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