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.
If there is a meaning in life at all,
then there must be a meaning in suffering.
Suffering is an ineradicable part of life,
even as fate and death.
Without suffering and death
human life cannot be complete.
Viktor E. Frankl
Man's Search for Meaning
Breath offers us an opportunity
to study our relationship with endings in an intimate way.
Breathing is a living process,
constantly changing and moving in cycles--
inhale, pause, exhale, pause .
Every breath has a beginning, middle, and end.
Every breath goes through a process
of birth, growth, and death.
Breathing is a microcosm of life itself.
Frank Otaseski
The Five Invitations:
Discovering What Death Can Teach Us About Living Fully
No one alive really understands death.
But as one woman who was close to death once told me,
“I see the exit signs much clearer than you do.”
In a way, nothing can prepare you for death.
Yet everything that you have done in your life,
everything that has been done to you,
and what you have learned from it all can help.
Frank Otaseski
The Five Invitations:
Discovering What Death Can Teach Us About Living Fully
The Tibetans say we leave this life
as easily as a hair is pulled from butter.
The Upanishads talk about death
as a ripe mango or a fig loosened from its branch,
falling naturally and easily.
Ram Dass Mirabai Bush
Walking Each Other Home:
Conversations on Loving and Dying
That which brought you here takes you home.
Roy Melvyn
Myths of Enlightenment and the End of Becoming
Everything is born of Pure Awareness,
and the knower of the Self knows
their infinite, boundless nature
and that there is no death.
Every living being has confidence in its body,
but the one who has faith in Self
will be untouched by death.
Your fear of death
is due to your body identity.
Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj
I Am Not the Body: Discovering the Truth Beyond Bondage
As long as there is consciousness in the body,
it requires regular food.
The mind and intellect depend on the food essence,
which deteriorates slowly over time,
until finally, the beingness disappears.
And when the beingness disappears,
it may look like what is called death,
but that person does not know of their death.
It is also true that one is not aware of the body’s birth;
only after some time
does the awareness of having been born come about,
which then prompts the person
to own his or her timebound existence.
Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj
I Am Not the Body:
Discovering the Truth Beyond Bondage
Old age is when you realize
you can’t do what you used to do.
I know more about being older now
and I feel compelled to write about it.
Partly because there aren’t very many old people in fiction,
and they are just as interesting as younger people.
And also, I think a writer who is still writing in her mid-eighties,
like José Saramago or me—even if I’m only writing poetry--
has a certain duty to report from the front.
We are bearing witness to a place most people haven’t been.
Ursula K. Le Guin
The Last Interview
In the future,
human beings, the older they get,
will need to take in spiritual impulses
if they want to be able to grow younger and younger
and really develop their inner life.
If they do so,
they may have grey hair and wrinkles and all kinds of infirmities,
but they will get younger and younger,
for their souls are taking in impulses
which they will take with them through the gate of death.
People who relate only to the body cannot grow younger,
for their souls will share in everything the body experiences.
Of course, it will not be possible to change the habit of going grey,
but it is possible for a grey head to gain a young soul
from the wellsprings of spiritual life.
Rudolf Steiner
Today men think:
When a human being has passed through the Gate of Death,
his activity ceases so far as the physical world is concerned.
But it is not so, in reality.
There is a living and perpetual intercourse
between the so-called dead and the so-called living.
Those who have passed through the Gate of Death
have not ceased to be present,
it is just that our eyes have ceased to see them.
They are there, nevertheless.
Rudolf Steiner
The Dead Are With Us
The uncanny authority of the psychedelic experience
might help explain why so many cancer patients
reported that their fear of death had lifted or at least abated:
they had stared directly at death
and come to know something about it,
in a kind of dress rehearsal.
“A high-dose psychedelic experience is death practice,”
says Katherine MacLean, the former Hopkins psychologist.
“You’re losing everything you know to be real,
letting go of your ego and your body,
and that process can feel like dying.”
And yet the experience brings the comforting news
that there is something on the other side of that death--
whether it is the “great plane of consciousness”
or one’s ashes underground being taken up by the roots of trees--
and some abiding, disembodied intelligence to somehow know it.
“Now I am aware that there is a whole other ‘reality,’”
one NYU volunteer told a researcher a few months after her journey.
“Compared to other people, it is like I know another language.”
Michael Pollan
How to Change Your Mind
The habits of our lives
have a powerful momentum
that propels us toward the moment of our death.
The obvious question arises:
What habits do we want to create?
Frank Ostaseski
The Five Invitations:
Discovering What Death Can Teach Us About Living Fully
Prior to the appearance of any object,
Consciousness is as it is.
This is the condition of unmanifest Consciousness
prior to our first experience in the womb,
during deep sleep
and during the numerous moments
between the disappearance of one object
and the appearance of the next.
There is nothing to suggest
that this will not be the experience of Consciousness
after the last appearance of the body at death.
Consciousness is not located in time or space.
It is pregnant with the entire universe,
including time and space.
Rupert Spira
The Transparency of Things
The ancient seers of the Upanishads have a beautiful prayer.
It is one of the most beautiful prayers ever uttered:
"Mrityorma amritam gamay
oh my lord, lead me from death to deathlessness.”
I would not say
“Lead me from death to deathlessness”
because death does not exist;
I would say
“Lead me from deathlessness to more deathlessness,
from life to more abundant life."
Osho
Last in the Evening
The moment you are absolutely empty
and you don’t see anything inside of you,
suddenly all becomes light.
Suddenly thousands of flowers open in your being.
You become full of fragrance and music,
a music that has not been heard before,
a fragrance that is not of the earth.
And you are liberated in that experience,
liberated from life,
liberated from death,
liberated from time itself.
You become part of the eternal flow of existence.
Osho
First in the Morning
There is no need to be afraid.
You can lose only that which has to be lost.
And it is good to lose it soon,
because the longer it stays,
the stronger it becomes.
And one does not know anything about tomorrow.
Don’t die before realizing your authentic being.
Only those few people are fortunate
who have lived with authentic being,
and who have died with authentic being--
because they know that life is eternal,
and death is a fiction.
Osho
Destiny, Freedom, and the Soul
From what we’ve seen at the end of life,
the saying that “there are no atheists in foxholes” isn’t quite true.
There are plenty of faithless and undecided
who find peace close to death.
And plenty of faithful who do not.
The difference seems to be
in how practiced a person is
in bumping up against what he can’t necessarily command or comprehend.
BJ Miller, Shoshana Berger
A Beginner's Guide to the End:
Practical Advice for Living Life and Facing Death
Birth is the entry to phenomenality.
Death is the exit from phenomenality.
All that requires insight is:
Who is born and who dies?
Or better stated:
What is born and what dies?
Wu Hsin
An Interlude in Eternity
Keep in mind
that staying conscious right up to the time of death
usually isn’t possible,
no matter how determined you are.
Common occurrences,
such as kidney or liver failure, delirium, or infection,
will alter your consciousness no matter what you do.
And severe pain can be more disorienting than pain meds;
in other words, withholding medications
might be exactly the wrong thing to do
if a conscious death is your goal.
Unless you’re an absolute purist,
a better goal is ultimately a relative one:
a more conscious death
or as conscious a death as possible.
BJ Miller, Shoshana Berger
A Beginner's Guide to the End:
Practical Advice for Living Life and Facing Death
There is nothing wrong with you for dying.
But you’d never know it from the way we talk about death.
We actually call it a failure:
Her health is failing.
He failed treatment.
If you believe what you read,
the entire enterprise of aging is optional.
Eat kale, drink red wine, walk 10,000 steps every day.
If we can’t beat death,
then clearly our character or will or faith isn’t strong enough.
And what about all those fighting words?
Beating death,
defying aging,
the war on cancer:
all battles we’re sure to lose.
Next to birth, death is one of our most profound experiences--
shouldn’t we talk about it, prepare for it,
use what it can teach us about how to live?
BJ Miller, Shoshana Berger
A Beginner's Guide to the End:
Practical Advice for Living Life and Facing Death
We cannot arouse in ourselves this feeling of gratitude
if having lost them, we wish them back in life;
we should be thankful we did have them with us
quite irrespective of the fact that we have them no longer.
Thus if we have not this feeling of gratitude
with regard to the beings whom we wish to approach,
they do not find us;
or, at any rate, they cannot speak to us.
The very feelings we so frequently have towards our nearest dead
are a hindrance to their speaking to us.
Rudolf Steiner
Earthly Death and Cosmic Life
It is necessary that we take into our consciousness
something of the feeling of gratitude
for all that reveals itself to us.
If there is none of this feeling within us,
if we are not able to thank the world
for enabling us to live,
for enriching our life continually with new impressions,
if we cannot deepen our soul
by often realising that our life is absolutely a gift,
the dead do not find a common air with us;
for they can only speak with us
through this feeling of gratitude;
otherwise there is a wall
between us and them.
Rudolf Steiner
Earthly Death and Cosmic Life
If to enjoy even an enjoyable present
we must have the assurance of a happy future,
we are “crying for the moon.”
We have no such assurance.
The best predictions are still matters
of probability rather than certainty,
and to the best of our knowledge
every one of us is going to suffer and die.
If, then, we cannot live happily
without an assured future,
we are certainly not adapted
to living in a finite world where,
despite the best plans,
accidents will happen,
and where death comes at the end.
Alan Watts
The Wisdom of Insecurity
The life represented by the thraldom of the senses
the Pythagoreans conceived
to be spiritual death
while they regarded death to the sense-world
as spiritual life.
Manly P. Hall
The Secret Teachings of All Ages
When once the rational consciousness of man
rolls away the stone and comes forth from its sepulcher,
it dies no more;
for to this second or philosophic birth there is no dissolution.
By this should not be inferred physical immortality,
but rather that the philosopher has learned
that his physical body is no more his true Self
than the physical earth is his true world.
In the realization that he and his body are dissimilar –
that though the form must perish the life will not fail –
he achieves conscious immortality.
This was the immortality to which Socrates referred when he said:
“Anytus and Melitus may indeed put me to death,
but they cannot injure me.”
To the wise,
physical existence is but the outer room of the hall of life.
Manly P. Hall
The Secret Teachings of All Ages
When the ‘I’ does not exist,
how can there be anything called birth or death?
When seeing that oneself is the Absolute Reality,
there is no place for such things as virtues or vices.
Virtues and vices, and the sufferings of death
do not exist in That which is attributeless.
When one’s Self is That which is without attributes,
how can birth and death exist?
One feels bound by body-consciousness
because of the identification with the body.
By the power of discrimination
one is freed from this body-identification.
This is what is called
the attainment of the state of Liberation.
Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj
I Am Not the Body: Discovering the Truth Beyond Bondage
The transitory ‘I am’ knowledge is not just your existence,
but the existence of the whole world.
Your world is birthed in the ‘I am’ knowledge,
without which, the world would not arise.
What is it, then, that dies?
Beingness is time bound;
it had a beginning (your so-called birth)
and will at some point end (your so-called death).
Since your first birthday,
you have been keeping count of your life.
Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj
I Am Not the Body: Discovering the Truth Beyond Bondage
I have said souls do have the freedom
to choose when, where, and who they want to be in their physical lives.
Certain souls spend less time in the spirit world
in order to accelerate development,
while others are very reluctant to leave.
There is no question
but what our guides exert great influence in this matter.
Just as we were given an intake interview
in the orientation phase right after death,
there are preparatory exit interviews by spiritual advisors
to determine our readiness for rebirth.
Michael Newton
Journey of Souls: Case Studies of Life Between Lives
Grief is for those who stay behind.
The Soul that is freed of the body
delights in the Sound and Light,
and in the fullness of being.
Harold Klemp
ECK Wisdom on Life after Death
I want to remind you
that between life and death
there is no distinction in the Spirit.
There is none.
There is no life or death in the Spirit.
There is only life and death
to the individual personality and its cohabitating body,
but to the Spirit and the Godhead,
there are no clear distinctions between the two.
Ramtha
The Mystery of Birth and Death: Redefining the Self
Death is the point at which knowledge fails,
and when knowledge fails, mind fails.
And when mind fails,
there is a possibility of truth penetrating you.
Osho
You are Soul--
an eternal, individual spark of God,
who can never die.
Death is a doorway,
a transition into the inner worlds.
Births and deaths mark the journey of Soul.
The translation, or movement,
from one stage of experience to another
is but a further step on Soul’s journey home to God.
The great fear behind all fears
is the fear of death.
Death is such an absolute term.
It means that’s the end of everything.
That’s how people think of death.
But if we look at the spiritual matter
of the death of the physical body,
we in Eckankar prefer the term translation;
we say someone has translated.
Harold Kemp
ECK Wisdom on Life after Death
Every man is related to the dead,
as shown by clairvoyant consciousness.
When the young—children or juveniles--
pass through the gate of death,
it is seen that the connection between the living and the dead
is different from that of older people,
those dying in the twilight of their life.
There is a decisive difference.
When we lose children,
when the young are apparently taken from us,
they do not really leave us at all,
but remain with us.
This is seen by clairvoyant consciousness
by the fact that the messages we receive on awakening
are forceful and vivid when the dead concerned
died as children or young people.
The connection between those remaining behind and the dead
is then such that we can only say
that a child or young person is not lost at all;
he really remains present.
Rudolf Steiner
Earthly Death and Cosmic Life
It is quite possible
to remain in connection, after death,
with people who one was close to during life,
but only through an emotional affinity which one had with them then.
An intense connection is formed as a result of such affinity.
After death one lives together with the living;
but also with those who have already died
with whom one had a connection during life.
This is how one must imagine the life after death,
which continues in this way for years.
It is a life in which the soul
chiefly lives through everything which it wills and desires
and longs for in connection with its felt and willed memories
of the life that is past.
Rudolf Steiner
Life Beyond Death
Whilst we wait in this Olympus of gods,
we think of nature as an appendix to the soul.
We ascend into their region,
and know that these are the thoughts of the Supreme Being.
"These are they who were set up from everlasting,
from the beginning,
or ever the earth was.
When he prepared the heavens, they were there;
when he established the clouds above,
when he strengthened the fountains of the deep.
Then they were by him,
as one brought up with him.
Of them took he counsel.”
All men are capable
of being raised by piety or by passion, into their region.
And no man touches these divine natures,
without becoming, in some degree, himself divine.
Like a new soul, they renew the body.
We become physically nimble and lightsome;
we tread on air;
life is no longer irksome,
and we think it will never be so.
No man fears age or misfortune or death,
in their serene company,
for he is transported out of the district of change.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Idealism
There is an overwhelming impact
of seeing people we thought we would never meet again
after they died on Earth.
A curious phenomenon about the spirit world
is that important people in our lives are always able to greet us,
even though they may already be living in another life in a new body.
Michael Newton
Journey of Souls: Case Studies of Life Between Lives
Deeply unsettled by Mum’s struggle,
I had a phone conversation
with a friend who is a palliative care doctor,
which helped me understand
that the palliative medicines couldn’t just settle Mum into easy breathing.
As Pam had said,
the struggle was requisite in a case like Mum’s.
She was in the death canal,
as she had once been in the birth canal.
In a follow-up text I wrote,
“She’s not necessarily suffering, right?
Looks like suffering, but perhaps not on a conscious level for her.”
She replied,
“Not necessarily suffering.
Just the machinery having a hard time
as it’s slowing down.
Not her self.
Just her body.”
Just her body.
Not her self.
That was incredibly helpful.
Alison Jean Lester
Absolutely Delicious: A Chronicle of Extraordinary Dying
Given the opportunity,
dying deserves to be lived with the same style
one has chosen to live all the rest of the journey.
Death comes after life;
dying is part of it.
Thomas Hornbein
quoted in:
Alison Jean Lester
Absolutely Delicious: A Chronicle of Extraordinary Dying
The Reality of Life is Life itself,
whose beginning is not in the womb,
and whose ending is not in the grave.
For the years that pass
are naught but a moment in eternal life;
and the world of matter and all in it
is but a dream
compared to the awakening
which we call the terror of Death.
Kahlil Gibran
The Words of the Master
It cannot be emphasized too strongly
that every individual has the right to his own life
and the right to his own death;
he has the right to be healthy
and he has just as much right to be sick;
he has as much right to seek his health through materia medica
as any other person has to seek his through God.
The medically minded person
does not relish having truth thrust down his throat
by his metaphysical friends
any more than does the one
who seeks his health and harmony through spiritual wisdom or truth
like to have his friends or members of his family interfering with him
and attempting to dissuade him from his course.
Joel S. Goldsmith
The Art of Spiritual Healing
Every birth and every death
is the entry and exit of consciousness
as it moves throughout this magnificent energy creation.
Each dimension serves a specific purpose,
providing us with unique training opportunities.
It is a fool-proof system for the evolution of consciousness.
Since we are immortal,
the time and number of training experiences
required to complete our education is irrelevant.
Graduation is assured for all.
William Buhlman, Susan Buhlman
Higher Self Now!:
Accelerating Your Spiritual Evolution
Fully recognize
that only your state of consciousness accompanies you at death.
It is the only valuable and lasting asset in your entire life.
All of your physical possessions
are nothing but a fleeting pile of dust.
What objects and events are you attached to?
Currently where do you focus most of your daily attention?
What can you do today to enhance your awareness?
Contemplate a potential change in your priorities.
William Buhlman, Susan Buhlman
Higher Self Now!:
Accelerating Your Spiritual Evolution
Dr. N: Will you please describe to me the exact sensation you feel at the time of death?
S: Like ... a force ... of some kind ...
pushing me up out of my body.
Dr. N: Pushing you? Out where?
S: I'm ejected out the top of my head.
Dr. N: And what was pushed out?
S: Well-me!
Dr. N: Describe what "me" means.
What does the thing that is you look like going out of the head of your body?
S: (pause) Like a ... pinpoint of light ... radiating …
Dr. N: How do you radiate light?
S: From ... my energy. I look sort of transparent white ... my soul …
Dr. N: And does this energy light stay the same after leaving your body?
S: (pause) I seem to grow a little ... as I move around.
Dr. N: If your light expands, then what do you look like now?
S: A ... wispy ... string ... hanging …
Dr. N: And what does the process of moving out of your body actually feel like to you?
S: Well, it's as if I shed my skin ... peeling a banana.
I just lose my body in one swoosh!
Dr. N: Is the feeling unpleasant?
S: Oh no! It's wonderful to feel so free with no more pain,
but ... I am ... disoriented ...
I didn't expect to die ...
Michael Newton
Journey of Souls: Case Studies of Life Between Lives
Ancestors, friends, and colleagues want me to tell you
that even though physical death has intervened,
forgiveness can still be given and received.
Most importantly,
they want me to show you that love and life continue,
that they’re still part of the family
and witnessing both important events and little moments,
and that we will all meet again in good time.
They are always delighted when a physical loved one comes calling,
and are eager to share their perspective on their time in the physical world.
As more than one spirit has cheerfully told me:
“It will all make sense when you’re dead!”
Priscilla Keresey
It Will All Make Sense When You're Dead:
Messages From Our Loved Ones in the Spirit World
Although opportunities for Realization arise in many different situations,
attaining it “in this life” is (as you no doubt know) not so easy.
The primary obstacle is that we are constantly distracted
by innumerable self-centered thoughts, feelings, sensations,
desires, aversions, attachments, etc.―
all of which seem rooted in Nature, herself.
And this is precisely why death presents such a “golden opportunity”
for attaining what was so hard to attain in life.
As the death process unfolds, everything will be reversed.
Nature (as the Tibetans say) will actually be cooperating with your practice
by progressively removing each and every distraction from your mind,
until finally there will be nothing left
but Consciousness Itself.
All you really have to do is wait
for this Pure Consciousness to appear,
and then Recognize it for what it is.
Death will take care of the rest!
Joel Norwood
Through Death’s Gate: A Guide to Selfless Dying
When a man knows God,
he is free:
his sorrows have an end,
and birth and death are no more.
When in inner union
he is beyond the world of the body,
then the third world,
the world of the spirit is found,
where the power of the All is,
and man has all:
for he is one with the ONE.
Upanishads
Ruby overcame the despondency of pessimism and morbid introspection.
In time, death forgot her because she forgot death.
Thoughts of death were dispersed
when she considered the richness that is life.
In one of her letters,
I found her translation of a quote from Tagore.
“When I gaze at the infinity that is you,
and lose myself in its beauty and vastness,
Death and pain have no meaning,
they are insignificant.
“But when I turn away from you and centre on myself,
Death looms large and pain overwhelms me.”
Sherwin B. Nuland
The Art of Aging
WELLER: You carried on very admirably after the passing of Maggie in 2003.
You were married for fifty-six years,
but you were writing just days afterward.
How were you able to do that?
BRADBURY: Work is the only answer.
You have to stay busy.
If you dwell on sad things they can destroy you.
The problem with death is it’s so damned permanent.
I remember at my father’s funeral fifty years ago,
my mother saying the most terrible words I’ve ever heard--
looking down at my father and saying,
“I’ll never see him again. I’ll never see him again.”
Such terrible words!
The truth can be so horrible and so immense at times
that you must stand up to it and say,
“I will not surrender.
I will carry on and stay busy.”
Ray Bradbury, Sam Weller
Ray Bradbury: The Last Interview: And other Conversations
Many people don’t realize until they are on their deathbed
and everything external falls away
that no thing ever had anything to do with who they are.
In the proximity of death,
the whole concept of ownership stands revealed
as ultimately meaningless.
In the last moments of their life,
they then also realize
that while they were looking throughout their lives
for a more complete sense of self,
what they were really looking for,
their Being,
had actually always already been there,
but had been largely obscured
by their identification with things,
which ultimately means
identification with their mind.
Eckhart Tolle
Oneness with All Life
Los Angeles funeral director Caitlin Doughty
once mentioned in an interview
that the denial of death is a “luxury” of living in a First World nation.
She went on to say that had we been born in India
we would view death as a natural part of life,
as a result of witnessing it on a daily basis:
from beggars dying on the streets
to family members dying in the home
to crematory pyres floating continuously along the Ganges River.
But we in Western society
have not had this lifelong exposure to death
and must intentionally educate ourselves
to overcome our intrinsic death-phobia.
Karen Wyatt, MD
What is the fear of death?
What harm has death ever caused anyone?
One has never heard of death harming anyone.
It is quite possible
that life has caused great damage in some cases,
but death causing any damage?
It has never been heard of.
Osho
Falling in Love With Darkness
I will not relinquish old age
if it leaves my better part intact.
But if it begins to shake my mind,
if it destroys its faculties one by one,
if it leaves me not life but breath,
I will depart from the putrid or tottering edifice.
I will not escape by death from disease
so long as it may be healed,
and leaves my mind unimpaired.
I will not raise my hand against myself
on account of pain,
for so to die is to be conquered.
But I know that if I must suffer
without hope of relief,
I will depart,
not through fear of the pain itself,
but because it prevents all for which I would live.
Seneca
To most people, death remains a hidden secret,
as eroticized as it is feared.
We are irresistibly attracted
by the very anxieties we find most terrifying;
we are drawn to them by a primitive excitement
that arises from flirtation with danger.
Moths and flames,
mankind and death--
there is little difference.
Sherwin B. Nuland
How We Die: Reflections on Life's Final Chapter
Everyone wants to know the details of dying,
though few are willing to say so.
Whether to anticipate the events of our own final illness
or better to comprehend
what is happening to a mortally stricken loved one--
or more likely
out of that id-borne fascination with death we all share--
we are lured by thoughts of life’s ending.
Sherwin B. Nuland
How We Die: Reflections on Life's Final Chapter
All our boundaries are drawn by our death;
we are defined by our death.
The moment we lose our boundaries,
we lose our death too.
Then we are eternal,
then we are infinite.
Osho
Last in the Evening
The moment you have learned the knack of meditation
you are a new being.
It is a new birth, the real birth,
because in that very moment
you know you are neither the body nor the mind,
you are pure consciousness.
In that very moment,
you know that this pure consciousness was before birth,
and is going to remain after death.
It is immortal.
This is the discovery of immortality.
And to discover immortality is to discover godliness,
to discover immortality is to discover eternity.
Osho
Last in the Evening
The necessity of nature’s final victory
was expected and accepted in generations before our own.
Doctors were far more willing to recognize the signs of defeat
and far less arrogant about denying them.
Sherwin Nuland
How We Die
The body is made for the soul;
the soul is not made for, and is not the product of, the body....
The source of all vital movement is the soul,
which builds up the machine of the body,
and maintains it for a time against external influences....
The immediate cause of death is not disease,
but the direct action of the soul,
which leaves the bodily machine,
either because it has become unworkable through some serious lesion
or because it does not choose to work it any longer.
Bernard Hollander, M.D.
In Search of the Soul
The very practice
of pinpointing the time of physical birth at conception itself errs.
There is no point at which you can say in basic terms
that an individual is alive,
though you do find it more practical
to accept certain points of life and death.
It is true that you emerge into space and time
at a certain point in your perception.
Your consciousness has been itself long before, however.
Jane Roberts
The “Unknown” Reality,
Volume Two (A Seth Book)
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