Welcome to Death Knells
​

The Death of Fearing Death

This site shares Life-affirming meditations
that heal misconceptions about Death.
Living beautifully and dying beautifully,
Embrace Death as our Birth
​into limitless Life Awareness.

Follow on Twitter @DeathKnells

Lisa Randall, theoretical physicist from Harvard University,
and Raman Sundrum, theoretical particle physicist
at the Maryland Center for Fundamental Physics,
use a five-dimensional model to explain the phenomena we find in dying.
At death,
the four-dimensional aspect of reality changes into the fifth dimension.
So, as we approach death,
the ELE phenomena will be available to the four-dimensional brain
on “special occasions” when the fifth dimension can be accessed to some extent,
as the structures within the brain weaken and allow it.
This would also explain the NDEs during cardiac arrest.
David Lawton, who has made studies of the NDE,
has also argued that death is simply the withdrawal of the 4D part
(with space-time being the fourth dimension),
leaving the 5D intact.
(If five dimensions seems difficult to cope with,
then remember that the string theory of reality
postulates an eleven-dimensional reality.) 

Leslie Kean
Surviving Death






If we are to ask about the location of the dead relatives,
the dying would answer
that their location is in the domain of transcendence.
So the question now becomes, where is this domain?
There are a number of theories
that postulate that this Newtonian/Einsteinian world we live in
is four-dimensional (three of space and one of time)
and is not a complete description of reality.
It has been suggested by the astrophysicist Bernard Carr,
professor of mathematics and astronomy at Queen Mary University of London,
that the world is in fact a five-dimensional matrix
and that it is within the fifth dimension
that these conscious experiences are stored.


Leslie Kean
​ Surviving Death








The human mystery
is incredibly demeaned by scientific reductionism,
with its claim in promissory materialism,
to account eventually for all of the spiritual world
in terms of patterns of neuronal activity.
This belief must be classed as a superstition.
We have to recognize
that we are spiritual beings with souls
existing in a spiritual world
as well as material beings with bodies and brains
existing in a material world.

Sir John Eccles
Nobel Prize winning neurophysiologist and philosopher
quoted in
Leslie Kean
Surviving Death



The fear of death
also comes from the fallacy of believing oneself to be the body.
Those who are suffering from this fear start chanting
“The soul is immortal, the soul is immortal.”
In this way, the fearful and weak seek refuge.
But both these concepts are born
out of one and the same misunderstanding.
They are two forms of the same misunderstanding
and two different reactions from two different types of people.
But remember:
both types have the same misunderstanding,
and in both cases
​the same misunderstanding is strengthened.

Osho
Love Letters to Life






One who comes to know life comes to know all.
He comes to know death too,
because death is nothing but a misunderstanding
born out of not knowing life.
One who does not know life
naturally believes his body to be his very self.
Because the body dies, the body perishes,
the entity called the body disappears,
the idea that death is a final end came into being.
Those who are foolhardy live by this belief.

Osho
Love Letters to Life






The average person assumes
that the aging of the body is the aging of themselves,
but when you awaken the consciousness a little,
you realise that you are not your body.
Yes, the body is aging,
and ultimately will fade away,
but that which is observing,
the conscious entity,
knows it will not die.
It is eternal.
There is no death for that.
Death is only for the physical.
This is why people who have had some experience
of things of a spiritual nature are not afraid of dying –
because they know it gives release
from the imprisonment of the physical body.
The body is a prison –
you’re stuck with it until you die.
But you can reach a higher level of consciousness
which doesn’t need to come back to the physical
​to learn any lessons through it.

Russel Williams
Not I, Not other than I
The Life And Teachings Of Russel Williams





We are universally young and becoming,
not getting old and dying,
though the body is aging.
If you cling wholly to the physical,
you might feel that you are dying,
that your body is aging, getting weaker,
and you will obviously pass and leave this world.
But the consciousness is still young
and it is not concerned or afraid.
It senses that when death occurs
​ it will be released.

Russel Williams
Not I, Not other than I
The Life And Teachings Of Russel Williams





When my father died I was quite content,
because somehow I knew that death was not the end,
and I knew he was still around,
and in a better place.
And I felt the same with my mother.
I sensed it –
I was aware of the exact moment when she died,
at about three o’clock in the afternoon,
while I was at the factory.
I was happy for her too,
because I knew she was clear;
I knew she was free of suffering.
It left a big hole, a big sense of loss,
​but I knew it was for the best.

Russel Williams
Not I, Not other than I
The Life And Teachings Of Russel Williams



The key to the powerful transformation
that the initiates experienced in the course of the Eleusinian mysteries
was the sacred potion kykeon,
capable of inducing visions of the afterlife so powerful
that it changed the way participants saw the world and their place in it.
They were freed from the fear of death
through the recognition that they were immortal souls
temporarily in mortal bodies.

Stanislav Grof
The Way of the Psychonaut Volume One:
Encyclopedia for Inner Journeys





When Death Comes

When death comes
like the hungry bear in autumn;
when death comes and takes all the bright coins from his purse

to buy me, and snaps the purse shut;
when death comes
like the measle-pox;

when death comes
like an iceberg between the shoulder blades,

I want to step through the door full of curiosity, wondering:
what is it going to be like, that cottage of darkness?

And therefore I look upon everything
as a brotherhood and a sisterhood,
and I look upon time as no more than an idea,
and I consider eternity as another possibility,

and I think of each life as a flower, as common
as a field daisy, and as singular,

and each name a comfortable music in the mouth,
tending, as all music does, toward silence,

and each body a lion of courage, and something
precious to the earth.

When it’s over, I want to say: all my life
I was a bride married to amazement.
I was the bridegroom, taking the world into my arms.

When it’s over, I don’t want to wonder
if I have made of my life something particular, and real.
I don’t want to find myself sighing and frightened,
or full of argument.

I don’t want to end up simply having visited this world.

Mary Oliver






The more you close yourself off to something,
the more you close yourself off to everything.
And the more closed off you are,
the less information you gather,
the less desire you feel,
the less summoning you do.
And when a person begins
closing themselves off systematically in that way,
they find themselves
closer and closer to the death experience.
Nothing opens you up to receive
​ like the death experience.

Daniel Scranton
Ascension: The Shift to the Fifth Dimension,
Volume 1: The Arcturian Council










I’ve never known how to tan or sew,
though people come to me for shoes.
I haven’t the needle to make the holes
or even the tool to cut the thread.
Others stitch and know, and tie themselves in knots
while I, who do not knot, break free.
I keep saying Ram and Ram, says Ravidas,
and Death keeps his business to himself.

Ravidas
John Stratton Hawley and Mark Juergensmeyer

Arundhathi Subramaniam
Eating God








The ego arises by identification with form,
and deep down it knows that no forms are permanent,
that they are all fleeting.
So there is always a sense of insecurity around the ego
even if on the outside it appears confident.
Once you realize and accept
that all structures (forms) are unstable,
even the seemingly solid material ones,
peace arises within you.
This is because
the recognition of the impermanence of all forms
awakens you to the dimension of the formless within yourself,
that which is beyond death.
​Jesus called it “eternal life.”

Eckhart Tolle
A New Earth


​



Death is a fiction of the unaware.
There is only life,
life, and life alone,
moving from one dimension to another.
If we cannot celebrate death as we celebrate birth,
we will not know life.

Sadhguru






I just want to stay alive and play music,
especially after Nirvana.
When Kurt died,
I truly woke up the next day
and felt so lucky to be alive,
and so heartbroken
that someone can just disappear.
I decided to take advantage of that,
for the rest of my life.

Dave Grohl
New York Times





Due to the multitude of belief systems on Earth,
various humans have very different, and often opposing ideas
of what happens after physical death.
We can assure you of this:
Your consciousness will survive after you die.
Why?
Because consciousness isn’t produced by the physical world.
The physical world is produced by consciousness.
How do we know this to be true?
Well, for my people, it’s an experiential fact.

Darryl Anka
The Masters of Limitation:
An ET's Observations of Earth




Mukti is also called Mahasamadhi.
Mahasamadhi means one is able to walk out of one’s body,
consciously, without damaging it.
Generally, if you want to leave the body,
you cannot come out of it
unless you damage the body in some way.
Unless you make the body unsuitable
to cradle the life that is within,
life will not leave.
When things go bad,
people say, ‘I want to die,’
but they don’t, because they cannot.
Mahasamadhi means
without using any other external means,
you leave the body at will.
For someone to be able to do this,
it needs tremendous energy.
Such a person knows where the body is connected to life,
​and they untie it and leave.

Sadhguru
Death: An Inside Story






Mukti means
you want to become free from the process of life and death,
not because you are suffering.
People who are suffering cannot attain mukti.
You are fine, you are joyful,
but you have had enough of kindergarten,
you want to move on.
However beautiful your school life was,
don’t you want to go to college?
That is all.
Death means the end of the physical body;
everything else continues and find another body soon;
whereas with mukti everything comes to an end.
In a way, mukti is the end of death--
​and of birth as well.

Sadhguru
Death: An Inside Story



Mourning is not the index of true love.
It betrays love of the object,
of its shape only.
That is not love.
True love is shown
by the certainty that the object of love is in the Self
and that it can never become non-existent.
There will be no pain
if the physical outlook is given up
and if the person exists as the Self.

Ramana Maharshi



The shock of the fear of death
drove my mind inwards
and I said to myself mentally, without actually framing the words:
‘Now that death has come; what does it mean?
What is it that is dying?
This body dies . . .
But with the death of the body am I dead?
Is the body I? . . .
The body dies
but the Spirit that transcends it
cannot be touched by death.
That means I am the deathless Spirit.’
All this was not dull thought;
it flashed through me vividly
as living truth which I perceived directly. . .
From that moment onwards
the ‘I’ or Self focused attention on itself
by a powerful fascination.
Fear of death had vanished once and for all.
Absorption in the Self
​ continued unbroken from that time on.

Ramana Maharshi








Accepting the existence of NDEs
means accepting the inevitability of our own death.
This is a key step to releasing our fear of death –
we know death will happen, we accept it will happen
and we know from the NDE accounts
that it need not be anything to be afraid of.
(Many NDErs believe that they have actually experienced death –
they have already died,
and now that they have come back to life
they know what to expect when death does eventually come.)
And it is a well-known psychological fact
that when we confront our fears
they usually begin to disappear.

Penny Sartori
What Is a Near-Death Experience?






With the One Who Knows

Life and death live in me at once
Never held one above the other

When one stands far, life I offer
In closeness, only death I deal

In death of the limited
Will the deathless be

How to tell the fools
Of my taintless evil.

Sadhguru
Mystic's Musings






Out-of-body explorers simply do not fear death.
They fully understand
that death is a natural and exciting transition of consciousness.
They have a tremendous advantage
over the fearful masses that cling to the density of flesh.
This is important for many reasons.
Out-of-body explorers are prepared
for the thought-responsive dimensions that await us.
They are not paralyzed by fear and negativity
or imprisoned by the limits of the body.
As they grow spiritually from their experiences,
they recognize and use their multidimensional abilities on a regular basis.
This is evident when Paul states in the New Testament,
“I die daily.”
Maybe today he would say,
“I leave my body daily.”

William Buhlman
The Secret of the Soul





In addition to ancient spiritual teachings,
dramatic evidence obtained from out-of-body explorations
provides a new perception of death and dying.
The ultimate journey and destination of soul
is not a simple predestined event that we must endure,
but a highly creative process.
At death we are not powerless victims,
but rather interactive participants
in a wondrous and natural transition of consciousness.
Let us awaken to a new vision of death and dying.

William Buhlman
The Secret of the Soul
www.astralinfo.org


Throughout the Tibetan Book of the Dead,
the basic premise of the instruction
is to direct our awareness to the “Clear Light”
beyond all three-dimensional concepts of shape and form.
This point is emphasized again with the phrase
“transparent vacuum without circumference or centre.”
The Tibetan masters clearly understood
that most people experience the Bardo state
(i.e., the astral state and body) immediately following death.
They are essentially instructing the dying
to focus their undivided attention upon their formless spiritual essence
that exists far beyond the astral, or Bardo, body.
They are directing the soul to bypass the astral plane
​and embrace the formless essence of pure spirit.

William Buhlman
The Secret of the Soul
www.astralinfo.org
​








Those who are wise have no life.
Not because they slight it,
but because they don’t possess it.
If someone has no life,
how can they be killed?
Those who understand this
can transcend change
​and make of life and death a game.

Chiao Hung
Red Pine
Lao-tzu's Taoteching





Those who guard their life
don’t cultivate life but what controls life.
What has life is form.
What controls life is nature.
When we cultivate our nature,
we return to what is real
​and forget bodily form.
Once we forget form,
our self becomes empty.
Once our self is empty,
nothing can harm.

Te-Ch'ing
Red Pine
Lao-tzu's Taoteching






Among ten people,
three seek life because they hate death,
three seek death because they hate life,
and three live as if they were dead.
Leaving the sage,
who neither hates death nor loves life,
​but who thus lives long.

Wang Pi
Red Pine
Lao-tzu's Taoteching




Appearing means life
disappearing means death
thirteen are the followers of life
thirteen are the followers of death
but people living to live
move toward the land of death’s thirteen
and why is this so
because they live to live
it’s said that those who guard life well
aren’t injured by soldiers in battle
or harmed by rhinos or tigers in the wild
for rhinos find nowhere to stick their horns
tigers find nowhere to sink their claws
and soldiers find nowhere to thrust their spears
and why is this so
because for them there’s no land of death

Red Pine
Lao-Tzu
Lao-tzu's Taoteching







DW: What surprised you the most about becoming an end of life doula?
MA: I was surprised that it wasn’t about death.
I really expected to be matched with someone
who would want to talk about death
and their impending nonexistence each time I saw him or her.
Instead I was matched with someone who I visited for three and a half years
and maybe he brought it up once.
The experience was much more about getting to know someone
and building a relationship
and learning the intricacies of human attachment and love
than it was about dying.


Excerpt from Death Writer Interview with Mara Altman









Do not make a distinction between the first step and the last step.
If you made a distinction in the beginning,
and you are towards the last steps,
at least now you must learn.
It does not matter whether you have another hundred steps to walk
or just one--
walk the same way, don’t make the distinction.
People say,
“At least towards the end of your life, you must think about God.”
If you have lived your life so blindly
that you did not look at anything,
and the last moment you say,
“Ram, Ram,” and think everything will be okay,
no,
it does not work like that.

Sadhguru
Life and Death In One Breath



Remember,
only that which you can take with you when you leave the body is important.
That means, except meditation, nothing is important.
Except awareness, nothing is important,
because only awareness cannot be taken away by death.
Everything else will be snatched away,
because everything else comes from without.
You will be taking with you
only whatsoever awareness you have attained.
​ That is your only real wealth.

Osho


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?

AJAHN CHAH
quoted in:
Koshin Paley Ellison and Matt Weingast.
​Awake at the Bedside: Contemplative Teachings on Palliative and End-of-Life Care




The spiritual process
means cranking up aliveness to such a peak
that both life and death disappear from you.
Then there is no distinction between the two for you.

Sadhguru
Don't Polish Your Ignorance...It May Shine








Another manifestation of Death

Silence is difficult and arduous;
it is not to be played with.
It isn't something that you can experience by reading a book,
or by listening to a talk, or by sitting together,
or by retiring into a wood or a monastery.
I am afraid none of these things will bring about this silence.
This silence demands intense psychological work.
You have to be burningly aware -
aware of your speech, aware of your snobbishness,
aware of your fears, your anxieties, your sense of guilt.
And when you die to all that,
then out of that dying comes the beauty of silence.

Krishnamurti








We're all going to die,
all of us, what a circus!
That alone should make us love each other
but it doesn't.
We are terrorized and flattened by trivialities,
​ we are eaten up by nothing.

Charles Bukowski



The reason why you lower your levels of aliveness
is because in death there is safety and tremendous security.
Though people are afraid of death,
they are always seeking it, courting it in many ways,
because death is such a relief.
They do not have the courage to simply step into it,
but they are courting it all the time.
They want it, because that saves them
​from all the turmoil and struggle of life.

Sadhguru
Don't Polish Your Ignorance...It May Shine








I often get asked about the best time to prepare for death.
The person asking the question usually already knows the answer --
an answer most of us do not want to hear --
that preparing for death begins right now,
this very moment.
We cannot wait for later, because later may never happen.
We do need to train our busy monkey-like mind
and learn to become more and more present,
in the pure awareness of the here and now.
If we don’t train the mind to not be distracted,
we could easily miss the opportunity
​ to fully participate in what unfolds at the moment of death.

Kirsten DeLeo
featured in
Koshin Paley Ellison and Matt Weingast.
Awake at the Bedside:
Contemplative Teachings on Palliative and End-of-Life Care






What happens after death
is so unspeakably glorious
that our imagination and our feelings do not suffice
to form even an approximate conception of it.
The dissolution of our time-bound form in eternity
brings no loss of meaning.

Carl Jung



Impermanence hurts…
but the reason we contemplate death and destruction
is not that we love to feel down.
We do it because it gives us the courage and strength
to look at the world with love and compassion.
Love and compassion heal the mind.
When we look at the world with loving eyes,
​ all harmful thoughts and emotions vanish naturally.

Chokyi Nyima Rinpoche
Sadness, Love, Openness




those who aren’t affected by death live long

Lao Tzu
Taoteching




Do you fear death?

No, not particularly.
I ought to be thinking more about it
because people are going to clear up after me.
I’m not entirely indifferent to material objects,
and I think about my poor son and daughter
who are going to have clear it all up.
That’s my main concern really.
​
David Attenborough
David Attenborough Still Has Hope for Our Future
New York Times, 29 December 2020






I joyfully hasten to meet Death.
If he comes before I have had the opportunity of developing all my artistic powers,
then, notwithstanding my cruel fate, he will come too early for me,
and I should wish for him at a more distant period;
but even then I shall be content,
for his advent will release me from a state of endless suffering.
Come when he may,
I shall meet him with courage.
Farewell!
Do not quite forget me,
even in death.

Beethoven
in a letter to his brothers




What are we really looking for?
What is actually achievable in this life?
What do we get out of all the things we do?
When this life is over, we can’t take anything with us.
Forget about money and possessions--
we can’t even bring the people we love the most.
This life culminates in a forced and final separation
from everything and everyone we have ever loved and held dear.
We have pushed ourselves so hard to get something out of this life.
We have been swimming in a sea of thoughts and ideas.
And maybe we have achieved a lot.
Maybe we have money in the bank.
Perhaps we are popular and have plenty of friends and a loving family.
But whatever we might have,
we will have to bid it all farewell
on the day death comes knocking on our door.

Chokyi Nyima Rinpoche
Sadness, Love, Openness






What will be left of all the fearing and wanting
associated with your problematic life situation
that every day takes up most of your attention?
A dash — one or two inches long,
between the date of birth
and date of death on your gravestone.
To the egoic self, this is a depressing thought.
​To you, it is liberating.

Eckhart Tolle
Stillness Speaks





What is death?
I’ve thought a lot about the question,
though it took me many years of practicing medicine
even to realize that I needed to ask it.
Like almost anyone,
I figured death was a simple fact, a singular event.
A noun. Obnoxious,
but clearer in its borders than just about anything else.
The End.
In fact, no matter how many times I’ve sidled up to it,
or how many words I’ve tried on,
I still can’t say what it is.
If we strip away the poetry and appliqué
our culture uses to try to make sense of death --
all the sanctity and style we impose on the wild, holy trip of a life
that begins, rises and falls apart --
we are left with a husk of a body.
No pulse, no brain waves, no inspiration,
no explanation.
Death is defined by what it lacks.

BJ Miller
What Is Death?
New York Times,
20 December 2020





Evidence obtained from out-of-body explorations
provides a new perception of death and dying.
The ultimate journey and destination of soul
is not a simple predestined event that we must endure,
but a highly creative process.
At death we are not powerless victims,
but rather interactive participants
in a wondrous and natural transition of consciousness.
Let us awaken to a new vision of death and dying.

William Buhlman
The Secret of the Soul




Many mystics have told us
that there’s no reason to be afraid of death,
not just because life continues
but because the process of ‘dropping off’ the material body
is a euphoric, liberating experience.
D. H. Lawrence saw death as the beginning of a ‘great adventure’
in which — as he writes in his poem ‘Gladness of Death’ --
‘the winds of the afterwards kiss us into the blossom of manhood’.
After the painful experience of dying there is, he writes,
‘an after-gladness, a strange joy’.
In a similar way, Walt Whitman
heard ‘whispers of heavenly death’ around him and wrote that
​ ‘To die is different from what any one supposed, and luckier.’

Steve Taylor
Waking From Sleep







All saints, when it is their time,
succumb to the laws governing physical death.
But a saint is not attached to his body/mind
in a way losing them will cause suffering.
It’s like returning home after a walk on a wintry day
and slipping off an old overcoat for the last time.
Your awareness then easily turns to the warmth of your inner abode
and the overcoat is simply forgotten.

Frank Kinslow
The Secret of Quantum Living






My perception has changed
since I have become conversant with Self.
I used to fight aging and illness and deny my mortality.
Now the thought of death is oddly comforting.
As I age and the reality of losing my body/mind becomes more palpable
(and many maintain that I am halfway there
for they are certain I have already lost my mind),
I observe those symptoms of aging
with a kind of curious detachment or even fondness
for a natural process that all life innately understands.

Frank Kinslow
The Secret of Quantum Living




In my view, what happens after death is a flat earth question.
Worrying about what happens to us when we die
is like worrying about what happens to us if we fall off the edge of the earth.
People used to worry about that,
but their fear was based on a misunderstanding.
Just as there is no edge to the earth,
there is no actual boundary,
no edge where life begins or ends.
The things we are worrying about
are all conceptual abstractions,
artificially pulled out of the whole.
Like the lines on a map dividing up the whole earth,
birth and death are artificial dividing lines on an indivisible reality.

Joan Tollifson
Death: The End of Self-Improvement





Our physical being is a unified entity only to outward, sense perception.
In fact, we are continually harnessed between powers
that, respectively, rejuvenate us and make us old,
powers of birth and powers of death.
At no single moment of life
is only one of these powers present in our body.
They are both always there.

Rudolf Steiner
Growing Old


Ego is identification with form.
When there is nothing to identify with anymore,
who are you?
When forms around you die or death approaches,
your sense of Beingness, of I Am,
is freed from its entanglement with form:
Spirit is released from its imprisonment in matter.
You realize your essential identity as formless,
as an all-pervasive Presence,
of Being prior to all forms,
all identifications.
You realize your true identity as consciousness itself,
rather than what consciousness had identified with.
That’s the peace of God.
The ultimate truth
​of who you are
is not I am this or I am that,
but I Am.

Eckhart Tolle
A New Earth







It seems that in India people aren’t bothered by danger.
It’s not that they aren’t bothered about danger.
It’s definitely true that the longing to survive,
the need to survive and the conscious urge to survive
are stronger in the West than here.
Here, if death comes,
people take it so much more easily than people there do.
Since Western cultures are young,
the survival instinct there is strong.
After ten thousand years, they will also be this way,
because by then physical wellbeing and social wellbeing
won’t mean as much to them;
they will be looking for other dimensions.
It’s unfortunate that cultures have to take so long to realize this.
Generally cultures may take a long time,
but individuals need not take that long.
Out of your intelligence you can see it right now,
​and the spiritual process is always individual.

Sadhguru
Mystic's Musings









Morning commuters in suits
will sink softly into slumber behind their steering wheels.
Highways, locomotives, and subways will slow to a muted halt.
Office workers will make themselves drowsily comfortable
on the floors and hallways of their tall buildings.
The squares of the world’s capitals will drift into silence.
Farmers in their wheat fields will doze off
as midflight insects touch down softly like snowflakes.
Horses will arrest their gallop and relax into a standing slumber.
Black jaguars in trees
will lower their chins to their paws on the branches.
This is how the world will close,
not with a bang but a yawn:
sleepy and contented,
​our own falling eyelids serving as the curtain for the play’s end.

David Eagleman
Sum




Something dawned on you when you heard the children’s song:
Merrily, merrily, merrily, merrily, life is but a dream.
You began to suspect that you were, perhaps,
a butterfly dreaming it was a human,
or, worse yet,
a brain in a jar experiencing sights and sounds and smells and tastes--
all of them but dreamstuff.
And so you waited for death in order to wake up,
in order to find out whether you were strapped with spotted wings
or surrounded by a glass jar.
But it turns out you missed the mark.
It is not life that is a dream;
it is death that is a dream.

David Eagleman
Sum






Dolphins,
I learned from Dr. William Worden
of the Harvard Child Bereavement Study at Massachusetts General Hospital,
had been observed refusing to eat after the death of a mate.
Geese had been observed reacting to such a death
by flying and calling,
​ searching until they themselves became disoriented and lost.

Joan Didion
The Year of Magical Thinking







Philippe Ariès, in The Hour of Our Death,
points out that the essential characteristic of death
as it appears in the Chanson de Roland is that the death,
even if sudden or accidental,
“gives advance warning of its arrival.”
Gawain is asked:
“Ah, good my lord, think you then so soon to die?”
Gawain answers:
“I tell you that I shall not live two days.”
Ariès notes:
“Neither his doctor nor his friends
nor the priests (the latter are absent and forgotten)
know as much about it as he.
​ Only the dying man can tell how much time he has left.”

Joan Didion
The Year of Magical Thinking







Q: When this human organism dies, what happens to it?
Is it absorbed back into What Is?
Wayne: The organism was never separate from What Is.
You can’t be absorbed back into something you were never separate from.
What actually happens when the human organism dies,
the surrounding human organisms hasten to get rid of it.
It becomes a nuisance very quickly.
Burn it or bury it, or leave it out for the birds to eat;
do something with it!
Once the body is disposed of,
then everybody can get on with their grief and their life.
The organism itself returns to its constituent elemental parts.
The elemental molecules of the body
will be recycled into other organisms,
and perhaps become part of other life forms.
That’s what happens to the body
but is the body what you are?
That’s the real question.

Wayne Liquorman
ENLIGHTENMENT IS NOT WHAT YOU THINK








Man has identified himself with this little body
and thinks he is it.
The day will come when he has to discard it
because he has worn it out.
As he discards it
all of his friends think he died.
He didn't die,
for he can't die.
He is an immortal being
​ who wore a garment of flesh and blood.

Neville
The Immortal Man




I may make my exit tonight with an unfulfilled desire,
which I think I am eager to see realized.
It doesn't matter, for I will realize it.
I will find myself in a world just as solid and real as this,
and all of my dreams will come to pass
​in the world into which I go.

Neville
The Immortal Man







Now you may say, "Suppose I die tonight."
May I tell you there is no death.
You wonder why everyone has such different beginnings in the world?
Because this is not the beginning at all.
You didn't begin in your mother's womb
​ and you don't end in the grave.

Neville
The Immortal Man







So there is no such thing as “my life,”
and I don’t have a life.
I am life.
I and life are one.
It cannot be otherwise.
So how could I lose my life?
How can I lose something
that I don’t have in the first place?
How can I lose something
that I Am?
​ It is impossible.

Eckhart Tolle
A New Earth








Life itself becomes conceptualized and separated from who you are
when you speak of “my life.”
The moment you say or think “my life” and believe in what you are saying
(rather than it just being a linguistic convention),
you have entered the realm of delusion.
If there is such a thing as “my life,”
it follows that I and life are two separate things,
and so I can also lose my life,
my imaginary treasured possession.
Death becomes a seeming reality and a threat.

Eckhart Tolle
A New Earth




No one knows for sure what happens after death,
and I may be surprised;
but I assume that dying will be just like going to sleep
or going under anesthesia.
Conscious experiencing--
my movie of waking life and the experience of being present--
will vanish as it does every night
in deep sleep or under anesthesia.
And, as in deep sleep,
I won’t be there to miss myself
or my movie of waking life.
The fear of dying only exists during waking life,
and only as a fearful idea.
In deep sleep, the problem--
and the one who seems to have it--
​no longer exist.

Joan Tollifson
Death: The End of Self-Improvement





Now is the time to dig down for questions,
impossible to accept that your powers are so limited,
and impossible to accept
that your own body can’t always behave and respond well.
Life is a mesmerizing mess,
but if you were a proper Christian
you’d find a comforting answer for the finite and infinite,
the temporal and spiritual,
with no grasping insistence that tomorrow, after all,
will not be just another day.
Isn’t it all too burdensome, this life,
with so much loss taking its root in the heart,
as the body goes spinning on towards a dreadful cessation.
You must accept that for a while you are here,
and then one day you are not,
because it’s all part of living.
Accept, accept, accept.
​Accept even the unacceptable.

Morrissey
Autobiography




I see something lies concealed which I cannot see.
He who has won this vision has gained greatly,
inasmuch as he sees things,
not only in their present state of being,
but also in their development and decay.
He begins to see in all things the spirit,
of which the bodily organs of sight have no perception,
and he has taken the initial steps on that road,
which will gradually lead him to the solution,
by direct vision,
of the secret of birth and death.
To the outer senses,
a being begins to exist at its birth,
and ceases to exist at its death.
This, however, only appears to be so,
because these senses are unable to apprehend
​the concealed spirit.
Birth and death are only,
for this spirit,
transformations,
just as the unfolding of the flower from the bud
is a transformation enacted before our physical eyes.

Rudolf Steiner
The Way of Initiation or,
How to Attain Knowledge of the Higher Worlds





There is nothing to fear in death.
Death is a great liberator;
death brings freedom.
You rejoice when babies come into your%2