Welcome to Death Knells
The Death of Fearing Death
This site shares Death Knells to misconceptions about Death.
Living beautifully and dying beautifully,
Death is fearlessly embraced as the Birth of new Life awareness.
Living beautifully and dying beautifully,
Death is fearlessly embraced as the Birth of new Life awareness.
“The thing to do when you’re impatient
is to turn to your left and ask advice from your death.
An immense amount of pettiness is dropped
if your death makes a gesture to you,
or if you catch a glimpse of it,
or if you just have the feeling
that your companion is there watching you.”
don Juan
Carlos Castaneda: Journey To Ixtlan
That night the lama sat in meditation and ceased breathing.
His heart stopped and bodily functions failed,
although he did not manifest the full signs of death.
This is the practice of tuk-dam,
when a yogi retreats to the heart in death meditation.
He sat like this for three days
without manifesting the signs of death.
Then his head fell to one side
and the death process was complete.
Such is the death of an accomplished yogi.
Glenn H. Mullin: Living in the Face of Death
Death is not like a person.
It is rather a presence.
But one may also choose to say that it is nothing
and yet it is everything.
One will be right on every count.
Death is whatever one wishes.
don Juan
Carlos Castaneda: Journey To Ixtlan
Death is only release into dreams;
it can only be bad if one’s dreams are bad.
Dorothy Bryant:
The Kin of Ata Are Waiting for You
Death is not there, it is a lie--
but it appears very real.
It only appears very real, it is not.
It appears so
because you believe too much
in your separate existence.
It is in believing that you are separate from existence
that you give reality to death.
Drop this idea of being separate from existence,
and death disappears.
Osho
The Book of Wisdom
I know now the whole mistake
lies in looking upon death as the end of "activity"
(with a renewal at some indefinite date),
whereas as a matter of fact
it is an incident only,
though a very important one,
in a continuous life.
Your feelings, your memory, your love,
your interests and ambitions remain;
all you have left behind
(and even that one cannot at first realize)
is the physical body,
which proves to be merely the covering of the spiritual
to enable it to function in a material world.
Man truly is a spirit and has a body,
not vice versa.
Claude’s Book
L. Kelway-Bamber channeling her deceased son, Claude
Penetrating the place where heaven and earth have not divided
and yin and yang do not reach,
directness will attain success.
The true self
is the self that is prior to the division of heaven and earth,
before your parents conceived and gave birth.
This self is the self that is in all animate things,
birds and beasts, grasses and trees.
This is what is called buddha-nature.
Therefore this self is self that has no shadow or form,
no birth or death.
It is not the self that is seen by the present physical eye.
Only enlightened people can see it.
Those who have seen it
are called people who have seen nature
and realized buddhahood.
Zen Master Takuan (1573-1645)
Thomas Cleary: Soul of the Samurai:
Modern Translations of Three Classic Works of Zen & Bushido
As soon as we are born, we are dead.
Our birth and our death are just one thing.
It’s like a tree:
when there’s a root there must be branches.
When there are branches there must be a root.
You can’t have one without the other.
It’s a little funny to see how 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?
Don’t worry about things too much;
just think, “This is the way things are.”
Ajahn Chah
Koshin Paley Ellison and Matt Weingast. Awake at the Bedside:
Contemplative Teachings on Palliative and End-of-Life Care
As people approach death,
their mental receptivity and sensitivity can dramatically increase.
As their hearts and minds
are in some sense less contained by their bodies,
their minds can become almost atmospheric.
Entering a dying person’s room
can sometimes feel like walking straight into that person’s mind.
What we bring into the room --
our thoughts and feelings --
can have a tremendous impact, positively or negatively.
Kirsten Deleo, Koshin Paley Ellison and Matt Weingast:
Awake at the Bedside:
Contemplative Teachings on Palliative and End-of-Life Care
It is real and deep wisdom
to learn to look at things in terms of manifestation.
If someone who is very close to you has passed away
and you define him or her as non-existing,
you are mistaken.
From nothing cannot be born something.
From no one cannot be born someone.
From something you cannot become nothing.
From someone you cannot become no one.
That is the truth.
If the person who is close to you
does not manifest in the form that you are used to seeing or perceiving,
that does not mean that he is non-existing.
It does not mean that he is no longer there.
If you look deeply,
you can touch his or her presence
in other forms of manifestation.
Thich Nhat Hanh: No Death, No Fear
The angel of death
can teach us to live every day as if it is the last day of our lives,
as if there may be no tomorrow.
We can begin each day by saying,
“ I am awake, I see the sun.
I am going to give my gratitude to the sun and to everything and everyone,
because I am still alive.
One more day to be myself.”
That is the way I see life,
that is what the angel of death taught me --
to be completely open,
to know that there is nothing to be afraid of.
Don Miguel Ruiz: The Four Agreements:
A Practical Guide to Personal Freedom
Death is not the biggest fear we have;
our biggest fear is taking the risk to be alive --
the risk to be alive and express what we really are.
Just being ourselves is the biggest fear of humans.
Don Miguel Ruiz: The Four Agreements:
A Practical Guide to Personal Freedom
Dying is traumatizing
when it is happening in a place and time
that will not make room for dying in its way of living.
It is not dying that is traumatic;
it is dying in a death-phobic culture that is traumatic.
Stephen Jenkinson: Die Wise:
A Manifesto for Sanity and Soul
The Post - Mortem Realms are expansive and diverse,
offering a vast spectrum of possible environments and experiences
through which an individual may integrate the lessons of his or her physical life
and begin to acclimatize once again to life in the non - physical realms.
Where a person goes upon death
and what he or she experiences depends on a variety of factors,
the most important of which is that person’s overall state of consciousness and energy.
The Post - Mortem Realms are themselves organized along an energy gradient
that stretches from energy states close to those of the physical world
to those that are equivalent to those found in the higher - order worlds.
There is no reward and punishment system to this organization.
A person goes to the level and environment
most suited to his or her wellbeing,
one that is resonant with his or her basic energy state
and conducive to further growth, integration and wholeness.
Because of principles of affinity,
the new arrival in the non - physical realms
will most likely be with people of similar mental and emotional states.
David Spangler: Subtle Worlds: An Explorer’s Field Notes
This is my attitude about death.
Laugh!
Let laughter be your attitude about death.
It is a cosmic lie created by man himself,
created by the ego, by self-consciousness.
That’s why in nature no other animal, bird, tree is afraid of death.
Only man, and he makes so much fuss out of it…
his whole life trembling.
Death is coming closer,
and because of death he cannot allow himself to live totally.
How can you live if you are so afraid?
Death creates fear.
And who is the culprit?
God has not created death,
it is man’s own invention.
Create the ego,
and you have created the other side of it—death.
Osho. The Book of Wisdom
If I am one with existence, how can I die?
Existence was there before me
and will be there after me.
I am just a ripple in the ocean,
and the ripple comes and goes,
the ocean remains, abides.
Yes, you will not be there--
as you are you will not be there.
This form will disappear,
but the one who is abiding in this form will go on abiding,
either in other forms or ultimately in formlessness.
Osho. The Book of Wisdom
Death is not there, it is a lie--
but it appears very real.
It only appears very real, it is not.
It appears so because you believe too much in your separate existence.
It is in believing that you are separate from existence
that you give reality to death.
Drop this idea of being separate from existence,
and death disappears.
Osho. The Book of Wisdom
I saw the death phobia that permeates our time
brought to bear upon dying people in the name of caring for them.
And I saw that as a culture
we have a withered psychology of coping and accepting
where we might once have had a mythology and a poetry
of purposed, meaningful dying.
This poverty was the constant companion and chimera
of almost every dying person I worked with.
I discovered that few wanted to die well,
fewer still, wisely.
Most didn’t want to die at all,
and they spent their dying time refusing to do so.
Stephen Jenkinson: Die Wise:
A Manifesto for Sanity and Soul
Medicine has come,
in its working research, and often clinical agenda,
to look upon death
as a correctable biological deficiency.
This stance has thus introduced
into the practice of medicine and public attitudes
a profound and often destructive self-contradiction.
We have been left fundamentally uncertain
whether death is to be accepted as part of life
or rejected as a repairable accident.
Daniel Callahan. The Troubled Dream of Life:
In Search of a Peaceful Death
Many people experience after death
a natural desire to reconnect with their loved ones and friends,
to let them know they’re really still alive and OK.
Even after some time has passed,
they may still wish to help those they have left on earth,
if only to mitigate the grief they may feel.
And if the newly dead person has wronged people on earth,
he or she may seek ways of making amends.
It takes time for a person who is now disincarnate
and learning to adjust to the vaster reality of the subtle worlds
to begin to think beyond their individuality
and into attunement with the larger wholes of which he or she is a part,
thereby experiencing himself or herself
as part of planetary life and beingness --
unless, of course, this person has already been accustomed
to thinking and attuning in this way while in a physical body.
David Spangler: Subtle Worlds:
An Explorer’s Field Notes
Set the intention to create a different relationship with the concept of death,
and understand that the way you have been taught to view it is not necessarily the truth.
As you come to understand that all things in this physical existence are transient,
that they will ebb and flow with the tides,
and that nothing in the physical can be fully grasped and anchored in place,
you will more easily make peace with the nature of all things,
people, and experiences in your life as they flow through you.
Every experience, every person, and every challenge
presents the opportunity for divine expression and connection,
especially in the death of a loved one,
who passes into the true divine essence of their soul
as they transition back to their original state
and shed the heaviness of the physical being .
Mike Dooley: Channeled Messages from Deep Space:
Wisdom for a Changing World
Ultimately, your life will be measured by what you gave,
not what you received.
Don’t hold out on the rest of us--
we need you to contribute.
Spend your life building a body of work you will be proud of.
Engage today with urgency and diligence.
Plant seeds every day that will yield a harvest later.
Tomorrow is only an unfulfilled wish,
so live and work as if today is all you have.
If you do, you will be able to lay your head down each night
satisfied with your work, and in the end,
you will die empty of regret,
but full of satisfaction for a life well lived.”
Todd Henry: Die Empty
Challenging situations serve a higher purpose
that extends beyond any pain or suffering
that ensues in the earthly experience;
it is what the individual does to respond to those circumstances
that creates the path to unfold before them.
And if that path includes the opportunity or probability
of what may be judged as an untimely, violent, or otherwise disturbing demise,
please be assured that the aspect of the soul
that chose that particular incarnation
has agreed to that demise,
and it has not experienced the loss of its life
as something that was beyond its control,
no matter how that death appears to the outside world.
Mike Dooley: Channeled Messages from Deep Space:
Wisdom for a Changing World
Everything that happens to us
is intended to help us forward in our development,
and is capable of doing so, if we will only take it in the right way
and try to learn the lesson which it is meant to teach.
Since this is true - - and those who have probed most deeply
into the mysteries of life and death know that it is - -
to grumble or to repine at suffering
is manifestly not only to waste much force uselessly,
but also to take an entirely inaccurate and foolish view of life,
and to lose what is designed as an opportunity.
C. W. Leadbetter:
The Hidden Side of Things
We fall into the world caught between two necessities,
compelled to live, born to die, and reconciling them
has forever been one of our most challenging puzzles.
The pieces just don’t fit together.
But while dying may be the easiest thing in the world to do,
it’s the hardest thing in the world to do well --
we are predisposed to avoid, ignore, flee, and fight it till the very last hour.
We are impelled in our deepest being to struggle against it .
Roy Scranton: Learning to Die in the Anthropocene:
Reflections on the End of a Civilization
Learning to die as an individual
means letting go of our predispositions and fear.
Learning to die as a civilization
means letting go of this particular way of life and its ideas of identity,
freedom, success, and progress.
These two ways of learning to die
come together in the role of the humanist thinker:
one who is willing to stop and ask troublesome questions,
the one who is willing to interrupt,
the one who resonates on other channels
and with slower, deeper rhythms .
Roy Scranton: Learning to Die in the Anthropocene:
Reflections on the End of a Civilization
A proverb says that man’s extremity is God’s opportunity.
We cannot find release
until we have known the real extremity of our situation,
and see that all striving for spiritual ideals is completely futile --
since the very seeking thrusts them away.
Yet why should it surprise us?
Hasn’t it been said again and again that we must die to come to life,
that heaven is always on the other side of the Valley of the Shadow of Death --
the valley of which physical death is merely a symbol --
where the helpless corpse,
bound hand and foot in its winding sheet,
is just a figure of the death in which we live so long
as we mistake it for life?
Where do we go from here?
We do not.
We come to an end.
Alan W. Watts:
Become What You Are
The end-of-life gate before us is rusted from disuse.
This rusted gate may take some effort to open.
It may squeak and squeal, and so may we.
We might not like everything we encounter
as we step through into a space we’ve purposefully avoided
for most, if not all, of our lives.
We may need to occasionally take a mental and emotional breath,
find our equilibrium,
as we traverse the place.
It’s a place known by an anti-name:
death denial.
And traverse it we must;
one step doesn’t get us very far.
Bart Windrum: The Promised Landing:
A Gateway to Peaceful Dying
A culture that denies death
is a barrier to achieving a good death.
Overcoming our fears and wild misconceptions about death
will be no small task,
but we shouldn’t forget how quickly other cultural prejudices
—racism, sexism, homophobia--
have begun to topple in the recent past.
It is high time death had its own moment of truth.
Caitlin Doughty: Smoke Gets in Your Eyes:
And Other Lessons from the Crematory
Death is not the tragedy that it appears to be,
and the soul being does not carry with it any memory of suffering.
All pain is temporary,
and death, in whatever way it occurs,
is a peaceful and beautiful experience for the soul
as it transitions to its natural state.
When death is sudden and violent,
the soul is assisted in that transition
so that it is nurtured
and carried into the peaceful state of nonphysical being.
Mike Dooley: Channeled Messages from Deep Space:
Wisdom for a Changing World
I have always found
that the people who have quite genuinely died to themselves
make no claims of any kind to their own part in the process.
They think of themselves as lazy and lucky.
If they did anything at all,
it was so simple that anyone else could do the same--
for all that they have done is to recognize a universal fact of life,
something as true of the weak and foolish as of the wise and strong.
They would even say that in this respect
there is some advantage in being weak and foolish,
for the possession of a strong will and a clever head
makes some things very difficult to see.
Alan W. Watts:
Become What You Are
Death to oneself
is the improbable source
of a way of life so new and so alive
that it feels like having been born again.
In this metaphorical sense,
the ego dies on finding out its own incapacity
to make any difference to itself that is really important.
Alan W. Watts:
Become What You Are
Many people who have had a near-death experience
report that they underwent a “life review” in which they saw, as if watching a movie,
all of their covert and overt actions,
their expressed and suppressed sentiments,
their public and private thoughts,
and their conscious and unconscious attitudes.
They saw who they were and how their thoughts, words, and deeds
affected everyone and everything in their lives.
Afterward, they typically describe having a greater understanding
about themselves and a desire to do a better job of living from then on.
And as a result, they perceive new possibilities
and better ways “to be” in any opportunity.
Having seen themselves from a truly objective point of view,
they clearly know what they want to change.
Recognition is like having a life review every day.
Since you have all of the equipment in your brain to notice who you are being,
why not do this before you die,
and, in effect, be reborn in the same life?
Joe Dispenza: Breaking the Habit of Being Yourself:
How to Lose Your Mind and Create a New One
In a world subject to change,
the traditional attitude toward death
is like a bulwark of inertia and continuity.
It has by now been so obliterated from our culture
that it is hard for us to imagine or understand it.
The ancient attitude in which death is close and familiar
yet diminished and desensitized
is too different from our own view,
in which it is so terrifying that we no longer dare say its name.
Thus, when we call this familiar death the tame death,
we do not mean that it was once wild and that it was later domesticated.
On the contrary, we mean
that it has become wild today when it used to be tame.
The tame death is the oldest death there is.
Philipp Aries: The Hour of Our Death
It will never feel comfortable
to sit so close to others ’ grief.
Working in the face of death will always feel profound,
numinous and sometimes overwhelming –
that’s why we work in teams.
But you will be able to recognise that you are offering something vital,
transformative and even spiritual:
the opportunity for individuals to meet or to watch death
with an awareness that is lost if we fail to be truthful.
The dreadful reality,
told with honesty and compassion,
allows patients and their families to make choices based on truth,
instead of encouraging the misleading,
hopeless quest for a medical miracle that promotes futile treatment,
protracts dying and disallows goodbyes.
Focus not on saving life at any cost,
but on enabling goodbye.
Sometimes, in the end,
it’s all we have to offer .
Kathryn Mannix: With the End in Mind:
Dying, Death, and Wisdom in an Age of Denial
Healthcare advances can only remediate us up to a point;
beyond the point of saving us to live ‘ well enough ’
there is a point of futility.
Here, technology is deployed in a new deathbed ritual
that is a triumph of denial over experience.
The death rate remains 100 per cent,
and the pattern of the final days, and the way we actually die,
are unchanged.
What is different is that we have lost
the familiarity we once had with that process,
and we have lost the vocabulary and etiquette
that served us so well in past times,
when death was acknowledged to be inevitable.
Kathryn Mannix: With the End in Mind:
Dying, Death, and Wisdom in an Age of Denial
We are so much attached to our own feeling,
to our individual existence.
For us, just now,
we have some fear of death,
but after we resume our true original nature,
there is Nirvana.
That is why we say,
“ To attain Nirvana is to pass away. ”
“ To pass away ” is not a very adequate expression.
Perhaps “ to pass on, ” or “ to go on, ” or “ to join ” would be better.
Will you try to find some better expression for death?
When you find it,
you will have quite a new interpretation of your life.
Shunryu Suzuki:
Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind
When the water returns to its original oneness with the river,
it no longer has any individual feeling to it;
it resumes its own nature,
and finds composure.
How very glad the water must be
to come back to the original river!
If this is so,
what feeling will we have when we die?
Shunryu Suzuki:
Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind
When you do not realize that you are one with the river,
or one with the universe,
you have fear.
Whether it is separated into drops or not,
water is water.
Our life and death are the same thing.
When we realize this fact
we have no fear of death anymore,
and we have no actual difficulty in our life.
Shunryu Suzuki:
Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind
I’ve had a lot of people pass away in my life.
I guess it’s all a matter of how you deal with your mortality--
and recognizing that you are mortal.
I’m trying to see what a gift life is
and how quickly it can be extinguished,
without any warning.
Timothy B. Schmit
There are some species of creatures on your planet
that resonate with higher divine energy
and therefore have the capacity of self-awareness
on a different level of frequency than others.
These creatures have the energetic power of discernment
and are more aware of their own free will and connection.
They do not suffer the fear of death
quite so much as humans,
as they have a higher awareness of death
as part of the natural life cycle,
and so even though they have a will to live,
they also have a natural understanding of the need to die,
and sometimes will choose death
when it appears to be beneficial to others of their species.
This involves a complex thought process
that is not available to most other species of being.
Mike Dooley: Channeled Messages from Deep Space:
Wisdom for a Changing World
Is there, then, any doubt that for hapless mortals,
that is, for men who are engrossed,
the fairest day is ever the first to flee?
Old age surprises them while their minds are still childish,
and they come to it unprepared and unarmed,
for they have made no provision for it;
they have stumbled upon it suddenly and unexpectedly,
they did not notice that it was drawing nearer day by day.
Even as conversation or reading
or deep meditation on some subject beguiles the traveller,
and he finds that he has reached the end of his journey
before he was aware that he was approaching it,
just so with this unceasing and most swift journey of life,
which we make at the same pace
whether waking or sleeping;
those who are engrossed become aware of it
only at the end .
Lucius Seneca: On the Shortness of Life
The greatest hindrance to living is expectancy,
which depends upon the morrow and wastes today.
You dispose of that which lies in the hands of Fortune,
you let go that which lies in your own.
Whither do you look?
At what goal do you aim?
All things that are still to come lie in uncertainty;
live straightway!
See how the greatest of bards sings the saving strain:
The fairest day in hapless mortals' life
Is ever first to flee. --
"Why do you delay?"says he,
"Why are you idle?
Unless you seize the day, it flees."
Even though you seize it, it still will flee;
therefore you must vie with time's swiftness in the speed of using it,
and, as from a torrent that rushes by and will not always flow,
you must drink quickly.
Lucius Seneca: On the Shortness of Life
The majority of mortals, Paulinus,
complain bitterly of the spitefulness of Nature,
because we are born for a brief span of life,
because even this space that has been granted to us
rushes by so speedily and so swiftly
that all save a very few find life at an end
just when they are getting ready to live.
Lucius Seneca: On the Shortness of Life
The wisest beings
with whom I have made contact in this lifetime
all assure me that a soul leaves the physical plane
neither a moment too early nor a moment too late.
For most of us on earth
who so strongly identify with our own bodies and personalities,
this is hard to accept.
If we have not listened deeply enough
inside ourselves to know differently,
we consider length of life an asset,
which makes it difficult to be with the dying
without trying to keep them alive.
Ram Dass: Walking Each Other Home:
Conversations on Loving and Dying
On the day I die,
when I am being carried toward the grave,
don't weep.
Death has nothing to do with going away.
The sun sets and the moon sets,
but they are not gone.
Death is a coming together.
The tomb looks like a prison,
but it's really release into union.
Your mouth closes here
and immediately opens with a shout of joy there.
Rumi
“It is important to look at death
because it is a part of life.
It is a sad thing, melancholy
but romantic at the same time.
It is the end of a cycle--
everything has to end.
The cycle of life is positive
because it gives room for new things.”
Lee Alexander McQueen
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
We must bravely look
at the array of choices ahead of us.
Identify and name them.
Ponder their differences.
Understand how we slip into situations
we say we want to avoid.
And until we do,
we continue to practice death denial
under the cover of death literacy.
Although the new phrase “ death positive”
is useful for newbies,
its wider adoption might actually serve
to provide an extension of that cover…"
Bart Windrum
www.axiomaction.com
The dying choose their moment of death
more often than we realise.
It’s not unusual for the dying to wait for a distant relative or a close friend.
Sometimes the reason to stay is a wedding anniversary or a birthday,
the arrival of a first grandchild,
or an important milestone that must be reached.
However impossible it might seem medically,
the dying are able to summon enough vital energy.
It’s good to remember that the dying
sometimes need the freedom to die by themselves in peace and tranquillity.
It can be that the emotional bond between people is so strong
and letting go is so difficult,
that they choose to die alone.
Ineke Koedam: In the Light of Death:
Experiences on the threshold between life and death
Instead of discussing openly how to think about death
and what we might appropriately choose in our dying
-a painful and difficult subject-
we too frequently and too easily transform the issue
into the more distanced, comfortable language of rights and choices:
not how or what we ought to choose,
but that we have a right to choose.
Daniel Callahan:
The Troubled Dream of Life: In Search of a Peaceful Death
Death has been dissected,
cut to bits by a series of little steps,
which finally make it impossible to know
which step was the real death,
the one in which consciousness was lost,
or the one in which breathing stopped.
All these little silent deaths
have replaced the great dramatic act of death,
and no one any longer has the strength or patience
to wait over a period of weeks
for a moment which has lost a part of its meaning.
Philippe Aries:
Western Attitudes Toward Death
How and when should I want to die?
How much pain and suffering should I be willing to bear, and for what reason?
What do I owe others in my dying,
especially those who would still have me with them if they could?
When I am in doubt about my living or dying,
where should I locate the benefit of doubt, toward life or death?
What kind of person should I be to ask questions of that kind?
A person who insists on control of death as well as of life?
What kind of person would that make me?
Daniel Callahan: The Troubled Dream of Life:
In Search of a Peaceful Death
Is death to be understood as within, or outside of, human life?
It is said, often enough, that death is a "part of life."
But what does that phrase, almost a cliche, mean?
It has been explored much less than it should be.
That exploration inexorably leads to perhaps the most troubling problem of all--
how we are to find meaning in death,
if there is any meaning to be found.
Daniel Callahan. The Troubled Dream of Life:
In Search of a Peaceful Death
You are alive
only in the proportion that you are aware.
Awareness is the difference
between death and life.
Buddhas have a different definition.
Their definition consists of awareness.
They don't say you are alive because you can breathe,
they say you are alive if you are awake.
Wakefulness is the way to life, says Buddha.
Become more wakeful
and you will become more alive.
OSHO
My life has always been integrated with death,
but I have kept my personal grief at a distance.
I have said many times that through my work
I have come to realize that death doesn’t exist.
I am of course speaking spiritually and symbolically.
When a loved one dies,
the reality of death on the physical level
is all too real.
Elisabeth Kübler-Ross: On Grief and Grieving:
Finding the Meaning of Grief Through the Five Stages of Loss
Death is but a transition from this life to another existence
where there is no more pain or anguish.
That knowledge helps me, in my own losses and grief,
to know that those I care for are okay.
That I will see them again.
And those I love now,
I will look after when I am gone.
I will laugh with them and smile at them.
And if they didn’t believe in life after death,
I will make funny faces at them and say,
‘ Ha ha, we are here and okay. ’
I know that the only thing that really lasts forever is love,
and I will miss so much about the life I had
and the people I have lost.
Elisabeth Kübler-Ross: On Grief and Grieving:
Finding the Meaning of Grief Through the Five Stages of Loss
Death remains an opportunity.
I understand the agony,
but an entity chooses to die
when it realizes that the maximum moment for death is appropriate.
There is a time when all things move into equilibrium
and death is appropriate.
The momentum is maximum for doing what needs to be done.
The mental, the physical, and the emotional
are in a state of readiness, and the necessity is there.
And the willing choice is made on a deep level.
When the whole entity says it’s time to go,
it looks around and picks a way.
When it is not necessary to stay,
staying is inappropriate.
A consciousness dies because it is time .
Bartholomew:
From the Heart of a Gentle Brother
Why, if you are masters of your own destiny,
would you pick a life that has death in it?
This is a very bold question.
Part of the answer is that it was not meant for you
to run about this earth plane century after century
simply enjoying the earth experience.
What you have come here to understand
is that you are beyond all those small, limited parameters
of being just a body.
You have come to understand
that you are vastly more wondrous, more powerful, alive,
and compassionate than the human situation shows you to be.
So death comes and it reminds you.
Pain, suffering, illness, and loss all come to remind you
that there is some greater purpose here.
Bartholomew:
From the Heart of a Gentle Brother
We aspire to die in peace,
but we don’t know how to overcome today’s many impediments
because we haven’t identified or considered them.
Our aspiration for peaceful deaths results in promises--
be they implied, expressed, or merely hoped for.
The promise we want fulfilled is to land gently when our music stops.
To literally come to Earth in peace.
Most of us will require learned skills
in order to orient ourselves toward the landing we want and,
as importantly, away from the landings we don’t want.
What must we plan for so steadfastly
in order to increase our likelihood of dying in peace?
It’s not that we’re all at risk of being attacked by bears,
dragged off by alligators , chomped on by sharks;
comparatively few of us die in vehicle wrecks;
fewer in industrial accidents or natural disasters;
and although the numbers by themselves are staggering,
only a fraction of us in the United States die by gunfire.
What is all this planning and resolving meant to protect us from?
Ourselves.
The system we’ve created.
Our strange culture of dying and death
that’s evolved over many generations --
Bart Windrum: The Promised Landing:
A Gateway to Peaceful Dying
In the face of death,
secular people often scramble to expand their experiences
or memorialize themselves in some lasting form.
They may work their way through a “bucket list”
of adventures and destinations
or struggle to complete a cherished project.
Or if they are at all rich or famous,
they may dedicate their final years and months
to the creation of a “legacy,” such as a charitable foundation,
in the same spirit as an emperor might plan his mausoleum.
The self becomes an obstacle
to what we might call, in the fullest sense, “successful aging.”
I have seen accomplished people consumed in their final years
with jockeying for one last promotion or other mark of recognition,
or crankily defending their reputation against critics and potential critics.
This is all that we in the modern world have learned how to do.
And when we acquire painful neuroses
from our efforts to promote and protect ourselves,
we often turn to forms of therapy
that require us to burrow even more deeply into ourselves.
Barbara Ehrenreich: Natural Causes:
An Epidemic of Wellness, the Certainty of Dying,
and Killing Ourselves to Live Longer
Paradise is our primordial pure consciousness,
which is free of all limitations
but embodies the infinity of the divine.
I remember seeing a bumper sticker that said,
"I believe in life before death."
To me this means that we don't have to imagine a future paradise.
Paradise can happen right here, right now,
while we're in this human incarnation.
The choice is ours.
Anam Thubten: No Self No Problem
From morning to night,
from birth until death,
whatever happiness and suffering we experience
and whatever good or bad objects appear to us,
they all come from our consciousness.
Everything that appears to us from birth until death
comes from our own consciousness.
All the different experiences we have of people,
places and sense objects come from our consciousness.
It is not only that everything that appears to us today
and from birth until death comes from our consciousness
but also that the whole appearance of samsara
comes from consciousness,
which is our own mind.
Lama Zopa Rinpoche:
How Things Exist: Teachings on Emptiness
We should let dead people look like dead people.
After sitting with a dead person for a day or so,
you can see the changes.
You are genuinely convinced that that soul, that personality,
is not there anymore.
It makes it a lot easier to tuck that person into the earth and say goodbye.
I think it’s harder to bury somebody
who is embalmed to look like they're alive.
Ellen Macdonald
www.eloisewoods.com
Quote from Art of Dying Magazine, Volume III
www.artofdying.net
The body’s transience inspires the way I work.
Biodegradability is a primary facet of my designs.
Wrapping the body in natural fiber
is harmonious with death and decomposition.
When you consider life as a composition of notes,
everyone’s essence is a song.
Decomposition is our notes’ return to the bio-system
to be reworked into new compositions.
I use fabrication that won't hinder that process
and is palatable to the soil.
I think of the body as a gift that you give back to the earth.
You present the gift of your body in a beautiful wrapping
that life delicately opens and receives.
Pia Interlandi
www.piainterlandi.com
Quote from Art of Dying Magazine, Volume III
www.artofdying.net
My interest in death isn't a morbid pursuit.
It's a way of clarifying my life.
It's a way of not being distracted.
You can go kicking and screaming if you want,
but if you've done your homework,
and you've practiced giving death attention,
you can relax into dying
by using death as your advisor.
That’s my goal.
Laura Pritchett
Author of Making Friends With Death
Quote from Art of Dying Magazine, Volume III
www.artofdying.net
We're living in a death denying culture
where most of us have never expressed pain, grief, sadness, anger, or fear
with people who are open and willing to understand
that what we're going through is natural and needed.
We have no idea what we have lost by living in a culture
where grief is rarely fully expressed.
Grief is a primary means of re-setting, re-wiring and calming
our nervous system to inner peace.
Tarron Estes
Quote from Art of Dying Magazine, Volume III
www.artofdying.net
If a diagnosis of a mortal illness changes the way you live,
then you haven’t been living the way you should.
Garth Callaghan
Quote from Art of Dying Magazine, Volume III
www.artofdying.net
One of the most important things that I impart to my students
is that death is very ordinary.
When we can see death as ordinary,
as a natural occurrence,
then we see the extraordinary.
We can’t see the extraordinary
until we acknowledge the ordinary.
Chodo Robert Campbell
Quote from Art of Dying Magazine, Volume III
www.artofdyingmagazine.com
Dying is the event for the remaining family and friends.
For the dying person, their evolutionary path is the event --
crossing the bridge into another dimension.
I’ve found that as the physical body declines,
the spiritual activity increases.
Consciousness is still in the body,
but they're starting to have out-of-body experiences.
They talk with deceased loved ones.
I let them know they’re in a safe space.
They’ll smile and say, "I just saw was my husband."
I'll ask, "How did that make you feel?
Are you looking forward to seeing him again?"
I don’t challenge their experience.
Susan Buhlman
Art of Dying Magazine, Volume III
www.artofdyingmagazine.com
Death is the end of our job,
a journey from this to the next plane of existence.
How fortunate Alex and I have been.
Our love is eternal.
Holding on is to suffer.
When and what will happen next is God’s secret.
Death is the precipice
over which we cannot see,
until we die.
Allyson Grey
Art of Dying Magazine, Volume III
www.artofdyingmagazine.com
The great earth burdens me with a body,
forces upon me the toil of life,
eases me in old age,
and calms me in death.
If life is good,
death is good also.
Zhuangzi
It is well for you to bear in mind the Universality of Life.
All of the Universe is alive,
vibrating and pulsating with life and energy and motion.
There is nothing dead in the Universe.
Life is everywhere,
and always accompanied by intelligence.
There is no such thing as a dead, unintelligent Universe.
Instead of being atoms of Life floating in a sea of death,
we are atoms of Life surrounded by an ocean of Life,
pulsating, moving, thinking, living.
William Walker Atkinson:
A Series of Lessons in Raja Yoga
C.G. Jung (1875–1961)
wrote in his autobiographical Memories, Dreams, Reflections
descriptions of near-death experiences he had in 1944
while in a hospital as the result of a heart attack.
During his near death he experienced profound freedom and ecstasy.
For several weeks after his initial experience,
while still in hospital convalescence,
he had blissfully transcendent visions during the night
and difficulty reintegrating with his physical body during the day:
" It is impossible to convey the beauty and intensity of emotion during those visions.
They were the most tremendous things I have ever experienced.
And what a contrast the day was:
I was tormented and on edge; everything irritated me;
everything was too material, too crude and clumsy,
terribly limited both spatially and spiritually.
It was all an imprisonment,
for reasons impossible to divine,
and yet it had a kind of hypnotic power, a cogency,
as if it were reality itself,
for all that I had clearly perceived its emptiness.
Although my belief in the world returned to me,
I have never since entirely freed myself of the impression that . . .
this life is a segment of existence
which is enacted in a three-dimensional box-like universe especially set up for it.
Joseph Selbie. The Physics of God
Death, as the saints, sages, and near - death experiencers tell us,
is only a shift from sensory awareness of our physical body
to a more complete and more subtle awareness of our ever - present energy body.
Our energy body is constantly with us.
It animates, controls, and continuously creates our physical body.
Moreover, as the saints and sages tell us,
our energy body contains what is most important,
most characteristic, most essential;
the things that give meaning to who and what we are:
our thoughts, our feelings, our dreams, our knowledge,
our memories, our enduring character traits.
When we die,
these essential aspects of who we are
continue to exist where they have always existed--
in our nonlocal energy body.
Joseph Selbie: The Physics of God
Death literacy requires us to face the end-of-life problems
we have made for ourselves—now, well before our dying time,
while we’re otherwise busy living our lives.
Increasing our likelihood of dying in peace
requires us to understand the personal and systemic obstacles
between us and our end-of-life promises.
It requires us to recognize
that by doing nothing now (death denial),
we reinforce the likelihood of our last weeks and days on planet Earth
being overly stressful and peace-less.
Bart Windrum The Promised Landing:
A Gateway to Peaceful Dying
In our death-denying and medicalized culture,
only the fortunate few, graced with great luck or good fortune,
attain a peaceful demise without arduous effort.
For most of us,
finding our promised landing will require a new response
to how we personally approach and manage dying--
through attention, openness, study, and preparation.
This is what is meant by death literacy.
Bart Windrum The Promised Landing:
A Gateway to Peaceful Dying
Death is the greatest joke there is.
Death has never happened,
cannot happen in the very nature of things,
because life is eternal.
Life cannot end;
it is not a thing, it is a process.
It is not something that begins and ends;
it has no beginning and no end.
You have always been here in different forms,
and you will be here in different forms,
or, ultimately, formless.
Osho. The Book of Wisdom:
The Heart of Tibetan Buddhism
The older I’ve gotten, the harder it becomes
not to think about my mortality.
St. Benedict said to “Daily keep your death before your eyes.”
No matter how rich or important and famous you are,
there is death coming.
Two things happen when we meditate in a healthy way that our lives are finite.
One, we become more appreciative of life and its gifts.
Two, we can prepare ourselves for the Big Death
by embracing all the little deaths that come our way:
the death of a dream, of a relationship.
Instead of trying to avoid thinking about those things,
it’s important to embrace the motto,
“If you can’t get out of it, get into it.”
There’s no way out except in and through.
As you do that, as you embrace the little deaths,
your heart becomes less brittle, more supple.
These deaths are more likely to break your heart open
than to break it apart.
These little deaths allow us to exercise our hearts
in the same way a runner exercises a muscle
so that it won’t snap while running.
Parker J. Palmer: On The Brink of Everything:
Grace, Gravity and Getting Old
I can’t imagine a sadder way to die
than realizing I never showed up in this world as myself.
That would be a particular kind of psychological pain
that I would find almost unbearable.
If you can say you showed up, more often than not,
with your heart in your hand,
you can die with a certain sense of satisfaction.
You have become what you were meant to be.
Parker J. Palmer: On The Brink of Everything:
Grace, Gravity and Getting Old
Death is not there, it is a lie--
but it appears very real.
It only appears very real, it is not.
It appears so because you believe too much in your separate existence.
It is in believing that you are separate from existence
that you give reality to death.
Drop this idea of being separate from existence,
and death disappears.
Osho. The Book of Wisdom:
The Heart of Tibetan Buddhism
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.
Rudolph Steiner
John Hayes, a psychotherapist in his fifties
who was one of the first volunteers at Hopkins,
"felt like mysteries were being unveiled
and yet it all felt familiar
and more like I was being reminded of things I had already known.
I had a sense of initiation
into dimensions of existence most people never know exist,
including the distinct sense that death is illusory,
in the sense that it is a door we walk through
into another plane of existence,
that we’re sprung from an eternity
to which we will return.
Michael Pollan: How to Change Your Mind:
What the New Science of Psychedelics Teaches Us
About Consciousness, Dying, Addiction, Depression, and Transcendence
Grief recurs and spins,
a Möbius strip of memory going on and on in a loop.
You aren’t in denial about the death.
You just keep remembering that it happened.
Sallie Tisdale: Advice for Future Corpses (and Those Who Love Them):
A Practical Perspective on Death and Dying
Whether we cling to it or flee it,
what happens to the emptied body feels momentous.
As long as we will continue to live,
we will remember what happened to the body of the one who died.
The beloved lies before you, completely revealed.
All of aging, every success and every injury,
the ragged ending of illness or trauma,
all of the lived life, is revealed.
The corpse is a mirror; we are its reflection.
When we see another exactly as he is,
exactly as she is,
we see how much alike we are.
Love is really the only possible response.
Sallie Tisdale: Advice for Future Corpses (and Those Who Love Them):
A Practical Perspective on Death and Dying
Man is born of eternal day,
not because he wills or wishes it,
not because he labors or strives toward it,
not because he earns it as a reward,
but simply because the Spirit has breathed life into him.
And the Spirit which has breathed this life into him
has breathed Its own Life
and cannot unbreathe It or take It away.
If we would only let go of our theological nonsense
and let our soul commune with the Universe,
it would tell us all these things
because we already know them inwardly.
Ernest Holmes: You Will Live Forever
A consideration of history will come about in the future
which will take account of the forces
of those who have passed through the portal of death
and are living in their soul nature
in the world between death and a new birth.
An entirely new color range will be imparted to the culture of humanity
through a consciousness of the total humanity,
including the so-called dead humanity.
Rudolph Steiner: Earthly Death and Cosmic Life
90% of a “Positive Passing” is planning ahead.
No matter what the actual disease process,
if someone has made their own choices
for what they want or what they do not want for end of life care
and if the loved ones have the basic skills
on how to care for their loved one in this last phase-
the overall experience can be better by 90%!
It is that important.
When is the time to do our advance directives
and to learn the skill of how to care for someone who is dying?
BEFORE anyone gets ill.
Suzanne O’Brien RN:
Creating Positive Passings:
End of Life Doula, Level 1, Caregiver Training
The poet Marie Howe imagines the moment of death not as an ending,
the halting of something, but as a point of completion.
A totaling of a life.
The eternal memory of the tired satisfaction at the end of a good day,
a satisfaction never before known:
At last / someone has knotted the lace of your shoe so it won’t ever come undone.
I am not who I was fifty years ago,
or ten years ago, or last year, or yesterday.
I am not the person who wrote this sentence.
Which of me will die?
This moment in which everything, everything, everything changes at once
is one of great mystery, great power,
like no other moment in all of time.
Sallie Tisdale: Advice for Future Corpses (and Those Who Love Them):
A Practical Perspective on Death and Dying
Our lives as we live them day by day
create the person we will be at the moment of death.
You see this at the bedside of a dying person.
You see it in the way a body rests or fights,
in the lines of the face, in the faint shadow of a smile
or a scowl, worry or peace.
With every passing day,
we create the kind of death we will have.
Sallie Tisdale: Advice for Future Corpses (and Those Who Love Them):
A Practical Perspective on Death and Dying
So living is dying.
You understand?
Living means that every day you are abandoning everything
that you are attached to.
Can you do this?
A very simple fact but it has got tremendous implications.
So that each day is a new day.
Each day you are dying and incarnating.
There is tremendous vitality, energy there
because there is nothing you are afraid of.
There is nothing that can hurt.
Being hurt doesn't exist.
Krishnamurti: The Future is Now
When someone's body can no longer perform its functions in the natural world
in response to the thoughts and affections of its spirit
(which it derives from the spiritual world),
then we say that the individual has died.
This happens when the lungs’ breathing and the heart's systolic motion have ceased.
The person, though, has not died at all.
We are only separated from the physical nature that was useful to us in the world.
The essential person is actually still alive.
I say that the essential person is still alive
because we are not people because of our bodies
but because of our spirits.
After all, it is the spirit within us that thinks,
and thought and affection together make us the people we are.
Emanuel Swedenborg:
Afterlife: A Guided Tour of Heaven and Its Wonders
Consciousness is consciousness no matter who is interpreting it.
The soul returns to its original state as pure consciousness,
a drop of bliss in the ocean of bliss.
Here, the quarrels of religion end.
Like all earthly attachments, they fall away.
This state of unity attracts the dying person toward it.
Through the magnetism of the soul,
one is drawn to the next stage of a personal dream
that is universal at the source.
Deepak Chopra: Life After Death: The Burden of Proof
It is never too early to start thinking about your own death
and the deaths of those you love.
I don’t mean thinking about death in obsessive loops,
fretting that your husband has been crushed in a horrific car accident,
or that your plane will catch fire and plummet from the sky.
But rational interaction,
that ends with you realizing that you will survive the worst,
whatever the worst may be.
Accepting death doesn’t mean that you won’t be devastated
when someone you love dies.
It means you will be able to focus on your grief,
unburdened by bigger existential questions like
“Why do people die?” and “Why is this happening to me?”
Death isn’t just happening to you.
Death is happening to us all.
Caitlin Doughty: Smoke Gets in Your Eyes:
And Other Lessons from the Crematory
Look, denial is fine.
It is normal to deny death.
We are wired that way.
But just, for a little bit, step outside of denial,
get your paperwork in order,
think about the options that face us,
think about the fact that each of us will, in time, die.
Talk with the people who are important to you.
Get your hands around death and dying and then, if you wish,
step right back into denial.
Susan Abel Lieberman. Death, Dying and Dessert.:
Reflections on Twenty Questions About Dying
Man’s dream body is still with him, of course,
but the physical body now obscures it.
The dream body cannot be harmed while the physical one can --
as man quickly found out
as he transformed his experience largely from one to the other.
In the dream body man feared nothing.
The dream body does not die.
It exists before and after physical death.
In their dream bodies men had watched the spectacle
of animals “ killing ” other animals,
and they saw the animals ’ dream bodies emerge unscathed.
They saw that the earth was simply changing its forms,
but that the identity of each unit of consciousness survived --
and so , although they saw the picture of death,
they did not recognize it as the death
that to many people now seems an inevitable end.
Jane Roberts:
Dreams, “Evolution,” and Value Fulfillment
Volume One
The Garden of Eden legend represents a distorted version
of man’s awakening as a physical creature.
He becomes fully operational in his physical body ,
and while awake can only sense the dream body
that had earlier been so real to him.
He now encounters his experience from within a body
that must be fed, clothed, protected from the elements --
a body that is subject to gravity and to earth’s laws.
He must use physical muscles to walk from place to place .
He sees himself suddenly, in a leap of comprehension,
as existing for the first time not only apart from the environment,
but apart from all of earth’s other creatures.
The sense of separation is, in those terms,
initially almost shattering.
Jane Roberts:
Dreams, “Evolution,” and Value Fulfillment
Volume One
In the terms of your earthly experience,
it is a metaphysical, a scientific, and a creative error
to separate matter from consciousness,
for consciousness materializes itself as matter in physical life.
In the beginning, then, there was a dream world,
in which consciousness formed a dream of physical reality,
and gradually became awake within that world.
Your consciousness will survive your body’s death,
but it will also take on another kind of form --
a form that is itself composed of “ units of consciousness. ”
Jane Roberts:
Dreams, “Evolution,” and Value Fulfillment
Volume One
A curious delusion seems to prevail in many quarters
that the mere fact of death at once turns a demon into a saint--
that, whatever a man' s life may have been,
the moment he dies he becomes practically an angel of goodness.
No idea could possibly be further from the truth,
as those whose work lies in trying to help the departed know full well.
The casting off of a man' s physical body
no more alters his disposition than does the casting off of his overcoat;
he is precisely the same man the day after his death
as he was the day before,
with the same vices and the same virtues.
C. W. Leadbetter:
The Hidden Side of Things
No one who has experienced death
ever mourns the death of anyone.
Neale Donald Walsch:
The Complete Conversations with God
I was born when it was time to be born,
and I shall die when it is time to die.
If we are in peace with time
and follow the order of things,
neither sorrow nor joy will move us.
The ancients called this ‘freedom from bondage.’
Those who are entangled with the appearance of things
cannot free themselves.
But nothing can overcome the order of nature.
Why should I be upset?
The Taoist Master Yu
Sushila Blackman:
Graceful Exits: How Great Beings Die
In his interview with Ernest Becker on his deathbed,
Sam Keen asked him
how he thought about himself as he was dying.
Becker said this:
“Well, I suppose the most immediate thing I feel
is relieved of the burden of responsibility for my own life,
putting it back where it belongs,
to whoever, whatever hatched me.
I think this is the most immediate thing I feel,
a great sense of relief
and trust that eggs are not hatched in vain.”
Karen Speerstra, Herbert Anderson:
The Divine Art of Dying: How to Live Well While Dying
In the Bardo of this life,
we may be very earnest in our contemplation
of mind’s ultimate nature,
and try with great effort
to gain some experience of it through meditation.
At the time of death, however,
this very experience arises effortlessly.
When we finally reach the point
of the dissolution of all dualistic appearances,
we experience a moment of complete awareness,
a moment of vivid clarity.
It is like a shift in the weather,
when the sky clears up;
the dense covering of clouds is gone,
and suddenly we see the vast sky.
At this moment,
mind arrives directly at its own ground.
It is just like coming home.
Dzogchen Ponlop: Mind Beyond Death
Death is a natural transition
of consciousness to our higher-vibrational energy body.
At the moment of death,
we experience the transfer of our consciousness
from our dense outer vehicle (the physical body)
to our more subtle (astral) energy body.
We are immortal as soul,
so death is the ultimate illusion.
William Buhlman:
Adventures in the Afterlife
All your life you think you are your body.
Some of the time you think you are your mind.
It is at the time of your death t
hat you find out Who You Really Are.
Neale Donald Walsch:
The Complete Conversations with God: An Uncommon Dialogue
We have learned that we are powerful, creative, and immortal souls,
capable of molding our reality in every dimension of the universe.
We have learned that death is an illusion
and our spiritual evolution continues
far beyond the limits of matter and form.
This is an amazing quest;
a spiritual journey through multiple thought-responsive dimensions.
By developing our creative abilities and exploring our inner self,
we awaken to the profound nature of our spiritual potential.
Our continuing life beyond the physical
is an exciting journey of consciousness,
for we create the adventures we experience,
now and forever.
William Buhlman
explore William and Susan Buhlman's online death illuminating "Our Incredible Journey"
course:
https://www.monroeinstitute.org/node/4014
We are immortal beings
who have extended our conscious awareness
throughout the entire breadth of our multidimensional universe.
We are courageous explorers
who have chosen to learn and evolve
through the use of temporary vehicles of consciousness.
Each life experience is orchestrated by us
for our continuing education.
We learn and grow at our own pace
through total immersion of our consciousness
in many different thought-responsive environments.
This remarkable system of spiritual evolution
is extremely demanding but also exceedingly effective,
because all of us, without exception,
will eventually graduate from the vast training grounds of form.
William Buhlman
explore William and Susan Buhlman's online death illuminating "Our Incredible Journey"
course:
https://www.monroeinstitute.org/node/4014
Maybe I’d produced all I was meant to.
Maybe the fire of my life was coming to its own natural conclusion.
Why try to fan it into life again,
particularly if its initial joy had forever vanished?
Maybe that course was better
than the determination and painful discomforts
that might be necessary to prolong lifely existence.
I thought it could all happen so easily and naturally and painlessly
that there would be no one point where you could say
“ Now she lives and now she doesn’t.”
I was consciously aware of thinking how easy it might be
to let my desires drop one by one,
to let myself simply drift off into an unastonished death.
Jane Roberts:
Dreams, “Evolution,” and Value Fulfillment, Volume One
When all the layers of false identity have been stripped off,
there is no longer any version of that old self.
What is left behind is pure consciousness.
That is our original being.
That is our true identity.
Our true nature is indestructible.
Awakening to our true nature is the key
to unlocking the door of the paradise that lies within each of us.
Paradise is our primordial pure consciousness,
which is free of all limitations
but embodies the infinity of the divine.
I remember seeing a bumper sticker that said,
“I believe in life before death."
To me this means that we don't have to imagine a future paradise.
Paradise can happen right here, right now,
while we're in this human incarnation.
The choice is ours.
Anam Thubten. No Self No Problem
William Blake said to his friend Crabbe Robinson :
There is nothing like death .
Death is the best thing that can happen in life ;
but most people die so late
and take such an unmerciful time in dying .
God knows , their neighbors never see them rise from the dead .
To the outer man of sense ,
who knows nothing of the inner man of Being ,
this is sheer nonsense .
But Blake made the above quite clear
when he wrote in the year before he died :
William Blake — one who is very much delighted with being in good company .
Born 28 November 1757 in London
and has died several times since .
Neville Goddard: Awakened Imagination
“ I feel no bitterness or need for inveighing against fate.
This is only our human condition — common to all.
I can only yield to this suffering without need to blame,
resent or be defeated.
It has come and that is --
just as clouds come over the mountain. ”
Dorothy Dushkin
witnessing her daughter’s death
Emily K. Abel: The Inevitable Hour
One has to die to everything one knows--
which is consciousness,
which is the past,
which is the accumulated result of time.
Because it is only in death,
in total death,
that there is something new,
that there is a total silence
in which a different kind of life can be led.
J. Krishnamurti: The Collected Works of J. Krishnamurti:
1965-1966: Volume 16: The Beauty of Death
When you glimpse heaven,
Earth as you have known it loses its appeal.
Nearly everyone who has had a near-death experience
reports that they no longer fear death.
They realize that you cannot truly die.
Death is not a scary place to go,
but a blessed release.
Earth, under the advisement of ego,
is a far scarier domain.
Alan Cohen: A Course in Miracles Made Easy:
Mastering the Journey from Fear to Love
There was a time when you were not a body or an ego.
You were a powerful spiritual being
united with God and the entire universe.
You knew who you were
and enjoyed all the benefits of a divine being.
Then a moment came when you ceased to know yourself as a spirit,
and you began to regard yourself as a body.
That moment occurred in the womb,
at the time of your birth, or soon thereafter.
You underwent a crucial identity shift.
You did not cease to be a spiritual being;
you ceased to know yourself as a spiritual being.
Alan Cohen: A Course in Miracles Made Easy:
Mastering the Journey from Fear to Love
Here are five reasons to have a Spiritual Directive
documented for your transition.
1. We do not always have the gift of time to design our spiritual
preferences, communicate them to our loved ones, and develop the action plan to see them through. So prepare now.
2. Your emotional state during your transition or that of a loved one may interfere with spiritual focus and intention. Learn how to raise your emotional frequency to support a higher vibration during transition.
3. Other people may have belief systems that they can impose during your transition.
If you do not have documented directives, then you may have religious practices conducted during your transition that are not compatible with you.
4. The medical event can become the priority over the spiritual one. Many people lose sight of the opportunity to impact our spiritual evolution through actions taken during our transition.
It is not just a medical situation but a spiritual one as well.
5. So often we hear about the regrets of the living because they were just not sure what to do at the end. Give a gift to your loved ones by providing clear direction for them to follow as you prepare for your non-physical journey.
This is a significant opportunity for you to use your physical life experiences, the transition to the non-physical and all that follows beyond this life as a catalyst for spiritual evolution. I encourage you to use the tools that are available to make this journey a launch pad to your Higher Self.
Click Here for a Spiritual Directive Planning Worksheet
William Buhlman
www.astralinfo.org
A Course in Miracles tells us repeatedly that death is not real.
There is only life;
death exists only at the surface level of forms and appearances.
Death is the universe’s way of clearing out what has served its purpose,
to make way for the next act of purpose.
When the body has completed its mission,
it will gently be laid aside
Alan Cohen: A Course in Miracles Made Easy:
Mastering the Journey from Fear to Love
Our soul, which is that part of us
that remains in the spirit world while our spirit inhabits a physical body,
ultimately decides our time of death.
So, for instance, if a person’s soul knows
that she is more likely to hang on to life and resist crossing over into the afterlife
while loved ones are in the room with her,
that soul will influence death while those loved ones have temporarily left the room
(perhaps to go eat or talk to the doctor)
or before those loved ones arrive in the first place.
Alternatively, if one’s soul knows that a family member
is not emotionally equipped to be present at the time of their death,
the soul will influence death when that family member has left the room
(or before that family member arrives)--
possibly in cooperation with that family member’s spirit guides.
Bob Olson: Answers about the Afterlife:
A Private Investigator’s 15-Year Research Unlocks the Mysteries of Life after Death .
Since his physical death,
my father has assisted my research and writing
from his home in the spiritual dimension
and has attended every one of my readings with mediums.
His example has taught me that our human experience
does not end upon our physical death;
but rather, it continues with our ongoing interactions
with loved ones on the physical plane.
Bob Olson: Answers about the Afterlife:
A Private Investigator’s 15-Year Research Unlocks the Mysteries of Life after Death .
I heard from a man in his early forties with serious heart problems.
He wrote to tell me about Krishnamurti,
a spiritual leader in India who died in 1986.
Krishnamurti was once asked what is the most appropriate thing to say
to a friend who was about to die.
He answered: “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.”
In his email to me, this man was reassuring:
“I know you are not alone.”
Randy Pausch: The Last Lecture
In what is probably the most celebrated example
of controlled cell death during human development in the womb,
the hand of the fetus changes from a flat paddle to separate digits.
Deaths that involve the executing power of mitochondria
eliminate cells in the in-between zones of what will become the future fingers.
Cell death is here a sculptor of development.
Unlike a sculpture of marble or wood,
in which the deleted scraps lie around the floor to be swept up and thrown away,
in this cell death process
the material is recycled into other cells.
Tyler Volk: Death & Sex
The meanings of life aren’t inherited.
What is inherited is the mandate to make meanings of life by how we live.
The endings of life give life’s meanings a chance to show.
The beginning of the end of our order, our way, is now in view.
This isn’t punishment,
any more than dying is a punishment for being born.
Stephen Jenkinson
In the entire fabric of your existence,
this life is a brilliant, eternally unique and precious portion,
but only a portion,
from which you emerge with joy and understanding
whether you die tomorrow or in years to come.
The choice of life and death is always yours.
Life and death are but two faces
of your eternal, ever-changing existence.
Feel and appreciate the joy of your own being.
Many live into their nineties without ever appreciating
to that extent the beauty of their being.
You have lived before, and will again,
and your new life, in your terms, springs out of the old,
and is growing in the old and contained within it
as the seed is already contained within the flower.
We are all travelers, whatever our position….
Jane Roberts: The Nature of Personal Reality
It is natural to live after death,
and natural to return the body to earth
and [then to] form another.
When you imagine a life after death as unnatural or supernatural
then you feel divorced, cut off and bewildered.
You must try to understand that there are different kinds of nature within Nature
— and a capital for the last one.
Your physical life — your human nature — is, in your terms,
dependent upon a time when you were not.
You must realize that not being in that connotation
is quite as natural as physical being.
Your existence before and after death
is as much a normal phenomenon as your present life.
Jane Roberts: The Nature of Personal Reality
Departed ones have "come to pass."
Life goes not backward but forward.
They should be permitted to move on to their next experience.
Any kind of holding on in an attempt to make contact with them
can serve only to hold them back in their journey.
And the psychic dabbling
can certainly keep you unnerved and confused,
holding you back from your own need
to walk on to the next step in your own growth.
Eric Butterworth: In the Flow of Life
Death is not a dead-end street,
either for the one who passes
or the one who remains behind.
Let there be no sad good-byes.
How much better to bid our friend,
"Good morning—and Godspeed on your way."
There is no need to wallow in grief.
There are those who hold that grief is a mark of respect,
almost like a duty that you should perform.
This is nonsense!
Of course it is natural to have feelings of sadness,
but the sadness should be tempered with the joy of knowing
that your loved one is in the flow of life
and that he or she goes onward to meet his or her good.
Any prolonging of grief,
any attempt to hold on to one who has passed,
is a mixture of guilt and anger,
and it is to be totally out of the flow of life yourself.
Eric Butterworth: In the Flow of Life
Don't wait until an experience of bereavement comes to search for answers.
Get a well-rounded insight into life that actually includes death.
Reflect much on the idea of the flow of life
that cannot be locked in between birth and death.
Break down the barriers by knowing that on the other side of birth
is a flow of life that has “come to pass,"
and on the other side of death is a flow of life
that leads to new birth.
Get the sense of being radiantly alive
in a continuing and eternal experience in the flow.
Eric Butterworth: In the Flow of Life
Ego fears both the past and the present.
It fears the past
because it has already lost control of the past.
It fears the future
because it is not yet in control of it.
It seeks continuity of identity,
yet it is forced to realize that the “I” of today
is hardly the “I” of thirty years ago.
It is the ego which so strongly fears death.
Jane Roberts: The Early Sessions:
Book 3 of The Seth Material
Your death was made when you were made,
born when you were born,
endured what you have endured.
It is your adversary – your executioner –
only when you grant your death no honor,
no place in the order of things,
no truth,
no seat at the head table in the banquet hall of your life.
It is your angel
when you begin to see how your death moves and speaks so much like you,
when you make sure there is always an empty seat at the head table
even when the other guests don’t understand why you’ve done so.
Stephen Jenkinson
Even the writers I was researching
—people who lived in structure, plots, words --
mostly did not find their way to conversations
that offered a satisfying ending.
They left things messy, unresolved, dangling.
Part of the problem is that some silences are too wide to narrate.
Words,
even if the right ones miraculously presented themselves,
would not be enough.
The confession and forgiveness we want to fill the room
do not spring up more naturally in extremis, under duress.
It may be the last chance for the dying person to clarify,
but clarity doesn’t necessarily come.
In this way, death is a lot like life.
Katie Roiphe
author of “The Violet Hour: Great Writers at the End”.
from New York Times article, Dying, With Nothing to Say
LÓPEZ LECUBE: Borges, how do you imagine your death?
BORGES: Ah, I’m waiting for it very impatiently,
I’m told that it will come
but I feel as though it won’t,
that I’m not going to die.
Spinoza says that we all feel immortal,
yes, but not as individuals,
I assume, rather immortal in a pantheist way,
in a divine way.
When I get scared, when things aren’t going so well,
I think to myself, “But why should I care what happens
to a South American writer, from a lost country like the Republic of Argentina
at the end of the twentieth century?
What possible interest could that hold for me
when I still have the adventure of death before me....
Jorge Luis Borges:
The Last Interview: and Other Conversations
The death process is about reestablishing your identity.
The first stage of the death process releases you from your body,
and any thoughts that you may still have
that identify you with the body and its appearance.
The second stage of the death process releases you from your mind,
and any thoughts you may still have
that identify you with the mind and its contents.
The third stage of the death process releases you from your soul,
and any thoughts you may still have
that identify you with your soul and its individuality.
Here, in the Total Immersion of Self,
you come to a place where Knowing and Experiencing are one,
and where what you Know and Experience
is that you are not your body,
you are not your mind,
and you are not your soul.
You are something much greater.
You are the sum total of the energies that produce all three.
In death, all of your individual identities are shed,
ending the separation OF you FROM you, at last.
Neale Donald Walsch:
Home with God: In a Life That Never Ends
“Death” is the energy that propels you
through the Core of Your Being and into your next reality.
“Birth” and “death” are moments of Pure Creation
because they align or “fine-tune” the energy that is Life Itself,
increasing the vibration of its frequency and manifesting as matter in the physical world,
or decreasing the vibration and manifesting as invisible energy in the spiritual realm.
It is in this way that entire universes are born.
It is in this way that you were born.
Neale Donald Walsch:
Home with God: In a Life That Never Ends
Many a man who shows a brave front to the world,
and laughs and smiles with the best,
is yet groaning inwardly all the while
under the oppression of a secret horror,
knowing that death must come,
dreading lest the sword should fall.
Yet all this is quite unnecessary,
and comes only from ignorance,
as indeed does all fear;
for those who comprehend death
feel no dismay at its approach.
They know that man does not die,
but simply lays aside his body
as one lays aside a worn-out suit of clothes;
and to them one process is no more terrible than the other.
The man who in this twentieth century
does not yet know the facts about death,
is merely the man who has not taken the pains to look into the matter,
and if he suffers from fear of that which does not exist,
he has only himself to blame.
C. W. Leadbeater:
The Hidden Side of Things
Gerson Leiber, an American modernist painter
whose ambitions were stunted until he attended art school in Budapest,
where he had served in the Army during World War II,
died on Saturday at his home in Springs, N.Y.,
a hamlet in East Hampton. He was 96.
He died of a heart attack
hours before his wife of 72 years, Judith Leiber,
the renowned handbag designer,
died, also of a heart attack, at 97.
They were buried together on Monday.
Jeffrey Sussman, the couple’s biographer and spokesman,
said Mr. Leiber, who had congestive heart failure,
told his wife on Friday night,
“Sweetie, it’s time for both of us to go.”
Richard Sandomir
New York Times
For as long as you are alive in this body,
you will have a mind,
which means you are always dreaming.
Don't be afraid to dream,
but also don't be afraid of the end of the dream.
Enjoy it all!
You are alive,
but your body is already dead.
So, there is no need to be afraid of death.
Instead, go and conquer the fear of being alive.
don Miguel Ruiz Jr.:
don Miguel Ruiz’s Little Book of Wisdom:
The Essential Teachings
Last words are supposed to be especially important
as a clue to the meaning of it all.
Henry James said something like
“Now, at last, the distinguished thing”--
sticking to the end with his Jamesian style of elegant moroseness.
Beethoven is supposed to have said
“More light! More light!”
That's better, not so pretentious,
and full of Beethovenesque imperative.
William Saroyan commented that he knew all men are mortal,
but didn't think it applied to him.
“Now what?” he asked.
That was proper and fine.
But I most admire the last words of Alfred Jarry,
author of King Ubu,
who noticed his admirers gathered around him,
hoping for a final revelation,
although he could barely utter a sound.
When someone bent an ear to his lips to catch his dying revelation,
Jarry whispered:
“Any-body got a toothpick?”
Herbert Gold: Not Dead Yet:
A Feisty Bohemian Explores the Art of Growing Old
Try imagining your death and practicing it once a day for a week.
Lie down on a bed or the floor and say, “I’m dying.”
Imagine the various stages of it all:
getting bad news, being at the hospital, feeling lousy,
seeing the faces of your family and friends as they react to the news,
and then peacefully taking that last breath.
Meditate on that for a while,
imagining that you will actually be taking your last breath someday.
Be aware of what thoughts and sensations arise.
Be in your body.
Let your mind ramble.
Then think, “Okay, this breath is going to be my last one.”
Breathe in, breathe out, and tell yourself goodbye
(then get back up and do the laundry or jumping jacks or whatever!).
I know this might sound creepy and possibly depressing,
but I swear, after a week of this,
you will literally have a different relationship with death.
If we practice death daily,
we can put into motion all that we’ve practiced when the time comes.
Laura Pritchett: Making Friends with Death:
A Field Guide for Your Impending Last Breath
(to be read, ideally, before it’s imminent!)
One of the most important things we can do
is to actually imagine our own death, and then practice it.
Death doesn’t just happen once.
Well, okay, it does,
but many experts and folks interested in dying well
spend time practicing their death,
so that when the real one comes
they’re a little more . . . well, practiced.
Just like you practice violin, or basketball,
or jokes in order to get the punch line right (okay, I do that one),
you can practice death.
And practicing death does not invite the Grim Reaper!
Laura Pritchett: Making Friends with Death:
A Field Guide for Your Impending Last Breath
(to be read, ideally, before it’s imminent!)
When you learn the proper interpretation of the word death,
you will see that it becomes a friend,
for it is a cleansing process.
It is a letting go completely and ascending to a place
where the former things cannot enter in
and have nothing whatsoever to do with the present manifestation.
Instead of getting rid of things temporarily,
man dies completely to the idea and its manifestation.
In the new place,
he finds himself as incapable of experiencing his former limitations
as an eagle flying over the abyss would have
in experiencing the cramped quarters of the eggshell from which it evolved.
Walter C. Lanyon:
The Temple Not Made with Hands
Many are seeking the new birth,
but they do not want to go through death to get it.
In other words, they want to hold on to old ideas
and at the same time try to express new capacities.
It is quite as impossible for a caterpillar to fly
as it is for an egg;
both must perform the death
upon the thing of which they want to be rid
and re-embody themselves with the new idea
before they can attain the expression they are seeking.
Walter C. Lanyon:
The Temple Not Made with Hands
So what are we?
Are we the tonal, or are we the nagual?
Are we matter, or are we life?
Humans have been asking this in different ways for thousands of years,
without realizing the simplicity of the truth.
The truth is life and death,
a simple binary formula
whose mathematical symbols are 0 and 1.
In the language of science,
this means energy and matter.
In religious storytelling,
it is God . . . and creation.
A nagual man knows himself
to be the force that creates existence and moves matter.
He sees that all else is temporal.
All else—like thought, like words--
is a mirror distortion.
To know these things is to know truth.
Don Miguel Ruiz:
The Toltec Art of Life and Death: A Story of Discovery
Here’s what I learned from the deaths in this book:
You work. You don’t work.
You resist. You don’t resist.
You exert the consummate control.
You surrender. You deny.
You accept.
You pray. You don’t pray.
You read. You work.
You take as many painkillers as you can.
You refuse painkillers.
You rage against death.
You run headlong toward it.
In the end the deaths are the same.
They all die.
The world releases them.
In the actual moment, you do not have a choice.
Grace finds you.
Acceptance hunts you down.
Katie Roiphe: The Violet Hour:
Great Writers at the End
“The organism wishes to die only in its own fashion.”
As Freud had written, he died in the manner he chose to die,
at the time he wanted to die.
He chose and controlled something
most of us are not privileged to choose and control.
He imagined for himself this death.
It looked to others like he had fallen asleep.
He stopped breathing in the early hours.
Anna wrote, “I believe there is nothing worse
than to see the people nearest to one lose the very qualities
for which one loves them.
I was spared that with my father,
who was himself to the last minute.”
He was so much himself to the last minute
that Anna would feel as if he were just off on one of his journeys,
with her keeping things in order until he came back.
Katie Roiphe: The Violet Hour:
Great Writers at the End
“All too often,”
wrote philosopher Robert C. Solomon,
“we approach death with the self-indulgent thought
that my death is a bad thing
because it deprives the universe of me.”
Yet if we think about it,
the universe survives the deaths
of about fifty-five million unique individuals a year quite nicely.
Barbara Ehrenreich:
Natural Causes:
An Epidemic of Wellness, the Certainty of Dying,
and Killing Ourselves to Live Longer
You can think of death bitterly or with resignation,
as a tragic interruption of your life,
and take every possible measure to postpone it.
Or, more realistically,
you can think of life as an interruption
of an eternity of personal nonexistence,
and seize it as a brief opportunity
to observe and interact with
the living, ever-surprising world around us.
Barbara Ehrenreich:
Natural Causes:
An Epidemic of Wellness, the Certainty of Dying,
and Killing Ourselves to Live Longer
Today, I woke before daylight
to an invitation from Death.
Like my Aztec ancestors,
I welcome it with the gratitude of a warrior
who has fought well and wishes for a safe homecoming . . .
and a long rest.
Don Miguel Ruiz:
The Toltec Art of Life and Death: A Story of Discovery
A personal legacy
is the compilation of all the experiences in our life.
It is the sum of all our actions, all our reactions,
all our emotions and feelings.
It is what we give to those who remain,
after we leave our physical body.
A legacy is all that we are,
the totality of ourselves.
Through the memories others have of us, our legacy is determined . . .
and the more authentic we are,
the brighter that legacy will be.
Don Miguel Ruiz:
The Toltec Art of Life and Death: A Story of Discovery
Come lovely and soothing death,
Undulate round the world, serenely
arriving, arriving,
In the day, in the night, to all, to each
Sooner or later, delicate death.
Walt Whitman
What a waste!
Born into times so fortunate
that I must die lying at home on the tatami!
Samurai Poet
18th Century
Most of the good deaths I have seen as a doctor
have involved the whole family
working towards exactly the same end –
singing, if you like, from the same hymn sheet.
I’ve always admired families who are absolutely determined
to let their loved one decide how he or she wants to die.
As far as they are concerned,
if the star of the show knows what they want,
the family’s only job is to help them get on with it.
It is so crucial not just to think about your own end,
but to engage your family in the bigger picture.
If you don’t, there is a real risk that protective instinct,
rather than pragmatic acceptance, will take over.
John Humphrys:
The Welcome Visitor: Living Well, Dying Well
Death is not waiting for us at the end of a long road.
Death is always with us,
in the marrow of every passing moment.
She is the secret teacher hiding in plain sight.
She helps us to discover what matters most.
And the good news is
we don’t have to wait until the end of our lives
to realize the wisdom that death has to offer.
Reflecting on death can have a profound and positive impact
not just on how we die,
but on how we live.
Frank Ostaseki: The Five Invitations:
Discovering What Death Can Teach Us About Living Fully
Life and death are a package deal.
You cannot pull them apart.
In Japanese Zen, the term shoji translates as “birth-death.”
There is no separation between life and death
other than a small hyphen, a thin line that connects the two.
We cannot be truly alive
without maintaining an awareness of death.
Frank Ostaseki: The Five Invitations:
Discovering What Death Can Teach Us About Living Fully
Here Are Some Things You Might Say to Your Doctor
Please tell it to me like it is.
I want to know what you really think so I can plan.
You see a lot of patients with [name the disease,
what is the pathway my disease is likely to take?
Would you be surprised if I were alive in five years?
One year? Six months?
What are the benefits and burdens of the treatment you are suggesting?
What are the alternatives?
What happens if we don’t pursue them?
What would you choose to do if this were you, your wife, your father?
Jessica Nutik Zitter: Extreme Measures:
Finding a Better Path to the End of Life
As an ICU physician,
I see many cases where patients’ bodies are being kept alive--
whether by breathing machines, feeding tubes, dialysis, and/or antibiotics--
despite poor prognoses for recovery or return to their previous function.
I so often wish that these patients
had given some indication to a loved one or a doctor
of how they would feel about being kept alive in this condition.
Surveys show that almost no one wants that,
and yet without a clear opt-out,
we doctors feel obligated to keep such patients alive.
We’ve achieved amazing things in modern medicine.
Our tools can bring the dying back to life.
But too often they serve to take life away from the dying.
Jessica Nutik Zitter: Extreme Measures:
Finding a Better Path to the End of Life
Just as each life matters, each death also matters.
Everything matters.
If we support even one person
in having a more sacred, dignified, and reverent death,
we make a huge contribution to this shift of consciousness.
If the only person we ever midwife
through this mystifying transition is ourselves,
we’ve done something powerful for the planet.
We’ve performed a major act of alchemy,
changing fear into awe, suffering into transformation.
We’ve been conduits for sacred magic.
That is no small act.
Joellyn St. Pierre: The Art of Death Midwifery:
An Introduction and Beginner’s Guide
How much of our lives is predicated on the fear of death?
The more we are in the presence of the dying,
the more we prepare for our own eventual death.
The more we prepare for our own transition,
the more likely we will be able to embrace this inevitable change of forms
with greater consciousness and grace.
If the only person we ever serve as death midwife
turns out to be ourselves,
that alone would cause a major shift in cosmic consciousness
and be a blessing to all.
Joellyn St. Pierre: The Art of Death Midwifery:
An Introduction and Beginner’s Guide
If you wait till symptom time
to start practicing accepting your death,
honey, you've waited too long.
Stephen Jenkinson
Nothing you can lose by dying
is half as precious as the readiness to die,
which is man’s charter of nobility.
George Santayana
I sat in the sunlit waiting room with the doctor in charge of my father
and we talked not of life, but of death.
He took me aback by quoting from the Victorian poet Arthur Hugh Clough.
They were words that, I believe,
should be inscribed on the wall of every doctor in the land
who might one day have to deal with someone like my father:
‘Thou shalt not kill; but need’st not strive officiously to keep alive.’
John Humphrys: The Welcome Visitor:
Living Well, Dying Well
The reason that the passing of a loved one is such a shattering experience
is that our frame of reference is too small.
Unless we have a view of life that transcends or includes death,
there will be fear and dread about our own lives
and confusing bereavement in facing the passing of another.
The you that transcends the body
is a time-space parenthesis in the universal dimension of eternity.
Life is whole; the universe is whole.
Even though we may experience this wholeness “in part,"
there is that of us that is changeless and deathless,
that is integrally and eternally involved in the universe.
If death comes,
it must be a part of that wholeness,
not a deviation from it.
Eric Butterworth: In the Flow of Life
We have been conditioned in our culture
to think of life as beginning with birth
and moving downhill inexorably toward death.
The clergy have droned,
"From the day we are born we begin to die."
This is the "great lie" that we must erase from consciousness.
Life does not grow old.
Life does not deteriorate.
Life does not die.
Life is an eternal, dynamic, flowing process.
Eric Butterworth: In the Flow of Life
— could anything be more perfect than the butterfly ,
the released beauty,
as it leaves behind a crumpling, damp chrysalis
to dry and wither, empty now, and blow away as ashes or fall as dust ?
Could anything be more true than the Monarch itself,
vibrating and migrating in decibels and reverberations
beyond our senses and imagination,
imprinted with the map, the code, the secret of Home ?
Homing, coming … home, come … come,
home … coming home … home coming.
Ellyn Peirson: After the Interlude:
A Dialogue about Death and Beyond
“Do not complain and cry and pray,
but open your eyes and see.
The light is all about you,
if you would only cast the bandage from your eyes and look.
It is so wonderful, so beautiful,
so far beyond what any man has dreamt of
or prayed for,
and it is for ever and for ever.”
Quote from "The Soul of a People"
Charles Leadbetter: The Devachanic Plane
Decisions made at the end of life
are often ambiguous and complicated by unexpectedly powerful emotions.
Families that have not learned to live with mystery and ambiguity
are sometimes torn apart by the complex decisions
that must be made when a family member is irreversibly ill or dying.
Our willingness to live with wonder and mystery
as dimensions of both living and dying
is a spiritual practice that will make it easier
to embrace end-of-life decisions already made
when one’s life situation was less ambiguous.
Karen Speerstra; Anderson, Herbert Anderson:
The Divine Art of Dying: How to Live Well While Dying
Intellectual forces assist us after death.
They help to render our conscious experience
of the period between death and a new birth particularly clear.
In fact, the more we endeavor to think clearly and truly
during our physical existence,
the greater our efforts to acquire a true knowledge of spiritual realities,
the brighter and clearer will be our consciousness
between death and a new birth.
Rudolf Steiner:
Life between Death and Rebirth
After death many things appear vividly before the soul
of which it had no inkling during life.
A host of things that one has not experienced
confronts one after death.
What appears ludicrous
actually becomes reality after death.
A whole world of which one is not aware in life
then comes to expression.
Rudolf Steiner:
Life between Death and Rebirth
What could be more uplifting than to know
that we can discover the fount of our life between death and rebirth.
We can discover our kinship with the whole universe!
What could give us greater strength for our duties in life
than the knowledge that we bear within us
the forces pouring in from the universe
and must so prepare ourselves in life
that these forces can become active in us when,
between death and rebirth,
we pass into the spheres of the planets and of the Sun.
Rudolf Steiner:
Life between Death and Rebirth
Death is not traumatic to the dying.
One moment you are alive
and then you are not,
and there is little difference except you are free.
Fear has told you that you will not have enough time
to complete whatever you have come to do.
Fear is wrong.
No physical body dies one moment before the soul is ready,
nor one moment after.
Pat Rodegast: Emmanuel’s Book III:
What Is an Angel Doing Here?
While a man is going about on Earth,
he regards his physical body and his etheric body --
of which he knows little,
but at least he feels it in his powers of growth,
as his own body,
but he has no right to do so.
Only his Ego and his astral body are his.
Everything present in his physical body and etheric body --
even while he is on Earth --
is the property of the divine-spiritual Beings
who live and weave within them,
and continue their work while the man is absent in sleep.
Rudolph Steiner
Do not let your imagination paint death through the mind’s palette.
Grieve for the loss of the physical embodiment
of a Love you have always known,
and mourn it to the depths of your human despair,
but do not believe it.
The loss is temporary.
Dying is not failure.
It is the means by which you can rid yourself of the physical body.
You die into no danger, no illness,
no falsity, no betrayal, no guesswork.
You remain.
Pat Rodegast: Emmanuel’s Book III:
What Is an Angel Doing Here?
Death is a release into the joy of Homecoming.
You are born into a world that insists upon death.
From the human point of view, death is a defeat.
Death is not your enemy.
It is your ticket Home.
Pat Rodegast: Emmanuel’s Book III:
What Is an Angel Doing Here?
Every death is brought about
by the culmination of the vibration of the Being.
There is not an exception to that.
No one, beast or human,
makes their transition into the Non-Physical
without it being the vibrational consensus
that is within them,
so every death is a suicide
because every death is self-imposed.
Esther Hicks: Ask and It Is Given
The best reason
to make your transition into the Non-Physical
is not because the physical is miserable.
It is because you have a sense of completion in physical--
and you are looking for another vantage point.
Death is a withdrawal of Consciousness;
it is like taking attention from here
and putting it there.
Esther Hicks: Ask and It Is Given
Truth, even bitter, difficult truth,
doesn't necessarily condemn a person to unrelenting sorrow.
Truth can be freeing.
Yes, it may initially cause sadness,
but accepting death can inspire deep inner work
and healing of relationships.
Jack went through an amazing transformation
in the last weeks of his life.
His relationships were never more loving.
Sheila and the girls spent an incredible amount of time with him.
Even with his continued decline and the changes in his face and body,
he always seemed joyous.
Everyone felt it when they were at his bedside.
He told me he was grateful to the cancer
for teaching him how to appreciate every moment
and helping his family to learn that as well.
He was truly at peace.
One of his daughters told me
she felt like they were living inside a rainbow.
Henry Fersko-Weiss: Caring for the Dying:
The Doula Approach to a Meaningful Death
Just before death
when the body separates from the soul,
a tremendous experience happens
which happens only to the mystics, to the meditators.
To them it does not happen by accident,
they have been preparing for it.
Their meditation is nothing but an effort
to disidentify themselves with the body.
The meditator experiences death many times consciously
so that when death comes
it is not a new experience.
The meditator has always died with laughter.
Osho:
The Art of Living and Dying
When I asked him once
what was the essential character of the seers of the new cycle,
he said that they are the warriors of total freedom,
that they are such masters of awareness, stalking, and intent
that they are not caught by death, like the rest of mortal men,
but choose the moment and the way of their departure from this world.
At that moment they are consumed by a fire from within
and vanish from the face of the earth,
free,
as if they had never existed.
Carlos Castaneda: The Fire from Within
Let us evermore,
amidst our jollity and feasting,
set the remembrance of our frail condition before our eyes,
never suffering ourselves to be so far transported with our delights,
but that we have some intervals of reflecting upon,
and considering how many several ways
this jollity of ours tends to death,
and with how many dangers it threatens it.
The Egyptians were won’t to do after this manner,
who in the height of their feasting and mirth,
caused a dried skeleton of a man to be brought into the room
to serve for a memento to their guests.
Michel de. Montaigne:
The Complete Essays
What we are experiencing now is an illusion,
like a dream.
We are in dream right now.
From the point of view of tomorrow,
it is not real.
When we look at our experience of a nighttime dream from the waking state,
we can see how solid and believable those appearances seemed
from within the dream state.
However, when we wake up from that dream,
those appearances are no longer there.
It was all just an illusion.
In the same way, the illusion of a solid and real world
dissolves when we wake up from this dream of samsara
into the state of awakening or buddhahood.
Dzogchen Ponlop: Mind Beyond Death
Just as what you call “death”
is not the end of your life experience,
what you call “birth”
was not the beginning.
You are Eternal Consciousness
expressing yourself in an endless,
glorious dance of Consciousness.
You will never cease to be.
Jerry and Esther Hicks: The Amazing Power of Deliberate Intent:
Living the Art of Allowing
Only the essence of the life that has passed
can appear before the consciousness at the time of death.
What is death?
Isn’t it the fulfillment of life itself?
How can it be in opposition to life?
It is only an extension of it.
It is only the fruit of life.
Osho
Earthen Lamps
Very little experience of these higher (Devachanic) planes
is needed to alter fundamentally the student’s conception
of the change which takes place at death ;
he realizes immediately on the opening of his consciousness
even in the astral , and still more in this mental world ,
that the fulness of true life
is something which can never be known down here ,
and that when we leave this physical earth
we are passing into that true life ,
not out of it .
Charles Webster Leadbeater:
The Devachanic Plane
When a water bubble
On the ocean bursts,
It returns to the ocean.
This is death;
All deaths.
Your death and my death.
Returning to the Source,
What is there to fear?
Wu Hsin:
Aphorisms for Thirsty Fish
Do not become preoccupied with
What occurs after death unless
There is willingness to die today.
This death, which is only
The death of identification, is
The doorway to liberation.
Wu Hsin:
Aphorisms for Thirsty Fish
The world eternal turns round;
all things therein are incessantly moving,
the earth, the rocks of Caucasus, and the pyramids of Egypt,
both by the public motions and their own.
Even constancy itself is no other
but a slower and more languishing motion.
I cannot fix my object;
’tis always tottering and reeling by a natural giddiness;
I take it as it is at the instant I consider it;
I do not paint its being,
I paint its passage.
Michel de Montaigne
When we who care are not afraid to die,
we will be better able to prepare the dying for death
and deepen their communion with others.
We all are born as fragile beings;
we all die as fragile beings.
We need each other
to live well and to die well .
Henri J. M. Nouwen: Our Greatest Gift:
A Meditation on Dying and Caring
Beings who have achieved the highest level of Mahamudra
have completely transcended meditation
and for them there is total freedom immediately after death.
For instance, Milarepa,
who attained the state of non-meditation,
understood that the nature of mind is voidness.
For him there was no more need to meditate,
to learn, or to do practice :
He was enlightened.
Lama Lodu. Bardo Teachings:
The Way Of Death And Rebirth
What happens to the consciousness of a person who dies
while they are asleep, or in the astral body?
There are many subtle forces
which come under the category of consciousness.
Even during sleep or a trance state,
while some components of consciousness may be separated from the physical body,
other forces remain.
If the body is disturbed,
these forces cause awareness to return instantly,
to participate in the fate of the physical body.
For this reason,
it is not possible to die
without knowing that death is taking place.
Lama Lodu. Bardo Teachings:
The Way Of Death And Rebirth
The difference between death cleaning and just a big cleanup
is the amount of time they consume.
Death cleaning is not about dusting or mopping up;
it is about a permanent form of organization
that makes your everyday life run more smoothly.
Margareta Magnusson: The Gentle Art of Swedish Death Cleaning:
How to Free Yourself and Your Family from a Lifetime of Clutter
I am death cleaning,
or, as we call it in Swedish, döstädning.
Dö is “death” and städning is “cleaning.”
In Swedish it is a term that means that you remove unnecessary things
and make your home nice and orderly
when you think the time is coming closer for you to leave the planet.
Some people can’t wrap their heads around death.
And these people leave a mess after them.
Did they think they were immortal?
Margareta Magnusson: The Gentle Art of Swedish Death Cleaning:
How to Free Yourself and Your Family from a Lifetime of Clutter
It's like your conscious desire to die
is fighting against your base instinct of self-preservation.
Leads to that weird feeling of wanting to “die without dying."
I just want to disappear for a while
without having to kill myself to do it.
My theory is if for just one moment in your life you’re glad to be alive
it’ll all have been worth it.
Reddit Posts
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To care for the dying
means to help them live their dying
as a way to gather around them not only those who come to visit,
not only family and friends, but all of humanity,
the living as well as the dead.
When we say that it is not good for a human being to die alone,
we touch a deep mystery.
In our death,
we need to be, more than ever, in communion with others.
The passage of our life is the passage that,
more than any other passage,
needs to be made with others.
Henri J. M. Nouwen:
Our Greatest Gift: A Meditation on Dying and Caring
If there is one thing I have noticed time and again,
it’s that death and dying has a way of breaking down barriers,
allowing us—for a moment--
to find common ground in our humanity.
It has a way of taking a church that officially excludes the LGBTQ community
and enabling them to see the importance of people over opinion.
Caleb Wilde: Confessions of a Funeral Director:
How the Business of Death Saved My Life
…is it possible to befriend our dying gradually
and live open to it,
trusting that we have nothing to fear?
Is it possible to prepare for our death
with the same attentiveness
that our parents had in preparing for our birth?
Can we wait for our death as for a friend
who wants to welcome us home?
Henri J. M. Nouwen: Our Greatest Gift:
A Meditation on Dying and Caring
Death creates its own culture.
Here, language is spoken with fewer words
and more tears, hugs, and contemplation.
The regular dress code doesn’t exist,
and the norms and mores of society are put on hold.
Here, in this sacred space,
God seems nearer;
family and friends surround you;
you can let your emotional inhibitions go.
This is the world that was never meant to be
and yet is everything you wish it could be..
it seems we have to go back through death
to get to Eden.
Caleb Wilde: Confessions of a Funeral Director:
How the Business of Death Saved My Life
Over the past eighty-plus years,
I’ve gone through many deaths and resurrections, as we all have.
Every time I’ve died to an old belief
and had the slightest change of consciousness
I have become a different self,
a different tapestry, than the one I was before,
and after each subsequent resurrection
I have had, to some extent, to rediscover myself.
After a resurrection
I appear outwardly to be the same person that I was,
but inside I am quite different.
My spiritual experiences define my inner being;
therefore, after changes occur,
it takes me some time to understand and get used to
the new person into which I have evolved.
Walter Starcke:
The Third Appearance: a crisis of perception
…self is lost in that of attaining for itself
the nearer and nearer approach that builds in manifested form,
whether in the Pleiades, Arcturus, Gemini, or in Earth…
as light, a ray does not end,
lives on and on,
until it becomes one in essence with the source of light.
As the entity moves from sphere to sphere,
it seeks its way home,
to the face of the Creator,
the first cause.
Edgar Cayce: Beyond Death:
Visions of the Other Side
There is an invisible something;
call it the Christ,
call it God,
call it the Father within,
call it what you will–
the spirit of God within man,
the transcendental Consciousness,
or that transcendental Presence–
but realize that it is invisible, it is infinite,
and it is closer to you than breathing.
If you mount up to heaven, it goes there with you;
if you make your bed in hell, you will find it there;
if you “walk through the valley of the shadow of death,”
you cannot fear because it is with you.
“The kingdom of God is within you.”
You live and move and have your being in God (Consciousness),
and God lives in you.
Joel S. Goldsmith:
Man Was Not Born to Cry
"What happens to me after death?"
The question dissolves
when it is seen that I am a dreamed character.
Then it is seen that there is no ‘me’ who dies,
no 'after'
because time is created only in the dreamed mind
and no 'death'
because death is simply the awakening from the dream.
Richard Sylvester: I Hope You Die Soon
The Way of the Samurai is found in death.
Meditation on inevitable death should be performed daily.
Every day without fail one should consider himself as dead.
This is the substance of the way of the samurai.
Yamamoto Tsunetomo
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.
Only awareness wells up within.
You will be taking with you
only whatsoever awareness you have attained.
That is your only real wealth.
Osho
As we think, act, and live here today,
we built the structures of our homes
in spirit realms after we leave earth,
and we build karma for future lives,
thousands of years to come,
on this earth or other planets.
Life will assume new dignity,
and labor new interest for us,
when we come to the knowledge
that death is but a continuation of life and labor,
in higher planes.
Edna Wheeler Wilcox
Death has nothing to do with going away.
The sun sets
The moon sets
But they are not gone.
Rumi
From now there shall be no fear left for me in this world,
and thou shalt be victorious in all my strife.
Thou hast left death for my companion
and I shall crown him with my life.
Thy sword is with me to cut asunder my bonds,
and there shall be no fear left for me in the world.
Rabindranath Tagore: Gitanjali
"the souls of men are divine,
and when they have quitted the body
a return to heaven is open to them,
least difficult to those who have been most virtuous and just"
Now if it be true that in proportion to a man's goodness
the escape from what may be called the prison and bonds of the flesh is easiest,
whom can we imagine to have had an easier voyage to the gods than Scipio?
I am disposed to think, therefore,
that in his case mourning would be a sign of envy rather than of friendship.
If, however, the truth rather is that the body and soul perish together,
and that no sensation remains,
then though there is nothing good in death,
at least there is nothing bad.
Marcus Tullius Cicero:
Treatises on Friendship and Old Age
And I ask you,
would you not say that one was the greatest of fools
who believed that a lamp was worse off when it was extinguished
than before it was lighted?
We mortals also are lighted and extinguished;
the period of suffering comes in between,
but on either side there is a deep peace.
For, unless I am very much mistaken, my dear Lucilius,
we go astray in thinking that death only follows,
when in reality it has both preceded us
and will in turn follow us.
Whatever condition existed before our birth, is death.
Seneca: Letters from a Stoic
You are younger;
but what does that matter?
There is no fixed count of our years.
You do not know where death awaits you;
so be ready for it everywhere.
Seneca: Letters from a Stoic
The Death of Etsugan
At daybreak he took a bath and then,
while sitting dignified in Zen meditation,
recited his last poem:
Buddha came down from the mountain,
I ascended it. Always I’ve
Run counter to his teaching,
And now I’m bound for hell—ha-ha!
Man’s inquisitiveness is sheer nonsense.
He then closed his eyes and, still sitting, died.
Sushila Blackman:
Graceful Exits: How Great Beings Die
Quantum physics places consciousness
at the centre of all reality.
However, what is being missed
is how consciousness actually ‘creates’ this reality.
Each individual human being can expect
to exist for 100 years at most.
At that time his, or her, consciousness
seems to simply disappear.
How can we on one hand proclaim
that consciousness brings the universe into existence
while on the other acknowledge
that that consciousness is finite.
It simply does not make sense.
Human personality must, in some yet unknown way,
be able to effect reality before birth and after death.
Anthony Peake:
Is there Life after Death?
The fear of death is
The penalty for accepting
The idea of individuality.
When the particular is seen to be
No different than the universal
The fear of death is gone.
Wu Hsin:
In the Shadow of the Formless
Death
I die a little each day
One dies many times in a lifetime
Before the liberating death
The many deaths are the events which plunge us into darkness
A difficult time and journey until we enter the rebirth canal
And climb back into the light to be born again
It gets harder to do the larger our ego gets
And the more we accumulate
But each death brings an opportunity for our rebirth
If we have the courage
Dying is easy
Living can be difficult and painful
One day there will be a gift for us all
Death
Until then I will keep crawling to the light each time I die
Bernie Siegel, MD
Spending time in a house where someone is dying
always reminds me to take in life fully.
To pay attention to the practical and the mysterious,
to the universal and the personal,
to what can be said in words
and what remains in the heart.
Fran Smith: Changing the Way We Die:
Compassionate End of Life Care and The Hospice Movement
It is only
The sense of a separate me
That is born.
The dissolution of this sense is
Its very death.
One need not die
To achieve this.
Wu Hsin:
In the Shadow of the Formless
Various cultists and healers usually take the position
that it is of major importance that the physical vehicle
be rendered free from disease and clutched away
from the processes of death.
It might, however, be desirable (and it often is)
that the disease be permitted to do its work
and death open the door
to the escape of the soul from imprisonment.
The time comes inevitably to all incarnated beings
when the soul demands liberation
from the body and from form life,
and nature has her own wise ways of doing this.
Disease and death must be recognised as liberating factors
when they come as the result of right timing by the soul.
Alice A. Bailey: Esoteric Healing
When it comes to death,
do not think about death,
do not fear death,
but die to every moment.
When St. Paul said, “Die unto death,”
he meant die to the past in every moment.
Step into what is happening right now,
and you die to both the past and the future.
If you can do this right now,
you can conquer the fear of death.
Deepak Chopra: Power, Freedom, and Grace:
Living from the Source of Lasting Happiness
One of the biggest misconceptions
is that the soul resides in the body.
People may say,
“This person died, and the soul has left,”
but it’s not true.
The soul is not inside the body.
The soul projects itself as the body and the mind.
It finds a location in space-time,
and broadcasts or telecasts itself through the body.
My soul is merely localizing or expressing itself through my body.
To believe that our soul is “inside a body, looking out”
is a convincing but socially induced hallucination.
Deepak Chopra: Power, Freedom, and Grace:
Living from the Source of Lasting Happiness
Sudden death –
however much we may wish for it
as preferable to being racked by our own body --
is a reminder
that we are never at any time insulated
by a guaranteed distance from the end of ourselves.
Death has no obligation to serve notice.
Raymond Tallis: The Black Mirror:
Looking at Life through Death
When the mind is dropped
and meditation has arisen,
then you see the total.
Then you see the whole as it is,
all the aspects together.
Then summer and winter are not separate;
then spring and fall are not separate.
Then you will see that birth and death
are two aspects of the same process.
Osho. The Path of Love
The unspeakable Nothing
italicizes at least some of the Everything that is life.
While death destroys us in fact%2