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.
One of the first books published in 1474
by William Caxton, England’s first printer,
was a manual of how to die.
It remained a bestseller for two centuries.
It was not until after the Reformation
that European death became macabre,
and Francis Bacon was the first to suggest
that doctors might hold death at bay.
Earlier Arab and Jewish doctors
had thought it blasphemous
for doctors to attempt to interfere with death.
For Paracelsus,
death was “a return to the womb.”
John Abraham: How to Get the Death You Want :
A Practical and Moral Guide
Those who beg to be consumed by the fire,
the sublime fire of divine love,
not only never die,
they are resuscitated.
That is the meaning of ‘Unless you die you will not live.’
We must die, but how?
Not with a knife or gun of course.
Jesus was not talking about physical death
but of dying unto the personality,
the lower world of desire and vices,
so that we might come to life on the higher plane,
that of the individuality.
That is when the individuality is nourished.
Omraam Mikhaël Aivanhov:
Man's Two Natures, Human and Divine
It is thanks to death
that a human being awakens to a new life.
Omraam Mikhaël Aivanhov:
Cosmic Balance; the Secret of Polarity
Life and death are brother and sister,
who work hand in hand to further the evolutionary process.
We see death as something frightful,
but just try to imagine what would happen
if death ceased to do its work –
that would be far worse.
Omraam Mikhaël Aivanhov:
Cosmic Balance; the Secret of Polarity
Since impermanence is an intrinsic characteristic of everything in existence,
life is really a series of small opportunities
to rehearse the process of dying.
In a sense, every breath represents a “little death”
and can be used as training ground in the work to accept impermanence.
Each complete breath,
consisting of an inhalation and an exhalation,
enacts the balance between fullness and emptiness,
which is a characteristic of the present moment.
The end of exhalation,
when the lungs are completely empty,
resembles the moment of death
when the breath is “given up.”
Karen Wyatt: What Really Matters:
7 Lessons for Living from the Stories of the Dying
Let the soul speak for itself,
and you will find that its song will ring forth
clearly, strongly, and gloriously:
“There is no Death; there is no Death;
there is no Death; there is naught but Life,
and that Life is Life Everlasting!”
Such is the song of the soul.
Listen for it in the Silence,
for there alone can its vibrations reach your eager ears.
It is the Song of Life ever denying Death.
There is no Death--
there is naught but Life
Everlasting,
forever,
and forever,
and forever.
William Walker Atkinson:
The Life Beyond Death
Not all will admit they are dying,
not even to themselves.
Unbelievable as it may seem,
some people go through the dying process with such denial
that they realize their condition is irreversible only after death.
Several dead I have worked with
took days to fully come to terms with their new situation.
Difficult adjustments are usually short-term,
lasting no more than a few days from our standpoint.
And someone is always on the other side ready to assist.
If the dying were to explore the afterlife as it is actually lived,
postmortem turmoil would all but cease.
Julia Assante: The Last Frontier:
Exploring the Afterlife and Transforming Our Fear of Death
When we disregard the paranormal events that surround the deathbed,
] we also miss a great deal of essential information
about the death process and the afterlife itself,
as well as messages about what the dying need,
what they want for us, and, sometimes,
what day or hour they will draw their final breath.
Nearing-death awareness seems to arise
when people make peace with death.
It is most noticeable in those
whose bodies are gradually shutting down.
In situations where mortality is sudden,
victims of accidents, crimes, and war
are still lovingly assisted.
Julia Assante: The Last Frontier:
Exploring the Afterlife and Transforming Our Fear of Death
It is a necessary and proper thing
that all of us learn about dying and about death,
about all of the before and the after,
well before the time of being tested and told comes.
We can learn before our gamble for more time
is foreclosed upon by the passing of time.
Stephen Jenkinson
How we care for the dying people in our midst,
and how we die when it is our turn:
these together are the proving ground,
the cradle and the grave both,
for every conviction we have about justice and mercy,
about the meaning of life,
about what love should look like
and what it should do.
They are the sum of every political instinct we have,
every dream of community we’ve nursed along
and every faith we’ve been willing to have in a better day.
They are where every fascination about the Other World and the Big Story live,
and they are where the midnight fear of Nothing comes to call.
Stephen Jenkinson
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.
Cautious cynics know what they are doing
every moment and why.
Submit to love without thinking,
as the sun this morning rose recklessly
extinguishing our star-candle minds.
Coleman Barks: Rumi: The Big Red Book
There are apparently vistas of amazing worlds ahead of us
which only open up to our understanding in measure
as we develop our minds and our aspiration to meet them.
We must realise that life on the Physical Plane
is but a fraction of the whole
and that the Sage or Yogi of both East and West
is endeavouring to train his mind
to a state of continued unbroken consciousness
throughout waking, sleeping, death,
and onwards to the next incarnation upon this earth.
In this way does a man finally become a god.
Vera Stanley Alder:
The Finding of the Third Eye
Let us now consider what is said to happen
when Death has snapped the Silver Cord,
and the person is finally separated from his physical body.
We are told that often it may take a little while
for the individual to realise that he is ‘dead’.
But for some time prior to this
he has been building in the astral stuff
the kind of Heaven or after-life to which he aspires.
Of course, thousands build a Heaven
with golden streets and angels playing on harps.
These numberless living ‘thought-forms’
cohere by the law of attraction into one great whole,
so that the conventional ‘Heaven’ is actually there awaiting its owners.
Those who expect, because of their guilt,
hell-fire and goblins,
have created that charming reception for themselves also!
The miser will probably have made for his use
a heaven full of nothing but gold pieces.
The Eastern pasha will certainly get his Paradise of Houris.
The disbeliever in after-life will have created for himself
a horrible blank abyss.
We are told, then,
that people remain imprisoned in their self-constructed Paradises
until they become so weary of the limitations of their own desires
that they are gradually freed from them,
and the mind is able to expand and aspire to fresh ideals.
Eventually the ego is free to pass through these lower astral realms,
known as Purgatory,
purged finally of petty wishes and conceptions,
and enjoy the higher states of Paradise
to which it has learnt to orient itself.
Vera Stanley Alder:
The Finding of the Third Eye
Truth, then, is that only which is immaterial
and not enclosed within a corporeal envelope,
that which is colorless and formless,
exempt from change and alteration;
that which is ETERNAL.
All of that which perishes is a lie.
The things of earth are but appearances and imitations of truth;
they are what the picture is to reality.
The things of earth are not the TRUTH! . . .
Death, for some persons,
is an evil which strikes them with profound terror.
This is ignorance. . . .
Death is the destruction of the body;
the being in it dies not. . . .
The material body loses its form,
which is disintegrated in course of time;
the senses which animated it return to their source
and resume their functions;
but they gradually lose their passions and their desires,
and the spirit ascends to heaven to become a HARMONY.
Hermes Trismegistus
Every soul who arrives in these or other realms of the spirit world
completely untutored about life here,
is concerned with one thing and one thing only:
what is to happen next?
Just that.
Because we are inhabitants of the spirit world
we have not become grand rhetoricians,
who speak only in long eloquent periods
upon matters of the highest spiritual consideration.
Deo gratias that we do not.
We are normal, rational people,
who speak and act in a normal, rational manner.
Anthony Borgia:
More About Life in the World Unseen
It may be complained
that anyone making ‘the awful change’ from life to death
and from death to eternal life—‘supernatural’ life--
would have grave things to think about and discuss .
With a long experience of transitions upon which to draw,
commencing with my own,
I know this beyond peradventure:
when the last earthly breath has been drawn,
and life has begun in the spirit world,
there is never the slightest inclination,
at that vital moment,
to think in terms of learned theological disquisitions
or indulge in any ‘pious platitudes’.
Anthony Borgia:
More About Life in the World Unseen
Every thought you have held about death
has been in error.
Every construction you have built in the name of death
has been built on false foundation.
It is only, let me repeat, only,
when you replace the word death with life
on every account that you speak and think of it,
that its secret will begin to unfold to you,
its magnificence,
its hidden beauty.
Karen Peebles: The Bridge Between Worlds
(Conversations with her deceased uncle)
You loved the friend when he was visible,
and you loved him so deeply
that you started feeling, through your love, the invisibleness of him.
Then death takes the body.
Now in that gross element, body is no more there to hinder.
Now love can flow totally.
You may even feel thankful to death.
You were already discovering the spiritual dimension of your beloved, lover, friend,
and now death has taken the last obstacle.
Now you can see through and through.
Death has given you an opportunity
to see whether you really loved or not,
because if love's eyes cannot penetrate that much
so that you can see that which is not body,
that which is beyond matter,
that which is invisible,
then it is not love.
Then those eyes may be of something else,
but not of love.
Love always reveals the God in the other;
that's the definition of love.
If it reveals the God in the other
only then it is love, otherwise it is not.
You will be crying and weeping and mourning,
and will you be thinking that you are weeping for the friend who has gone?
No, you are weeping for yourself,
you are crying for yourself.
Osho
Question - Yesterday I heard that my friend had died.
Yet as I wept,
I found myself giving thanks for the sweetness of life.
Is there a place for mourning?
Osho - If you have loved somebody, really loved,
and you didn't miss an opportunity to love,
then there is no place for mourning
because then there is no repentance.
Osho
When one dies,
it does not mean the end of life.
It is a latent stage of life.
Don Mariano Ico
This is the beauty of Tantra:
it joins together the opposites,
the contraries, the contradictories.
If you go to the cremation ground
you will feel sad;
it will be difficult for you to be joyous.
It will be very difficult for you to sing and dance
where people are being burned,
and where people are crying and weeping,
and every day death and death,
day and night, death.
How will you rejoice?
But if you cannot rejoice there,
then all that you think is your joy is just make-believe.
If you can rejoice there,
then joy has really happened to you.
Now it is unconditional.
Now it doesn’t make any difference
whether death happens or life,
whether somebody is born
or somebody is dying.
Osho. The Tantra Experience:
Evolution through Love
You are no longer concerned with where you fall,
your manner of death, the pain.
You no longer care, don’t feel the need to.
This is only the end of a night,
the last of your nights,
the culmination of your entire life.
Ending in this perfect fall.
All of it, everything, has been a flash.
You don’t understand it,
but it’s beautiful...
Nukila Amal: The Original Dream
There is death in life,
and it astonishes me that we pretend to ignore this:
death, whose unforgiving presence we experience
with each change we survive
because we must learn to die slowly
. We must learn to die:
That is all of life.
To prepare gradually the masterpiece of a proud and supreme death,
of a death where chance plays no part,
of a well-made, beatific, and enthusiastic death
of the kind the saints knew to shape.
Of a long-ripened death
that effaces its hateful name
and is nothing but a gesture that returns those laws
to the anonymous universe which have been recognized and rescued
over the course of an intensely accomplished life.
It is this idea of death
which has developed inside of me since childhood
from one painful experience to the next,
and which compels me to humbly endure the small death,
so that I may become worthy
of the one which wants us to be great.
Rainer Maria Rilke: The Dark Interval
Death is not waiting for us at the end of a long road
Death is always with us,
in the marrow of every passing moment.
She is the secret teacher hiding in plain sight.
She helps us to discover what matters most.
And the good news is we don’t have to wait until the end of our lives
to realize the wisdom that death has to offer.
Reflecting on death can have a profound and positive impact
not just on how we die,
but on how we live.
Frank Ostaseki: The Five Invitations:
Discovering What Death Can Teach Us About Living Fully
Life and death are a package deal.
You cannot pull them apart.
In Japanese Zen, the term shoji translates as “birth-death.”
There is no separation between life and death
other than a small hyphen,
a thin line that connects the two.
We cannot be truly alive
without maintaining an awareness of death.
Frank Ostaseki: The Five Invitations:
Discovering What Death Can Teach Us About Living Fully
Death,
especially the most completely felt and experienced death,
has never remained an obstacle to life for a surviving individual,
because its innermost essence
is not contrary to us (as one may occasionally suspect),
but it is more knowing about life
than we are in our most vital moments.
I always think that such a great weight,
with its tremendous pressure,
somehow has the task of forcing us into a deeper, more intimate layer of life
so that we may grow out of it
all the more vibrant and fertile.
Rainer Maria Rilke:
The Dark Interval
Take it that you have died today,
and your life’s story is ended;
and henceforward regard what future time may be given you
as an uncovenanted surplus,
and live it out in harmony with nature.
Marcus Aurelius
Now comes the greatest revelation that you have ever had:
all that appears as human experience is but an illusion.
You are destined to prove the greatest revelation,
that even death is an illusion.
This is the highest revelation ever given to the world,
the revelation that ultimately will be its salvation.
Joel S. Goldsmith:
Collected Essays
You may hear of someone's death,
but he has not died to himself,
as it was appointed that all men would die only once.
We died when we left our heavenly home
to come down and assume the limitations of the flesh.
Your death is over.
When you go through the gate called death,
you don't die,
but instantly emanate a young, unaccountably new body.
Most of those who go through the gate do not even know it.
They simply take their young body for granted,
just as they do everything here.
Neville Goddard:
Let Us Go Into The Silence
Disease is a purificatory process,
carried out in order to produce a purer expression,
life aroma, influence and soul usefulness.
When this is the case, a cure is possible.
Disease can be a gradual and slow process of dying
and of thus releasing the soul.
A cure then will not be possible,
though palliative and ameliorative measures are needed
and should most certainly be used.
The length of the life can be prolonged,
but a permanent and final cure is out of the question.
This the average mental healer fails to realise.
They make a horror out of death,
whereas death is a beneficent friend.
Alice A. Bailey:
Esoteric Healing
Various cultists and healers usually take the position
that it is of major importance that the physical vehicle be rendered free from disease
and clutched away from the processes of death.
It might, however, be desirable (and it often is)
that the disease be permitted to do its work
and death open the door to the escape of the soul from imprisonment.
The time comes inevitably to all incarnated beings
when the soul demands liberation from the body and from form life,
and nature has her own wise ways of doing this.
Disease and death must be recognisedas liberating factors
when they come as the result of right timing by the soul.
Alice A. Bailey:
Esoteric Healing
From one angle, disease is a process of liberation,
and the enemy of that which is static and crystallised.
Think not, from what I say,
that therefore disease should be welcomed,
and that the process of death should be cherished.
Were that the case,
one would cultivate disease and put a premium on suicide.
Fortunately for humanity,
the whole tendency of life is against disease,
and the reaction of the form life upon the thought of man fosters the fear of death.
This has been rightly so,
for the instinct of self-preservation and the preservation of form integrity
is a vital principle in matter,
and the tendency to self-perpetuation of the life within the form
is one of our greatest God-given capacities and will persist.
But in the human family this must eventually give place
to the use of death as the organised, freeing process
in order to conserve force and give to the soul
a better instrument of manifestation.
For this liberty of action,
mankind as a whole is not yet ready.
The disciples and aspirants of the world should now, however,
begin to grasp these newer principles of existence.
Alice A. Bailey: Esoteric Healing
One should really consider the matter of what death means,
not when one is ill or unbalanced,
or very close to it,
but when one is living with vitality,
with health and energy,
knowing the organism must necessarily wear out some day.
In dealing with this question, one must consider it,
not from the point of immortality,
but from the point of view of eternity
– that which is timeless –
and that is Now.
Ramesh Balsekar:
The Only Way to Live
Because so few of us are exposed to dying as a normal life passage,
we are both captivated and tyrannized by death.
We are either terrified into silence and avoidance,
or we flee into a sentimental narrative of the “good death,”
a purely spiritual experience where all is forgiven, the heavens open,
and the secretions, smells, exhaustion, and messiness disappear.
But a death, like a birth, weds the animal to the soulful.
Perhaps a more realistic hope for caregivers,
and for ourselves when we are dying,
is for a “good-enough death,”
where we keep the dying as comfortable and pain free as possible,
and leave room for the beautiful and the transcendent,
which may or may not occur.
Katy Butler: The Art of Dying Well:
A Practical Guide to a Good End of Life
I personally believe that death is part of God’s (or Nature’s) plan,
and that a loving God never intended
to force people to suffer at the hands of advanced technologies
that cannot restore them.
Yes, the Bible recounts miraculous healings,
but its miracles are grounded in faith,
not in man-made inventions with a potential for both good and evil.
It’s hard to morally justify putting people through regimens
that cause them suffering when they can neither understand
the purpose of the pain inflicted, nor meaningfully assent to it.
We must normalize saying “no”:
depriving a demented person of a natural death may seem loving,
but it is rarely kind.
The suffering of caregivers also deserves moral weight.
If your doctor is not on the same page,
find another more attuned to your values.
Katy Butler: The Art of Dying Well:
A Practical Guide to a Good End of Life
Ask a cloud:
“What is your date of birth?
Before you were born, where were you?”
Looking deeply,
you do not see a real date of birth
and you do not see a real date of death for the cloud.
All that happens is that the cloud transforms into rain or snow.
There is no real death
because there is always a continuation.
A cloud continues in the ocean,
the river and the heat of the sun,
and the rain continues the cloud.
If we are afraid of death
it is because we have not understood
that things do not really die.
Thich Nhat Hanh:
No Death, No Fear
Since before time you have been free.
Birth and death are only doors through which we pass,
sacred thresholds on our journey.
Birth and death are a game of hide-and-seek.
You have never been born and you can never die.
Our greatest pain
is caused by our notions of coming and going.
Thich Nhat Hanh:
No Death, No Fear
Is this heaven?” Billy asked his grandfather.
“Billy, there are many different heavens.
More than anyone can imagine.
I’ve learned that life is just beginning at death.
The choices available are beyond our imagination.
The physical world is but a tiny part of the many worlds we live within.”
William and Susan Buhlman:
Beyond the Astral: Metaphysical Short Stories
https://www.amazon.com/Beyond-Astral-Metaphysical-Short-Stories-ebook/dp/B07TK1T49K/ref=sr_1_1?keywords=beyond+the+astral&qid=1563456074&s=electronics&sr=8-1
At death,
one goes back to where one came from
– Home.
Ramesh Balsekar:
The End Of Duality
You don’t want death,
but that is not in your control.
You want life,
but even that is not in your control.
Therefore, the important point is –
let life happen.
And by letting life happen,
let death happen.
Ramesh Balsekar:
The End Of Duality
Tolstoy’s exemplary novella The Death of Ivan Ilych
exposes the emptiness and moral death in an ordinary existence,
the blindness and selfishness involved in worldly pursuits,
until illness and the fear of imminent death
reveal to the dying person the vanitas of his life,
and death itself is ultimately lived as an illuminating epiphany.
Ivan’s joyful last words to himself--
“Death is finished. It is no more”
—seem to echo with redemptive simplicity
the famous line of Donne’s sonnet:
For, those, whom thou think'st, thou dost overthrow,
Die not, poore death, nor yet canst thou kill mee.
Victor Brombert: Musings on Mortality:
From Tolstoy to Primo Levi
All occultists recognize
in the transformation stages of the caterpillar-chrysalis-butterfly
a picture of the transformation
which awaits every mortal man and woman.
For death to the human being
is no more a termination or cessation
than is the death-sleep of the caterpillar.
In neither case
does life cease for even a single instant--
life persists while Nature works her changes.
Yogi Ramacharaka.
The Life Beyond Death
To come to the end of suffering,
to experience the beginning of the end,
you must go through a type of death.
Many spiritual traditions have taught this:
you must “die” before you physically die
so that you can truly live.
If you’ve ever been with somebody who’s close to physical death
and who has also completely let go,
you know what a state of freedom this can be.
It’s such an amazing, paradoxical moment,
because there the person is, knowing they’re going to die,
and yet they knew it all along.
They knew it their whole life.
They knew they were going to die, but they didn’t really know
it until they got some terminal disease,
for example, or until the doctor said,
“You’ve got six months to live.”
For others, the knowledge of death is a certainty:
“I’m not going to make it out of here alive.”
With most people, however,
whether they’ve embraced the idea of death all along or not,
there’s a turn at the very seat of their consciousness when death looms.
What seemed the most horrible thing that could ever happen
—physical death--
is seen in such a lightness.
For some people who are confronted with the immovable barrier of death,
death actually becomes their avenue to spiritual awakening
and the end of suffering.
Adyashanti. Falling into Grace
I wanted to see spirits.
I begged for it.
WHY? I am a believer, why can’t I see spirits?
Then once I got the ability to sense spirit activity it scared me.
Once I turned it on, I could not turn it off.
I do not see people shapes.
I just see sparks.
They look like the sparks you see when someone is flicking a lighter.
They are there and then gone.
They zip around the room.
When my aunt was dying
they were in the room constantly.
Lizzy Miles: Somewhere In Between:
The Hokey Pokey, Chocolate Cake and The Shared Death Experience
“Teacher,” you say carefully,
“I do not understand the doctrine of rebirth.
If there is no independent soul,
then when we die, does anything survive us?”
“It is simply this,” Zenjo responds quietly.
“There is no death.”
“But,” you object, “does not the body cease to breathe,
and does not the body then decay,
and can the mind exist without the body?”
Zenjo looks down at his ancient frame, and almost smiles.
“The body does decay.”
After a moment of silence, he continues.
“The mind? The mind is not separate from the body.”
“Then what continues when you die?”
“You do not continue. Nor do you end.
Who are you, anyway?”
You are silent.
Anthony Aguirre: Cosmological Koans:
A Journey to the Heart of Physical Reality
One short sleep past, we wake eternally
And death shall be no more; Death, thou shalt die.
John Donne
Death be not proud, though some have called thee
Mighty and dreadfull, for, thou art not soe,
For, those, whom thou think'st, thou dost overthrow,
Die not, poore death, nor yet canst thou kill mee.
John Donne
The most incredible common element that I found
(researching Near Death Experiences)
and the one that had the greatest effect on the individual
is the encounter with a very bright light,
one that is most often described as a “being of light.”
This being first appeared as a dim light
and then became rapidly brighter
until it reached an unearthly brilliance.
Often described as “Jesus,” “God,” or an “angel”
by those with religious training,
the light communicates with the individual
(sometimes in a language they have never heard)
often asking them if they are “ready to die,”
or what their accomplishments are.
The being of light does not ask these questions in a judgmental way.
Rather it asks Socratic questions,
ones aimed at acquiring information
that can help the person proceed along a path of truth and self realization.
The light or being of light
is described as “unimaginable” or “indescribable”
as well as “funny,” “pleasant,” or “secure.”
Raymond Moody:
Paranormal: My Life in Pursuit of the Afterlife
While it is certainly theoretically possible
to carry on an intimate relationship with family after one dies,
one’s circumstances are radically altered after death,
and the best way to love and help them generally
is to move ahead yourself with the task at hand.
If the relationship beyond the grave becomes a fixation,
then it distracts both parties from living in the present.
Leaving the physical body is a quantum leap forward in your evolution,
and you cannot take full advantage of that growth
if you are preoccupied with the relating to the physical realm.
A certain degree of continued exchange of love and guidance
on the subtle levels of existence is natural and appropriate.
Deepak Chopra:
Ask Deepak About Death and Dying
Between death and a new birth
we exist in relationship with the facts,
happenings, and beings of a supersensory world.
Human beings have an occupation or activity
in the physical world between birth and death;
likewise, they have activities-occupations
between death and a new birth.
What we can learn about human life and human activity
between death and a new birth
will lead humanity more and more toward
what we may call the overcoming of "the abyss" that,
especially in our materialistic times,
separates those who live on earth
from those whom we call the "dead."
In this process,
communication and a mutual entering-into-relationship
will increasingly come to be established
between the living and the "dead."
Rudolf Steiner; Christopher Bamford:
Staying Connected :
How to Continue Your Relationships With Those Who Have Died
What good is it to desire an empty and unreal illusion?
What good will it do me to cling
to an unreal apparition as if it were solid and could protect me?
What am I afraid of?
There is nothing real besides myself as the Clear Shining Light,
and so there is nothing that can hurt me,
because there is nothing to hurt.
I have been pretending that what is real is unreal,
and that what doesn’t exist does exist.
Can it be that I need something to exist so desperately
that I am willing todo this to myself?
Since all these things are simply the images
which I place on my own essential self,
the void itself,
there is no sense in clinging to them.
Even the essential self itself,
the void of the void,
is nonexistent in reality,
and has been nonexistent from the very beginning.
Even this voice, this teaching and the necessity for it
are nonexistent.
There never was nor will there ever be a world,
nor have there ever been or ever will be
six lower dimensions of inhabitants
in which to be born.
John C. Lilly; E. J. Gold; Claudio Naranjo:
American Book of the Dead
No matter what I think is happening
or what I think I see,
I am only the Clear Shining Light.
The Father-Mother, the storms, the thunder,
the whirlwind, the terrifying apparitions,
the guides and my fears are only the thought-forms
of my consciousness folding and unfolding.
Whatever I have experienced on any realm
is only the projection of my own consciousness.
The only genuine experience I have ever had
is that of being the Clear Luminous Void of the Void.
No matter what it seems to be,
that is the only reality.
Only I,
the Clear and Shining Void,
am real.
John C.Lilly; E. J. Gold; Claudio Naranjo.
American Book of the Dead
The profound question of our age:
Is protracted dying the necessary cost of extended living?
Who owns your dying?
Who controls?
What is required of you, and of me, to die in peace?
Want to die at peace?
Got to die in peace.
Rainer Maria Rilke, the 20th century poet,
said it beautifully and succinctly in his masterwork, The Sonnets to Orpheus:
Be ahead of all parting.
Yes, it’s a challenge, but guess what?
You’re young—or young at heart;
we’ve got the time and we can do it.
It’s up to each of us, and all of us,
to change this paradigm.
Bart Windrum:
The Promised Landing: A Gateway to Peaceful Dying
www.axiomaction.com
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,
%