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

You wish to live;
 well, do you know how to live?
You are afraid to die.
 But come now: is this life of yours anything but death?
Gaius Caesar was passing along the Via Latina,
when a man stepped out from the ranks of the prisoners,
 his grey beard hanging down even to his breast,
 and begged to be put to death.
"What!" said Caesar, "are you alive now?"
 That is the answer which should be given
 to men to whom death would come as a relief.
​"You are afraid to die; what! are you alive now?"

Seneca: Letters from a Stoic ​



You are not the victim of the world you see
because you invented it.
You can give it up as easily as you made it up.
You will see it or not see it, as you wish.
While you want it you will see it;
when you no longer want it,
​it will not be there for you to see.

A Course In Miracles




Dolores: People are so afraid of dying. Can you tell me what it is like when it happens? 

Spirit: Well, when I’m in the body it feels heavy.
It pulls on me. It’s just uncomfortable.
But when you die it’s a lifting of weight. It’s relaxing.
People carry all those problems around.
 And it’s like they are carrying around a weight
 because they are heavy and laden with all these other things.
When you die it’s like tossing them out the window and it feels good.
​It’s a transition.

Dolores Cannon:  Between Death and Life:
 Conversations With A Spirit ​






If you die in an accident,
 it is painful just before you lose consciousness of the physical plane.
But after you lose consciousness
it is very easy and natural.
It’s as natural as anything else in life:
making love, walking, running, swimming.
It is just another part of life.
There’s no such thing as dying.
You just go on to a different stage of your life.
Dying is pleasant.
If people are worried about it,
tell them to go to a place in the river that has a deep pool.
Tell them to dive down to the bottom of the pool.
And then, at the bottom push up vigorously with their feet
 and come plunging up to the surface.
​Tell them it is like that.

Dolores Cannon:  Between Death and Life:
 Conversations With A Spirit ​












The ideal of the Good Death,
as our ancestors defined it,
was a natural death free of medical flailing.
It did not require experts.
It took place at home and was neither sudden nor lingering.
Just as we do now, our ancestors hoped
 to die in a familiar place among close friends and family;
to be safe and gently cared for in their hour of need;
to have their last words heard and treasured;
 to express their love and forgiveness
 and to hear that they were loved and forgiven in turn.
 The impulse for the Good Death may be bred into our bones:
 it was once so strong that soldiers on Civil War battlefields
did their best to re-create it symbolically,
propping photographs of their mothers or sisters on their chests
​as they died far from home.

Katy Butler:  
Knocking On Heaven’s Door 








There is attraction for the sense objects because of your body-identity.
 That goes away with your conviction of being as light,
and then there is no birth and death for you.
 Being self-luminous, you see things in your own light.
​But you still believe that you are your body, which sees.

Mohan Gaitonde:  Self-Love, The Original Dream:
Shri Nisargadatta Maharaj’s Direct Pointers To Reality 







Dying in peace
pertains to the months, weeks, and days of our demise,
during which we likely will seek and manage medical treatments 
to obtain their benefits without getting dragged into dying situations
we wish to avoid.
Dying in peace
 means peacefully living our waning days 
with the assistance of compassionately offered and sensibly applied medical treatments--
no more and no less.

 Bart Windrum:
 The Promised Landing: A Gateway to Peaceful Dying 









That we so want a peaceful death makes plainly evident
how sacred our dying time is for each of us—and for our loved ones.
And how elusive dying in and at peace has become for most of us.
Although we might luck out and die without strife,
 doing nothing other than taking a final breath,
today’s world is so undersupportive and overcontrolling
 and dying is so overmedicalized,
​that assuming we will just luck our way out is foolish at best.

 Bart Windrum: 
The Promised Landing: A Gateway to Peaceful Dying 





When the moment of death arrives,
 and a chorus of wailing wells up by his side,
his soul will laugh at its own fear.
For in that instant,
the rich person will realize he has no gold;
the clever person will know he has no more schemes.

Yahiya Emerick:  The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Rumi Meditations  ​


It is very important to send our thoughts and feelings
 to a loved one who has died and is now in the spiritual worlds.
Our thoughts must not contain yearnings to have the departed back with us,
as this complicates his life in the spheres in which he must now enter.
What we need to send to the spiritual worlds is not the suffering we endure
but the love we bear towards the departed.
Spiritual research has shown that feelings of love give wings that bear the dead up,
whereas longings like: “Oh how I wish you ere still with us”
​ create obstacles in his path. 


Rudolf Steiner







For Gandhi, the art of dying was very often a public act
and an act of publicising one’s will to be free.
There is something revealing in the parallel that Gandhi established
 between the struggle for freedom and the art of dying.
 In a speech at a meeting of the Congress in Bombay in August 1942,
​he invited his fellow freedom fighters to follow a new mantra:
 “Here is a mantra, a short one, that I give to you.
You may imprint it on your hearts
and let every breath of yours give expression to it.
The mantra is ‘Do or Die.’
We shall either free India
 or die in the attempt;
we shall not live to see the perpetuation of our slavery...
He who loses his life will gain it,
he who will seek to save it shall lose it.
​Freedom is not for the coward or the faint-hearted.”

Ramin Jahanbegloo

www.thehindu.com







…a Swedish oceanographer told his son
 that as he faced death, he would be sustained
​“by an infinite curiosity as to what was to follow.”

Emily K. Abel:  The Inevitable Hour ​





This is an essential experience of any mystical realization.
You die to your flesh and are born into your spirit.
You identify yourself with the consciousness and life
 of which your body is but the vehicle.
 You die to the vehicle
and become identified in your consciousness
 with that of which the vehicle is but the carrier.
​That is the God.
​
Joseph Campbell






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 the earth--
​the fields of fall rye rolling as far as the eye can see.

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





Is it an effort for the consciousnesses
that are already on the other side
to greet the consciousness that is newly over
in a form that will be recognised?

Consciousness creates form.
Consciousness can create any form it wishes.
 Therefore consciousness creates the form that it is aware,
​telepathically you might say,
 will be acceptable to the newly arrived “soul."
Any image can be created.

David and Jean Ingman
www.realityandyou.com




 “Death is a stripping away of all that is not you.
 The secret of life is to “die before you die” --
                                                          and find that there is no death.”                                                                   
  Eckhart Tolle






Humans!
We think life goes on forever.
We think everything will remain more or less the same,
there’s always time to get to everything.
 We stumble briefly upon moments to enjoy this life,
in between the distractions and the annoyances.
The stupid bullshit that keeps us off balance;
our birth family, drama, politics, conflict.
The nonsense that pulls us from the things we love.
A twig snaps and we spin around to realize
70 years whooshed by like a second.
“Whooops,” we’ll say, “How can that be?
What has happened here?”
Trying to remember the things we used to love about each other,
but our memory fails
and we’ll stare absently into the distance,
wondering about everything we must have once experienced
 now lost to time--
Why do we horde useless memories,
rather than horde the things we really care for?
Why do we spend our time on nonsense?
​ Utter nonsense. 
I went about my business
 as if there was so much time remaining.
Left when I should have stayed,
 didn’t pick up the phone when I should have talked for hours.
Couldn’t I see the countdown ticking?
The crowd chanting the last of it.
Didn’t we stop to consider the game was almost over?
​We thought we’d get endless innings of overtime.

Sam Rosenthal








When we cannot contemplate the moment of death,
 beyond the portal of death,
then our ego-consciousness after death is in the same case
as our physical ego-consciousness here upon the earth when we are asleep.
Just as we know nothing of our physical ego-consciousness when we are asleep,
so we know nothing concerning ourselves after death
 if we do not constantly have before us the moment of death.
It stands before us
​as one of the most beautiful and loftiest moments.

Rudolph Steiner







Throughout the time between death and a new birth
 We have an ego-consciousness that not only resembles but far exceeds
that which we have here during our physical life.
We would not have this ego-consciousness
 if we could not look back incessantly, if we would not always see --
but from the other side, from the spiritual side --
 that moment in which our spiritual part extricated itself from the physical.
We know that we are an ego only because we know that we have died,
that our spiritual has freed itself from our physical part.


Rudolph Steiner







Here, on earth,
death has a terrifying aspect
only because we look upon it as a kind of dissolution,
as an end.
But when we look back upon the moment of death
 from the other side,
from the spiritual side,
then death continually appears to us as a victory of the spirit,
as the Spirit that is extricating itself from the physical.
It then appears as the greatest,
most beautiful
​and significant event. 

Rudolph Steiner





How can we be free of the fear of death?  
We are afraid of death and focus our minds on it.
We are hypnotized by our fear of it.
However, the true question is about life, not death.
Before we understand who dies,
we need to understand who lives.
It is too soon to understand death,
but we can understand life.
Life is present right now.
So, who is alive?
When we find out what life is,
 we may also discover that there is no death.
​After all, who is there to die?

 Francis Lucille:
The Perfume of Silence  





All suffering is based on the notion that death is bad.
Whether we are aware of it or not,
 suffering is about the fear of death.
 People are willing to suffer a great deal of physical pain
 rather than die.
The belief that we are subject to death is the cause of suffering
 and this suffering prevents us from truly living,
 because instead we live a life based on this false belief.
This belief projects us into the past and future.
It is incompatible with happiness.
​Understand that there is no death.

 Francis Lucille:
The Perfume of Silence  





Death destroys our identity
only to permit us a surer access to it--
a reconstitution;
 for death has no meaning
​unless we accord it all the attributes of life.

 E. M. Cioran:  
The Temptation to Exist



No one greets death’s arrival cheerfully
​except those who have long prepared themselves for it.

Seneca:  How to Die  ​



Death -- the Inevitable Initiator
​
At birth
only a third part of the Divine Nature of man 
temporarily dissociates itself from its own immortality
and takes upon itself the dream of physical birth and existence,
animating with its own celestial enthusiasm
a vehicle composed of material elements,
part of and bound to the material sphere.
At death
this incarnated part awakens from the dream of physical existence
and reunites itself once more
with its eternal condition.


 Manly P. Hall:  
The Secret Teachings Of All Ages  





Learning to die is hard.
It takes practice.
There is no royal road, no first-class lane.
Learning to die demands daily cultivation of detachment
and daily reminders of mortality.
It requires long communion with the dead.
And since we can’t ever really know how to do something
until we do it,
learning to die also means accepting the impossibility
of achieving that knowledge as long as we live.
We will always be practicing,
failing, trying again and failing again,
until our final day.
Yet the practice itself is the wisdom.
In the words of Zen master Dōgen:
​“To practice the way single-heartedly is, in itself, Enlightenment.”

Roy Scranton:  Learning to Die in the Anthropocene:
Reflections on the End of a Civilization  







In Emptiness
there is no form, sensation, perception, mindful conduct,
or consciousness; no eyes, ears, nose, tongue, body, or mind;
there is no shape, smell, taste, sense of touch,
or objectification; there is no realm of sight,
much less a realm of consciousness;
there is no ignorance nor any ending of ignorance,
much less is there any old age and death,
​ or any ending of old age and death.

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







When death thoughts are conscious, most people--
fitness buffs and stamp collectors alike--
say they will exercise more
because the health and longevity benefits of exercise
flush death thoughts from awareness.
However, once death thoughts are unconscious,
only those who base their self-esteem on fitness
respond to unconscious death thoughts
​ by saying they would work out more regularly.


Sheldon Solomon; Greenberg, Jeff Greenberg; Tom Pyszczynski:
The Worm at the Core: On the Role of Death in Life 







By filling each moment with meaning--
whether you are rich or poor, famous or unknown,
well-traveled or homebound--
you will weave together a life filled with meaning.
Then when Death arrives
​you will be ready to dissolve effortlessly into the light.

Embrace Death and you will find meaning in Life.

Karen Wyatt, MD.  The Tao of Death:
The Secret to a Rich & Meaningful Life  



Life and Death are both realities of this existence.
The Way of Death teaches
that they are actually two sides of the same coin.

The few travelers who understand the Way of Death
are able to live Life fully
while also embracing the reality of physical Death.
They don’t fool themselves or hide from the truth.
Because they are free of expectations and fear
they flow through the ups and downs of life
​ with ease and harmony.

Karen Wyatt, MD.  The Tao of Death:
The Secret to a Rich & Meaningful Life  





Your life and your identity and your consciousness
will still be here ten thousand years from now,
but in a different form.
You will not be gone:
only your form will change.
That this is true is evidenced by the fact
that when you came into this world,
you weighed six, seven, eight, nine, or ten pounds,
but that form has been changing ever since.
 The child-body is not that of the adult-body,
and the body of the aged i
s not the same as the body of the adult;
but the individual is the same,
the life is the same,
the Soul is the same,
the consciousness is the same.
​ Only the outer form changes.

Joel S. Goldsmith.
The Contemplative Life  






When an individual is awakened to the fact
that life is indestructible,
destructible, immortal, and eternal,
he cannot fear death;
and once he no longer fears death,
he cannot know death.
No one can experience anything
that is not a part of his consciousness,
and when death is no longer a part of consciousness,
he cannot die.

Joel S. Goldsmith.
The Contemplative Life  







Neither life nor death can separate me from God.
I am in the presence of God,
and as long as I am in the presence of God,
it matters not whether I am what the world calls alive or dead.
I cannot be separated from the life of God,
the love of God,
the consciousness of God,
from the God-being Itself.

Joel S. Goldsmith.
The Contemplative Life  




According to the definition given by the International Association for Near Death Studies,
an NDE is an experience that occurs with some people
who have a near-death episode,
whereby the person is pronounced clinically dead,
is very close to death, or is in a situation
where death is quite likely or even expected.
 Many NDErs have stated that the term near death is incorrect
because what they experienced was being in death
and not just near it
(and indeed many are clinically pronounced dead by doctors).
Only a relatively small number of people
report negative NDEs that involve fearful situations and feelings.
In all cases, people report the experience to be hyper-real,
​even more real than earthly life.


Ziad Masri:   Reality Unveiled 







To suppose that the objective faculties die with the brain,
is to suppose that the brain thinks and reasons.
This is proved to be false through the experience of death itself,
for if the brain could think,
it would think on and on forever.
No, it is not the brain that thinks.
The thinker thinks through the brain perhaps,
but of itself the physical brain has no power to think or feel.
Detach the brain and it will not formulate ideas nor work out plans.
THE THINKER ALONE CAN THINK!
It is not merely pleasing and satisfactory to suppose
that we pass from this life to the next,
in full and complete retention of our faculties:
it is logical…
We are not going to attain immortality--
WE ARE NOW IMMORTAL!  
Our contention is not that the dead live again,
but that the living never die.


Ernest Holmes:  The Science of Mind 








The plane upon which we are now living with its form of matter
is probably but one of innumerable planes,
each having its own matter with its corresponding form.
 “There are celestial bodies and bodies terrestrial.” ...
“There is a natural body and there is a spiritual body.”
 The “resurrection body,” then,
will not be snatched from some Cosmic Shelf,
as the soul soars aloft.
It is already within
and we may be certain that it will be a fit instrument
for the future unfoldment of the soul.
If this is true,
and if remembrance links events together,
in a continuous stream of consciousness and form,
then the future body will resemble this one,
except that it will be free from disease, old age,
or whatever hinders a more complete flow of the Spirit.
It would seem, then,
that we have a spiritual body now,
and need not die to receive one.
We now remember the past,
and have outlived many physical bodies during this life.
So it looks as if we were already immortal
and need not die to take on immortality.

Ernest Holmes:  The Science of Mind 






We are not content with the thought
that immortality is merely the result of one’s life and work,
which he has left behind;
for instance, that he immortalizes himself in his offspring --
we still ask “ What of the man ? ”
Man, then, if he is to have an immortality worthy of the name,
must continue as he now is beyond the grave.
​DEATH CANNOT ROB HIM OF ANYTHING IF HE BE IMMORTAL !

Ernest Holmes:  The Science of Mind 







Man is immortal;
​therefore he must die endlessly.
For life is a creative idea;
it can only find itself in changing forms. 

Rabindranath Tagore






 If we believe that there is disease and death,
we can experience them.
Passing from sight is part of the mesmeric influence.
Those who are born must die;
those who believe in birth
must believe in death,
for they are those who have not been able
to see that this human picture is really immortal,
eternal, and spiritual,
but that it is seen falsely
​through the belief in two powers.

Joel Goldsmith: The Joel Goldsmith Reader 







According to the Unity of Mind,
thought is everywhere present,
and so long as it persists it will remain present.
What is known in one place,
may be known in all places.
Time, space and obstructions
are unknown to Mind and thought.
It follows, that anyone tuning into our thought,
will enter into our stream of consciousness,
no matter where we are and no matter where he may be.
If we still persist after the body shall have suffered physical death
(and we are convinced that we shall)
this law must still hold good,
for past and present are one and the same in Mind.
Time is only the measure of an experience,
and space, of itself,
is not apart from, but is in, Mind.


Ernest Holmes:  The Science of Mind 








With the first touch of spiritual light,
 all fear of death disappears,
because that light reveals that there is no death
and that the experience of passing from this plane of life
to what is called the next is not really a death:
it is just another experience
like our birth;
it is a passing from one phase of life to another.
In other words,
life never had a beginning;
therefore our coming into this world
​was but a coming forth from another phase of life.


Joel S. Goldsmith
The Contemplative Life  






When you know who You are,
you will instantly recognize
that death has nothing to do with you,
but until that time,
you will hold opinions about death
as you hold opinions about life.
 Make friends with death.
​Dying can be the most exquisite experience of a lifetime .

 Pat Rodegast:  Emmanuel’s Book III 









To help someone die in peace,
remind yourself— and him--
that he is going Home,
that he is leaving illusion
and moving back into truth.
You have all experienced dreams
that you knew were not the usual sleeping dreams.
You have gone somewhere wonderful,
soft, loving, joyful, and lighted.
Believe those dreams.
Encourage your dying friend
to believe in his own dreams.
​They are visits Home.

 Pat Rodegast:  Emmanuel’s Book III 






​





Prior to the rising of self-consciousness,
there were no wants.
Now there are wants;
you all want to know about death.
Why inquire regarding what happens after death?
We remain unclear on what is going on right now.
Let us clarify that first.

Wu Hsin:  Solving Yourself 







All individuals die.
Only those 
Who are no longer individuals
 Live forever.

Wu Hsin:  
In the Shadow of the Formless 



Today,  I woke before daylight
to an invitation from Death.
Like my Aztec ancestors,
I welcome it with the gratitude of a warrior
who has fought well
​ and wishes for a safe homecoming . . .
and a long rest.

Don Miguel Ruiz:
 The Toltec Art of Life and Death: A Story of Discovery 



To those who dragged through life
the heavy load of a diseased or defective organism,
the shedding of their burden of flesh
can only be a subject for thankfulness and rejoicing.
To all it will be a gain.
For if we are to believe
the assurances of those who have passed through the great experience,
we shall find the ethereal body
an infinitely free and more perfect medium of expression
​than the body of flesh.

 A.P. SINNET,   ANNIE BESANT:  
WHAT HAPPENS AFTER DEATH  











Most people, it is affirmed,
find the transition and the awakening on the other side
more natural than they had expected,
and they soon become aware
that they are in a real world among real people,
and are as much alive as ever they were on earth.

"The spirit body is as actual, and real to the spirit," says one communicator,
"as the old earth body appeared to me,
and its environments are as palpable to its perceptions--
it has simply passed from one plane of conscious existence to another."
The invisible has become visible,
​and the formerly visible things invisible.

 A.P. SINNET,   ANNIE BESANT:  
WHAT HAPPENS AFTER DEATH  








Some people can’t wrap their heads around death.
And these people leave a mess after them.
Did they think they were immortal?

The difference between death cleaning and just a big cleanup
is the amount of time they consume.
Death cleaning is not about dusting or mopping up;
it is about a permanent form of organization
​ that makes your everyday life run more smoothly.

 Margareta Magnusson: The Gentle Art of Swedish Death Cleaning:
How to Free Yourself and Your Family from a Lifetime of Clutter 










Doesn’t individuality necessarily have some eventual end? 

Is there a time when all blends into one?
Yes.
But there is never a time
when one blends into nothingness.

Pat Rodegast:   Emmanuel’s Book:
 A Manual for Living Comfortably in the Cosmos 





Life and death
should not be considered as opposites.
It is closer to the truth
to speak of dying as an entrance
rather than an exit.
What the doorway of death offers
is a resurgence of tremendous vitality,
for you are entering from what could be described
as a watered down version of life
into the thing itself,
the vitality of the primary reality.

Pat Rodegast:   Emmanuel’s Book:
A Manual for Living Comfortably in the Cosmos 







It is hard for us to be with a dying person
until we learn how to see what is eternal,
so we can be there together as souls.
It’s simple, but it’s not easy.
A dying person needs you to be fully there,
just being,  listening for what is needed
with love and kindness
but not trying to impose ideas of how to die.
Just being “ a loving rock, ”
appreciating that you’re here,
that you’re two human beings on the edge of the mystery,
and that you can share your truth together.
You are not your roles. 
You are two souls.
This is it.

Ram Dass--Walking Each Other Home:
Conversations on Loving and Dying 









Love— the Creative Energy of the Universe--
gives rise to everything
and then draws it back again
with perfect timing.
This is the Way of Death.
Love breathes life
  into material form
and nurtures, teaches, and protects it,
asking nothing in return,
until life dissolves once again into Love.

Knowing that your life
is just a single breath of Love,
cherish everything
cling to nothing.

The Way of Death
  whispers in your ear:
“There is only Love.”

 Karen Wyatt MD: Tao of Death:
The Secret to a Rich & Meaningful Life 








When you encounter death,
when you see it face - to - face ,
when you don’t avoid,
when you don’t dodge,
when you don’t escape,
when you don’t create a cloud around you --
when you face it, encounter it, 
the fact of death --
suddenly you become aware that death is life.
The deeper you move into death,
the deeper you move in life
because opposites meet and mingle;
​they are one.


Osho
Awareness: The Key to Living in Balance 





 "Personality is suspended upon a thread
from the nature of Being, " declares the secret work.
Man is essentially a permanent and immortal principle;
only his bodies pass through the cycle of birth and death.
 The immortal is the reality;
the mortal is the unreality.
During each period of earth life,
reality thus dwells in unreality,
to be liberated from it temporarily by death,
​and permanently by illumination.

 Manly P. Hall:  
The Secret Teachings Of All Ages  




The initiates of old
warned their disciples
that an image is not a reality
but merely the objectification of a subjective idea.
Images of the gods
were nor designed to be objects of worship
but were to be regarded merely as emblems or reminders
of invisible powers and principles.
Similarly, the body of man
must not be considered as the individual
but only as the house of the individual,
in the same manner that the temple
​ was the House of God.

Manly P. Hall:  
The Secret Teachings Of All Ages 



To the ignorant
the body is supreme
and they are incapable of realizing
the immortality that is within them.
Knowing only the body which is subject to death,
they believe in death
because they worship that substance
which is the cause and reality of death.

He who through the error of attachment
loves his body,
abides wandering in darkness,
sensible and suffering the things of death,
but he who realizes that the body
is but the tomb of his soul,
​ rises to immortality.

 Manly P. Hall:  
The Secret Teachings Of All Ages  





If you die,
you may be dying as far as your body is concerned,
but your mind continues.
   Immediately after death,
the mind starts dreaming.
 The time between one death and another birth
is used in dreaming.
 Once you die
all the pressure of bodily reality and objective reality
disappears.  
​The mind is free to dream.

Osho:  Dancing In The Breeze 





“The thing to do when you’re impatient
is to turn to your left and ask advice from your death.
An immense amount of pettiness is dropped
if your death makes a gesture to you,
or if you catch a glimpse of it,
or if you just have the feeling
​that your companion is there watching you.”

don Juan
 Carlos Castaneda:  Journey To Ixtlan 






That night the lama sat in meditation and ceased breathing.
 His heart stopped and bodily functions failed,
although he did not manifest the full signs of death.  
This is the practice of tuk-dam,
when a yogi retreats to the heart in death meditation.
 He sat like this for three days
without manifesting the signs of death.
Then his head fell to one side
and the death process was complete.
​ Such is the death of an accomplished yogi.

Glenn H. Mullin:  Living in the Face of Death 





Death is not like a person.
It is rather a presence.
But one may also choose to say that it is nothing
and yet it is everything.
One will be right on every count.
​Death is whatever one wishes.

don Juan
Carlos Castaneda:  Journey To Ixtlan 







Death is only release into dreams;
​ it can only be bad if one’s dreams are bad.

 Dorothy Bryant:
 The Kin of Ata Are Waiting for You 




Death is not there, it is a lie--
but it appears very real.
It only appears very real, it is not.
It appears so
because you believe too much
in your separate existence.
It is in believing that you are separate from existence
that you give reality to death.
Drop this idea of being separate from existence,
​and death disappears.

Osho
The Book of Wisdom 








I know now the whole mistake
lies in looking upon death as the end of "activity"
(with a renewal at some indefinite date),
whereas as a matter of fact
it is an incident only,
though a very important one,
in a continuous life.
Your feelings, your memory, your love,
your interests and ambitions remain;
all you have left behind
(and even that one cannot at first realize)
is the physical body,
which proves to be merely the covering of the spiritual
to enable it to function in a material world.
Man truly is a spirit and has a body,
​not vice versa.

Claude’s Book
 L. Kelway-Bamber channeling her deceased son, Claude 







Penetrating the place where heaven and earth have not divided
and yin and yang do not reach,
directness will attain success.

The true self
is the self that is prior to the division of heaven and earth,
before your parents conceived and gave birth.
This self is the self that is in all animate things,
birds and beasts, grasses and trees.
This is what is called buddha-nature.
Therefore this self is self that has no shadow or form,
no birth or death.
It is not the self that is seen by the present physical eye.
Only enlightened people can see it.
Those who have seen it
are called people who have seen nature
​and realized buddhahood.

Zen Master Takuan (1573-1645)
Thomas Cleary:   Soul of the Samurai:
Modern Translations of Three Classic Works of Zen & Bushido 





As soon as we are born, we are dead.
Our birth and our death are just one thing.
It’s like a tree:
when there’s a root there must be branches.
When there are branches there must be a root.
You can’t have one without the other.
It’s a little funny to see how at death
people are so grief-stricken and distracted,
and at birth how happy and delighted.
It’s delusion;
nobody has ever looked at this clearly.
I think if you really want to cry,
it would be better to do so when someone’s born.
Birth is death, death is birth;
the branch is the root, the root is the branch.
If you must cry, cry at the root;
cry at the birth.
Look closely:
If there were no birth, there would be no death.
Can you understand this?
Don’t worry about things too much;
​just think, “This is the way things are.”


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






As people approach death,
their mental receptivity and sensitivity can dramatically increase.
As their hearts and minds
are in some sense less contained by their bodies,
their minds can become almost atmospheric.
Entering a dying person’s room
can sometimes feel like walking straight into that person’s mind.
What we bring into the room --
our thoughts and feelings --
​can have a tremendous impact, positively or negatively.


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






It is real and deep wisdom
to learn to look at things in terms of manifestation.
If someone who is very close to you has passed away
and you define him or her as non-existing,
you are mistaken.
From nothing cannot be born something.
From no one cannot be born someone.
From something you cannot become nothing.
From someone you cannot become no one.
That is the truth.
If the person who is close to you
does not manifest in the form that you are used to seeing or perceiving,
that does not mean that he is non-existing.
It does not mean that he is no longer there.
If you look deeply,
you can touch his or her presence
​in other forms of manifestation.

 Thich Nhat Hanh:  No Death, No Fear 







The angel of death
can teach us to live every day as if it is the last day of our lives,
as if there may be no tomorrow.
We can begin each day by saying,
“ I am awake, I see the sun.
I am going to give my gratitude to the sun and to everything and everyone,
because I am still alive.
One more day to be myself.”
That is the way I see life,
that is what the angel of death taught me --
to be completely open,
to know that there is nothing to be afraid of.

 Don Miguel Ruiz:   The Four Agreements:
A Practical Guide to Personal Freedom 





Death is not the biggest fear we have;
our biggest fear is taking the risk to be alive --
the risk to be alive and express what we really are.
​Just being ourselves is the biggest fear of humans.

Don Miguel Ruiz:   The Four Agreements:
A Practical Guide to Personal Freedom 






Dying is traumatizing
when it is happening in a place and time
that will not make room for dying in its way of living.
It is not dying that is traumatic;
​it is dying in a death-phobic culture that is traumatic.

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



The Post - Mortem Realms are expansive and diverse,
offering a vast spectrum of possible environments and experiences
through which an individual may integrate the lessons of his or her physical life
and begin to acclimatize once again to life in the non - physical realms.
Where a person goes upon death 
and what he or she experiences depends on a variety of factors,
the most important of which is that person’s overall state of consciousness and energy.
The Post - Mortem Realms are themselves organized along an energy gradient
that stretches from energy states close to those of the physical world
to those that are equivalent to those found in the higher - order worlds.
There is no reward and punishment system to this organization.
A person goes to the level and environment
most suited to his or her wellbeing,
one that is resonant with his or her basic energy state
and conducive to further growth, integration and wholeness.
Because of principles of affinity,
the new arrival in the non - physical realms
will most likely be with people of similar mental and emotional states.

David Spangler:   Subtle Worlds: An Explorer’s Field Notes  









This is my attitude about death.
Laugh!
Let laughter be your attitude about death.
It is a cosmic lie created by man himself,
created by the ego,  by self-consciousness.
That’s why in nature no other animal, bird, tree is afraid of death.
Only man, and he makes so much fuss out of it…
his whole life trembling.
Death is coming closer,
and because of death he cannot allow himself to live totally.
How can you live if you are so afraid?
Death creates fear.
And who is the culprit?
God has not created death,
it is man’s own invention.
Create the ego,
​ and you have created the other side of it—death.

Osho. The Book of Wisdom 






If I am one with existence, how can I die?
Existence was there before me
and will be there after me.
I am just a ripple in the ocean, 
and the ripple comes and goes,
the ocean remains, abides.
Yes, you will not be there--
as you are you will not be there.
This form will disappear,
but the one who is abiding in this form will go on abiding,
​ either in other forms or ultimately in formlessness.

Osho. The Book of Wisdom 





Death is not there, it is a lie--
but it appears very real.
It only appears very real, it is not.
It appears so because you believe too much in your separate existence.
It is in believing that you are separate from existence
that you give reality to death.
Drop this idea of being separate from existence,
​ and death disappears.

Osho. The Book of Wisdom 






I saw the death phobia that permeates our time
brought to bear upon dying people in the name of caring for them.
And I saw that as a culture
we have a withered psychology of coping and accepting
where we might once have had a mythology and a poetry
of purposed, meaningful dying.
This poverty was the constant companion and chimera
of almost every dying person I worked with.
I discovered that few wanted to die well,
fewer still, wisely.
Most didn’t want to die at all,
​ and they spent their dying time refusing to do so.

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










Medicine has come,
in its working research, and often clinical agenda,
to look upon death
​ as a correctable biological deficiency.
This stance has thus introduced
into the practice of medicine and public attitudes
a profound and often destructive self-contradiction.
We have been left fundamentally uncertain
whether death is to be accepted as part of life
or rejected as a repairable accident.

Daniel Callahan. The Troubled Dream of Life:
In Search of a Peaceful Death  




Many people experience after death
a natural desire to reconnect with their loved ones and friends,
to let them know they’re really still alive and OK.
Even after some time has passed,
they may still wish to help those they have left on earth,
if only to mitigate the grief they may feel.
And if the newly dead person has wronged people on earth,
he or she may seek ways of making amends.

It takes time for a person who is now disincarnate
and learning to adjust to the vaster reality of the subtle worlds
to begin to think beyond their individuality
and into attunement with the larger wholes of which he or she is a part,
thereby experiencing himself or herself
as part of planetary life and beingness --
unless, of course, this person has already been accustomed
​to thinking and attuning in this way while in a physical body. 

David Spangler:   Subtle Worlds:
An Explorer’s Field Notes  







Set the intention to create a different relationship with the concept of death,
and understand that the way you have been taught to view it is not necessarily the truth.
As you come to understand that all things in this physical existence are transient,
that they will ebb and flow with the tides,
and that nothing in the physical can be fully grasped and anchored in place,
you will more easily make peace with the nature of all things, 
people, and experiences in your life as they flow through you.
Every experience, every person, and every challenge
presents the opportunity for divine expression and connection,
especially in the death of a loved one,
who passes into the true divine essence of their soul
as they transition back to their original state
​ and shed the heaviness of the physical being .

Mike Dooley:  Channeled Messages from Deep Space:
Wisdom for a Changing World 





Ultimately, your life will be measured by what you gave,
not what you received.
Don’t hold out on the rest of us--
we need you to contribute.
Spend your life building a body of work you will be proud of.
Engage today with urgency and diligence.
Plant seeds every day that will yield a harvest later.
Tomorrow is only an unfulfilled wish,
so live and work as if today is all you have.
If you do, you will be able to lay your head down each night
satisfied with your work, and in the end,
you will die empty of regret,
but full of satisfaction for a life well lived.”

Todd Henry:  Die Empty




Challenging situations serve a higher purpose
that extends beyond any pain or suffering
that ensues in the earthly experience;
it is what the individual does to respond to those circumstances
that creates the path to unfold before them.
And if that path includes the opportunity or probability
of what may be judged as an untimely, violent, or otherwise disturbing demise,
please be assured that the aspect of the soul
that chose that particular incarnation
has agreed to that demise,
and it has not experienced the loss of its life
as something that was beyond its control,
​ no matter how that death appears to the outside world.

 Mike Dooley:  Channeled Messages from Deep Space:
Wisdom for a Changing World  








Everything that happens to us
is intended to help us forward in our development,
and is capable of doing so, if we will only take it in the right way
and try to learn the lesson which it is meant to teach.
Since this is true - - and those who have probed most deeply
into the mysteries of life and death know that it is - -
to grumble or to repine at suffering
is manifestly not only to waste much force uselessly,
but also to take an entirely inaccurate and foolish view of life,
​ and to lose what is designed as an opportunity.

 C. W. Leadbetter:  
The Hidden Side of Things 






We fall into the world caught between two necessities,
compelled to live, born to die, and reconciling them
has forever been one of our most challenging puzzles.
The pieces just don’t fit together.

But while dying may be the easiest thing in the world to do, 
it’s the hardest thing in the world to do well --
we are predisposed to avoid, ignore, flee, and fight it till the very last hour.
​We are impelled in our deepest being to struggle against it .

 Roy Scranton:  Learning to Die in the Anthropocene:
Reflections on the End of a Civilization 



Learning to die as an individual
means letting go of our predispositions and fear.
Learning to die as a civilization
means letting go of this particular way of life and its ideas of identity,
freedom, success, and progress.
These two ways of learning to die
come together in the role of the humanist thinker:
one who is willing to stop and ask troublesome questions,
the one who is willing to interrupt,
the one who resonates on other channels
and with slower, deeper rhythms .

Roy Scranton:  Learning to Die in the Anthropocene:
Reflections on the End of a Civilization  





A proverb says that man’s extremity is God’s opportunity.
We cannot find release
until we have known the real extremity of our situation,
and see that all striving for spiritual ideals is completely futile --
since the very seeking thrusts them away.
Yet why should it surprise us?
Hasn’t it been said again and again that we must die to come to life,
that heaven is always on the other side of the Valley of the Shadow of Death --
the valley of which physical death is merely a symbol --
where the helpless corpse, 
bound hand and foot in its winding sheet,
is just a figure of the death in which we live so long
as we mistake it for life? 
Where do we go from here?
We do not.
We come to an end.

Alan W. Watts:
Become What You Are








The end-of-life gate before us is rusted from disuse.
This rusted gate may take some effort to open.
It may squeak and squeal, and so may we.
We might not like everything we encounter
as we step through into a space we’ve purposefully avoided
for most, if not all, of our lives.
We may need to occasionally take a mental and emotional breath,
find our equilibrium,
as we traverse the place.
It’s a place known by an anti-name:
death denial.
And traverse it we must;
​one step doesn’t get us very far.

Bart Windrum:  The Promised Landing:
A Gateway to Peaceful Dying 






A culture that denies death
is a barrier to achieving a good death.
Overcoming our fears and wild misconceptions about death
will be no small task,
but we shouldn’t forget how quickly other cultural prejudices
—racism, sexism, homophobia--
have begun to topple in the recent past.
​ It is high time death had its own moment of truth.

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






Death is not the tragedy that it appears to be,
and the soul being does not carry with it any memory of suffering.
All pain is temporary,
and death, in whatever way it occurs,
is a peaceful and beautiful experience for the soul
as it transitions to its natural state.
When death is sudden and violent,
the soul is assisted in that transition
so that it is nurtured
​ and carried into the peaceful state of nonphysical being.

 Mike Dooley:  Channeled Messages from Deep Space:
Wisdom for a Changing World  



I have always found
that the people who have quite genuinely died to themselves
make no claims of any kind to their own part in the process.
They think of themselves as lazy and lucky.
If they did anything at all,
it was so simple that anyone else could do the same--
for all that they have done is to recognize a universal fact of life,
something as true of the weak and foolish as of the wise and strong.
They would even say that in this respect
there is some advantage in being weak and foolish,
for the possession of a strong will and a clever head
​ makes some things very difficult to see.

 Alan W. Watts:
 Become What You Are 










Death to oneself
is the improbable source
of a way of life so new and so alive
that it feels like having been born again.
In this metaphorical sense,
the ego dies on finding out its own incapacity 
to make any difference to itself that is really important.

 Alan W. Watts:
 Become What You Are 








Many people who have had a near-death experience
report that they underwent a “life review” in which they saw, as if watching a movie,
all of their covert and overt actions,
their expressed and suppressed sentiments,
their public and private thoughts,
and their conscious and unconscious attitudes.
They saw who they were and how their thoughts, words, and deeds
affected everyone and everything in their lives.
Afterward, they typically describe having a greater understanding
about themselves and a desire to do a better job of living from then on.
And as a result, they perceive new possibilities
and better ways “to be” in any opportunity.
Having seen themselves from a truly objective point of view,
they clearly know what they want to change.
Recognition is like having a life review every day.
Since you have all of the equipment in your brain to notice who you are being,
why not do this before you die,
​and, in effect, be reborn in the same life?

 Joe Dispenza:   Breaking the Habit of Being Yourself:
How to Lose Your Mind and Create a New One









In a world subject to change,
the traditional attitude toward death
is like a bulwark of inertia and continuity.
It has by now been so obliterated from our culture
that it is hard for us to imagine or understand it.
The ancient attitude in which death is close and familiar
yet diminished and desensitized
is too different from our own view,
in which it is so terrifying that we no longer dare say its name.
Thus, when we call this familiar death the tame death,
we do not mean that it was once wild and that it was later domesticated.
On the contrary, we mean
that it has become wild today when it used to be tame.
The tame death is the oldest death there is.

 Philipp Aries:   The Hour of Our Death 






It will never feel comfortable
to sit so close to others ’ grief.
Working in the face of death will always feel profound,
numinous and sometimes overwhelming –
that’s why we work in teams.
But you will be able to recognise that you are offering something vital,
transformative and even spiritual:
the opportunity for individuals to meet or to watch death
with an awareness that is lost if we fail to be truthful.
The dreadful reality,
told with honesty and compassion,
allows patients and their families to make choices based on truth,
instead of encouraging the misleading,
hopeless quest for a medical miracle that promotes futile treatment,
protracts dying and disallows goodbyes.

Focus not on saving life at any cost,
but on enabling goodbye.
Sometimes, in the end,
​it’s all we have to offer .

Kathryn Mannix:   With the End in Mind:
Dying, Death, and Wisdom in an Age of Denial 










Healthcare advances can only remediate us up to a point;
beyond the point of saving us to live ‘ well enough ’
there is a point of futility.
Here, technology is deployed in a new deathbed ritual
that is a triumph of denial over experience.
The death rate remains 100 per cent,
and the pattern of the final days, and the way we actually die,
are unchanged.
What is different is that we have lost
the familiarity we once had with that process,
and we have lost the vocabulary and etiquette
that served us so well in past times,
​when death was acknowledged to be inevitable.

Kathryn Mannix:   With the End in Mind:
Dying, Death, and Wisdom in an Age of Denial 





We are so much attached to our own feeling,
to our individual existence.
For us, just now,
we have some fear of death,
but after we resume our true original nature,
there is Nirvana.
That is why we say,
“ To attain Nirvana is to pass away. ”
“ To pass away ” is not a very adequate expression.
Perhaps “ to pass on, ” or “ to go on, ” or “ to join ” would be better.
Will you try to find some better expression for death?
When you find it,
​ you will have quite a new interpretation of your life.

Shunryu Suzuki:
 Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind






When the water returns to its original oneness with the river,
 it no longer has any individual feeling to it;
it resumes its own nature,
and finds composure.
How very glad the water must be
to come back to the original river!
If this is so,
​what feeling will we have when we die?

Shunryu Suzuki:
 Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind





 When you do not realize that you are one with the river,
or one with the universe,
you have fear.
Whether it is separated into drops or not,
water is water.
Our life and death are the same thing.
When we realize this fact
we have no fear of death anymore,
​and we have no actual difficulty in our life.

Shunryu Suzuki:
 Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind



I’ve had a lot of people pass away in my life.
I guess it’s all a matter of how you deal with your mortality--
and recognizing that you are mortal.
I’m trying to see what a gift life is
and how quickly it can be extinguished,
without any warning.

Timothy B. Schmit


There are some species of creatures on your planet
that resonate with higher divine energy
and therefore have the capacity of self-awareness
on a different level of frequency than others.
These creatures have the energetic power of discernment
and are more aware of their own free will and connection.

They do not suffer the fear of death
quite so much as humans,
as they have a higher awareness of death
as part of the natural life cycle,
and so even though they have a will to live,
they also have a natural understanding of the need to die,
and sometimes will choose death
when it appears to be beneficial to others of their species.
This involves a complex thought process
​that is not available to most other species of being.

 Mike Dooley:  Channeled Messages from Deep Space:
Wisdom for a Changing World 














Is there, then, any doubt that for hapless mortals,
that is, for men who are engrossed,
the fairest day is ever the first to flee?
Old age surprises them while their minds are still childish,
and they come to it unprepared and unarmed,
for they have made no provision for it;
they have stumbled upon it suddenly and unexpectedly,
they did not notice that it was drawing nearer day by day.
Even as conversation or reading
or deep meditation on some subject beguiles the traveller,
and he finds that he has reached the end of his journey
before he was aware that he was approaching it,
just so with this unceasing and most swift journey of life,
which we make at the same pace
whether waking or sleeping;
those who are engrossed become aware of it
only at the end .

 Lucius Seneca:  On the Shortness of Life 








The greatest hindrance to living is expectancy,
which depends upon the morrow and wastes today.
You dispose of that which lies in the hands of Fortune,
you let go that which lies in your own.
Whither do you look?
At what goal do you aim?
All things that are still to come lie in uncertainty;
live straightway!
See how the greatest of bards sings the saving strain:
The fairest day in hapless mortals' life
​Is ever first to flee. --
"Why do you delay?"says he,
"Why are you idle?
Unless you seize the day, it flees."
Even though you seize it, it still will flee;
therefore you must vie with time's swiftness in the speed of using it,
and, as from a torrent that rushes by and will not always flow,
you must drink quickly.

 Lucius Seneca:  On the Shortness of Life 













The majority of mortals, Paulinus,
complain bitterly of the spitefulness of Nature,
because we are born for a brief span of life,
because even this space that has been granted to us
rushes by so speedily and so swiftly
that all save a very few find life at an end
​just when they are getting ready to live.

Lucius Seneca:  On the Shortness of Life 





The wisest beings
with whom I have made contact in this lifetime
all assure me that a soul leaves the physical plane
neither a moment too early nor a moment too late.
For most of us on earth
who so strongly identify with our own bodies and personalities,
this is hard to accept.
If we have not listened deeply enough
inside ourselves to know differently,
we consider length of life an asset,
which makes it difficult to be with the dying
without trying to keep them alive.

Ram Dass: Walking Each Other Home:
Conversations on Loving and Dying 





On the day I die,
when I am being carried toward the grave,
don't weep.
Death has nothing to do with going away.
The sun sets and the moon sets,
but they are not gone.
Death is a coming together.
The tomb looks like a prison,
but it's really release into union.
Your mouth closes here
and immediately opens with a shout of joy there.

Rumi



“It is important to look at death
because it is a part of life.
It is a sad thing, melancholy
but romantic at the same time.
It is the end of a cycle--
everything has to end.
The cycle of life is positive
​because it gives room for new things.”

Lee Alexander McQueen








Dying is the most important thing you do in your life.
It’s the great frontier for every one of us.
And loving is the art of living as a preparation for dying.
Allowing ourselves to dissolve into the ocean of love
is not just about leaving this body;
it is also the route to Oneness and unity
with our own inner being,  the soul, while we are still here.
If you know how to live and to love,
​you know how to die.

Ram Dass: Walking Each Other Home:
Conversations on Loving and Dying 










We must bravely look
at the array of choices ahead of us.
Identify and name them.
Ponder their differences.
Understand how we slip into situations
we say we want to avoid.
And until we do,
we continue to practice death denial
under the cover of death literacy.
Although the new phrase “ death positive”
 is useful for newbies,
its wider adoption might actually serve
​to provide an extension of that cover…"


Bart Windrum
www.axiomaction.com









The dying choose their moment of death
more often than we realise.
It’s not unusual for the dying to wait for a distant relative or a close friend.
Sometimes the reason to stay is a wedding anniversary or a birthday,
the arrival of a first grandchild,
or an important milestone that must be reached.
However impossible it might seem medically,
the dying are able to summon enough vital energy.

It’s good to remember that the dying
sometimes need the freedom to die by themselves in peace and tranquillity.
It can be that the emotional bond between people is so strong
and letting go is so difficult,
that they choose to die alone.

 Ineke Koedam: In the Light of Death:
Experiences on the threshold between life and death  







Instead of discussing openly how to think about death
and what we might appropriately choose in our dying
-a painful and difficult subject-
we too frequently and too easily transform the issue
into the more distanced, comfortable language of rights and choices:
not how or what we ought to choose,
​but that we have a right to choose.

Daniel Callahan:
The Troubled Dream of Life: In Search of a Peaceful Death  






Death has been dissected,
cut to bits by a series of little steps,
which finally make it impossible to know
which step was the real death,
the one in which consciousness was lost,
or the one in which breathing stopped.
All these little silent deaths
have replaced the great dramatic act of death,
and no one any longer has the strength or patience
to wait over a period of weeks
​for a moment which has lost a part of its meaning.

Philippe Aries:  
Western Attitudes Toward Death 





How and when should I want to die?
How much pain and suffering should I be willing to bear, and for what reason?
What do I owe others in my dying,
especially those who would still have me with them if they could?
When I am in doubt about my living or dying,
where should I locate the benefit of doubt, toward life or death?
What kind of person should I be to ask questions of that kind?
A person who insists on control of death as well as of life?
​What kind of person would that make me?

Daniel Callahan:  The Troubled Dream of Life:
In Search of a Peaceful Death 





Is death to be understood as within, or outside of, human life?
It is said, often enough, that death is a "part of life."
But what does that phrase, almost a cliche, mean?
It has been explored much less than it should be.
That exploration inexorably leads to perhaps the most troubling problem of all--
how we are to find meaning in death,
​ if there is any meaning to be found.


Daniel Callahan. The Troubled Dream of Life:
In Search of a Peaceful Death 






You are alive
only in the proportion that you are aware.
Awareness is the difference
between death and life.

Buddhas have a different definition.
Their definition consists of awareness.
They don't say you are alive because you can breathe,
they say you are alive if you are awake.

Wakefulness is the way to life, says Buddha.
Become more wakeful
​ and you will become more alive.

OSHO  





My life has always been integrated with death,
but I have kept my personal grief at a distance.
I have said many times that through my work
I have come to realize that death doesn’t exist.
I am of course speaking spiritually and symbolically.
When a loved one dies,
the reality of death on the physical level
 is all too real.

 Elisabeth Kübler-Ross: On Grief and Grieving:
Finding the Meaning of Grief Through the Five Stages of Loss  






Death is but a transition from this life to another existence
where there is no more pain or anguish.
That knowledge helps me, in my own losses and grief,
to know that those I care for are okay.
That I will see them again.
And those I love now,
I will look after when I am gone.
I will laugh with them and smile at them.
And if they didn’t believe in life after death,
I will make funny faces at them and say,
‘ Ha ha, we are here and okay. ’
I know that the only thing that really lasts forever is love,
and I will miss so much about the life I had
​and the people I have lost. 

 Elisabeth Kübler-Ross: On Grief and Grieving:
Finding the Meaning of Grief Through the Five Stages of Loss  








Death remains an opportunity.
I understand the agony,
but an entity chooses to die
when it realizes that the maximum moment for death is appropriate.
There is a time when all things move into equilibrium
and death is appropriate.
The momentum is maximum for doing what needs to be done.
The mental, the physical, and the emotional
are in a state of readiness, and the necessity is there.
And the willing choice is made on a deep level.
 When the whole entity says it’s time to go,
it looks around and picks a way.
When it is not necessary to stay,
staying is inappropriate.
A consciousness dies because it is time .

Bartholomew:
 From the Heart of a Gentle Brother 







Why, if you are masters of your own destiny,
would you pick a life that has death in it?
This is a very bold question.
Part of the answer is that it was not meant for you
to run about this earth plane century after century
simply enjoying the earth experience.
What you have come here to understand
is that you are beyond all those small, limited parameters
of being just a body.
You have come to understand
that you are vastly more wondrous, more powerful, alive,
and compassionate than the human situation shows you to be.
So death comes and it reminds you.
Pain, suffering, illness, and loss all come to remind you
​that there is some greater purpose here.

Bartholomew:
 From the Heart of a Gentle Brother 






We aspire to die in peace,
but we don’t know how to overcome today’s many impediments
because we haven’t identified or considered them.
Our aspiration for peaceful deaths results in promises--
be they implied, expressed, or merely hoped for.
The promise we want fulfilled is to land gently when our music stops.
To literally come to Earth in peace.
Most of us will require learned skills
in order to orient ourselves toward the landing we want and,
as importantly, away from the landings we don’t want.

What must we plan for so steadfastly
in order to increase our likelihood of dying in peace?
It’s not that we’re all at risk of being attacked by bears, 
dragged off by alligators , chomped on by sharks;
comparatively few of us die in vehicle wrecks;
fewer in industrial accidents or natural disasters;
and although the numbers by themselves are staggering,
only a fraction of us in the United States die by gunfire.
What is all this planning and resolving meant to protect us from?
Ourselves.
The system we’ve created.
Our strange culture of dying and death
that’s evolved over many generations --

Bart Windrum:  The Promised Landing:
A Gateway to Peaceful Dying  











In the face of death,
secular people often scramble to expand their experiences
or memorialize themselves in some lasting form.
They may work their way through a “bucket list”
of adventures and destinations
or struggle to complete a cherished project.
Or if they are at all rich or famous,
they may dedicate their final years and months
to the creation of a “legacy,” such as a charitable foundation,
in the same spirit as an emperor might plan his mausoleum.

The self becomes an obstacle
to what we might call, in the fullest sense, “successful aging.”
I have seen accomplished people consumed in their final years
with jockeying for one last promotion or other mark of recognition,
or crankily defending their reputation against critics and potential critics.
This is all that we in the modern world have learned how to do.
And when we acquire painful neuroses
from our efforts to promote and protect ourselves,
we often turn to forms of therapy
​ that require us to burrow even more deeply into ourselves.

Barbara Ehrenreich:  Natural Causes:
An Epidemic of Wellness, the Certainty of Dying,
and Killing Ourselves to Live Longer 










Paradise is our primordial pure consciousness,
which is free of all limitations
but embodies the infinity of the divine.
I remember seeing a bumper sticker that said,
"I believe in life before death."
To me this means that we don't have to imagine a future paradise.
Paradise can happen right here, right now,
while we're in this human incarnation.
​The choice is ours.

Anam Thubten: No Self No Problem 






From morning to night,
from birth until death,
whatever happiness and suffering we experience
and whatever good or bad objects appear to us,
they all come from our consciousness. 
 Everything that appears to us from birth until death
comes from our own consciousness.
All the different experiences we have of people,
places and sense objects come from our consciousness.
It is not only that everything that appears to us today
and from birth until death comes from our consciousness
but also that the whole appearance of samsara
comes from consciousness,
​which is our own mind.

Lama Zopa Rinpoche:
 How Things Exist: Teachings on Emptiness 



We should let dead people look like dead people. 
After sitting with a dead person for a day or so,
you can see the changes.
You are genuinely convinced that that soul, that personality,
is not there anymore.
It makes it a lot easier to tuck that person into the earth and say goodbye.
I think it’s harder to bury somebody
who is embalmed to look like they're alive.

Ellen Macdonald
www.eloisewoods.com
Quote from Art of Dying Magazine, Volume III
www.artofdying.net








The body’s transience inspires the way I work.
  Biodegradability is a primary facet of my designs.
Wrapping the body in natural fiber
is harmonious with death and decomposition.
When you consider life as a composition of notes,
everyone’s essence is a song. 
Decomposition is our notes’ return to the bio-system
to be reworked into new compositions. 
I use fabrication that won't hinder that process
and is palatable to the soil.
I think of the body as a gift that you give back to the earth. 
You present the gift of your body in a beautiful wrapping
​that life delicately opens and receives.  

Pia Interlandi
www.piainterlandi.com
Quote from Art of Dying Magazine, Volume III
www.artofdying.net








My interest in death isn't a morbid pursuit.
It's a way of clarifying my life. 
It's a way of not being distracted.
You can go kicking and screaming if you want,
but if you've done your homework, 
and you've practiced giving death attention,
you can relax into dying
by using death as your advisor.
​That’s my goal.

Laura Pritchett 
Author of Making Friends With Death
Quote from Art of Dying Magazine, Volume III
www.artofdying.net






We're living in a death denying culture
where most of us have never expressed pain, grief, sadness, anger, or fear
with people who are open and willing to understand
that what we're going through is natural and needed.
We have no idea what we have lost by living in a culture
where grief is rarely fully expressed. 
Grief is a primary means of re-setting, re-wiring and calming
​ our nervous system to inner peace.

Tarron Estes
Quote from Art of Dying Magazine, Volume III
www.artofdying.net








If a diagnosis of a mortal illness changes the way you live,
​then you haven’t been living the way you should. 

Garth Callaghan
Quote from Art of Dying Magazine, Volume III
www.artofdying.net







One of the most important things that I impart to my students
is that death is very ordinary.
When we can see death as ordinary,
as a natural occurrence,
then we see the extraordinary.
We can’t see the extraordinary
​ until we acknowledge the ordinary.  

Chodo Robert Campbell
Quote from Art of Dying Magazine, Volume III
www.artofdyingmagazine.com






Dying is the event for the remaining family and friends. 
 For the dying person, their evolutionary path is the event --
crossing the bridge into another dimension.
 I’ve found that as the physical body declines,
the spiritual activity increases.
  Consciousness is still in the body,
but they're starting to have out-of-body experiences.
They talk with deceased loved ones.
  I let them know they’re in a safe space.
They’ll  smile and say, "I  just saw was my husband."
I'll ask, "How did that make you feel? 
Are you looking forward to seeing him again?"
I don’t  challenge their experience.

Susan Buhlman
Art of Dying Magazine, Volume III
www.artofdyingmagazine.com







Death is the end of our job,
a journey from this to the next plane of existence.
How fortunate Alex and I have been.
Our love is eternal.
Holding on is to suffer.
When and what will happen next is God’s secret.
 Death is the precipice
over which we cannot see,
​until we die. 

Allyson Grey
Art of Dying Magazine, Volume III
www.artofdyingmagazine.com






The great earth burdens me with a body,
forces upon me the toil of life,
eases me in old age,
and calms me in death.
If life is good,
​death is good also.

Zhuangzi 



It is well for you  to bear in mind the Universality of Life.
All of the Universe is alive,
vibrating and pulsating with life and energy and motion.
There is nothing dead in the Universe.
Life is everywhere,
and always accompanied by intelligence.
There is no such thing as a dead, unintelligent Universe.
Instead of being atoms of Life floating in a sea of death,
we are atoms of Life surrounded by an ocean of Life,
​ pulsating, moving, thinking, living. 

 William Walker Atkinson:
 A Series of Lessons in Raja Yoga  







C.G. Jung (1875–1961)
wrote in his autobiographical Memories, Dreams, Reflections
descriptions of near-death experiences he had in 1944
while in a hospital as the result of a heart attack.
During his near death he experienced profound freedom and ecstasy.
For several weeks after his initial experience,
while still in hospital convalescence,
he had blissfully transcendent visions during the night
and difficulty reintegrating with his physical body during the day:
" It is impossible to convey the beauty and intensity of emotion during those visions.
They were the most tremendous things I have ever experienced.
And what a contrast the day was:
I was tormented and on edge; everything irritated me;
everything was too material, too crude and clumsy,
terribly limited both spatially and spiritually.
It was all an imprisonment,
for reasons impossible to divine,
and yet it had a kind of hypnotic power, a cogency,
as if it were reality itself,
for all that I had clearly perceived its emptiness.
Although my belief in the world returned to me,
I have never since entirely freed myself of the impression that . . .
this life is a segment of existence
​which is enacted in a three-dimensional box-like universe especially set up for it.

Joseph Selbie. The Physics of God  









Death, as the saints, sages, and near - death experiencers tell us,
is only a shift from sensory awareness of our physical body
to a more complete and more subtle awareness of our ever - present energy body.
Our energy body is constantly with us.
It animates, controls, and continuously creates our physical body.
Moreover, as the saints and sages tell us,
our energy body contains what is most important,
most characteristic, most essential;
the things that give meaning to who and what we are:
our thoughts, our feelings, our dreams, our knowledge,
our memories, our enduring character traits.
When we die,
these essential aspects of who we are
continue to exist where they have always existed--
in our nonlocal energy body.

Joseph Selbie: The Physics of God 










Death literacy requires us to face the end-of-life problems
we have made for ourselves—now, well before our dying time,
while we’re otherwise busy living our lives.
Increasing our likelihood of dying in peace
requires us to understand the personal and systemic obstacles
between us and our end-of-life promises.
It requires us to recognize
that by doing nothing now (death denial),
we reinforce the likelihood of our last weeks and days on planet Earth
​being overly stressful and peace-less.

Bart Windrum The Promised Landing:
A Gateway to Peaceful Dying 








In our death-denying and medicalized culture,
only the fortunate few, graced with great luck or good fortune,
attain a peaceful demise without arduous effort.
For most of us,
finding our promised landing will require a new response
to how we personally approach and manage dying--
through attention, openness, study, and preparation.
​This is what is meant by death literacy.

Bart Windrum The Promised Landing:
A Gateway to Peaceful Dying 



Death is the greatest joke there is.
Death has never happened,
cannot happen in the very nature of things,
because life is eternal.
Life cannot end;
it is not a thing, it is a process.
It is not something that begins and ends;
it has no beginning and no end.
You have always been here in different forms,
and you will be here in different forms,
or, ultimately, formless.

Osho. The Book of Wisdom:
The Heart of Tibetan Buddhism





The older I’ve gotten, the harder it becomes
 not to think about my mortality. 
St. Benedict said to “Daily keep your death before your eyes.”
No matter how rich or important and famous you are,
there is death coming.
Two things happen when we meditate in a healthy way that our lives are finite.
One, we become more appreciative of life and its gifts.
Two, we can prepare ourselves for the Big Death
by embracing all the little deaths that come our way:
the death of a dream, of a relationship.
Instead of trying to avoid thinking about those things,
it’s important to embrace the motto,
“If you can’t get out of it, get into it.”
There’s no way out except in and through.
As you do that, as you embrace the little deaths,
your heart becomes less brittle, more supple.
These deaths are more likely to break your heart open
than to break it apart.
These little deaths allow us to exercise our hearts
in the same way a runner exercises a muscle
​so that it won’t snap while running.

Parker J. Palmer:  On The Brink of Everything:
 Grace, Gravity and Getting Old









I can’t imagine a sadder way to die
than realizing I never showed up in this world as myself.
That would be a particular kind of psychological pain
that I would find almost unbearable.
If you can say you showed up, more often than not,
with your heart in your hand,
you can die with a certain sense of satisfaction.
​You have become what you were meant to be.

Parker J. Palmer:  On The Brink of Everything:
 Grace, Gravity and Getting Old








Death is not there, it is a lie--
but it appears very real.
It only appears very real, it is not.
It appears so because you believe too much in your separate existence.
It is in believing that you are separate from existence
that you give reality to death.
Drop this idea of being separate from existence,
​ and death disappears.

Osho. The Book of Wisdom:
The Heart of Tibetan Buddhism






In the future, human beings, the older they get,
will need to take in spiritual impulses
if they want to be able to grow younger and younger
and really develop their inner life.
If they do so, they may have grey hair and wrinkles and all kinds of infirmities,
but they will get younger and younger,
for their souls are taking in impulses
which they will take with them through the gate of death.
People who relate only to the body cannot grow younger,
for their souls will share in everything the body experiences.
Of course, it will not be possible to change the habit of going grey,
but it is possible for a grey head to gain a young soul
​ from the wellsprings of spiritual life.

Rudolph Steiner


John Hayes, a psychotherapist in his fifties
who was one of the first volunteers at Hopkins,
"felt like mysteries were being unveiled
and yet it all felt familiar
and more like I was being reminded of things I had already known.
I had a sense of initiation
into dimensions of existence most people never know exist, 
including the distinct sense that death is illusory,
in the sense that it is a door we walk through
into another plane of existence,
that we’re sprung from an eternity
​ to which we will return.

Michael Pollan:   How to Change Your Mind:
What the New Science of Psychedelics Teaches Us
About Consciousness, Dying, Addiction, Depression, and Transcendence  








Grief recurs and spins,
a Möbius strip of memory going on and on in a loop.
You aren’t in denial about the death.
You just keep remembering that it happened.

Sallie Tisdale:   Advice for Future Corpses (and Those Who Love Them):
A Practical Perspective on Death and Dying 






Whether we cling to it or flee it,
what happens to the emptied body feels momentous.
As long as we will continue to live,
we will remember what happened to the body of the one who died.  
The beloved lies before you, completely revealed.
All of aging, every success and every injury,
the ragged ending of illness or trauma,
all of the lived life, is revealed.
 The corpse is a mirror; we are its reflection.
When we see another exactly as he is,
exactly as she is,
we see how much alike we are.
​Love is really the only possible response.

Sallie Tisdale:   Advice for Future Corpses (and Those Who Love Them):
A Practical Perspective on Death and Dying 








Man is born of eternal day,
not because he wills or wishes it,
not because he labors or strives toward it,
not because he earns it as a reward,
but simply because the Spirit has breathed life into him.
And the Spirit which has breathed this life into him
has breathed Its own Life
​and cannot unbreathe It or take It away.
If we would only let go of our theological nonsense
and let our soul commune with the Universe,
it would tell us all these things
​because we already know them inwardly.

Ernest Holmes: You Will Live Forever  








A consideration of history will come about in the future
which will take account of the forces
of those who have passed through the portal of death
and are living in their soul nature
in the world between death and a new birth.
An entirely new color range will be imparted to the culture of humanity
through a consciousness of the total humanity,
​ including the so-called dead humanity.

Rudolph Steiner: Earthly Death and Cosmic Life  






90% of a “Positive Passing” is planning ahead.
No matter what the actual disease process,
if someone has made their own choices
for what they want or what they do not want for end of life care
and if the loved ones have the basic skills
on how to care for their loved one in this last phase-
the overall experience can be better by 90%! 
 It is that important.
When is the time to do our advance directives
and to learn the skill of how to care for someone who is dying? 
 BEFORE anyone gets ill.

 Suzanne O’Brien RN:
 Creating Positive Passings:
​End of Life Doula, Level 1, Caregiver Training 






The poet Marie Howe imagines the moment of death not as an ending,
the halting of something, but as a point of completion.
A totaling of a life.
The eternal memory of the tired satisfaction at the end of a good day,
a satisfaction never before known:
At last / someone has knotted the lace of your shoe so it won’t ever come undone.
I am not who I was fifty years ago,
or ten years ago, or last year, or yesterday.
I am not the person who wrote this sentence.
Which of me will die?
This moment in which everything, everything, everything changes at once
is one of great mystery, great power,
​like no other moment in all of time.

Sallie Tisdale:  Advice for Future Corpses (and Those Who Love Them):
A Practical Perspective on Death and Dying  


Our lives as we live them day by day
create the person we will be at the moment of death.
You see this at the bedside of a dying person.
You see it in the way a body rests or fights,
in the lines of the face, in the faint shadow of a smile
or a scowl, worry or peace.
With every passing day,
​ we create the kind of death we will have.

Sallie Tisdale:  Advice for Future Corpses (and Those Who Love Them):
A Practical Perspective on Death and Dying  






So living is dying.
You understand?
Living means that every day you are abandoning everything
that you are attached to.
Can you do this?
A very simple fact but it has got tremendous implications.
So that each day is a new day.
Each day you are dying and incarnating.
There is tremendous vitality, energy there
because there is nothing you are afraid of.
There is nothing that can hurt.
​Being hurt doesn't exist. 

Krishnamurti: The Future is Now







When someone's body can no longer perform its functions in the natural world
in response to the thoughts and affections of its spirit
(which it derives from the spiritual world),
then we say that the individual has died.
This happens when the lungs’ breathing and the heart's systolic motion have ceased.
The person, though, has not died at all.
We are only separated from the physical nature that was useful to us in the world.
The essential person is actually still alive.
I say that the essential person is still alive
because we are not people because of our bodies
but because of our spirits.
After all, it is the spirit within us that thinks,
​ and thought and affection together make us the people we are.

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











Consciousness is consciousness no matter who is interpreting it.  
 The soul returns to its original state as pure consciousness,
a drop of bliss in the ocean of bliss.
Here, the quarrels of religion end.
Like all earthly attachments, they fall away.
This state of unity attracts the dying person toward it.
Through the magnetism of the soul,
one is drawn to the next stage of a personal dream
​that is universal at the source.

Deepak  Chopra: Life After Death: The Burden of Proof




It is never too early to start thinking about your own death
and the deaths of those you love.
I don’t mean thinking about death in obsessive loops,
fretting that your husband has been crushed in a horrific car accident,
or that your plane will catch fire and plummet from the sky.
But rational interaction,
that ends with you realizing that you will survive the worst,
whatever the worst may be.
Accepting death doesn’t mean that you won’t be devastated
when someone you love dies.
It means you will be able to focus on your grief,
unburdened by bigger existential questions like
“Why do people die?” and “Why is this happening to me?”
Death isn’t just happening to you.
​Death is happening to us all.

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









Look, denial is fine.
It is normal to deny death.
We are wired that way.
But just, for a little bit, step outside of denial,
get your paperwork in order,
think about the options that face us,
think about the fact that each of us will, in time, die.
Talk with the people who are important to you.
Get your hands around death and dying and then, if you wish,
​step right back into denial.

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





Man’s dream body is still with him, of course,
but the physical body now obscures it.
The dream body cannot be harmed while the physical one can --
as man quickly found out
as he transformed his experience largely from one to the other.
In the dream body man feared nothing.
The dream body does not die.
It exists before and after physical death.
In their dream bodies men had watched the spectacle
of animals “ killing ” other animals,
and they saw the animals ’ dream bodies emerge unscathed.
They saw that the earth was simply changing its forms,
but that the identity of each unit of consciousness survived --
and so , although they saw the picture of death,
they did not recognize it as the death
​that to many people now seems an inevitable end.

 Jane Roberts:
 Dreams, “Evolution,” and Value Fulfillment
Volume One 







The Garden of Eden legend represents a distorted version
of man’s awakening as a physical creature.
He becomes fully operational in his physical body ,
and while awake can only sense the dream body
that had earlier been so real to him.
He now encounters his experience from within a body
that must be fed, clothed, protected from the elements --
a body that is subject to gravity and to earth’s laws.
He must use physical muscles to walk from place to place .
He sees himself suddenly, in a leap of comprehension,
as existing for the first time not only apart from the environment,
but apart from all of earth’s other creatures.
The sense of separation is, in those terms,
initially almost shattering.

 Jane Roberts:
 Dreams, “Evolution,” and Value Fulfillment
Volume One 






In the terms of your earthly experience,
it is a metaphysical,  a scientific, and a creative error
to separate matter from consciousness,
for consciousness materializes itself as matter in physical life.
 In the beginning, then, there was a dream world,
in which consciousness formed a dream of physical reality,
and gradually became awake within that world.
 Your consciousness will survive your body’s death,
but it will also take on another kind of form --
a form that is itself composed of “ units of consciousness. ”

 Jane Roberts:
 Dreams, “Evolution,” and Value Fulfillment
Volume One 







A curious delusion seems to prevail in many quarters
that the mere fact of death at once turns a demon into a saint--
that, whatever a man' s life may have been,
the moment he dies he becomes practically an angel of goodness.
No idea could possibly be further from the truth,
as those whose work lies in trying to help the departed know full well.
The casting off of a man' s physical body
no more alters his disposition than does the casting off of his overcoat;
he is precisely the same man the day after his death
as he was the day before,
​with the same vices and the same virtues.

C. W. Leadbetter:
The Hidden Side of Things 







No one who has experienced death
​ever mourns the death of anyone.

 Neale Donald Walsch:
 The Complete Conversations with God 






I was born when it was time to be born,
and I shall die when it is time to die.
If we are in peace with time
and follow the order of things,
neither sorrow nor joy will move us.
The ancients called this ‘freedom from bondage.’
Those who are entangled with the appearance of things
cannot free themselves.
But nothing can overcome the order of nature.
​Why should I be upset?

The Taoist Master Yu

 Sushila Blackman:
 Graceful Exits: How Great Beings Die 







In his interview with Ernest Becker on his deathbed,
Sam Keen asked him
how he thought about himself as he was dying.
Becker said this:
“Well, I suppose the most immediate thing I feel
is relieved of the burden of responsibility for my own life,
putting it back where it belongs,
to whoever, whatever hatched me.
I think this is the most immediate thing I feel,
​a great sense of relief
and trust that eggs are not hatched in vain.”

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






In the Bardo of this life,
we may be very earnest in our contemplation
of mind’s ultimate nature,
and try with great effort
to gain some experience of it through meditation.
At the time of death, however,
this very experience arises effortlessly.
When we finally reach the point
of the dissolution of all dualistic appearances,
we experience a moment of complete awareness,
a moment of vivid clarity.
It is like a shift in the weather,
when the sky clears up;
the dense covering of clouds is gone,
and suddenly we see the vast sky.
At this moment,
mind arrives directly at its own ground.
​It is just like coming home.

 Dzogchen Ponlop:  Mind Beyond Death  






Death is a natural transition
of consciousness to our higher-vibrational energy body.
At the moment of death,
we experience the transfer of our consciousness
from our dense outer vehicle (the physical body)
to our more subtle (astral) energy body.
We are immortal as soul,
​so death is the ultimate illusion.

William Buhlman:  
Adventures in the Afterlife 







All your life you think you are your body.
Some of the time you think you are your mind.
It is at the time of your death t
​hat you find out Who You Really Are.

 Neale Donald Walsch:
 The Complete Conversations with God: An Uncommon Dialogue 




We have learned that we are powerful, creative, and immortal souls,
capable of molding our reality in every dimension of the universe.
We have learned that death is an illusion
and our spiritual evolution continues
far beyond the limits of matter and form.
 
This is an amazing quest;
a spiritual journey through multiple thought-responsive dimensions.
By developing our creative abilities and exploring our inner self,
we awaken to the profound nature of our spiritual potential.
Our continuing life beyond the physical
is an exciting journey of consciousness,
for we create the adventures we experience,
​ now and forever.

William Buhlman
explore William and Susan Buhlman's online death illuminating "Our Incredible Journey"
course: 
https://www.monroeinstitute.org/node/4014






We are immortal beings
who have extended our conscious awareness
throughout the entire breadth of our multidimensional universe.
We are courageous explorers
who have chosen to learn and evolve
through the use of temporary vehicles of consciousness.
Each life experience is orchestrated by us
for our continuing education.
We learn and grow at our own pace
through total immersion of our consciousness
in many different thought-responsive environments.
This remarkable system of spiritual evolution
is extremely demanding but also exceedingly effective,
because all of us, without exception,
​will eventually graduate from the vast training grounds of form.

William Buhlman
explore William and Susan Buhlman's online death illuminating "Our Incredible Journey"
course: 
https://www.monroeinstitute.org/node/4014








Maybe I’d produced all I was meant to.
Maybe the fire of my life was coming to its own natural conclusion.
Why try to fan it into life again,
particularly if its initial joy had forever vanished?
Maybe that course was better
than the determination and painful discomforts
that might be necessary to prolong lifely existence.

I thought it could all happen so easily and naturally and painlessly
that there would be no one point where you could say
  “ Now she lives and now she doesn’t.”
I was consciously aware of thinking how easy it might be
to let my desires drop one by one,
​to let myself simply drift off into an unastonished death.

 Jane Roberts:  
Dreams, “Evolution,” and Value Fulfillment, Volume One  









When all the layers of false identity have been stripped off,
there is no longer any version of that old self.
What is left behind is pure consciousness.
That is our original being.
That is our true identity.
Our true nature is indestructible.
 Awakening to our true nature is the key
to unlocking the door of the paradise that lies within each of us.  
 Paradise is our primordial pure consciousness,
which is free of all limitations
but embodies the infinity of the divine.
I remember seeing a bumper sticker that said,
“I believe in life before death."
To me this means that we don't have to imagine a future paradise.
Paradise can happen right here, right now,
while we're in this human incarnation.
​The choice is ours.




Anam Thubten. No Self No Problem  




William Blake said to his friend Crabbe Robinson :
There is nothing like death .
Death is the best thing that can happen in life ;
but most people die so late
and take such an unmerciful time in dying .
God knows , their neighbors never see them rise from the dead .
To the outer man of sense ,
who knows nothing of the inner man of Being ,
this is sheer nonsense .
But Blake made the above quite clear
when he wrote in the year before he died :
William Blake — one who is very much delighted with being in good company .
Born 28 November 1757 in London
​and has died several times since .

 Neville Goddard: Awakened Imagination 






“ I feel no bitterness or need for inveighing against fate.
This is only our human condition — common to all.
I can only yield to this suffering without need to blame,
resent or be defeated.
It has come and that is --
just as clouds come over the mountain. ”

Dorothy Dushkin
witnessing her daughter’s death
Emily K. Abel:   The Inevitable Hour  





One has to die to everything one knows--
which is consciousness,
which is the past,
which is the accumulated result of time.
Because it is only in death,
​in total death,
that there is something new,
that there is a total silence
in which a different kind of life can be led.

J. Krishnamurti: The Collected Works of J. Krishnamurti:
1965-1966: Volume 16: The Beauty of Death 






When you glimpse heaven,
Earth as you have known it loses its appeal.
Nearly everyone who has had a near-death experience
reports that they no longer fear death.
They realize that you cannot truly die.
Death is not a scary place to go,
but a blessed release.
Earth, under the advisement of ego,
​ is a far scarier domain.

Alan Cohen:  A Course in Miracles Made Easy:
Mastering the Journey from Fear to Love  







There was a time when you were not a body or an ego.
You were a powerful spiritual being
united with God and the entire universe.
You knew who you were
and enjoyed all the benefits of a divine being.
Then a moment came when you ceased to know yourself as a spirit,
and you began to regard yourself as a body.
That moment occurred in the womb,
at the time of your birth, or soon thereafter.
You underwent a crucial identity shift.
You did not cease to be a spiritual being;
​you ceased to know yourself as a spiritual being.

Alan Cohen:  A Course in Miracles Made Easy:
Mastering the Journey from Fear to Love  








Here are five reasons to have a Spiritual Directive
documented for your transition.
 
               1.  We do not always have the gift of time to design our spiritual   
                    preferences, communicate them to our loved ones, and develop the action plan to see them through. So prepare now.

     2.  Your emotional state during your transition or that of a loved one may interfere with spiritual focus and intention. Learn how to raise your emotional frequency to support a higher vibration during transition.
 
       3.  Other people may have belief systems that they can impose during your transition.
​ If you do not have documented directives, then you may have religious practices conducted during your transition that are not compatible with you.
 
       4.  The medical event can become the priority over the spiritual one. Many people lose sight of the opportunity to impact our spiritual evolution through actions taken during our transition.
It is not just a medical situation but a spiritual one as well.

5.  So often we hear about the regrets of the living because they were just not sure what to do at the end. Give a gift to your loved ones by providing clear direction for them to follow as you prepare for your non-physical journey.

This is a significant opportunity for you to use your physical life experiences, the transition to the non-physical and all that follows beyond this life as a catalyst for spiritual evolution. I encourage you to use the tools that are available to make this journey a launch pad to your Higher Self.

Click Here for a Spiritual Directive Planning Worksheet

William Buhlman
www.astralinfo.org




A Course in Miracles tells us repeatedly that death is not real.
There is only life;
death exists only at the surface level of forms and appearances.
Death is the universe’s way of clearing out what has served its purpose,
to make way for the next act of purpose.
When the body has completed its mission,
​ it will gently be laid aside

Alan Cohen:  A Course in Miracles Made Easy:
Mastering the Journey from Fear to Love  







Our soul, which is that part of us
that remains in the spirit world while our spirit inhabits a physical body,
ultimately decides our time of death.
So, for instance, if a person’s soul knows
that she is more likely to hang on to life and resist crossing over into the afterlife
while loved ones are in the room with her,
that soul will influence death while those loved ones have temporarily left the room
(perhaps to go eat or talk to the doctor)
or before those loved ones arrive in the first place.
Alternatively, if one’s soul knows that a family member
is not emotionally equipped to be present at the time of their death,
the soul will influence death when that family member has left the room
(or before that family member arrives)--
​ possibly in cooperation with that family member’s spirit guides.

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










Since his physical death,
my father has assisted my research and writing
from his home in the spiritual dimension
and has attended every one of my readings with mediums.
His example has taught me that our human experience
does not end upon our physical death;
but rather, it continues with our ongoing interactions
​with loved ones on the physical plane.

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






I heard from a man in his early forties with serious heart problems.
He wrote to tell me about Krishnamurti,
a spiritual leader in India who died in 1986.
Krishnamurti was once asked what is the most appropriate thing to say
to a friend who was about to die.
He answered: “Tell your friend that in his death,
a part of you dies and goes with him.
Wherever he goes, you also go.
He will not be alone.”
In his email to me, this man was reassuring:
​“I know you are not alone.”

 Randy Pausch: The Last Lecture 








In what is probably the most celebrated example
of controlled cell death during human development in the womb,
the hand of the fetus changes from a flat paddle to separate digits.
Deaths that involve the executing power of mitochondria
eliminate cells in the in-between zones of what will become the future fingers.
Cell death is here a sculptor of development.
Unlike a sculpture of marble or wood,
in which the deleted scraps lie