals,
that is, for men who are engrossed,
the fairest day is ever the first to flee?
Old age surprises them while their minds are still childish,
and they come to it unprepared and unarmed,
for they have made no provision for it;
they have stumbled upon it suddenly and unexpectedly,
they did not notice that it was drawing nearer day by day.
Even as conversation or reading
or deep meditation on some subject beguiles the traveller,
and he finds that he has reached the end of his journey
before he was aware that he was approaching it,
just so with this unceasing and most swift journey of life,
which we make at the same pace
whether waking or sleeping;
those who are engrossed become aware of it
only at the end .
Lucius Seneca: On the Shortness of Life
The greatest hindrance to living is expectancy,
which depends upon the morrow and wastes today.
You dispose of that which lies in the hands of Fortune,
you let go that which lies in your own.
Whither do you look?
At what goal do you aim?
All things that are still to come lie in uncertainty;
live straightway!
See how the greatest of bards sings the saving strain:
The fairest day in hapless mortals' life
Is ever first to flee. --
"Why do you delay?"says he,
"Why are you idle?
Unless you seize the day, it flees."
Even though you seize it, it still will flee;
therefore you must vie with time's swiftness in the speed of using it,
and, as from a torrent that rushes by and will not always flow,
you must drink quickly.
Lucius Seneca: On the Shortness of Life
The majority of mortals, Paulinus,
complain bitterly of the spitefulness of Nature,
because we are born for a brief span of life,
because even this space that has been granted to us
rushes by so speedily and so swiftly
that all save a very few find life at an end
just when they are getting ready to live.
Lucius Seneca: On the Shortness of Life
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
On the day I die,
when I am being carried toward the grave,
don't weep.
Death has nothing to do with going away.
The sun sets and the moon sets,
but they are not gone.
Death is a coming together.
The tomb looks like a prison,
but it's really release into union.
Your mouth closes here
and immediately opens with a shout of joy there.
Rumi
“It is important to look at death
because it is a part of life.
It is a sad thing, melancholy
but romantic at the same time.
It is the end of a cycle--
everything has to end.
The cycle of life is positive
because it gives room for new things.”
Lee Alexander McQueen
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
We must bravely look
at the array of choices ahead of us.
Identify and name them.
Ponder their differences.
Understand how we slip into situations
we say we want to avoid.
And until we do,
we continue to practice death denial
under the cover of death literacy.
Although the new phrase “ death positive”
is useful for newbies,
its wider adoption might actually serve
to provide an extension of that cover…"
Bart Windrum
www.axiomaction.com
The dying choose their moment of death
more often than we realise.
It’s not unusual for the dying to wait for a distant relative or a close friend.
Sometimes the reason to stay is a wedding anniversary or a birthday,
the arrival of a first grandchild,
or an important milestone that must be reached.
However impossible it might seem medically,
the dying are able to summon enough vital energy.
It’s good to remember that the dying
sometimes need the freedom to die by themselves in peace and tranquillity.
It can be that the emotional bond between people is so strong
and letting go is so difficult,
that they choose to die alone.
Ineke Koedam: In the Light of Death:
Experiences on the threshold between life and death
Instead of discussing openly how to think about death
and what we might appropriately choose in our dying
-a painful and difficult subject-
we too frequently and too easily transform the issue
into the more distanced, comfortable language of rights and choices:
not how or what we ought to choose,
but that we have a right to choose.
Daniel Callahan:
The Troubled Dream of Life: In Search of a Peaceful Death
Death has been dissected,
cut to bits by a series of little steps,
which finally make it impossible to know
which step was the real death,
the one in which consciousness was lost,
or the one in which breathing stopped.
All these little silent deaths
have replaced the great dramatic act of death,
and no one any longer has the strength or patience
to wait over a period of weeks
for a moment which has lost a part of its meaning.
Philippe Aries:
Western Attitudes Toward Death
How and when should I want to die?
How much pain and suffering should I be willing to bear, and for what reason?
What do I owe others in my dying,
especially those who would still have me with them if they could?
When I am in doubt about my living or dying,
where should I locate the benefit of doubt, toward life or death?