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.
You can’t take away death,
but you can be there in love and comfort
as the dying person goes through the changes that lead to death.
Sit close enough so that they feel your oneness.
You are serving each other
by helping each other let go of fear.
Alone it is a daunting task;
together you enter something bigger than yourself.
Love is more powerful than fear.
Ram Dass
Walking Each Other Home:
Conversations on Loving and Dying
Dying is the most important thing you do in your life.
It’s the great frontier for every one of us.
And loving is the art of living as a preparation for dying.
Allowing ourselves to dissolve into the ocean of love
is not just about leaving this body;
it is also the route
to Oneness and unity with our own inner being, the soul,
while we are still here.
If you know how to live and to love,
you know how to die.
Ram Dass
Walking Each Other Home:
Conversations on Loving and Dying
I loved my friends.
I loved my life
and I decided to love my death.
Throughout my end-of-life journey,
people marvelled at how comfortable I was with dying,
but I did not leave without sadness.
It’s hard to say goodbye.
Until we meet again,
I leave you with a simple message:
Be kind … because you can.
Audrey Parker
1961-2018
More from Audrey
I knew that if I made peace with my death
and made living well my new path in what was left of my life,
I would have a fabulous end-of-life experience.
I have always liked to do things well
and to the best of my ability,
so I took my death on as a project.
All I wanted was to have a fabulous end-of-life experience
on my terms and to die in style.
After all, death is natural
and can be a beautiful thing
if we allow it to be.
Audrey Parker
1961-2018
More from Audrey
Why is it that we believe
that our first breath is so much more important than our last?
I think society has it backwards.
When I received my unexpected diagnosis of terminal breast cancer,
I thought a lot about my two most important breaths;
I just knew I had to be true to myself
and give as much reverence to my last breath
as was given to my first.
Audrey Parker
1961-2018
More from Audrey
What if you are already dead
and you are viewing this moment,
how would you live this moment?
That is a cardinal rule for masters.
How would this moment be
lived forever and ever and ever?
Ramtha
Defining the Master
Drop all boundaries, become infinite.
Think only in terms of infinity, eternity.
Less than that has never satisfied anybody
and is not going to satisfy anybody – ever.
The boundary of the body has to be dropped.
We are too identified with our bodies.
We think that we are the body, and we are not.
This is the first falsehood that has to be dropped.
Out of this falsehood many other falsehoods arise.
If one is identified with the body,
one will be afraid of old age, disease, death.
Think of yourself as pure consciousness.
You are not the body,
you are the one who is aware of the body.
Osho
Last in the Evening:
365 Relaxing Moments to Enter the Night Consciously
Before death comes,
attain something of eternity,
have a taste of something which is timeless,
deathless;
then death cannot destroy you.
Then you can die dancing, singing, laughing.
And to be able to die singing, laughing, dancing,
is the greatest achievement of life.
Osho
Last in the Evening:
365 Relaxing Moments to Enter the Night Consciously
A very wonderful statement of the necessity, and the difficulty,
of maintaining a connection to one’s own child-self
is Wordsworth’s “Ode on Intimations of Immortality.”
The poem offers a profoundly felt, profoundly thoughtful, radical argument:
Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting . . .
Instead of seeing birth as an awakening from blank nonbeing
and fetal incompletion into the child’s fullness of being,
and seeing maturity as a narrowing, impoverishing journey toward blank death,
the ode proposes that a soul enters life
forgetting its eternal being,
can remember it throughout life
only in intimations and moments of revelation,
and will recall and rejoin it fully only in death.
Ursula K. Le Guin
No Time to Spare: Thinking About What Matters
You have chosen the kind of consciousness
that identifies with the flesh for a certain period of time.
Other species of consciousness --
of a different order entirely,
and with a different rhythm of experience --
would think of a life in your terms as a day,
and have no trouble bridging that gap
between apparent life, death, and new life.
Jane Roberts
The “Unknown” Reality
Volume Two (A Seth Book)
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.”
Again, your own consciousness triumphantly rides above
those deaths that you do not recognize as such.
In your chosen three-dimensional existence,
however, and in those terms,
your consciousness finally recognizes a death.
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
The “Unknown” Reality
Volume Two (A Seth Book)
As we live through thousands of dreams in our present life,
so is our present life only one of many thousands of such lives
which we enter from the other more real life…
and then return after death.
Our life is but one of the dreams of that more real life,
and so it is endlessly,
until the very last one,
the very real life of God.
Leo Tolstoy
Does it not seem an absurd nonsense
that you after death go either to heaven or hell?
Can you picture a person,
although noble in thought, but absolutely unlearned,
to be at once by the side of God?
Do you not recollect the words of Christ:
‘in my Father’s place there are many mansions?’
Do you not recollect Buddha saying
‘you go higher and higher until you are lost?'
That meant to go through innumerable stages,
until you can lose yourself.
It means absolute purification, not annihilation,
and so you become nameless.
Reginald H. Gray, David J. Dye
Messages From Beyond The Veil:
Spiritual Guidance For Our Human Experience
I’ve never cried as much as I have here.
Or laughed.
I thought I knew what to expect when I died
—you know, either “God, judgment, a few deceased relatives”
or “lights out, game over, absolute nothingness”—but I had no idea.
Nothing could have prepared me for all I’ve found.
How the whole world had it so wrong is beyond me.
If I had had just an inkling of the truth about life
and what I now know while I was alive,
things would have been so different for me!
Imagine living amid the all-or-nothing romance of time and space
while learning how to change what you don’t like,
add more of what you do,
and never be afraid of anything!
Where everything is so precious, ephemeral, and fantastic!
Where there is so much love, love, love,
everywhere, always.
Why didn’t I see it then?
Mike Dooley
The Top Ten Things Dead People Want to Tell YOU
Death will be the gateway
to being more “alive” than you now suspect is possible.
Mike Dooley
The Top Ten Things Dead People Want to Tell YOU
All mourn death,
when, in fact, death is to be celebrated.
It is the moving forward of the soul
to another strata of expression.
You are weeping for your own grief, your own loss,
not the tragedy of the passing
but what the passing means to the individual.
Everyone leaves in divine appointment.
The soul is always aware
of the exit from this plane to the new
and does not mourn the life lived,
but understands it through the learning it has amassed
through the new agreements made to be realized in a higher way.
Every lifetime is opportunity.
Every encounter--
an easy one or a less easy one--
is an opportunity for progression.
Paul Selig
Alchemy
We need to honour the dying experience
and nurture it by paying it full attention, kindness and love,
emptying our minds
and really concentrating on what is unfolding.
As we do this,
we naturally become softer, more compassionate,
peaceful, loving and kinder
and able to really reach out to the person who is dying
with an open and loving heart.
Intimacy is sacred – a secret trust –
a soulful commitment.
Don’t go in with your own baggage,
just observe the mystery of the other person.
People ask me if I experience fear or sorrow while I work–
none of that manifests when I’m with the dying person.
It’s their time, not mine.
Any burden or sorrow or wounds of your own disappear.
You hold the person and keep vigil
while they quietly, almost invisibly,
shimmer an indescribable membrane of light.
Shauna Ray
quoted in:
Felicity Warner
A Safe Journey Home: The simple guide to achieving a peaceful death
One day your body will return to the Earthly Mother;
even also your ears and your eyes.
But the Holy Stream of Life,
the Holy Stream of Sound,
and the Holy Stream of Light,
these were never born,
and can never die.
The Essene Gospel of Peace
Gregg Braden
The Wisdom Codes
There is no seed of a god which has perished,
neither has he who belongs to him.
You will not perish,
who belongs to him.
The Unas Pyramid Texts
Utterance 213, Verse 145
Gregg Braden
The Wisdom Codes
The soul is not born, nor does it die.
It did not spring from something,
and nothing sprang from it.
It is unborn, eternal, immortal, and ageless.
It is not destroyed
when the body is destroyed.
Katha Upanishad
Gregg Braden
The Wisdom Codes
Love After Love
The time will come
when, with elation
you will greet yourself arriving
at your own door, in your own mirror
and each will smile at the other's welcome,
and say, sit here. Eat.
You will love again the stranger who was your self.
Give wine. Give bread. Give back your heart
to itself, to the stranger who has loved you
all your life, whom you ignored
for another, who knows you by heart.
Take down the love letters from the bookshelf,
the photographs, the desperate notes,
peel your own image from the mirror.
Sit. Feast on your life.
Derek Walcott
When, dear one, a person dies,
his voice is absorbed into his mind;
his mind into his breath;
his breath into heat;
and heat into formless Spirit.
That is the Real.
That is the essence of this whole world.
That thou art.
Chandogya Upanishad
If you understand that the what that you are,
in high octave, in high vibrational accord,
is not relinquished in death,
but made new in a transition to a higher frequency,
you will lose the fear of mortality.
Paul Selig
Beyond the Known: Realization
Most of us to live out our lives under a comforting but dangerous delusion―
namely, that death will not come to us any time soon;
that it is something which will happen only in some distant future;
and that, consequently,
there is nothing we need do to prepare for it now.
Thus, when the legendary Hindu king, Yudhishthira, was asked,
“What is the greatest wonder in the world?” he replied:
“All around us people die everyday
and yet no one believes it will happen to them.”
Joel Norwood
Through Death’s Gate: A Guide to Selfless Dying
In reality, there is no death
because there is no individual ‘self’ or ‘I’ who could die.
In reality, there is only that Primordial Consciousness or God
which, though appearing in myriad forms,
is Itself empty of all forms
and therefore without birth or death.
This Consciousness is who I am.
This Consciousness is also who you are.
Thus, whether you Realize it or not,
your sense of being a separate self is a delusion,
and ultimately,
so is the death of that ‘self’.
Joel Norwood
Through Death’s Gate: A Guide to Selfless Dying
There is no transforming power in death
and, whether we are here or there,
we fashion the world that surrounds us
by the intensity of our imagination and feeling,
and we illuminate or darken our lives
by the concepts we hold of ourselves.
Neville Goddard
Awakened Imagination
What we imagine, that we are.
By our imagination
we have created this dream of life,
and by our imagination
we will re-enter that eternal world of light,
becoming that which we were
before we imagined the world.
Neville Goddard
Awakened Imagination
I am an immortal being
conceiving myself as man
and forming worlds
in the likeness and image
of my concept of self.
Neville Goddard
Awakened Imagination
Gods may be immune from death,
aging, and many of the other horrors
that afflict and affright mortals,
but they are not immune from pain.
Stephen Fry
Mythos
The whole range of dualities has sprung up in life
simply because you separated yourself from the rest of existence
by identifying yourself with the limited form.
From there every other duality has come.
That is the basis.
So fear of death is just another manifestation of it.
It is just pure ignorance
because you are identified with the limited form.
Your whole life is about protecting the limited form.
You have come with certain deep instincts to protect the limited form.
The necessary awareness to look beyond, to rise beyond this, is absent.
That is the only reason why the fear of death exists.
Sadhguru
Don't Polish Your Ignorance...It May Shine
You have always associated the words
'darkness', 'death', 'devil' with evil.
But if you want to know life,
there is no other way to know it
except by fully coming to terms with and accepting death.
Only that person who is willing to die can live.
If you do not want to die you should not live.
It is as simple as that.
So they are not really separate.
The separation has come out of ignorance.
The separation has come
because first of all you have separated yourself from life.
Sadhguru
Don't Polish Your Ignorance...It May Shine
Everything comes down to your limited identifications.
You identify yourself as a body only because of that.
First of all,
you are creating a distinction between life and death.
Otherwise life and death
are just whatever you are referring to as 'life',
which is being born as an infant and becoming an adult,
growing old, and one day being gone.
So that is life, is it not?
That and what you are referring to as death
are both just small happenings
in the infinite possibility which I am referring to as life.
If you wish you can call it death.
You know both ways, it is okay.
But you have an aversion to the word 'death';
you would prefer to call it 'life'.
Sadhguru
Don't Polish Your Ignorance...It May Shine
may the entire air be clean with flowers and trees and bulls.
may some of the justice of our living be the song of the body.
may each of our deaths and half-deaths
be as easy as possible now.
Charles Bukowski
On Love
A warrior considers himself already dead,
so there is nothing for him to lose.
The worst has already happened to him,
therefore he’s clear and calm;
judging him by his acts or by his words,
one would never suspect
that he has witnessed everything.
Carlos Castaneda
The Wheel Of Time
Without the awareness of death,
everything is ordinary, trivial.
It is only because death is stalking him
that a warrior has to believe
that the world is an unfathomable mystery.
Carlos Castaneda
The Wheel Of Time
We should constantly deny the possibility of extinction
or of a supernatural future heaven and hell.
God is the life of man,
and His idea of life can only include
progression, unfoldment and evolution.
If the universe is evolving,
then we must be evolving also.
We are consciousness living in Mind,
and our bodies are secondary.
At the right time we release our bodies
and move on into larger realms of mental experience.
All mourning is self-pity,
and all belief in death is contrary to God
and God’s idea of man.
Ernest Holmes, Raymond Charles Barker
365 Days of Richer Living
One of the greatest, if not the greatest, delusions
that pursue the human mind
is the idea of death.
Yet, this idea is contrary to all nature
and to all reason and logic.
It is inconceivable that a just God
would create a temporary man
to flourish and then to wither.
If God is an eternal, creative presence and Mind,
then His creation must be equally eternal.
Ernest Holmes, Raymond Charles Barker
365 Days of Richer Living
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 kno