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.

Follow on Twitter @DeathKnells

Beings are not manifest to human senses before birth.
During the period between birth and death they are manifest.
They again return to the unmanifest at death.
In this natural process,
​what is there to be concerned about?

Ramesh Balsekar:   The Ultimate Understanding 






The language of the dying is  not static;
 it is a language of movement,
of platforms, tickets, passports and maps,
visitations and greetings,
entrances and exits.
 A language of arrivals and departures.
 They will often ask if their bags are packed
or if there is a full tank of gas in the car.
 They repeat themselves,
asking if the train is on time;
 asking if you will be coming with them.  
You must enter this as you would enter a foreign land;
 signs will be of little help.
You must see what they see.  
It is never planes they wait for;
 rather, they pull away slowly from this earth--
​the field of fall rye rolling as far as the eye can see.  

Eve Joseph:  The Slender Margin:
 The Intimate Strangeness of Death and Dying 







The idea of the “good” death
is not owned by any one approach or institution.
 It doesn’t only occur within hospital settings
or with availability of hospice care.
 The idea of “good” is affected by the  nature of the experience
wherever it occurs and whatever model of dying is finally selected.
 It evolves out of the experience itself
by the opportunities that are taken by all participants.  
In this way, an attitude of awe and sacredness toward death
doesn’t necessarily depend on “how” or “where” one dies,
as much as on “who one is”
and “what one carries” into the experience.
 Though any death can be managed in better ways,
if we desire that a sense of awe, respect, and sacredness be present,
these must be brought to the experience
​by the participants themselves.

Stephen Jamison, Ph.D.:  Final Acts of Love:
 Families, Friends, and Assisted Dying 







Pure consciousness cannot be destroyed;
it can only be expressed.
Knowing this frees us from the fear of death
because nothing in the universe is ever lost;
it is only transformed.
If you and I are speaking on the phone,
and somebody cuts off the phone lines,
what happens to us?
Where do we go?
Nothing happens to us, and we don’t go anywhere.
So, too, when physical death occurs,
nothing happens to us.
Certain lines of communication
that use a certain nervous system
have temporarily been disrupted.
But we are still here.
The soul doesn’t go anywhere;
​ it’s the body that dissolves and returns to the earth.

Deepak Chopra:   Power, Freedom, and Grace:
Living from the Source of Lasting Happiness 





Now, can one die every day
to everything that one knows--
except, of course, the technological knowledge,
the direction where your home is, and so on;
that is, to end, psychologically, every day,
so that the mind remains fresh, young and innocent?
That is death.
And to come upon that there must be no shadow of fear.
To give up without argument, without any resistance.
That is dying.
Have you ever tried it?
To give up without a murmur, without restraint, without resistance,
the thing that gives you most pleasure
(the things that are painful, of course, one wants to give up in any case).
Actually to let go.
Try it.
Then, if you do it,
you will see that the mind becomes extraordinarily alert,
alive and sensitive, free and unburdened.
Old age then takes on quite a different meaning,
​not something to be dreaded. -

Krishnamurti: You are the World 


We believe we are the body,
and when it stops functioning,
we think we have died.
That pattern of experience has concretized
into a visceral fear of death,
but it is ultimately based on a misunderstanding of our true nature.
As we become more aware
of our essential nature as pure consciousness,
untouched by matter and change,
we lose our fear of death.
Instead of feeling that it is an annihilation of our existence,
we see death as a quantum leap forward in our evolution,
a new step in our progress toward enlightenment.
The soul takes up and leaves physical bodies
the same way we put on and take off clothes.
Our immortal nature knows
that changing bodies
does not put an end to our existence
and is not to be feared
​any more than we would fear changing clothes.

Deepak Chopra: Ask Deepak About Death and Dying  






The 'I' is eternal.
It passes unharmed through the fire, the air, the water.
Sword and spear cannot kill or wound it.
It cannot die.
The trials of the physical life are but as dreams to it.
Resting secure in the knowledge of the 'I,'
Man may smile at the worst the world has to offer,
and raising his hand he may bid them disappear
into the mist from which they emerged.
​ Blessed is he who can say (understandingly) 'I'.

William Walker Atkinson:  Raja Yoga 





Our world of matter
makes it difficult for you
to remember in the smaller consciousness
what takes place in the larger.
You will not begin to live
​until you have died.

A. W..Austen:   The Teachings of Silver Birch  




We chose to come Here from Elsewhere.
We forget our beginnings as we learn to talk in Earthspeak.
We dream our lives into being.
When we die to this life,
we are free and return to our Original.
If we contemplate and accept our own death,
we are liberated from the unholy grips of the archenemy:
 Fear.

Ellyn Peirson:   After the Interlude: A Dialogue about Death and Beyond  






You always ask what happens after death.
But you have never asked what happens before death,
what happens now in your life.
What is your life?--
working, office, money, pain, striving,
climbing the ladder of success.
That is your life.
And death puts an end to all that.
So, is it possible, while living, to end--
end your attachment, end your belief?
To end, the beauty of ending something voluntarily,
without motive, without pleasure—can you do it?
In ending there is a new beginning.
If you end, there is something,
the doors are opened,
but you want to be sure before you end
that the door will open.
So you never end,
never end your motive.
The understanding of death
is to live a life, inwardly ending.

 Krishnamurti: Mind Without Measure 







There is much that you can expect
if you can free yourself from fear.
You should allow yourself to travel.
This is a physical form of expansion
that should not be overlooked.
Fear speaks for security.
Fear causes to expect.
The physical symptoms of old age
are the physical manifestations of fear in the tissues.
There is no reason why you, or any man,
​ should not be strong and vital until death.

Jane Roberts:   The Early Sessions: Book 3 of The Seth Material 





You can always decide,
you can ALWAYS decide
to not incarnate again.
 You could allow the life you are living right now to be,
in a sense, linearly speaking, the last life you will have.
 You do not necessarily have to be what you might call
“the most spiritually awakened being on Earth”
in order to allow yourself to realize
that you may wish to explore and grow and learn in other dimensions,
and in non-physicality as well.
 But you do not ever “have to” incarnate.  
​Never.

Bashar:  Quest for Truth 







The human being experiences no lack of consciousness
when he passes the gate of death.
On the contrary,
his soul experiences a superabundance of consciousness.
He lives and weaves completely in consciousness,
and as well as the strong sunlight dazes the eyes,
he is dazed at first by consciousness,
he has too much consciousness.
First, this consciousness must be dampened,
so that he can orientate himself
in the life he has entered after death.
More and more moments happen
in which the consciousness makes such an orientation possible.
The soul becomes conscious for a  short time
and again enters into a condition similar to sleep.
Then such moments become gradually longer and longer, t
he soul comes more and more in such conditions,
​ until it is able to orient itself entirely in the spiritual world.

Rudolph Steiner 








Strangers, kinsmen, and all you who grieve, come near.
Say a few words to me and shed a few tears.
So that the tears become a cool spring,  a lake, an ocean
and flood down into the underworld;
so that the unwashed can wash, and the thirsty can drink;
so that good housewives can knead and make bread;
so that handsome men can comb and part their hair
when they want to go for a walk, 
when they want to go out for a stroll;
and so that little children in school can make ink to write.

Loring M. Danforth:  The Death Rituals of Rural Greece 





Tears are poison in the eyes of the living,
but water in the world of the dead.  
Tears are associated with death in this world
but with life in the underworld.
 A transformation from poison to water
takes place as tears fall to the ground
and sink into the earth.
 In this way tears mediate
both the opposition between life and death
​and the opposition between water and poison.

Loring M. Danforth:  The Death Rituals of Rural Greece 





    Suzanne was an elderly woman in a hospital
suffering the final stages of a terminal disease.
 One morning she told her doctor she had just awakened from a dream:

    She sees a candle lit
on the windowsill of the hospital room
and the candle suddenly goes out.  
Fear and anxiety ensue
as the darkness envelops her.
 Suddenly, the candle lights on the other side of the window
and she awakens.

    The same day Suzanne died, “completely at peace.”

    Kelly Bulkeley, PhD. and Reverend Patricia Bulkley:  Dreaming Beyond Death:  A Guide to Pre-Death Dreams and Visions 







I have never been anywhere but sick.
In a sense sickness is a place,
more instructive than a long trip to Europe,
and it’s always a place where there’s no company,
where nobody can follow.
Sickness before death is a very appropriate thing
and I think those who don’t have it
​miss one of God’s mercies.

Flannery O’Conner:  Habit of Being 




So this whole process of death was created 
so that the physical body would die 
and would HAVE to release the spirit.
  It was done so that you wouldn't get lost in this world of matter, 
so that you had an easy way to come back to our side of the veil--
which, by the way, is a much more natural state for you.  
Much more natural.

Saint-Germain:  Death and Dying








 With the last breath 
all worries and cares of the mundane world are cast aside. 
 The feeling is like that of walking into a lover’s embrace, 
or like the joyful anticipation of a child
 waiting to open presents on Christmas morning.  

Philip Kapleau:  The Zen of Living and Dying 







To Die Before You Die 

To die before you die 
is the secret of the spiritually awake 
What dies is your self-centered ego 
and personal identification  
with the stories that you have told yourself 
for as long as you can remember 
about who and what you are
 as a separate person

 which you have reinforced
 to substantiate yourself

and which
the world has reinforced
to substantiate you 
​
you sadly have come to believe
that the fiction you call me
is the whole story

our impoverished ego
only knows how to protect itself 
from the mysterious truth
that there is no substantiality whatsoever 
to hang on to and call me

this is strange
wondrous magical
hard to understand 
hard to accept
hard to realize 

but if you are committed 
to making peace with death
then your journey will take you 
to understanding that 
who you call me is a dream


Tai Sheridan:  Relax, You're Going to Die  









Few people are totally oblivious of their mortality,
but when we do speak of death
​ it is mostly in terms of ‘a case of death’,
of ‘someone or other is dying’.
We do also acknowledge that
‘one of these days one will die too, in the end;
but right now it has nothing to do with us’.
This evasive concealment in the face of death
dominates everydayness so stubbornly that,
in being with one another,
the ‘neighbours’ often still keep talking the ‘dying person’
into the belief that he will escape death
and soon return to tranquillized everydayness.
​Such ‘solicitude’ is meant to ‘console’ him.

Professor George Pattison: Heidegger on Death:
A Critical Theological Essay 








When we identify ourselves with life itself
(and by life, I don’t mean existence,
a span in time between birth and death,
but the core of our being, the timeless background),
or rather, when we stop identifying ourselves
with anything limited,
with an object, be it gross or subtle,
there is no death.
So, to understand death,
one first has to understand life.
​ Then the question about death appears in a different light.

 Francis Lucille: Eternity Now 







If you have ever been in the room at the moment of someone’s death,
you have probably experienced the shift in energy
that occurs and sometimes remains for minutes or hours afterward.
I call it the Silence of the Leaving.

 Within the silence
that follows the final breath of the dying person
is the certainty that something is occurring.
In the nonmoving movement
of air in the room
one senses a deep, deep loneliness
and at the same time
​ the connectedness of everything.

Robert Chodo Campbell

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








    Our whole education is only for life.  
That is only half an education,
and the other half—which is far more important,
which comes as the crescendo of life--
is completely missing from all systems of education
that have existed before or are now in existence.
    Meditation prepares you for  the other half;
 it helps you to know death without dying.
 And once you have known death without dying,
the fear of death will disappear forever.
 Even when death comes, 
you will be silently watching it,
knowing absolutely
that it cannot even make a small scratch on your being.
 It is going to take away your body,
your mind,
​but not you.
    You belong to the immortal life.

OSHO:  The Hidden Splendor 








Meditation and death are very similar experiences.
 In death your ego disappears;
 only your pure being remains.
 The same happens in meditation too:
 the disappearance of the ego
and the presence only of pure-is-ness,
of your being.  
The similarity is so deep
that just as people are afraid of death,
they are also afraid of meditation.
 On the other hand,
if you are not afraid of meditation,
​you will not be afraid of death either.  

Meditation prepares you for death.

OSHO:  The Hidden Splendor  








No longer mourn for me when I am dead
 Then you shall hear the surly sullen bell
 Give warning to the world that I am fled
 From this vile world, with vilest worms to dwell:
 Nay, if you read this line, remember not
 The hand that writ it; for I love you so 
That I in your sweet thoughts would be forgot
 If thinking on me then should make you woe. 
O, if, I say, you look upon this verse 
When I perhaps compounded am with clay, 
Do not so much as my poor name rehearse.
 But let your love even with my life decay,
 Lest the wise world should look into your moan
 And mock you with me after I am gone.

William Shakespeare:  Sonnet 71   











This year I want 
 to see the lotus 
 on the other side.

Death Poem of Jakura
Age 59:  1906

from: Yoel Hoffmann:   Japanese Death Poems:
 Written by Zen Monks and Haiku Poets on the Verge of Death . 




Birth and death are man-made laws,
for the "wages of sin is death";
the Adamic fall in consciousness
through the belief in two powers.
The real man, spiritual man,
is birthless and deathless!
He never was born and has never died-
'As he was in the beginning,
​he is now, and ever shall be!"

Florence Scovel Shinn:  The Complete Works  




This must be
my birthday there
in paradise.

Death Poem of Joseki
Age 85:  1779

Yoel Hoffmann:   Japanese Death Poems:
Written by Zen Monks and Haiku Poets on the Verge of Death







When you are dying and coming to life in each moment,
would-be scientific predictions about what will happen after death
are of little consequence.
The whole glory of it is that we do not know.
Ideas of survival and annihilation are alike based on the past,
on memories of waking and sleeping,
and, in their different ways,
the notions of everlasting continuity and everlasting nothingness
​are without meaning.

 Alan W. Watts:  The Wisdom of Insecurity  






The person approaching the stage generally called “death,”
 which is merely a transition stage between two great planes of life,
experiences a gradual dulling of the physical senses.
Sight, hearing, and feeling, grow dimmer and dimmer,
and the “life” of the person seems as a flickering candle flame
gradually approaching utter extinction.
In many cases, this is the only phenomenon
attending the approach of death.
But, in many other cases,
while the physical senses are growing dimmer,
the psychical senses are growing wonderfully acute.
It is a common occurrence for dying persons
to manifest a consciousness of what is occurring
in another room, or another place.
Clairvoyance frequently accompanies the approach of death,
in some cases being attended by clairaudience,
​the dying person being conscious of sights and sounds in distant places.

Yogi Ramacharaka:  THE LIFE BEYOND DEATH.
The Journey Of Transformation From “Death”
To The Astral Planes To Rebirth And Beyond 











There is no such thing as Death.
The name is a lie--
the idea an illusion growing from ignorance.
There is no death--
there is nothing but Life.
Life has many phases and forms,
and some of the phases are called “death” by ignorant men.
Nothing really dies--
​ though everything experiences a change of form and activity.

Yogi Ramacharaka:  THE LIFE BEYOND DEATH.
The Journey Of Transformation From “Death”
To The Astral Planes To Rebirth And Beyond 






Who looks out with my eyes?
What is the soul?
I cannot stop asking.
If I could taste one sip of an answer,
I could break out of this prison for drunks.
I didn’t come here of my own accord,
and I can’t leave that way.
Whoever brought me here
​ will have to take me home.

Coleman Barks, Jalal al-Din Rumi:  The Essential Rumi  







That which has loved you since before time began --
who has been with you in every life you have ever lived,
who is the only entity that will be with you
in the death of your body or the ascension of it --
is you.
You are the only one who loves you steadfastly enough
to go through all the things you have gone through.
When you embrace and love yourself
and allow that love to be your standard,
you will transcend the social consciousness of man
into the all-consciousness of God,
for what you are goes beyond beauty.
It goes beyond perfection.
It goes beyond the containment of laws and dogma and social standards.
It goes into destiny,
into the fulfillment of self,
which is the fulfillment of God.
That is the only thing that is important
 in the eyes of the Isness of life.

Ramtha - The White Book  





The very ancient Khemitians (Egyptians),
over 10,000 years ago,
did not have a word in their language for death.
They used the phrases “Westing,” or “going to the West,”
for the release of the physical form,
but did not see the body as the total existence.
The end of the physical envelope
​was not the cessation of consciousness.

Stephen S. Mehler, MA 




One of the issues that pops up almost immediately
when given the news of a loved one’s impending death or their actual death
is the certainty of our own.
We may be conscious of its inevitability,
but on many levels we are blind to it.
It lurks in the background of our mind and body,
often acting out in a subconscious fashion.
Facing your own death is so important.
Here is the thing:
if you haven’t confronted your own death,
how on earth can you help a friend or family member face theirs?
​ You can’t! 


Stephen Lloyd Garrett:
 When Death Speaks:  Listen, Learn, and Love 






We can face death and be very realistic about serious illness
without becoming depressed about it.
We can cultivate a sense of health in the midst of the dying process.
We see patients do this all the time.
Some people transform when they are told they have a terminal disease.
Their senses transform.
They might start talking about the fact
that they’re seeing things in a different way.
They are less distracted.
They have less of a filter of distracted thoughts
between what they’re looking at and what they see.
They see colors more vividly.
They appreciate their families more.
We hear reports like that from patients all the time. 

This is not true for all patients, of course,
but when some patients are faced with a death sentence,
it is actually liberating.
​ You can discover a greater sense of health during the dying process. 


from Sam Mowe interview with Dr. Mitchell Levy:
 Death as a Spiritual Experience:  Tricycle Magazine 









Death doesn’t need to terrify you.
 You can prepare for the end of your life,
or the life of someone you love,
in a way that deepens the experience
​and uplifts you at the same time.

 Henry Fersko-Weiss:  Caring for the Dying:
The Doula Approach to a Meaningful Death  







Things go better
if we practice the steps of the dance beforehand.
Perhaps if we find ways
to make the pathway to natural death sacred and familiar again,
we will recover the courage to face our deaths.
If we don’t, technological medicine at the end of life
will continue to collude with our fear and ignorance and profit from it.
Unless we create new rites of passage
to help prepare for death long before it comes,
we will remain vulnerable
to the commercial exploitation of our fears
and to the implied promise that death can forever be postponed.
Dying is a sacred act.
Even in the worst of circumstances,
​it can be made holy.

Katy  Butler:  Knocking on Heaven's Door:
The Path to a Better Way of Death 





A team from the device manufacturer came out
and, after some hesitation, deactivated the device.
Bella and her daughter pushed two beds together in the living room,
in front of a window overlooking the ocean,
and stayed with her father as he grew weaker,
sleeping with him throughout the night,
their hands entwined with his, heads resting together.
He died peacefully,
one week and one hour after the pacemaker was disabled,
in her home, in her arms, surrounded with love.
Thanks to his daughter’s extraordinary efforts,
medical overdoing was undone,
and he died the Good Death that our ancestors so prized--
in the bosom of family, at home, and in a state of acceptance.
It was an expression of a new Art of Dying for a biotechnical time:
one requiring discernment, resisting Fast Medicine’s default never-quit pathway,
and honoring death.
The decision was Slow Medicine at its best--
a shared decision that took into account the suffering of the whole family
and did not focus reflexively on fixing an organ or extending a life.
It empowered the people who carried the burden rather than doctors
who would perform a heroic intervention
and then leave the family to pick up the pieces.
It accepted the reality of her father’s twin terminal illnesses--
dementia and heart trouble.
It was not made in isolation by an exhausted daughter
but with the support and validation of a larger moral community.
It was the fruit of unusually harmonious cooperation
between a family and a medical institution.
It was, in its own way, loving, beautiful, and holy.
​ This is one possible path to death.

Katy  Butler:   Knocking on Heaven's Door: The Path to a Better Way of Death  











When I first started out washing and coffining corpses early in 1965,
the majority of cases were home deaths.
I’d go to a farming home in the foothills
to find a corpse with a withered frame like a dead tree. . . .
They looked like dried-up shells,
the chrysalis from which the cicada had fled.
Along with the economic advances in our country, though,
we no longer see these corpses that look like dead trees. . . .
The corpses that leave the hospital are all plumped up,
both arms blackened painfully by needle marks made at transfusion,
some with catheters and tubes still dangling from throat or lower abdomen. . . .
There’s nothing natural about the way they die,
as the image of dried leaves falling in late autumn would impart.
This tells us that our medical facilities
​leave us no room to think of death.

Shinmon Aoki:  Coffinman 
The Journal of a Buddhist Mortician







When the end of my life is near,
if it is possible for us to talk, let’s do that.
Do not be afraid to talk about dying,
to ask how I feel, and to tell me how you feel.
You will, I imagine from my own experience,
feel sadness and impatience and confusion and love
and maybe even guilt and nostalgia.
All normal.
We have always spoken openly and directly.
You know how much I value that.
Please don’t let dying get in the way of that.
Keep talking from the heart and from the mind.
Come into my bedroom and laugh,
​be your usual irreverent selves…

Susan Abel Lieberman: Death, Dying and Dessert:
 Reflections on Twenty Questions About Dying









Let me capitulate in some detail the masters’ accounts
 of the stages of the journey from death to rebirth.
  During the first stage the most striking element
 is the thought of how easy it is to die. 
 Unlike the sometimes prolonged act of dying,
 death itself is as simple, easy,
 and as natural as a leaf’s fluttering off a tree.

Philip Kapleau:  The Zen of Living and Dying 








Coming to terms with the moment of death
is important for every human being.
Thinking about mortality is something that most of us avoid and fear,
which impacts the way that we live.
Even if you’re a person who doesn’t believe in reincarnation,
finding peace with the fact that you’re going to die
is incredibly important for everyone.
Of course for Buddhists who do believe in reincarnation,
it’s especially important
because at the moment of death the course elements, afflicted emotions,
and habitual tendencies have dissolved,
and it’s a very special opportunity for practice.
But I don’t think that it’s necessary for anyone
to have any particular belief system
​to want to face death peacefully and courageously.

Allison Choying Zangmo 






Having to make an emotional connection with the reality of death
throws our whole belief system out of whack.
After all, when we designed our version of the world,
we did not make allowances for the unknown.
We failed to plan for the reality of death.
But if we examine more deeply, we find that the problem
is not the existence of suffering in the world;
the problem is the closed system itself.
In a closed system, emotional stability relies on compartmentalizing:
shutting out and excluding unpleasant and unwanted experiences
and avoiding the very reality we live in.
This may serve us for a time.
But what happens when our spouse, our parents, our children
get sick and pass away right before our eyes?
What about when we get sick
​and we’re forced to look death straight in the eye?

Anyen;  Allison Choying Zangmo:
 Living and Dying with Confidence: A Day-by-Day Guide 









Caught up trying to extend our lives,
we’ve forgotten how to let them go. 

Sam Mowe







The transition from married to bereaved was disorienting.
At first I could scarcely grasp what widowhood meant;
I was too busy looking for ways to comfort Paul even after he died.
When the funeral home asked me to bring a set of clothes for Paul to be buried in,
I wore them first, thinking I will make these clothes warm and redolent of us.
I put a pair of our daughter’s socks in his pants pocket.
On the day of the burial, I stepped out from the procession
and moved ahead of the pallbearers, compelled to lead his coffin down the hill.
 I can’t take your hand, but I will guide you;
you will not go alone.
 For several months,
I slept with my head on the pillow he had died on,
 left his medications in their drawer,
wore his clothes to bed.
Still today, months after his death,
I go and sit at his grave,
absent-mindedly stroking the grass as if it were his hair,
​talking to him using nicknames only he would understand.

Lucy Kalanthi:  
My Marriage Didn’t End When I Became a Widow 








It’s helpful to make a distinction between the word ‘dying’ and the word ‘death.’
Dying (a physical event) can be painful.
Death (a spiritual event) is not.
Death is the state where you are physically dead, but your consciousness survives.
Many people who have died for a few seconds or minutes
and then been revived have said that they were fully aware
of their body and surroundings while dead,
only they were not in their bodies during these experiences.
These are called near-death experiences (NDEs).


Regardless of the state of their physical bodies,
there was never any pain felt while floating in this observer position
separated from their bodies.
Even those who were struck by lightning or hit by a train,
 had no sensation other than weightlessness,
freedom from the confines of their dense physical body,
and a deep sense of inner peace.
Most people who have experienced these near-death experiences
admit that they felt so absolutely wonderful while out of their body
that they did not want to return to it.
That’s how blissful it feels to leave our bodies
​and exist in spiritual form.

 Bob  Olson: Answers about the Afterlife:
A Private Investigator's 15-Year Research Unlocks the Mysteries of Life after Death  













If we stop to consider why a soul chooses
to experience a physical lifetime in the first place,
a lot of it has to do with the fact that human lives end.
Our mortality is something we as souls cannot experience in the spirit world
because our existence there is eternal.
Yet the fact that we can die affects many of our choices
and ignites many of our fears.
So it’s valuable for souls to experience mortality
because it teaches them so much
​that they are unable to learn or know in the afterlife.

 Bob  Olson: Answers about the Afterlife:
A Private Investigator's 15-Year Research Unlocks the Mysteries of Life after Death  






Life is a follower of death.
Death gives birth to life.
Who knows where the thread of self begins?
Human life is gathered ch’i.
Gather ch’i, and that’s life.
Disperse it, and that’s death.
Life and death are disciples.
They follow one another.
​ Can I call either a calamity?

Sam Hammill:   The Essential Chuang Tzu  





So it is when a drunken man falls from his chariot--
though he might be injured, he won’t be killed.
His bones are put together like everyone else’s,
but his injury is different.
His spirit was whole: he didn’t know he was riding;
he didn’t know he’d fallen out.
Fear of death had no way to penetrate his breast.
And so he confronted things without a flutter of fear.
If one may find a wholeness in wine like this,
how much more wholeness may one draw from heaven?
The sage resides in heaven;
​there is no thing there that can harm him.

Sam Hammill:   The Essential Chuang Tzu  




There is a deep contradiction
in failing to enjoy life and yet fearing death when faced with it.
It is because they have no fear of death
that people fail to enjoy life –
no, not that they don’t fear it,
but rather they forget its nearness.
Of course, it must be said that the ultimate gain
lies in transcending the relative world
​with its distinction between life and death.

 Chomei Kenko: Essays in Idleness: and Hojoki  







​If you are certain of entering paradise at death,
your rebirth there is certain.
If you are in doubt,
your rebirth will be likewise.

Hōnen 




Dying may not be a joking matter,
but I would not mind dying to the sound of loving laughter.

Susan Abel Lieberman:
Death, Dying and Dessert:
 Reflections on Twenty Questions About Dying  








Anton sat up unusually straight and said loudly and clearly
(although he knew almost no German):
 Ich sterbe ("I'm dying").
The doctor calmed him, took a syringe,
gave him an injection of camphor,
and ordered champagne.
Anton took a full glass,
examined it, smiled at me and said:
"It's a long time since I drank champagne."
He drained it and lay quietly on his left side,
and I just had time to run to him
and lean across the bed and call to him,
but he had stopped breathing
​ and was sleeping peacefully as a child ..

Death of Anton Chekhov described by wife Olga 







" 



"My very Christian 87 year old mother chose to die via VSED this past August after several debilitating strokes. She wanted to live but would no longer be able to drive or live independently in her own home. A nursing home was her only option, and the doctors said that another stroke that would possibly be fatal or render her unable to make decisions for herself, was inevitable. She was a strong, independent woman who had lived alone for over twenty years after my father passed away from cancer. Her quality of life was never even discussed with her rehab team at her "care conference." When I asked them to rate that on a scale of 1-10, they just looked at each other blankly. Why? Because quality of life is never even considered. That's when my mother said, "get me the hell out of here, I want to go home." And, home she went. The first night we drank margaritas and ate at the Dairy Queen. As she munched on a chicken strip she said, "Well, I bet Jesus didn't have chicken strips for his last supper." My sister and I stayed with her 24/7 and looked at photos, laughed, had friends come over to say good-bye, and watched beautiful sunsets over the lake in front of her condo. She passed away in 12 days after only minimal ice chips, and was only bed-ridden the last two. I miss her terribly, but am so glad that her last days on this earth were not spent in a place she dreaded most; a nursing home.”

Story shared in response to Phyllis
Book:  Choosing to Die: A Personal Story
available on Amazon.com. 









It is in the order of human life
that we can learn to die well,
but the tuition in our time is dear.
A good death is not wrested from the madness of our days
by being killed by overdose.
The madness moves on to the next house,
the next generation.
It is purchased instead
by very costly learning about
what we have made of dying.
Living doesn’t always require the ability to live,
or the willingness to,
​and dying isn’t the collapse of that ability or that willingness.

Stephen Jenkinson:  Die Wise:
A Manifesto for Sanity and Soul  





There is something in our basic understanding of life
that makes us strangers
​ to the natural world and its ways,
and it makes our death--
the meaning of our death--
​ unnatural.

Stephen Jenkinson:
 Die Wise: A Manifesto for Sanity and Soul  





come on sweetheart
let's adore one another
before there is no more
of you and me

once you think of me
dead and gone
you will make up with me
you will miss me
you may even adore me

why be a worshiper of the dead
think of me as a goner
come and make up now

since you will come
and throw kisses
at my tombstone later
why not give them to me now
this is me
that same person

Rumi




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?

Ajahn Chah

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






The space between life and death
is the parade ground of Romanticism.  
The threat of illness itself seems to sound a Romantic note--
I’ve been feeling exalted since I heard the diagnosis.  
A critical illness is like a great permission,
an authorization or absolving.
 It’s all right for a threatened man to be romantic, even crazy, if he feels like it.
 All your life you think you have to hold back your craziness,
​ but when you’re sick you can let it out in all its garish colors.

Anatole Broyard:  Toward A Literature of Illness 







From this side of life,
death appears to be a dissolution,
something in face of which
the human being has a ready fear and dread.
From the other side,
death appears as the light-filled beginning
of experience of the Spirit,
as that which spreads a sun-radiance
over the whole of the subsequent life between death and a new birth;
as that which most of all warms the soul through with joy
in the life between death and a new birth.
The moment of death
is something that is looked back upon with a deep sense of blessing.
Described in earthly terms:
the moment of death,
viewed from the other side,
is the most joyful, the most enrapturing point
​in the life between death and a new birth.

Rudolph Steiner 




 When people die,
they cannot be replaced.
They leave holes that cannot be filled,
for it is the fate
— the genetic and neural fate --
of every human being to be a unique individual,
to find his own path,
to live his own life,
​to die his own death.

Oliver Sacks 







"Dying is the end of illness.  
It is the further shore of illness.  
There’s a wonderful book called The Wilder Shores of Love.  
​Well, dying is the wilder shore of illness.”

Anatole Broyard 





Only a religious person can be patient
because he has come to know the quality of eternity.
Paradoxically, the religious person knows that this life is going to end,
but underneath this life there is a Life which never ends.
Paradoxically he knows this time is going to end in death
but hidden beneath this time is eternity.
If you enter Life you enter eternity.
​If you remain on the surface you remain in time.

Osho:
Nirvana: The Last Nightmare:
Learning to Trust in Life 








For me, the moment of transition from life to death--
what else can one call it?—was easy.
There was no time for fear, pain or thought.
There was no chance "to see my whole life before me," as others have related.
The last impression I can recall lasted a brief instant.

Now I was not in a place, nor even in a dimension,
but rather in a condition of being.
This new "I" was not the I which I knew,
but rather a distilled essence of it,
yet something vaguely familiar, something I had always known
buried under a superstructure of personal fears, hopes, wants and needs.
This "I" had no connection to ego.
It was final, unchangeable, indivisible, indestructible pure spirit.
While completely unique and individual as a fingerprint,
"I" was, at the same time, part of some infinite, harmonious and ordered whole.
I had been there before.

...since my return from that other condition of being,
many of my attitudes toward our world have changed
and continue to change, almost by themselves.
A recurrent nostalgia remains for that other reality,
that condition of indescribable stillness and quiet
​where the "I" is part of a harmonious whole.

excerpts from :
I Died at 10:52 AM by Victor D. Solow

To read entire article:
http://tatfoundation.org/forum2003-12.htm#5







 “It is impossible to imagine our own death,”  wrote Freud,
“and whenever we attempt to do so,
we an perceive that we re in fact still present as spectators.”
 What we see and feel at the bedside, as observers--
the immensity of loss, the shutting down of the body,
our own grief and helplessness--
is not always the same for the dying,
who in some miraculous way often appear to be spared
the full knowledge of the reality of their death.
 I don’t know how this works,
but over and over again I saw the dying in what appeared to be in an altered state.
 Whereas the living see the past, the present and the future--
see what is being lost, how it is being lost and what will no longer be--
the perspective of the dying appears less expansive,
as if, preparing to enter a narrow space,
their focus becomes more immediate.  
It is a state not unlike that of marathon runners
for whom endorphins kick in as they near the end of a race,
​leaving some calm, some elated, some euphoric.

Eve Joseph:  In The Slender Margin:
 The Intimate Strangeness of Death and Dying 











In contemplating death,
it is important that we start with our very own,
very personal relationship with death.
 When we are called upon to help other people,
we will be more trusted if we are not just passing on advice
but can speak from our own experience.
 But since everyone is different,
no two people will have exactly the same experience.
 So the point of this practice
is not to come up with the correct understanding of death,
​but to have the courage to look at how we deal with death personally.  

Judith L. Lief:  Making Friends with Death 






The ongoing contemplation of death,
so that it is never out of our awareness,
is a powerful form of spiritual training.
 For that reason, many different religious traditions
have practices for contemplating death.  
The goal of such practices is not to encourage morbid fascination with death
or sink people into a dark depression
but to stir people from complacency
and rewaken their reverence for life.
Death is a great teacher
and we have much to learn,
but first, we must overcome our fears
​and make a relationship with death.  

Judith L. Lief:  Making Friends with Death 









And when from death I’m free, I’ll sing on.
And when from death I’m free
I’ll sing and joyful be,
And through eternity I’ll sing on.

American Folk Hymn, 1835 






It is the secret of the world
that all things subsist and do not die,
but retire a little from sight
and afterwards return again.

Ralph Waldo Emerson,: Essays: Second Series






The Oregon Death with Dignity Act has been around for 14 years now,
and the … primary reasons for patients asking their physician for this prescription
have remained consistent over all of those years.
It’s not about pain; pain can actually be managed …
that’s not why people want to hasten their dying.
They do [it] because they’re not able to do any of the things that they’ve always enjoyed doing --
that give them any kind of pleasure.
They can’t do those things anymore.
And they have a complete loss of autonomy,
they’re dependent upon other people to care for them,
and they feel that they’ve lost all dignity. 
This doesn’t matter for everybody,
but for those people that it does matter to, it matters profoundly.
This is really what we really think of …
as sort of existential distress --
the meaningless of having to just wait for this death to occur.

They are on a dying trajectory.
The only choice they have is the circumstances of their death
and what kind of disability they will be suffering as they approach that time.
These are  people for whom death is not the worst thing that could happen to them.
​ In fact, prolonging their dying is the worst thing that could happen to them,


Judith Schwarz,
Clinical Coordinator,
Compassion & Choices of New York













I AM here, there, and everywhere.
I AM within all, within every fiber, nerve, and cell of your being.
I AM in the inanimate as well as the animate ---
I AM everywhere;
call upon ME and see if I will not open the windows of Divine Substance.
I AM that I AM --- that particular I AM Consciousness
which will come to this condition or situation and make its nothingness appear.
I will release the power that lies hidden there.
I AM ALL in ALL --- I AM everywhere.
No matter wither you go, into what locality, I AM there ---
I have gone before you, because I AM there already and always have been.
I have already caused Myself to be so impressed upon you
that you find everything prepared before you arrive.
You find everything answered before you ask.
You find everything supplied before the need arises.
It is well with you --- do you hear? ---
irrespective of person, place, or thing.
It is well with you,
irrespective of teachings of any nature whatsoever.
I AM -- I AM --- I AM.

—Walter Lanyon











“Death is life’s greatest teacher –
it is time for us take this skeleton out of the closet once and for all,
to lay her gently on the table
and allow her wisdom to gently penetrate the depths of our psyche
till we are free from fear,
free from attachment,
free from conditioning,
free to truly live.”  

  Rev. Olivia Bareham
www.sacredcrossings.com






I know I’m going to leave this body.
Even if I live for another twenty or thirty years, it doesn’t seem far off.
I live each day preparing myself to die
by being present to what I’m doing now.
I’m okay with not having any definite answers.
I’m living with a strong foundation
of inner growth and gratitude for the gift of life today.
I believe that how I live my life will affect the way I die.
The poet Rilke said, to paraphrase,
that death is not the scissors that cut off the rope of life at the end;
​ death is one of the strands woven into the rope of life.

Phyllis Shacter:  Choosing To Die:
A Personal Story: Elective Death By Voluntarily Stopping Eating and Drinking (VSED)
in the Face of Degenerative Disease 

Available on Amazon:  
https://www.amazon.com/Choosing-Die-Personal-Voluntarily-Degenerative-ebook/dp/B06XPLPGMK/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1491231307&sr=8-1&keywords=choosing+to+die






 There are times when I can’t face the reality of the end of my life.
I’m not afraid of death.
If I didn’t have Emma, I would be able to say, “Well, it’s been a good ride.”
I can’t bear the thought of leaving my little girl,
of not being there to watch her grow up,
to provide counsel and advice, laughs and jokes.
To be her dad.
So, I’ve had to find another way.
I don’t know how much time I have left.
But I have discovered a way to every day let her know
how loved she is, how much I support her,
and how much I care about the person she becomes.
I write her Napkin Notes,
which I tuck inside her lunch bag every morning.

None of us knows how much time we have left.
Yes, we walk around the planet with the hope that we are invincible,
but we all know life can be taken away in an instant.
I have the “gift” of realizing that the end is coming.
I can take the time to take stock
and share with the people I love how much they mean to me.
It’s the only thing that matters.
Your house, your bank account, your skills, your profession--
none of it matters.
It’s all about the long-lasting relationships we build.
That’s it.
​That’s the whole thing.

 Garth W. Callaghan: Napkin Notes: Make Lunch Meaningful, Life Will Follow





It has often been remarked that the culture of Bali
is an amalgam of indigenous and imported Hindu elements.
 In the death rituals,
the Indic element is shown by the casualness
with which the corpse is treated.
 Bits of bone are pulled haphazardly out of the grave,
and remains are poked about and jokingly urged to burn rapidly.
 This is in accordance with Hindu dogma
that the body is but a container of the soul,
and of little significance.

Peter Metcalf; Richard Huntington:  
Celebrations of Death:  The Anthropology of Mortuary Ritual






The close connection between sleep, dreaming , and death
is the stuff of myth and mysticism.
 According to the world’s religious traditions,
through this doorway lie otherworldly realms of divine mystery,
where liberated souls make wonderful journeys of discovery and revelation.
    On a more personal scale,
the sleep-dreaming-death nexus provides each of us
with a valuable source of insight into our own individual feelings, beliefs, hopes, and desires surrounding the inevitability of death.
​ Reflect back over your life as a dreamer--


Kelly Bulkeley, Ph.D, The Reverend Patricia Bulkley:  
Dreaming Beyond Death:
 A Guide to Pre-Death Dreams and Visions 











Death is not a sudden thing,
an on-off that either is or isn't,
even though the machines that measure it are.
 Death is a process with a number of stages
most of which exist outside of the body.  

No one who has ever had a death return experience ever forgets it,
for there is no longer any question of whether or not there is life after death.
One has actual and absolute knowledge that there is.
And so it cannot help but be a life-transforming experience
which changes every fiber in a person's being.  
​The biggest question of all has been answered.

Anton Grosz:  Letters to a Dying Friend




Only part — and indeed the rather lesser part --
of what happens on the earth originates from those who are living in the physical body.
The dead are perpetually working into our physical world.
The forces of which man is unwilling to speak to-day in the age of materialism
are nevertheless at work in the physical world.
Our physical environment is fashioned and permeated
not only by the forces emanating from the spiritual world,
from the Beings of the higher Hierarchies,
but forces proceeding from the dead also penetrate
into what surrounds and overtakes us here.
So that a full and complete survey of man’s life is possible
only if we look beyond what can be told us
​ by knowledge obtained through the senses and through history, here on earth.


Rudolph Steiner  










All people, all creatures, are preparing to leave.
When beings have lived an appropriate time,
they must go on their way.
Rich, poor, young, and old must all experience this change.
When you realize that’s the way the world is,
you’ll feel that it’s a wearisome place.
When you see that there’s nothing real or substantial you can rely on,
you’ll feel weary and disenchanted.
Being disenchanted doesn’t mean you are averse;
the mind is clear.
It sees that there’s nothing to be done to remedy this state of affairs;
it’s just the way the world is.
Knowing in this way you can let go of attachment,
letting go with a mind that is neither happy nor sad,
but at peace with conditions
through seeing their changing nature with wisdom.

So you needn’t worry about anything,
because this isn’t your real home;
it’s only a temporary shelter.
Having come into this world,
you should contemplate its nature.
​Everything is preparing to disappear.

Ajahn Chah
Koshin Paley Ellison and Matt Weingast:
 Awake at the Bedside: Contemplative Teachings on Palliative and End-of-Life Care 












A new approach to dying is emerging,
one that encourages a dying person and their loved ones
to face their fear, break through denial, and engage
in an honest, open exploration of death and dying.
This approach also goes well beyond rupturing the thick crust
of denial and evasion that separates us from facing death more directly.
 It helps people to introduce a sense of sacredness into the dying process;
to establish how they want the space around them to look and feel in the last days of life.
It introduces the idea of designing rituals they can conduct during the last days,
which will enrich the meaning of the experience.
And, finally, it helps family understand the importance of reprocessing the dying experience
after their loved one dies, reshaping the images and thoughts
that may be haunting their waking mind and their dreams.
Naturally, this approach to dying helps the patient and family
to be more in control of how the dying process will unfold.

The approach was inspired by the work that birth doulas do with a woman in labor.
There is now a growing field of people who guide and support the dying
and their families through the labor of death.
They are referred to as end-of-life doulas, death doulas, or death midwives.
Like their counterparts in birth, death doulas coach a dying person and the family
 through the entire experience: helping them plan for the last days of life;
supporting them emotionally, spiritually, and physically
through the labor of dying;
then helping the family emotionally after the death.

 Henry Fersko-Weiss: Caring for the Dying:
The Doula Approach to a Meaningful Death  













On June 3, 1976,
we simultaneously shared the same psychedelic vision:
an experience of the “Universal Mind Lattice.”
Our shared consciousness,
no longer identified with or limited by our physical bodies…

At a superorgasmic pitch of speed and bliss,
we became individual fountains and drains of Light,
interlocked with an infinite omnidirectional network
of fountains and drains composed of and circulating
a brilliant iridescent love energy.
We were the Light, and the Light was God.
It seemed as if the “real” material world was an illusory veil, now withdrawn,
and the energetic scaffolding of causation and creation,
the Ultimate Reality, eternal and infinite,
was laid bare before and through us.
All polarities were incorporated and transcended without conflict--
past and future, microscopic and cosmic, male and female, self and other.

We both realized our vital connection
with all beings and things in the Universe, with God.
We felt that death was not to be feared
because the Light was our spiritual core
and we would eventually return
to the profoundly transcendent bliss of this lattice realm.

Alex and Allyson Grey:
Sacred Mirrors: The Visionary Art of Alex Grey  










At death there is only liberation.
 It’s just more chic to see liberation while you’re alive.

Max Furland 



You cannot have a happy ending to a journey
that has not been pleasant along the way.
The end absolutely does not justify the means.
The means, or the path along the way,
​ always brings about the essence of an identical ending.

Abraham-Hicks 



The mind is immortal.
It remains untouched despite the body’s dissolution.
One has no more reason to fear its death when the body is destroyed
than one has to fear its death when one retires to sleep at night.
Sleep affects the body but leaves the mind as active as everin dream
or as potentially active as ever in deep sleep.
Death works upon the human being in a somewhat similar manner
and the experiences which come to the soul after the body has terminated
are nothing else than prolonged vivid dreams or unconscious deep sleep.
If one can touch and see things and people
without the help of the body during dream,
​one shall certainly be able to do the same during so-called death.

 Anil Sharma:  Life Beyond Death  




Ageing can be the culminating adventure of our lives,
up to which the earlier years may be seen as a preparation.
I do not refer here to the promise of perpetual youth
peddled by golden oldie consumerism.
That is more evasion than adventure.
The adventure of ageing is nothing less
than the opportunity to transcend the self
which has lived its life up to now,
​and hence to transcend the decrepitude and death of that self.

Ken Jones







Life is often called “birth” in Buddhism,
since a person is seen as being born and dying
many times at each moment.
Thus birth and death are experienced
not in opposition but as one.
To indicate this unity,
we sometimes translate them as birth-and-death.
In meditation one may experience
​a state beyond birth and beyond death.

Kazuaki Tanahashi and Peter Levitt:
The Essential Dogen: Writings of the Great Zen Master 




When death occurs,
our old strategies no longer apply,
so we are disorientated and frightened.
How can we work with this ?
How can we better prepare ourselves to deal with death ? 
 The best preparation is working with our state of mind now 
rather than thinking about exotic things we might do later
when we are looking death in the eyes.
It is better to learn to relate to death now,
when we still have the strength and ability…
People have different paths and different teachers and different traditions –
but whatever our tradition is,
it is not going to help us very much if we don’t actually apply it.
​The point is: do it now; don’t wait.  


Judith Lief:  Making Friends With Death




If we ask ourselves questions like “What is my death?”
and “Where do I go after I die?”
we may be able to come up with some interesting ideas.
But in the shadow of death,
we shall need more than fascinating explanations to sustain us.
Our salvation lies in sustaining holy ignorance,
the open, receptive mind of bare awareness.
This requires faith, courage, and determination,
because when we penetrate beyond ideas about dying,
we uncover what we really fear--
our feelings about dying.


Ken Jones:
 Ageing: The Great Adventure: A Buddhist Guide









A kind of waking trance I have frequently had,
quite up from boyhood, when I have been all alone.
This has generally come upon me
thro’ repeating my own name two or three times to myself silently,
till all at once, as it were out of the intensity of the consciousness of individuality,
the individuality itself seemed to dissolve and fade away into boundless being,
and this is not a confused state,
but the clearest of the clearest, the surest of the surest,
the weirdest of the weirdest, utterly beyond words,
where death was an almost laughable impossibility,
the loss of personality (if so it were)
​ seeming no extinction but the only true life.

Alfred Lord Tennyson 







Nothing is more creative than death,
since it is the whole secret of life.
It means that the past must be abandoned,
that the unknown cannot be avoided,
that “I” cannot continue,
and that nothing can be ultimately fixed.
When a man knows this,
he lives for the first time in his life.
By holding his breath, he loses it.
By letting it go he finds it.

 Alan W. Watts:  The Wisdom of Insecurity  










Death is the epitome of the truth
that in each moment we are thrust into the unknown.
Here all clinging to security is compelled to cease,
and wherever the past is dropped away and safety abandoned,
life is renewed.
Death is the unknown
​in which all of us lived before birth.


 Alan W. Watts:  The Wisdom of Insecurity  






If it pleases you to acknowledge your birth, do so,
but reverse the count of your years and become younger.
When you do not expect your death,
you will never know it.
Always live in the present.
Never acknowledge any future other than this Now.
Your Now will be eternity if you permit it to be so.
Never contemplate how long you are going to live,
for you will always live.
That is simply how it is.

 Ramtha - The White Book 






Whether you depart this physical experience
by way of deliberate “suicide" or by way of not-deliberate release,
the Eternal Being that you are continues to be
and looks back on the physical experience you have just left behind
only with love and appreciation for the experience.  
There are those who are filled with so much hatred
as they live in their physical experience
that the chronic pinching off from Source and Well-Being is the reason for their death.
There are those who simply are no longer finding interesting reasons
to focus and remain, who turn their attention to the Non-Physical,
and that is the reason for their death.
And there are those who have not come to understand Energy or thought or alignment,
who desperately want to feel good
and can find no way of stopping the chronic pain they have lived for so long
that they deliberately choose to reemerge back into the Non-Physical.
But in any case, you are Eternal Beings,
who, once refocused in the Non-Physical,
become whole and renewed
​and completely aligned with who-you-really-are.

Esther Hicks;Jerry Hicks and Abraham;  Money, and the Law of Attraction:
Learning to Attract Wealth, Health, and Happiness 







Since everything thing that you experience
comes about because of the balance of your thought,
and no one else can think your thoughts or offer your vibration,
then everything that happens in your life
experience-including that which you term your physical death-
is is self-inflicted.
Most do not decide to die-
they just do not decide to continue to live.

Abraham





Take a moment today to think
of the things you would do if this were your last day.
How would you want to love those you love?
How would you want to use your time productively?
What would you want to share with those around you?
What would you want to teach?
If these things are important to you,
then do them today.
Don’t wait until time is very limited,
because time is always very limited.


The Rabbis tell us to 'do teshuva (mend your ways) the day before you die'.
The obvious question is: how does one know?
And the response is,
​ so do teshuva every day – for it may be your last.




Rabbi Shaul Rosenblatt 










Six weeks before my wife passed away,
our oncologist called me in to her office.
'Time is very limited,' she told me.
How limited, I wanted to know.
'No more than a few days,' was her response.
Well, we had six weeks, six very wonderful weeks
and I think we have our oncologist's pessimistic prediction
to thank as much as anything else.
If you think that someone you love might die tomorrow,
you will make sure that you love him or her properly today.
If you think that you might die tomorrow,
you will make sure that you use today.
We spent six weeks of intense, quality time –
probably more than we would have put into 6 years -
no, maybe 6o years, had she been healthy


Neither she nor I knew whether she would wake up in the morning.
But in reality no one knows what will be tomorrow;
cancer or no cancer, life is very fickle.
Each day of life is an opportunity
that we cannot be sure will exist tomorrow.
Each day is too precious to be wasted
on worry, frustration at ourselves, anger at those we love…
Living each day as though it is your last is not morbid.
​If done properly, it is incredibly uplifting.


Rabbi Shaul Rosenblatt 












Initially language had nothing to do with words,
and indeed verbal language emerged
only when man had lost a portion of his love,
forgotten some of his identification with nature,
so that he no longer understood its voice to be his also.
In those early days man possessed a gargantuan arena
for the expression of his emotions.
He did not symbolically rage with the storms, for example,
but quite consciously identified with them to such a degree
that he and his tribesmen merged with the wind and lightning,
and became a part of the storms’ forces.
They felt, and knew as well,
that the storms would refresh the land, whatever their fury.
Because of such identification with nature,
the death experience, as you understand it,
was in no way considered an end.
The mobility of consciousness was a fact of experience.
The self was not considered to be stuck within the skin.
The body was considered more or less like a friendly home or cave,
​kindly giving the self refuge but not confining it.

 Jane  Roberts:   The Nature of the Psyche:
Its Human Expression (A Seth Book)  






The dead can experience their present spiritual environment
only to the degree in which they formerly reflected,
as much as earthly men are capable of doing,
on the spiritual world.
 You know how many people are saying now-a-days:
Why should I worry about life after death?
We might as well wait.
Once we are dead, we shall see what is going to happen. --
This thought, however, is completely misleading.
People who have not reflected,
while still alive, on the spiritual world,
who have lived in a purely materialistic way,
​will see absolutely nothing after death.


Rudolph Steiner








We can face death and be very realistic about serious illness
without becoming depressed about it.
We can cultivate a sense of health in the midst of the dying process.
We see patients do this all the time.
Some people transform when they are told they have a terminal disease.
Their senses transform.
They might start talking about the fact that they’re seeing things in a different way.
They are less distracted.
They have less of a filter of distracted thoughts
between what they’re looking at and what they see.
They see colors more vividly.
They appreciate their families more.
We hear reports like that from patients all the time. 
This is not true for all patients, of course,
but when some patients are faced with a death sentence,
it is actually liberating.
​ You can discover a greater sense of health during the dying process. 


Dr. Mitchell Levy





Physical Beings often think of themselves as either dead or alive,
and in that line of thinking they sometimes acknowledge
that they existed in the Non-Physical realm before coming forth into their physical body,
and that, following their physical death, they will return to that Non-Physical realm.
But few people actually understand
that the Non-Physical part of them remains currently, powerfully, and predominantly focused
in the Non-Physical realm while a part of that perspective
flows into this physical perspective and their now physical body.
An understanding of both of these perspectives
and their relationship to each other is essential
for a true understanding of who-you-are
and of how to understand what you have intended
​as you came forth into this physical body.

Esther and Jerry Hicks and Abraham:  
The Law of Attraction: The Basics of the Teachings of Abraham  








Death can really help us examine our daily existence
and causes us to evaluate how fully and deeply we really are living.
Having death sitting on your shoulder
as a gentle and consistent reminder of the lack of permanence of life
can support each one of us to live with more passion and inspiration.
Viewed as a friend,
death can remind us not to put off until tomorrow
the love we can share today,
the dreams we can live today,
​ and the differences we can make today.

Stephen Lloyd Garrett:  When Death Speaks:  Listen, Learn, and Love 









One of the issues that pops up almost immediately
when given the news of a loved one’s impending death or their actual death
is the certainty of our own.
We may be conscious of its inevitability,
but on many levels we are blind to it.
It lurks in the background of our mind and body,
often acting out in a subconscious fashion.
Facing your own death is so important.
Here is the thing: if you haven’t confronted your own death,
how on earth can you help  a friend or family member face theirs?
 The more real you can be with your own death,
the more of a genuine help you can be for a friend or family member that is dying.
The degree to which you can accept your own death
​ is the same degree you will embrace and live your own life!

Stephen Lloyd Garrett:  When Death Speaks:  Listen, Learn, and Love 






Dying is nothing to fear.
It can be the most wonderful experience of your life.
It all depends on how you have lived.
Death is but a transition from this life to another existence
where there is no more pain and anguish. 
My death will come to me like a warm embrace.
Life in a physical body is a very short span of one’s total existence. 
No one dies alone.
​ Everyone is loved beyond comprehension.

Elisabeth Kübler-Ross: The Wheel of Life: A Memoir of Living and Dying 






But why not throw a going-away party?
Why not celebrate?
At seventy-one years old, I can say that I have truly lived.
After  starting out as a “two-pound nothing” who was not expected to survive,
I spent most of my life battling the Goliath-sized forces of ignorance and fear.
Anyone familiar with my work knows
that I believe death can be one of life’s greatest experiences.
Anyone who knows me personally can testify
to how impatiently I have been awaiting the transition
from the pain and struggle of this world
to an existence of complete and overwhelming love.
  My only wish has been to leave my body,
like a butterfly shedding its cocoon,
​ and finally merge with the great light.

  Elisabeth Kübler-Ross: The Wheel of Life: A Memoir of Living and Dying  





While each action of your life
is taken in context with all other actions of your life until your death,
this does not mean that your death is predestined to occur at any given time.
As you might change your sentence in the middle
from one version to another without even being consciously aware of it,
so as you live your life you also work with probabilities.
You are the self who speaks the sentence,
and you are the self who lives the life.
You are larger than the sentence that you speak,
​ and larger than the life you live.

 Jane  Roberts:  The Nature of the Psyche: Its Human Expression  








In Europe, even up to the thirteenth century,
death was recognized for the natural event it is,
and as a result was easily accepted.
 Literature of that period abounds with accounts of a king or a knight
feeling death coming on and taking to his bed,
calling in his family and friends,
settling his worldly affairs, saying the proper prayers,
and easing back onto the pillows to die in peace.  

There was a dignity in dying,
even though it took place without great fanfare or formal ceremony.
 The priest would be there, but only to perform the rituals;
 except for the Last Rites of the Church,
 the dying person was the one who set the pace
and decided what would happen next.
 Family and friends came to say goodbye,
and old disputes were settled,
lest they get in the way
​ of whatever the dying person expected to face on the other side.

Anton Grosz:  Letters to a Dying Friend









What a beautiful occasion
when mortals  forgather to witness the ascension
of their loved ones in spiritual flames,
and what a contrast to those earlier ages
when mortals must commit their dead to the embrace of the terrestrial elements!
The scenes of weeping and wailing characteristic of earlier epochs of human evolution
are now replaced by ecstatic joy and the sublimest enthusiasm
as these God-knowing mortals bid their loved ones a transient farewell
as they are removed from their material associations
by the spiritual fires of consuming grandeur and ascending glory.
On worlds settled in light and life,
"funerals" are occasions of supreme joy,
​profound satisfaction, and inexpressible hope.

 The Urantia Book 






Let death and exile,
and all other things which appear terrible
be daily before your eyes,
but chiefly death,
and you win never entertain any abject thought,
​nor too eagerly covet anything.

Epictetus : The Art of Living  





Spiritual healing is based on the premise
that sin, disease, and death have no externalized reality:
They exist only as illusory beliefs or concepts.
But matter is not unreal;
the body is not unreal; this world is not unreal:
This world is beautiful, immortal, and eternal.
This world will never be dissolved,
but our concepts of it will change,
just as our concepts of body change.
Every adult will have to admit that he outgrew his concept of an infant body
and put on a child’s body;
he outgrew that and took the body of a youth;
and later he discarded his youthful body
when he grew to the stature of maturity.
Furthermore, as he progresses on the spiritual path,
he will entertain a more spiritual sense of body,
​but never will he have a more spiritual body than he has now.

Joel S. Goldsmith:  The Art of Spiritual Healing  







For when the body is worn out and the brain is tired,
the whole organism welcomes death.
But it is difficult to understand how death can be welcome
when you are young and strong,
so that you come to regard it as a dread and terrible event.
For the brain, in its immaterial way,
looks into the future
and conceives it a good to go on and on and on forever--
not realizing that its own material would at last
find the process intolerably tiresome.
Not taking this into account, the brain fails to see that,
being itself material and subject to change,
its desires will change,
​ and a time will come when death will be good.

Alan W. Watts: The Wisdom of Insecurity 







I want to say a word to those who are about to die.
 I want to beg them to forget their bodies as soon as possible
after the change which they call death. 
Oh, the terrible curiosity to go back
and look upon that thing which we once believed to be ourselves!
If we could only remember in life that the form which we call our self
is not our real immortal self at all, 
we would not give it such an exaggerated importance, 
though we would nevertheless take needful care of it. 
 Many souls who have not been here long are so melancholy. 
They return again and again to the place which they should not visit.
One day while walking down an avenue of trees—for we have trees here--
I met a tall woman in a long black garment. 
She was weeping—for we have tears here also. 
I asked her why she wept, and she turned to me with eyes of unutterable sadness.
“I have been back to it,” she said. 
My heart ached for her, because I knew how she felt. 
The shock of the first visit is repeated each time, 
as the thing one sees 
is less and less what we like to think of ourselves as being.

Elsa Barker:   LETTERS FROM THE AFTERLIFE  ​











He alone lives whose life is in the whole universe,
and the more we concentrate our lives on limited things,
the faster we go towards death.
Those moments alone we live
when our lives are in the universe, in others;
and living this little life is death, simply death,
and that is why the fear of death comes.
The fear of death can only be conquered
when man realises that so long as there is one life in this universe, he is living.
When he can say, "I am in everything, in everybody,
I am in all lives, I am the universe,"
then alone comes the state of fearlessness.
To talk of immortality in constantly changing things is absurd.
Says an old Sanskrit philosopher:
​It is only the Spirit that is the individual, because it is infinite.

Swami Vivekananda 








Think...and think...while you are alive.
What you call "salvation" belongs to the time before death.
If you don't break your ropes while you're alive,
do you think your ghost will do it after?
The idea that the soul will rejoin with the ecstatic
just because the body is rotten- that is all fantasy.
What is found now is found then. 
If you find nothing now, you will simply end up
with an apartment in the City of Death.
If you make love with the divine now, in the next
life you will have the face of satisfied desire.

 Kabir







Death is an invitation to simplicity
 simplicity is an invitation to clarity
 clarity is an invitation to relaxation 
relaxation is an invitation to presence
 presence is an invitation to living 
living is an invitation to death…

Tai Sheridan: Relax, You’re Going to Die  







Your life is fleeting.
The water of life is slipping through your fingers,
any moment and death may strike –
and you are trying to solve metaphysical puzzles?
“Who created the world?
Whether anybody created it or not?
Who is God?
What is his form?”
People go on constantly discussing, debating.
It seems they are avoiding something through these discussions.
They are avoiding existence.
They are trying to remain occupied in something
​so that the reality of life and death is not encountered.

Osho:  Nirvana: 
The Last Nightmare: Learning to Trust in Life 










The moment one reaches a higher level of consciousness
even to a slight degree,
one sees at once that death is quite different in character.
It appears as a metamorphosis
​ rather than the end of a phase of life.

Rudolf  Steiner: Broken Vessels 







Awareness of death
is the very bedrock of the path.
Until you have developed this awareness,
all other practices are useless.

the Dalai Lama


When we identify ourselves with life itself
(and by life, I don’t mean existence, a span in time between birth and death,
but the core of our being, the timeless background),
or rather, when we stop identifying ourselves with anything limited,
with an object, be it gross or subtle,
there is no death.
So, to understand death,
one first has to understand life.
​ Then the question about death appears in a different light.


 Francis Lucille:  Eternity Now



Any mentation takes birth out of, exists in, and dies
into the background of awareness, our true nature.
 When we take our stand in the background,
there is no death.
At the relative levels, there is death:
at the physical level, there is death at the end of the body;
at the subtle level, there is death from moment to moment,
at the end of a perception or a thought;
​at the ultimate level, there is only timeless continuity.

 Francis Lucille:  Eternity Now 









 The dead are cut off from the living more drastically in the present age
than they were a comparatively short time ago,
and this makes it more difficult for them to perceive what is astir
in the souls of those left behind.
This belongs to the evolution of humanity,
but evolution must also lead to a rediscovery of this connection,
this real intercourse between the living and the dead.
In earlier times the human soul was still able to maintain a real connection with the dead,
even if it was no longer a fully conscious one.
For long now men have ceased to be clairvoyant.
In even more ancient times the living were able to look upwards with clairvoyant vision
to the dead and to follow the happenings of their life.
Just as it was once natural for the soul to be in living relationship with the dead,
so it is possible today for the soul to re-establish this intercourse
​ and relationship by acquiring thoughts and ideas about the spiritual worlds.


Rudolph Steiner 
Links Between The Living And The Dead









The spirit-self inevitably surrounds itself in a new life
with that to which it is related from previous lives.
And it is on this account that sleep is a good likeness for death.
For the man during sleep is withdrawn from the field of action in which his fate waits for him. While one sleeps, events in this field of action pursue their course.
One has for a time no influence on this course of events.
Nevertheless, our life on a new day depends on the effects of the deeds of the previous one.
Our personality actually embodies or incarnates itself anew
every morning in our world of action.
What was separated from us at night is on the next day,
as it were, spread out around us.
​ So it is with the actions of the former embodiments or incarnations of man.

Rudolph Steiner: Theosophy  









On January 20, 1936, King George V
was injected with a lethal dose of morphine and cocaine to hasten his death.
His physician, Lord Dawson, administered the injection
after consulting with the King’s wife and son –
they saw no point in prolonging the King’s suffering
since his condition, cardiorespiratory disease, was terminal.
In fact, Lord Dawson agreed with Queen Mary,
who told him to not “strive officiously” to keep the King alive.
In notes that he made after the King's death, Lord Dawson wrote:
“It was evident that the last stage might endure for many hours,
unknown to the patient but little comporting with the dignity and the serenity
which he so richly merited and which demanded a brief final scene.”
King George’s death via a lethal injection
​ was kept hidden from the public for fifty years.

 Elaine Feur:  To Gently Leave This Life: The Right To Die 

The turn toward death is a decision to choose life,
to live as fully as possible until the end,
and to be an actor in living while dying.
We like to call this moment a blessed recognition.
Others may call it consciously dying.
It’s choosing to live until we die — with the emphasis on living.
Taking this turn, then, becomes an authentic journey and a movable feast
with unexpected detours and surprising opportunities
for giving and receiving love and then giving it all away again.
 Choosing to participate fully in living toward death
can become a grace-filled time overflowing with new discoveries
​ and love from unexpected sources.

Karen Speerstra, Herbert Anderson: 
 The Divine Art of Dying: How to Live Well While Dying 






The psychic being is immortal
while the body, the vital and the mind are dissolved at death, or a little later.
It passes from life to life,
gathering the essence of its life experiences
and makes that its basis of growth
in the evolution of the individual through the ages.
The true central being, the individual Self or Spirit (Jivatman)
presides over the individual evolution,
but it remains above the cosmic manifestation:
it is not born nor does it evolve.
It puts forward, as a representative of itself, the psychic being,
which stands behind the manifestation in mind, life and body,
and ensures the continuity of the individual evolution.
 The ego, the little self,
which regards itself as separate from others and from the world,
is a physical, vital and mental formation;
​ it belongs to the transitory personality and dissolves with it.

Sri Aurobindo. Future Evolution of Man  








By coupling the words dying with divine and art,
we imply that dying is not technology driven,
but instead holds the possibility of being as God-filled,
loving, and as sacred as being born.
Dying, just as any other point during our lives,
can be an integrative event, rather than a splintering one.
We don’t negate the fact that it will be lonely,
for we all finally do it alone.
But by framing death and dying as a divine art,
we hope to paint a picture of integrative wholeness
that we all very humanly and naturally encounter at the end of our lives.
It holds the potential to be both sad and joyous.
It’s not something to be denied or feared
but to be embraced and loved,
​as all of life can and ought to be.

Karen Speerstra, Herbert Anderson: 
 The Divine Art of Dying: How to Live Well While Dying 









The process of living attentively and intentionally
through the course of incurable illness
entails a succession of “letting go’s”
as parts of our selves no longer fit.
The tasks of completing a life
involve turning over responsibilities and relinquishing roles,
grieving the loss of habits and pastimes,
saying good-bye to friends, relatives, and lovers.
As hard and unwanted as it may be,
the process of letting go can lighten without destroying a person.
A person may become less dense without disintegrating.
In growing through a progressive, incurable condition,
it is possible for people to remain whole
​even as they dissolve from life.

Ira  Byock, MD









If death is as horrible as is claimed,
how is it that after the passage of a certain period of time
we consider happy any being, friend or enemy,
​who has ceased to live?

 E. M. Cioran:
The Trouble with Being Born  








The Buddha said the nature of your reality
is the nature of no birth and no death;
no coming, no going; no being,
no non-being; no same, no different.
This teaching sounds as though it contradicts the teaching
that everything that is born must die,
the teaching that we cannot escape death, sickness and old age.
Practice looking deeply.
You will realize that birth is a notion,
death is a notion,
coming is a notion, going is a notion, 
being is a notion and non-being is also a notion.
We have to remove all notions concerning reality.
Then we touch the ultimate reality, or suchness.  
Suchness means that reality is as it is.
You cannot say anything about it; you cannot describe it.
 Any notion, any idea concerning God
cannot describe God.
Nirvana is the same.
Nirvana is the removal of all notions and concepts
so that reality can reveal herself fully to you.

 Thich Nhat Hanh : No Death, No Fear  







So instead of saying that so-and-so was “born” today,
we could say that so-and-so was “created” today.
And instead of saying that so-and-so “died” today,
we could say that so-and-so was “created anew” today.

Yes, that would be wonderful!
​That would be far more accurate!

Neale Donald Walsch:  Home with God  






Q:  The experience of death and the experience of birth are identical?
​
A:  At the Center of the Core of Your Being, yes.
To your soul, yes.
Both are simply energy attenuations,
acting not unlike power transformers,
facilitating transitions from one world to the next.
The words "death"  and "birth"
could well be eliminated from all of your languages.
The word "creation" could easily be substituted in both cases.
Birth and death are moments of creation.
They are the Prime Moments.

Neale Donald Walsch:  Home with God  




It is just as necessary for a human being
to have knowledge, feeling and perceptiveness
of the life between death and the new birth
as of earthly life itself.
For when he enters earthly life at birth,
the confidence, strength and hopefulness connected with that life
depend upon what forces he brings with him
from the life between the last death and the present birth.
But again, the forces we are able to acquire during that life
depend upon our conduct in the earlier incarnation,
upon our moral and religious disposition
or the quality of our attitude of soul.
We must realise that whether the future evolution of the human race
will be furthered or impeded
depends upon our active and creative co-operation
with the super-sensible world in which we live
​ between death and the new birth.


Rudolph Steiner








Everyone has to die;
so die as your true nature.
Why die as a body?
Never forget your true nature.
It may not be acceptable to many, but it is a fact...
this body has nothing to do with you.
If you must have an ambition have the highest,
so that at least while dying, you will be the Absolute.
Decide that now firmly, with certainty and conviction.
​ Giving up the body is a great festival.

Nisargadatta Maharaj






Whether the fire burns up our bodies,
or age wastes them away,
death holds no evils to suffer.
Souls cannot die;
they leave their previous dwellings
and live in new homes,
which they forever inhabit.
All things change,
​but nothing perishes.

Ovid 






Death itself is a wonderful and positive experience,
but the process of dying, when it is prolonged like mine, is a nightmare.
It saps all your faculties, especially patience, endurance and equanimity….
What kind of life is this? A miserable one.
I can honestly say that I am anxious to graduate.
I am very weak, in constant pain and totally dependent.
According to my Cosmic Consciousness,
I know that if I would stop being bitter, angry and resentful of my condition
and just say yes to this kind of “end of my life,”
then I could take off and live in a better place and have a better life.
But since I am very stubborn and defiant,
I have to learn my final lessons the hard way.
Just like everyone else….
As difficult as those lessons are,
I know that the Highest of the High has a plan.
I know that He has a time that will be right for me to leave my body
the way a butterfly leaves its cocoon.
Our only purpose in life is growth.
There are no accidents.

Elisabeth Kubler-Ross:  
The Wheel of Life: A Memoir of Living and Dying  










“Opponents often misrepresent hospice and palliative care
as the alternative to aid in dying.
They have a rather romantic idea of how people should die,” Robb Miller told me.
“They believe in the idea of personal growth occurring at the end of life,
that it prepares someone to die.”
Hospice workers wanted patients to talk about how they were feeling,
to say their last goodbyes, to love and forgive family and friends,
to seek love and forgiveness.
I knew what he was talking about.
As a hospice volunteer, I often felt as if my charge was not to just hold hands,
but also to lead patients down a particular path
that hospice considered the way to a good death.
“The idea permeates hospice and palliative care,
that if that period of personal growth is short-circuited by aid in dying,”  Miller said,
“the patient is denied this spiritual growth and journey.
​Reviewing your life and all of those things. It’s arrogant.”

Ann Neumann:
  The Good Death: An Exploration of Dying in America 






So the Zen attitude about death is
exactly the same as is the Zen attitude towards life –
that of laughter, joy, celebration.
And if you can laugh at death, in death, you are free from all.
Then you are freedom.
If you cannot laugh at death
you will not be able to laugh in life either
because death is always coming.
Each act in life, each move in life, brings death closer.
Each moment that you live you get closer to death.
If you cannot laugh with death,
​how can you laugh with life and in life?

OSHO 






….when Death unlocks the door for him,
he knows the country into which he emerges,
having trodden its ways at his own will.
And at last he grows to recognise that fact of supreme importance,
that "Life" has nothing to do with body and with this material plane;
that Life is his conscious existence, unbroken, unbreakable,
and that the brief interludes in that Life, during which he sojourns on Earth,
are but a minute fraction of his conscious existence,
and a fraction, moreover, during which he is less alive,
because of the heavy coverings which weigh him down.
For only during these interludes (save in exceptional cases)
may he wholly lose his consciousness of continued life,
being surrounded by these coverings which delude him
and blind him to the truth of things,
making that real which is illusion,
​and that stable which is transitory.

Annie Besant:  
 Death— And After?  







Laughter.
Yes, laughter is the Zen attitude towards death
and towards life too,
because life and death are not separate.
Whatsoever is your attitude towards life
will be your attitude towards death,
because death comes as the ultimate flowering of life.
Life exists for death.
Life exists through death.
Without death there will be no life at all.
Death is not the end but the culmination, the crescendo.
Death is not the enemy
it is the friend.
​ It makes life possible.

OSHO 






Perhaps if we find ways
to make the pathway to natural death sacred and familiar again,
we will recover the courage to face our deaths.
If we don’t, technological medicine at the end of life
will continue to collude with our fear and ignorance and profit from it.
Unless we create new rites of passage
to help prepare for death long before it comes,
we will remain vulnerable to the commercial exploitation of our fears
​and to the implied promise that death can forever be postponed.

Katy Butler:  Knocking on Heaven's Door:
The Path to a Better Way of Death. 





Our ancestors did not want to die any more than we do.
Sixteenth-century lithographs show Death as a grinning skeleton
who grabs a wrist and insists on dancing
with farmers, apprentices, matrons, and businessmen,
all of them protesting
that they have much more important things to do than die.
​ But sooner or later, dance we must.
Things go better if we practice the steps of the dance beforehand.

Katy Butler:  Knocking on Heaven's Door:
The Path to a Better Way of Death. 








The only way for us to satisfy our shock or hurt,
caused by the gaping disparity between what we say about death
and how it actually arrives,
is to spend more time with the dying.
To know how death comes for others
is to know how death could come for us.
Knowing what death looks like strips away all the romance
but makes it easier to understand and to live through.
Yet the medical community’s conduct around death
continues to shield us from what we want to know--
​and what we would benefit from knowing.

Ann Neumann:
 The Good Death: An Exploration of Dying in America 







It is very well worth your while to study death,
for the knowledge of the truth takes away all fear of death,
and makes life easier to live,
because we understand its object and its end.
Death brings no suffering, but only joy,
for those who live the true, the unselfish life.
The old Latin saying is literally true
— Mors janua vita — death is the gate of life.
That is exactly what it is --
​a gate into a fuller and higher life.

C.W. Leadbetter: Life After Death  







Life goes on changing forms;
one day you are this, another day you are something else.
Where is the child you once were?
Has the child died?
Can you say that the child has died?
The child has not died, but then where is the child?
The form has changed.
The child is still there in its essentiality,
but now you have become a young man or a young woman.
The child is there with all its beauty;
it has been superimposed by new riches.
And then one day you will become old.
Then where is your youth?
Died?
No, again something more has happened.
Old age has brought its own crop,
old age has brought its own wisdom,
​old age has brought its own beauties.

Osho: The Book of Wisdom 











Our heavy emphasis on "drugging" patients prior to their deaths
is a great disservice to them and their families.
 Patients who were not heavily medicated in their final hours
were able to experience these blissful states prior to their transition,
resulting in a knowledge (rather than a belief)
of a waiting, loving presence of another being,
of an existence (rather than a place) of peace and equanimity,
of a state of well-being and a wholeness--
​transcending all fear of death.

Elisabeth Kubler-Ross
foreword to The Human Encounter With Death 







The dream has disappeared because awareness happened,
suddenly you became aware in the dream….
And remember, awareness and dreaming cannot exist together.
Here, awareness arises, and there, the dream disappears….
examine the nature of this awareness.
Look into it, look deep into it.
Shake yourself into as full alertness as possible.
Wake up and see!
And you will start laughing--
because now you will see there has never been a birth,
and there is never going to be a death.
This is unborn and undying consciousness.
It has always been here.
It is eternal, it is timeless.
And how afraid you were of death,
and how afraid you were of old age,
and how afraid you were of a thousand and one things!
And nothing has ever happened:
all was a dream.
Seeing this, one smiles, one laughs.
Your whole life up to now has been ridiculous, absurd.
You were unnecessarily afraid,
unnecessarily greedy, unnecessarily suffering.
You were living in a nightmare
​and it was your own creation.

Osho : The Book of Wisdom 





Death is the greatest of earth’s illusions ;
there is no death,
but only changes in life’s conditions.
Life is continuous, unbroken, unbreakable;
“unborn, eternal, constant,”
it perishes not with the perishing of the bodies that clothe it.
We might as well think
that the sky is falling when a pot is broken,
as imagine that the soul perishes
​when the body falls to pieces.

Annie  Besant: The Ancient Wisdom 







For death is only a change
that gives the soul a partial liberation,
releasing him from the heaviest of his chains.
It is but a birth into a wider life,
a return after a brief exile on earth to the soul’s true home,
a passing from a prison into the freedom of the upper air.

Annie  Besant: The Ancient Wisdom 








…it’s startling every time--
every single time--
that beauty and  loss coincide in every life,
in every soul, in every memory.
It doesn’t have to be that life is beautiful but it must end.
It can be that life is beautiful . . .
and still, as much as we may not want it to be so,
​ it ends.
It can be both beautiful and,
by the very truth that it ends,
full of loss and tragedy and trauma.
The two can coincide.
They do coincide.

Kerry Egan:  On Living  




 Living a good death
begins the moment we accept our mortality as part of who we are.
  We’ve had to integrate other aspects of who we are into our daily lives –
our gender, racial background, and cultural heritage, to name a few. 
​ Why not our mortality? 

Richard Wagner:  The Amateur's Guide to Death and Dying:
Enhancing the End of Life
www.theamateursguide.com








There is no Art of Dying manual available in our society,
so I decided to write my own.
It is intended not only for the religious,
but also for the growing number of atheists, agnostics, and vaguely “spiritual” among us.
For me, the good death includes being prepared to die,
with my affairs in order, the good and bad messages delivered that need delivering.
The good death means dying while I still have my mind sharp and aware;
it also means dying without having to endure large amounts of suffering and pain.
The good death means accepting death as inevitable,
and not fighting it when the time comes.
This is my good death,
but as legendary psychotherapist Carl Jung said,
“It won’t help to hear what I think about death.”
​ Your relationship to mortality is your own.

 Caitlin Doughty:  Smoke Gets in Your Eyes:
And Other Lessons from the Crematory  










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  







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  




There is a kind of seeming death....
 It does not come because of hurtful thoughts
and raging anger at the universe.
It merely signifies the end has come
for usefulness of body functioning.
And so it is discarded as a choice,
as one lays by a garment now outworn.
We thank the body, then,
for all the service it has given us.
 This is what death should be;
a quiet choice,
​made joyfully and with a sense of peace… 

 Kenneth Wapnick:  A Vast Illusion:
Time According to ‘A Course in Miracles’ 







When human beings are living
in the spiritual world between death and a new birth,
they direct their longing to our physical world
somewhat as physical human beings direct their longing to the spiritual world.
Human beings between death and a new birth
expect people on earth to show and radiate up to them
knowledge that can be acquired only on earth.
 The earth has been summoned to life
so that what is possible nowhere else may come into being.
Knowledge of the spiritual worlds--
which means more than vision, more than merely looking on--
can arise only on earth.
​  We ourselves are living books for the dead.

Rudolf Steiner: Staying Connected










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.  
 We can see, then, that when we die
we simply move from one world into another.
This is why in the inner meaning of the Word, “death”
​ means resurrection and a continuation of life.

Emanuel Swedenborg
Afterlife:  A Guided Tour of Heaven and Its Wonders








Creation is light and shadow both,
else no picture is possible.
The good and evil of maya must ever alternate in supremacy.
If joy were ceaseless here in this world,
would man ever seek another?
Without suffering he scarcely cares to recall
that he has forsaken his eternal home.
Pain is a prod to remembrance.
The way of escape is through wisdom!
The tragedy of death is unreal;
those who shudder at it are like an ignorant actor
who dies of fright on the stage
when nothing more is fired at him than a blank cartridge.
My sons are the children of light;
​they will not sleep forever in delusion.

Paramhansa Yogananda : Autobiography of a Yogi 







I have become disheartened
by the number of patients who received invasive treatment
in the final days and hours of life.
So many spend their final moments hooked up to tubes and lines in the ICU,
alarms beeping in the background,
hidden away from the people who care about them.
Modern medicine is always poised
to offer another procedure or therapy for prolonging life,
but it often does so without considering the quality of that life.
How much suffering is five more weeks worth?
Or five days, or five hours?
My patients have all taught me valuable lessons
about what a “good death” might look like.
Each one has reminded me that there is more to medicine
than placing a line to monitor the heart, or performing an intubation.
Just because more tests and procedures exist
does not mean that we should perform them all each time.
Sometimes the most powerful healing of all
comes through the simple act of sitting and listening
to our patients with compassion.
 I no longer see death as a failure
but as a place we are all headed at some point --
and if I can help someone live their fullest to the very end,
​I have practiced the best medicine.



Shoshana Ungerleider, MD
http://www.shoshanaungerleider.com











God is not mysterious.
Sometimes God is frightening and horrible, distorted and bizarre..
but in the end, God is God,
and the Angel of Death is very much God,
come to take you home.
The uninitiated see the Angel of Death
as a horrible, grotesque, distorted, terrifying figure,
but to those who are initiated,
who have died before they died,
the angel of death comes as a lover...
beautiful, seductive and compelling...
awe-inspiring, breath-taking.
Breathtaking beauty-
to take the breath-
​and the breath speaks,
`Let me return into thee."' 

E. J. Gold. THE GREAT ADVENTURE:
Talks on Living, Dying, and the Bardos 









Through my work in hospice
I saw people achieving a certain amount of growth and grace at the end of life,
able to find beauty, love, dignity and redemption in their final days.
I also saw that each of us is on our own unique spiritual path
and so we struggle with different issues at the end of life.
Some of us are at the beginning of the journey,
working to accept the suffering that life brings us;
others have moved on to the expression of love and forgiveness;
others are searching for meaning and purpose in both life and death;
and a few, who have already completed the previous stages,
are preparing to embrace death
and let go of their attachments to life. 

Karen Wyatt, MD
www.karenwyattmd.com


​
If there is any great difference
between the people who know they are dying
and the rest of us, it’s this:
They know they’re running out of time.
They have more motivation to do the things they want to do
and to become the person they want to become,
up until the very last breath.
But you don’t have to wait until you’re dying to do that.
There’s nothing stopping you
​from acting with the same urgency the dying feel.

Kerry Egan:  On Living  





I don’t know 
if listening to other people’s life stories as they die
can make you wise,
but I do know that it can heal your soul.
​ I know this because those stories healed mine.

Kerry Egan:  On Living  






When a being knows it can die, it changes everything.
It creates fear and alters choices.
When death is a potential occurrence,
we think, say, and do things differently.
We act out of survival.
Even the possibility of injury, illness, or pain
leads one to choose differently
than if that person were immortal and invincible.
And this is why living a human life
is such an intriguing challenge for our souls.
It’s not an easy challenge.
It’s not even necessarily fun.
It simply creates a new paradigm
from which to have new experiences,
experiences our souls are unable to duplicate in the spiritual realm.

Bob Olson:  Answers about the Afterlife:
A Private Investigator's 15-Year Research Unlocks the Mysteries of Life after Death




SHARED-DEATH EXPERIENCES:
There are many claims of family members and friends
who have shared their dying loved one’s deathbed visions,
called shared-deathbed experiences (or shared-death experiences).
In these instances, people say that they too had an otherworldly experience
that was similar to or exactly the same as their dying loved one’s
transition back to the spiritual world.
Many believe it occurs because they’re in the same room with the dying person,
but not everyone who has experienced this phenomenon has been in the same room.
People who have had shared-death experiences have seen spirits of deceased people,
caught a glimpse of the spirit world,
and even felt an alternate dimension,
as if the dying person held open the door to eternity
​ so they could experience what it is like for a moment.

Bob Olson:  Answers about the Afterlife:
A Private Investigator's 15-Year Research Unlocks the Mysteries of Life after Death









You are afraid to die?
Buddha says: “You cannot die,
because in the first place, you are not.”
How can you die?
 Look into your being, go deep into it.
See, who is there to die? –
and you will not find any ego there.
Then there is no possibility of death.
Only the idea of ego creates the fear of death.
When there is no ego there is no death.
You are utter silence, deathlessness, eternity –
not as you, but as an open sky,
uncontaminated by any idea of “I,”
of self – unbounded, undefined.
​ Then there is no fear.

Osho 






There is no need to be afraid of death.
Death is like deep sleep and means peace!
That’s what death really is – it means peace.
But the ego doesn’t know that,
and that is why the ego is afraid.
The ego thinks it is enjoying the peace in deep sleep,
but the peace in deep sleep exists
because there is absence of the ego.
​And death is simply a longer deep sleep.

Ramesh S. Balsekar 



A child has no conception of ‘mine’ and ‘not-mine’,
and cannot understand the concept of theft.
Nor does the child have any conception of truth and untruth
because it cannot differentiate between dream and reality.
It is only the ego that distinguishes between dream and reality.
The sage understands this ‘reality’ as only a dream.
This is the reason a precocious, intuitive child could say,
‘We are all dreaming,
and we shall wake up when we are dead.’
​Life and death are part of the flowing that is phenomenality.

Ramesh S. Balsekar:
 Confusion No More: For the Spiritual Seeker 




Very frequently encountered on the astral plane
is the person who cannot believe that they are dead at all.
Indeed, most people consider the very fact that they are still conscious
to be an absolute proof that they have not passed through the portals of death;
somewhat of a satire this, if one thinks of it,
on the practical value of our much vaunted belief in the immortality of the soul!

The main work done for the newly dead by our helpers
is that of soothing and comforting them -
of delivering them when possible from the terrible though unreasoning fear
which but too often seizes them, and not only causes them much unnecessary suffering,
but retards their progress to higher spheres -
and of enabling them as far as may be
​ to comprehend the future that lies before them.

 Charles Leadbeater:  Invisible Helpers 







We need to start 
treating our death
as part of our legacy
instead of the end of it.

Ned Buskirk
www.yg2d.com 




There have been recorded cases of prisoners waiting for execution on death row,
when suddenly, inexplicably they realized the deepest joy and peace of true surrender.
There have been recorded cases of prisoners in Hitler’s extermination camps,
while standing in a row waiting to be led to the gas chambers,
suddenly laughing loud and hard, joking with the armed guards
who of course, thought that tension had driven them to insanity,
yet deeply recognizing the miracle of surrender to the present moment.
They were no longer afraid of death
because they had died to the present moment;
Consciousness had released itself
​from the confines of a three-dimensional human object.

 Ramesh S. Balsekar:  Confusion No More 






The language we use every day
wants us to know that dying is not passive, can’t be passive.
Dying is active.
Dying is not what happens to you.
Dying is what you do. 
Dying in the English speaking world
is usually an affliction, a malfeasance, an arbitration,
certainly something coming from somewhere beyond
your plans and abilities to steal your plans and abilities from you.
It is an intrusion, a violation, a visitation of Nothingness,
a grim reaping.
It is almost never spoken of as something you do,
or could do, or ought to do,
and this is where our confusion spirals into the great fear and loathing
of the contemporary death experience.
The “disease trajectory,” as it is called in the trade,
is somewhat predictable, fairly trustworthy in its unfortunate way,
with a ring of the inevitable about it.
But what you do in the face of that inevitability--
there is nothing inevitable about that.
What you do while the disease goes as it goes
is entirely up for grabs,
just as our grammar says it is.
​And almost nobody knows this.


 Stephen Jenkinson:
 Die Wise: A Manifesto for Sanity and Soul 










There is a running gag in medicine
that there is no such thing as dying;
there is only a failure to thrive.
In a culture that wakes up every day demanding to live,
dying is a failure,
at least temporarily, of the way that culture lives.
But the treatment of every new sick or disabled
or broken or depressed or dying person
is where the culture reaffirms its belief
​ that a long, full life is the inalienable right of all.

 Stephen Jenkinson:
 Die Wise: A Manifesto for Sanity and Soul  






The Great Clod loaded me down with this form,
and burdened me with life.
It eased me with age
and will release my own heart and mind in death.
Thus, if I make life a good,
I must make death a good as well.

—Tzu Lai
Sam Hamill:   The Essential Chuang Tzu  







Zen transcends life and death,
a long life or a short life,
and declares that,
regardless of the length,
​ one’s life is complete at every moment.

William Scott Wilson:   
The One Taste of Truth: Zen and the Art of Drinking Tea 







Think continually how many physicians are dead
after often contracting their eyebrows over the sick;
and how many astrologers
after predicting with great pretensions the deaths of others;
and how many philosophers
after endless discourses on death or immortality;
how many heroes after killing thousands;
and how many tyrants who have used their power over men’s lives
with terrible insolence as if they were immortal…
Pass then through this little space of time
conformably to nature, and end thy journey in content,
just as an olive falls off when it is ripe,
blessing nature who produced it,
​and thanking the tree on which it grew.

Marcus Aurelius: Meditations 







I have been walking in a dream,
dreaming as if there were a dream,
resisting as if there were something to resist,
but now I resist no longer as there is no other:
no karma, no self, no void, no wombs, no male, no female,
no birth, no death, no labyrinth, no reality, no unreality.
Only my own endless endlessness remaining
with no beginning and no end.
Now it is finished,
and I am done with my desire, aggression, resistance,
attractions, thoughts, experience.
I am ready now to be what I am.
I am that I am.
​There is no other.

 John C Lilly; E. J. Gold; Claudio Naranjo: American Book of the Dead  






There is no soul to be saved
in the ordinary sense in which the words are used,
because we ourselves are the souls;
and furthermore there is nothing to be saved from
except our own error and ignorance.
The body is nothing but a vestment,
​and when it is worn out we cast it aside.

Charles Webster Leadbeater:  The Inner Life 








“Everywhere I sense a presence, or atmosphere, or atmospheric presence
that is well-intentioned, gentle yet powerful, and all-knowing.…
at the risk of understating, this presence seems more like a loving condition
that permeates existence, and from which all existence springs.
The feeling of safety is definitely connected here,
in that I know that no evil or harm can befall me,
that each of my choices will yield benefits,
and that this loving condition upholds me in all of my ways…
I  know that this presence or loving condition
forms itself into me, and into all other personalities;
that it lends itself actively to seek my good
​in the most particular and individual ways.”

William James describing his afterdeath environment
Jane Roberts: The Afterdeath Journal of an American Philosopher: The World View of William James. 






The Way of the Samurai is found in death. . . .
If by setting one’s heart right every morning and evening,
one is able to live as though his body were already dead,
he gains freedom in the Way.
His whole life will be without blame,
and he will succeed in his calling.

Yamamoto Tsunetomo
Hagakure: The Book of the Samurai 





The so-called loss of a loved one by death
is really only a temporary absence,
and not even that
as soon as a man develops the power to see on the higher planes.
Those whom we think we have lost are with us still,
even though with our physical eyes we cannot see them;
and we should never forget that,
although we may sometimes be under the delusion that we have lost them,
they are not in the least under the delusion that they have lost us,
because they can still see our astral bodies,
and as soon as we leave the physical vehicle in sleep
we are with them and can communicate with them
​exactly as when they were on the physical plane.

Charles Webster Leadbeater:  The Inner Life 









The fear of death is a stern reality in the minds of many people.
A far larger number suffer from it than one would suppose,
and still more from the fear of what may happen to us after death.
Naturally this is especially to be found among people
who have ideas of hell, and of probable punishment if they do not believe this or that.
It is a gross and degraded form of superstition,
but still the suffering is real,
and what is even worse is the fear as to the fate of others after death.
​Many a mother’s whole life is embittered by doubts and fears as to what may happen to her son.  While it is true that there is no eternal hell for him,
there is certainly much real earthly suffering for her.
 But we know the law of karma,
and realize that the states after death are simply a continuation
of the life which we are now living, although on a higher plane and without a physical body;
and when in addition we learn that what we commonly call life
is only one day in the real and greater life, then all these things
assume quite a different perspective.
We know then that progress is absolutely certain.
A man may stumble, he may set himself against the forces of progress,
but he will be carried on by them in spite of himself,.
We see at once that this knowledge eliminates fear.

Charles Webster Leadbeater:  The Inner Life








Because I so misunderstood the meaning of death,
I avoided it at every turn,
and as a result, I avoided setting foot on the only path
leading away from a fragmented life.
I have since chanced down that path
and learned that in death all is not lost;
only that which was never real.
​To die is to awaken from the dream of a separate existence.

John Ptacek:  The Journey Home: Discovering the Essential Self






"BEING WITH DYING”
is a phrase that aptly describes the human condition.
We may be unique among species in being aware of our mortality.
Although the capacity to contemplate death is an essential human trait,
most people actively eschew thinking about how their life might end.
 From the moment of diagnosis,
death becomes the bell that won’t stop ringing.
We can distract ourselves with medical information and frenetic activity.
We can drink or take drugs to muffle the peal,
but at quiet moments we can always hear its ring.
Ultimately, usually reluctantly,
we find that only by answering the call
can we hope to silence the shrill bell within.  
Illness reveals that at every moment of every day we are
— and have always been--
merely a heartbeat away from death.
This incontrovertible fact need not be depressing.
Instead, our readiness to die
can inform and enliven how we live
and how we relate to one another.

Ira Byock, MD.:  from foreword to Being With Dying by Joan Halifax 










Life is expression.
It comes to be out of the force of itself,
and no force stands against it or threatens it.
Death in your terms certainly seems an end,
​ but it is instead a translation of life into another form.

 Jane Roberts:   The Nature of the Psyche: Its Human Expression 





Each present moment of your experience
is dependent upon the future as well as the past,
your death as well as your birth.
Your birth and your death are built in,
so to speak, together, one implied in the other.
You could not die
unless you were the kind of creature who was born. 
Your body is aware of the fact of its death at birth,
and of its birth at its death,
for all of its possibilities for action take place in the area between.
Death is therefore as creative as birth,
and as necessary for action and consciousness, in your terms. 

 Jane Roberts:   The Nature of the Psyche: Its Human Expression










Your idea of death
is based upon your dependence upon the outer senses.
You will learn that it is possible,
through no physical act
(and underline that, through no physical act),
to relinquish the physical body,
expand the self,
using atoms and molecules as stepping stones
to a given destination,
​ and reforming the physical body at the other end.

 Jane Roberts:  The Early Sessions: Book 2 of The Seth Material  






Death is life, and life is death.
He who seeks realities in this life
shall also seek realities after death;
and he who seeks unrealities in this life
shall also seek unrealities after death.

Charles Webster Leadbeater:  The Inner Life





At night when you can drop the activities of the day,
you should engage in a series of meditative contemplations similar to these:
“All right, soon I’m going to fall asleep.
How many people have I heard about who went to sleep and never woke up?
When I lay my head down on my pillow, I may not wake up again.
Death is not that complicated.
It is simply a matter of not being able to take in one more breath.
Then I am dead.
​That could happen to me tonight in my sleep.”

 Chagdud Tulku Rinpoche:  Life in Relation to Death





Death is the transition
from  conditional existence
​to Unconditional Existence.

Roy  Melvin: Life Never Dies  






After his last breath,
my father remained in a state of meditation for almost six full days
that prevented the usual deterioration of his body.
The ability to remain in a state of meditation after the breath stops
is well known among great Tibetan masters,
but circumstances have rarely allowed it to occur in the West.
Chagdud Rinpoche remained sitting in a natural, lifelike meditation posture,
with little visible change of color or expression.
During that time, no one touched his body.


Until the sixth day,
  Rinpoche showed no physical signs that his meditation had ended.
In the interim we were in constant consultation
with a lawyer and other officials about local customs and regulations.
Friday midday, his meditation ended
and his mind separated from his body.
Within hours, his appearance changed.
​He took on the signs typical of those occurring within the first 24 hours of death.

Jigme Tromge Rinpoche describing death of Chagdud Tulku Rinpoche




Whether by degenerative disease or the completion of old age,
we know that we will soon die.
An understanding of the physical, perceptual, and mental phenomena
of the dying process can be very helpful
as our own death approaches;
it may also provide insights into the experiences of others who are dying.
We should realize, however, that the strange sensations of dying
and the loss of the familiar support of the body
will still be very difficult.
For this reason we must develop an unwavering recognition
of the absolute nature that will carry us through the dying transition
​ no matter what arises.

 Chagdud Tulku Rinpoche : Life in Relation to Death




It is good to live with people,
it is good to be in the world while you are living,
but when one is getting nearer to death
it is good to move into total aloneness,
so that you move towards the original source
in your absolute purity and loneliness,
uncontaminated by the world.

Osho, quoting Lao Tzu
Osho :  Absolute Tao:






One evening I was staying a little later than my assigned shift time
to visit with Mrs. Smith as long as possible.
The nurse in charge told me she was not doing well
and they didn’t expect her to make it through the night.
When I got back to work the next morning I hurried to her room.
The door was closed.
I opened it with caution to see that all Mrs. Smith’s belongings were gone.
I closed the door and headed down the hall.
Jane, a patient,  rolled out to greet me.
“Becki, you mustn’t cry about Mrs. Smith.
She’s not having to worry
about whether or not someone’s going to keep force-feeding her.
She does not have to worry
about getting that cold or hot shower twice a week by someone in a hurry.”
I looked at her and said, “But she’s gone.
And what if she was alone when she died?”
“Yes, she’s gone," Jane said.
"And it doesn’t matter anymore if she was alone or not.
She’s not alone anymore.
And you mustn’t be sad for her.
She’s just gone from her body.
Her  spirit is safe.”
I turned the corner and sat down in the mop closet.
I pulled my knees up close to my chest and cried like a baby.
I thought, “I don’t think I’m as sad for Mrs. Smith as I am for me.”

Becki Hawkins:  Transitions: A Nurse's Education about Life and Death 












While materialism permits us to bring to life
only relationships between souls confined to their earthly existence,
spiritual science opens the way for free communication and exchange
between souls on the earth and souls that dwell beyond the earth in the other world.
The dead will live with us.
And, when that happens, what we may call the passage through the gate of death
will often after a time be experienced
as merely a change in the form of existence.
The whole transformation in the life of spirit and of soul
that will take place when such things become common knowledge
​ will be of enormous significance.

Rudolf  Steiner:  Staying Connected 






We must regain the understanding
that we are not on earth just to build things
in the physical universe during our physical existence.
We must understand that during our whole existence
we are connected to the whole world.
Those who have passed through the gates of death
want to work with us on the physical world.
This working together only appears to be a physical collaboration,
for everything physical is only an outer expression of spirit.
Materialism has alienated human beings
​from the world of the dead.

Rudolf Steiner:   Staying Connected









Farewell, my friends, was beautiful with you. 
Farewell, world, you were the greatest, in which I could have been. 
Farewell, life, I could have had no better. 


If you suffer, just make art out of it. 
The greater the suffering, the more insistent the art. 

Last posts by Dmitrij Panov,
25 year old author of Sterben mit Sway (Dying with Swag) blog
http://sterbenmitswag.blogspot.com/
Godspeed Dmitrij!



Paul confronted death--
examined it, wrestled with it, accepted it--
as a physician and a patient.
He wanted to help people understand death and face their mortality.
Paul’s decision not to avert his eyes from death
epitomizes a fortitude we don’t celebrate enough in our death-avoidant culture.
His strength was defined by ambition and effort,
but also by softness, the opposite of bitterness.
He spent much of his life wrestling with the question
of how to live a meaningful life,
and his book explores that essential territory.
“Always the seer is a sayer,” Emerson wrote.
“Somehow his dream is told; somehow he publishes it with solemn joy.”
Writing this book was a chance for this courageous seer to be a sayer,
​to teach us to face death with integrity.

Lucy Kalanithi, from the epilogue to her husband’s book:
Paul Kalanithi:  When Breath Becomes Air 









 It has always been known
that the capacity to accept death in the midst of life--
to swing with a conventionally intolerable vibration--
is a source of immense creative power.
“Unless a grain of corn falls into the ground and dies,
it remains isolated.
But if it dies, it brings forth much fruit.” 
And the Zen master Bunan:
"While living be a dead man, thoroughly dead.
​Then, whatever you do, just as you will, will be right."

Alan Watts: Does It Matter?: Essays on Man’s Relation to Materiality  




As long as you do not know how to die
and come to life again,
you are but a sorry traveler on this dark earth.

Goethe


​
The Lord has cautioned us in the Bhagavad Gita,
“It is best to die in Swadharma
(the death of body identification, which brings one into the Self).
 The aspirant should recognize the importance of the caution
that is being imparted in the Lord's words.
Eradicating the idea of identification with the body
is the sign of the "Knowledge of the Self."
Mahatmas experience this type of death while living.
 Saint Tukaram said, "I have seen my own death,
how shall I describe that process which is unique?"
How can those who live in a religion that is not of the Self,
and who die a corpse's death,
understand this process of death while living?
The unfortunate one only thinks of death
​ in terms of various customs and rites according to one's religion.

Shri Sadguru Siddharameshwar Maharaj
  Amrut Laya - The Stateless State  









The knower of consciousness has no death.
​ He drops his body in a blissful state.

 Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj 





Peace, peace! he is not dead, he doth not sleep--
He hath awakened from the dream of life--
'Tis we, who lost in stormy visions, keep                          
With phantoms an unprofitable strife,
And in mad trance, strike with our spirit's knife Invulnerable nothings.--WE decay
Like corpses in a charnel;
fear and grief Convulse us and consume us day by day,                               
And cold hopes swarm like worms within our living clay.

Envy and calumny and hate and pain,
And that unrest which men miscall delight,
Can touch him not and torture not again;                             
From the contagion of the world's slow stain He is secure,
and now can never mourn
A heart grown cold, a head grown gray in vain;
Nor, when the spirit’s self has ceased to burn,
With sparkless ashes load an unlamented urn.                         
 
He lives, he wakes--'tis Death is dead, not he;
Mourn not for Adonais.

excerpt from
Percy Bysshe Shelley's  Adonais









Look to the light, Seeker!  
Look to death as life’s highest adventure.
 Look to death as the soul’s greatest hope for initiation--
the soul’s ultimate union with God.
 So live that when that moment of opportunity approaches,
the portals of paradise will be open wide
and a voice from the Clear Light will bid you entrance:
     “Well done, good and faithful servant.
​ Enter now into the joys of eternal life.”

Earlyne Chaney:  The Mystery of Death & Dying:  Initiation at the Moment of Death






Each of us has within our being the ability to love and to fear.
Our heart settles into love when the mind runs out of options.
When we are dying there are no choices left.
We may project our fears from life onto our death,
but life as we know it is near its end.
Fearing death is the final futile attempt of the mind to hold us back.
There is nothing we can do except move ahead.
When we move through our fears, acknowledging them without resistance,
our fears vanish into the emptiness from which they came.
​ What is left is an affectionate heart and an alert, sensitive mind.

 Rodney Smith: Lessons from the Dying   




The known, invariant sequence of human development on the Path of Return
makes it plausible to suggest that the ultimate level of human consciousness and identity,
union with Reality,
occurs in the accelerated transformative process of dying.
What is not known or knowable at this point
is whether or not and for how long the state of Unity Consciousness is maintained
after it is experienced during the dying process.
The still revolutionary insight of Buddhism is
that “life and death are in the mind and nowhere else.” 
Transcending ordinary mind,
​we enter the world of the unborn and the undying.

Kathleen Dowling Singh:  The Grace in Dying: A Message of Hope, Comfort and Spiritual Transformation  
http://www.kathleendowlingsingh.com






As one gets closer and closer to dying,
acquaintances and neighbors,
then friends and family members from the outer circle
are bid adieu.  
Typically, only the inner circle is left at the time of death.  
The love experienced here seems to be the last bond the dying feel
with those who are not engaged in the same momentous process of transformation they are.  
This period of withdrawal, of “dying to the world,”
both for those involved in deep and deliberate meditative disciplines
and for those ho are entering the process of physically dying,
is a period that precedes and helps to precipitate the lifting of the primal repression
​and the subsequent inpouring of the power of the Ground of Being.


Kathleen Dowling Singh:  The Grace in Dying: A Message of Hope, Comfort and Spiritual Transformation  
http://www.kathleendowlingsingh.com






Death ought to form how we live our lives
because the qualities that define a good life
are those that make up a good death.
When we allow ourselves to be confronted by death, it is not easy.
It’s tough to recognize that our lives on this earth will end,
and it can be hard to realize that much of what we pursue in life
has little ultimate meaning.
In response, we may deploy a range of methods
to avoid being confronted by death.
We zealously seek medical treatment to forestall the inevitable
or we simply maintain lives that are too busy
to be interrupted by a trip to the nursing home.
Whatever method we pursue,
​ avoiding death often means refusing to recognize what is valuable in our own lives.

Rob Moll:  The Art of Dying: Living Fully Into the Life to Come 






Spiritual evolution is possible before, during and even after physical death.
However, this is easier to accomplish
when you have knowledge of the dying process
and feel more comfortable with what to expect.  
Whether there is a terminal illness or sudden death,
having a spiritual support plan already in place
​will help you to navigate through a highly emotional time.

Susan Buhlman (Death Doula) with William Buhlman:  Higher Self Now!  






When you feel that your loved one has begun to withdraw,
respect (don’t correct) their choice of behavior.
It is most likely a sign of acceptance of fate,
although it may manifest to you as detachment.
 It may feel like you have done something wrong, but this is not the case.
 This is  not personal,
this is disconnecting from this world in preparation for the next.
 Gentle support for any change in routine is the best course of action.

Susan Buhlman (Death Doula) with William Buhlman:  Higher Self Now! 

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The fear of death
is also fear of time because death stops all time.
Nobody is afraid of death--
how can you be afraid of something that you have not known?
How can you be afraid of the absolutely unknown, unfamiliar, strange?
Fear can only exist with something which is known.
No, when you say, “I am afraid of death”
you are not afraid of death— you don’t know!
Who knows?— death may be better than life.
The fear is not of death, the fear is of time.
In India we have the same term for both.
Time we call kala and death also we call kala.
We have one term for both death and time.
It is meaningful, the word kala is meaningful, very significant,
because time is death,
​ and death is nothing but time.

Osho
Fear: Understanding and Accepting the Insecurities of Life   


Since one was not concerned with the phenomenon of one’s birth,
why should one be concerned with the phenomenon of death?
Indeed, there really is no ONE who need be concerned with anything.
It is only this very concern, in fact,
​that constitutes one’s bondage as a personal entity.

Ramesh S. Balsekar





Death loses its sting and the grave its victory
when we realize that life is eternal.
We are not permitted to stay too long in any one place,
just long enough to gather the experience necessary
to the unfolding and advancement of the soul.
This is wise, for should we stay here too long
we would become too set, too rigid, too inflexible.
In the process of evolution change is inevitable,
and when this change comes we should welcome it
with a smile on the lips and a song in the heart.
While it is true that we weep for our friends,
we should know that their life goes on.
We are thinking, then, of eternity from this larger viewpoint,
as a continuity of time, ever and ever expanding,
until “time” as we now know and experience it shall be no more.
Realizing this, we should see in everyone a budding genius,
a becoming God,
an unfolding soul, an eternal destiny. 

 Ernest Holmes:  You Will Live Forever 








Death is an illusion.
It is not real.
Only life is real.
You are all immortal, eternal.
None of you—not one—came into any of your physical incarnations
intending to stay physical forever.
That is neither possible nor desirable.
You came here to play, first of all.
Those of you reading this—at least many of you—know that.
You came to have fun, to be happy, to live joyfully.

But at this time in your  evolution,  it is critical that all of you return
to the full awareness of who you are.
Which is God.
You and God are one.
God is immortal.
​So too are you.

John Cali channeling Spirit 











Let us embrace a new approach to death and dying.
 Instead of fear, let us embrace joy,
for we know that we continue to live and love beyond the dense vehicle of flesh.
 Our exit from this temporary training ground
is a glorious return to our true spiritual home.
 Let us open our hearts and minds
to the formless void of pure spiritual consciousness.
 Let us embrace the journey of death
as a self-empowering launch pad
propelling us to the very core of our spiritual essence.
 With this focused intention,
death becomes a powerful opportunity to experience liberation.

William Buhlman & Susan Buhlman:  Higher Self Now!

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​

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  



​
What makes the medical hastening of death a modern way of dying
is not simply that the time of death, in addition to the manner of dying,
is determined by human will.
That would make the medical hastening of death no different from suicide.
Suicide is always an extraordinary act
performed under extraordinary circumstances,
whereas the medical hastening of death is meant to be a routinized response
to a problem we all know we may face,
the onset of a fatal illness. 

 Shai J. Lavi:   The Modern Art of Dying: A History of Euthanasia in the United States  







This is the vision:
Wherever you go, there is palliative care.
You shouldn’t have to be in the hospital or be in hospice --
palliative care can be just part of what you get when you have a serious illness.
Isaac Eisenoff said, “Life is pleasant, death is peaceful. It’s the transition that is troublesome.” That’s what we are here for. 
Contemplative care is the embodiment, ethos, and practice of palliative care.
It is palliative care.
And those of us who are not Buddhist monks
are borrowing from the wisdom traditions
to practice the work that we do with patients.
​Contemplative care is a coming home.

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

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https://smile.amazon.com/Awake-Bedside-Contemplative-End---Life-ebook/dp/B017I22DZW/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1473272698&sr=1-1&keywords=awake+at+the+bedside








According to the orthodox Christian view,
Death is a separation,
and the "spirits of the dead" wait for reunion
until those they love also pass through Death's gateway,
or--according to some--until after the judgment-day is over.
As against this the Esoteric Philosophy teaches
that Death cannot touch the higher consciousness of man,
and that it can only separate those who love each other
so far as their lower vehicles are concerned;
the man living on earth, blinded by matter,
feels separated from those who have passed onwards,
but the Devachan  has a complete conviction
“that there is no such thing as Death at all”,
having left behind it all those vehicles over which Death has power.
Therefore, to its less blinded eyes,
its beloved are still with it;
for it, the veil of matter that separates has been torn away.

(A “Devachan” is one who, after death, dwells in Devachan or The Mental Plane.  The individuated Soul spends more of what humans call  time in Devachan than on earth.  Life in Devachan is ultimately more familiar, more real than life on earth.  Part of individuated consciousness dies in Devachan to be born (embodied) on earth and is reborn in Devachan upon earthly death.}

Annie Besant:  Death-- And After?   







We are with those whom we have lost in material form,
and far, far nearer to them now than when they were alive.
And it is not only in the fancy of the Devachan,
as some may imagine, but in reality.
For pure divine love is not merely the blossom of a human heart,
but has its roots in eternity.
Spiritual holy love is immortal,
and Karma brings sooner or later all those who loved each other
​ with such a spiritual affection to incarnate once more in the same family group.

Annie Besant:  Death-- And After?   



I asked the japonica flowers: 
“Are you the same as the flowers that died in the frost or are you different flowers?”
 The flowers replied to me: “We are not the same and we are not different. 
When conditions are sufficient we manifest 
and when conditions are not sufficient we go into hiding. 
It’s as simple as that.”

Thich Nhat Hanh  No Death, No Fear  






The reality of our afterlife
is far more exciting than my humble words can express.
 We are all approaching a magnificent journey of consciousness beyond the body.
 For many of us, the time has come to expand our awareness
beyond the beliefs of our youth and explore our own amazing spiritual existence.
 Always remember that we are powerful beings 
who possess the ability not only to create our current environment,
but to shape our continuing existence beyond this life as well.

William Buhlman and Susan Buhlman:  Higher Self Now:  Accelerating Your Spiritual Evolution

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As a little girl raised in Switzerland,
I could never, not in my wildest dreams--
and they were pretty wild--
have predicted one day winding up the world-famous author of On Death and Dying,
a book whose exploration of life’s final passage
threw me into the center of a medical and theological controversy.
Nor could I have imagined that afterward
I would spend the rest of my life explaining
that death does not exist.

 Elisabeth Kubler-Ross:  The Wheel of Life: A Memoir of Living and Dying  







The only incontrovertible fact of my work
is the importance of life.
I always say that death can be one of the greatest experiences ever.
If you live each day of your life right,
​then you have nothing to fear.

 Elisabeth Kubler-Ross:  The Wheel of Life: A Memoir of Living and Dying 



After the human being has passed the Gate of Death,
he experiences his thought-life, his thinking, in a different way.
In our life between birth and death
we experience thoughts within our soul, we think.
And these thoughts, between birth and death,
are no more than images of an outer reality.
When the human being has laid aside his physical body,
then thought becomes an outer reality.
This is the first experience in the spiritual world for someone who has died;
he perceives his thoughts to be, as it were, set free from himself.
They are outside and beyond his soul,
just as, in the life between birth and death, sensory objects are outside and beyond us.
 The whole thought-world which the human being has gathered
to himself between birth and death becomes an objective world.
They do not separate from us by sinking down into an unformed darkness;
they become independent and form a thought-world outside us.

Rudolf Steiner:  Life Beyond Death: Selected Lectures  







Death destroys the personality
but it cannot annihilate the individuality.
Individuality isseparate and has distinct existence.
It is something which is beyond the body.
It has no relation to your personality at all.
It is the sense of ‘I’.
It is like a continuous current.
It is the continuity of the one thought, the thought of ‘I’.
All other thoughts are centred round this ‘I’.
I was a boy. I become a man. I was a doctor. I ate. I drank. I spoke.
I meditated. I talked.
I went to America, England, France and Germany.
The same ‘I’ has gone through all these experiences.
‘I’ is the dweller in this body.
‘I’ is the same in childhood, youth and old age.
Personality changes
but your individuality, the sense of ‘I’ can never change
because the sense of ‘I’ will continue to exist with you.
After leaving this physical body
the sense of ‘I’ continues to exist.
After death you take the sense of ‘I’ with you.
Even in dream you have the sense of ‘I’ within.
​ Even in deep sleep you have the sense of ‘I’.

Sivananda:  What Becomes of the Soul After Death









I have been walking in a dream, 
dreaming as if there were a dream,
resisting as if there were something to resist,
but now I resist no longer as there is no other:
no karma, no self, no void, no wombs,
no male, no female, no birth, no death, no labyrinth,
no reality, no unreality.
Only my own endless endlessness remaining
with no beginning and no end.
Now it is finished, and I am done with my desire,
aggression, resistance, attractions, thoughts, experience.
I am ready now to be what I am.
I am that I am.
​There is no other.

 John C. Lilly; E. J. Gold; Claudio Naranjo:  American Book of the Dead 






Certainly the birth of a child
is really basically just as incomprehensible,
but this transformation is projected into,
rather than out of, your sphere of understanding.
What you call death
is merely the transformation of your own energy
​ onto a sphere that cannot be perceived by the outer senses.

Jane Roberts  The Early Sessions: Book 2 of The Seth Material 








What you consider death has no more basic reality
than has your idea of time and space.
Death really represents a blind spot in your present ability
to perceive energy transformation, and even value fulfillment.
Death merely represents the termination of your own perception,
that is, the termination of your understanding.
Your ability here amounts to a complete dwindling of comprehension.
Your senses are not equipped to perceive
​ the transformation of energy from one form to another.
 
Jane Roberts  The Early Sessions: Book 2 of The Seth Material 






The completely spiritualized mind-body is a Tathagata,
who doesn’t go anywhere when he dies,
for the good reason that he is already, actually and consciously,
where everyone has always potentially been without knowing.
The person who has not, in this life, gone into Thusness,
into the eternal principle of all states of being,
goes at death into some particular state,
​either purgatorial or paradisal.

 Aldous Huxley:The Perennial Philosophy:
An Interpretation of the Great Mystics, East and West 







Prajapati taught Indra the highest truth of the Self.
“This body,” he said, “is mortal, forever in the clutch of death.
But within it resides the Self, immortal, and without form.
This Self, when associated in consciousness with the body,
is subject to pleasure and pain;
and so long as this association continues,
no man can find freedom from pains and pleasures.
But when the association comes to an end,
there is an end also of pain and pleasure.
Rising above physical consciousness,
knowing the Self as distinct from the sense-organs and the mind,
knowing Him in his true light,
​ one rejoices and one is free.”

From the Chandogya Upanishad









This is a plea –
to my family, my carer, doctors and specialists;
to my friends and neighbours, and the people I’m yet to meet:
start talking about death as much as you talk about life.
Think of death as something you can control,
where you can live out your last wishes
safe in the knowledge that the ones left behind will be able to cope without you.
Start talking to your children about death as a natural process,
not something to be scared of.
Children are taught about sex, drugs and taxes,
but not how to cope with death.
We need to have conversations about dying –
because yours could happen before mine.

Mandy Paine
https://www.theguardian.com/healthcare-network/2016/may/12/i-am-dying-want-talk-family-carer-doctors-death





Sunset is only an appearance,
for what is sunset here is sunrise elsewhere.
 In reality, the sun never sets.
 Likewise, there is no death.
 Death is  only an illusion, an appearance.
​ For death here is birth elsewhere.

Sadhu Vaswani 

dedicated to Betsy Davis.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/inspired-life/wp/2016/08/16/a-terminally-ill-woman-had-one-rule-at-her-end-of-life-party-no-crying/

​
Escape from the round of earthly reincarnation is possible
when the soul learns the truth regarding its own nature
and its relation to the Whole.  
When it perceives the illusory nature of the phenomenal universe,
and realizes that the spiritual world is the only real one,
then do the ties of the material life begin to slip away,
and to soul begins to struggle free from its confining bonds.

There exists an infinite scale of being,
composed of realm after realm,
ever rising higher and higher and higher.
​ The soul is destined to move on and on and on toward the Infinite.

Yogi Ramacharaka:  The Life Beyond Death



“Oh, Sang Hu came;
 Oh, Sang Hu came!
Now he’s gone back
to being what he truly is,
While we must go on being human!”

(Song sung by friends beside Tzu Sang Hu’s corpse)
Sam Hamill: The Essential Chuang Tzu