Welcome to Death Knells
The Death of Fearing Death
This site shares Death Knells to misconceptions about Death.
Living beautifully and dying beautifully, our awareness expands, our essence ascends.
And Death is embraced as Birth into new Life awareness.
Living beautifully and dying beautifully, our awareness expands, our essence ascends.
And Death is embraced as Birth into new Life awareness.
Look to the light, Seeker!
Look to death as life’s highest adventure.
Look to death as the soul’s greatest hope for initiation--
the soul’s ultimate union with God.
So live that when that moment of opportunity approaches,
the portals of paradise will be open wide
and a voice from the Clear Light will bid you entrance:
“Well done, good and faithful servant.
Enter now into the joys of eternal life.”
Earlyne Chaney: The Mystery of Death & Dying: Initiation at the Moment of Death
Each of us has within our being the ability to love and to fear.
Our heart settles into love when the mind runs out of options.
When we are dying there are no choices left.
We may project our fears from life onto our death,
but life as we know it is near its end.
Fearing death is the final futile attempt of the mind to hold us back.
There is nothing we can do except move ahead.
When we move through our fears, acknowledging them without resistance,
our fears vanish into the emptiness from which they came.
What is left is an affectionate heart and an alert, sensitive mind.
Rodney Smith: Lessons from the Dying
The known, invariant sequence of human development on the Path of Return
makes it plausible to suggest that the ultimate level of human consciousness and identity,
union with Reality,
occurs in the accelerated transformative process of dying.
What is not known or knowable at this point
is whether or not and for how long the state of Unity Consciousness is maintained
after it is experienced during the dying process.
The still revolutionary insight of Buddhism is
that “life and death are in the mind and nowhere else.”
Transcending ordinary mind,
we enter the world of the unborn and the undying.
Kathleen Dowling Singh: The Grace in Dying: A Message of Hope, Comfort and Spiritual Transformation
http://www.kathleendowlingsingh.com
As one gets closer and closer to dying,
acquaintances and neighbors,
then friends and family members from the outer circle
are bid adieu.
Typically, only the inner circle is left at the time of death.
The love experienced here seems to be the last bond the dying feel
with those who are not engaged in the same momentous process of transformation they are.
This period of withdrawal, of “dying to the world,”
both for those involved in deep and deliberate meditative disciplines
and for those ho are entering the process of physically dying,
is a period that precedes and helps to precipitate the lifting of the primal repression
and the subsequent inpouring of the power of the Ground of Being.
Kathleen Dowling Singh: The Grace in Dying: A Message of Hope, Comfort and Spiritual Transformation
http://www.kathleendowlingsingh.com
Death ought to form how we live our lives
because the qualities that define a good life
are those that make up a good death.
When we allow ourselves to be confronted by death, it is not easy.
It’s tough to recognize that our lives on this earth will end,
and it can be hard to realize that much of what we pursue in life
has little ultimate meaning.
In response, we may deploy a range of methods
to avoid being confronted by death.
We zealously seek medical treatment to forestall the inevitable
or we simply maintain lives that are too busy
to be interrupted by a trip to the nursing home.
Whatever method we pursue,
avoiding death often means refusing to recognize what is valuable in our own lives.
Rob Moll: The Art of Dying: Living Fully Into the Life to Come
Spiritual evolution is possible before, during and even after physical death.
However, this is easier to accomplish
when you have knowledge of the dying process
and feel more comfortable with what to expect.
Whether there is a terminal illness or sudden death,
having a spiritual support plan already in place
will help you to navigate through a highly emotional time.
Susan Buhlman (Death Doula) with William Buhlman: Higher Self Now!
When you feel that your loved one has begun to withdraw,
respect (don’t correct) their choice of behavior.
It is most likely a sign of acceptance of fate,
although it may manifest to you as detachment.
It may feel like you have done something wrong, but this is not the case.
This is not personal,
this is disconnecting from this world in preparation for the next.
Gentle support for any change in routine is the best course of action.
Susan Buhlman (Death Doula) with William Buhlman: Higher Self Now!
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The fear of death
is also fear of time because death stops all time.
Nobody is afraid of death--
how can you be afraid of something that you have not known?
How can you be afraid of the absolutely unknown, unfamiliar, strange?
Fear can only exist with something which is known.
No, when you say, “I am afraid of death”
you are not afraid of death— you don’t know!
Who knows?— death may be better than life.
The fear is not of death, the fear is of time.
In India we have the same term for both.
Time we call kala and death also we call kala.
We have one term for both death and time.
It is meaningful, the word kala is meaningful, very significant,
because time is death,
and death is nothing but time.
Osho
Fear: Understanding and Accepting the Insecurities of Life
Since one was not concerned with the phenomenon of one’s birth,
why should one be concerned with the phenomenon of death?
Indeed, there really is no ONE who need be concerned with anything.
It is only this very concern, in fact,
that constitutes one’s bondage as a personal entity.
Ramesh S. Balsekar
Death loses its sting and the grave its victory
when we realize that life is eternal.
We are not permitted to stay too long in any one place,
just long enough to gather the experience necessary
to the unfolding and advancement of the soul.
This is wise, for should we stay here too long
we would become too set, too rigid, too inflexible.
In the process of evolution change is inevitable,
and when this change comes we should welcome it
with a smile on the lips and a song in the heart.
While it is true that we weep for our friends,
we should know that their life goes on.
We are thinking, then, of eternity from this larger viewpoint,
as a continuity of time, ever and ever expanding,
until “time” as we now know and experience it shall be no more.
Realizing this, we should see in everyone a budding genius,
a becoming God,
an unfolding soul, an eternal destiny.
Ernest Holmes: You Will Live Forever
Death is an illusion.
It is not real.
Only life is real.
You are all immortal, eternal.
None of you—not one—came into any of your physical incarnations
intending to stay physical forever.
That is neither possible nor desirable.
You came here to play, first of all.
Those of you reading this—at least many of you—know that.
You came to have fun, to be happy, to live joyfully.
But at this time in your evolution, it is critical that all of you return
to the full awareness of who you are.
Which is God.
You and God are one.
God is immortal.
So too are you.
John Cali channeling Spirit
Let us embrace a new approach to death and dying.
Instead of fear, let us embrace joy,
for we know that we continue to live and love beyond the dense vehicle of flesh.
Our exit from this temporary training ground
is a glorious return to our true spiritual home.
Let us open our hearts and minds
to the formless void of pure spiritual consciousness.
Let us embrace the journey of death
as a self-empowering launch pad
propelling us to the very core of our spiritual essence.
With this focused intention,
death becomes a powerful opportunity to experience liberation.
William Buhlman & Susan Buhlman: Higher Self Now!
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Man is born of eternal day,
not because he wills or wishes it,
not because he labors or strives toward it,
not because he earns it as a reward,
but simply because the Spirit has breathed life into him.
And the Spirit which has breathed this life into him
has breathed Its own Life and cannot unbreathe It or take It away.
If we would only let go of our theological nonsense
and let our soul commune with the Universe,
it would tell us all these things
because we already know them inwardly.
Ernest Holmes: You Will Live Forever
What makes the medical hastening of death a modern way of dying
is not simply that the time of death, in addition to the manner of dying,
is determined by human will.
That would make the medical hastening of death no different from suicide.
Suicide is always an extraordinary act
performed under extraordinary circumstances,
whereas the medical hastening of death is meant to be a routinized response
to a problem we all know we may face,
the onset of a fatal illness.
Shai J. Lavi: The Modern Art of Dying: A History of Euthanasia in the United States
This is the vision:
Wherever you go, there is palliative care.
You shouldn’t have to be in the hospital or be in hospice --
palliative care can be just part of what you get when you have a serious illness.
Isaac Eisenoff said, “Life is pleasant, death is peaceful. It’s the transition that is troublesome.” That’s what we are here for.
Contemplative care is the embodiment, ethos, and practice of palliative care.
It is palliative care.
And those of us who are not Buddhist monks
are borrowing from the wisdom traditions
to practice the work that we do with patients.
Contemplative care is a coming home.
Koshin Paley Ellison and Matt Weingast:
Awake at the Bedside: Contemplative Teachings on Palliative and End-of-Life Care
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According to the orthodox Christian view,
Death is a separation,
and the "spirits of the dead" wait for reunion
until those they love also pass through Death's gateway,
or--according to some--until after the judgment-day is over.
As against this the Esoteric Philosophy teaches
that Death cannot touch the higher consciousness of man,
and that it can only separate those who love each other
so far as their lower vehicles are concerned;
the man living on earth, blinded by matter,
feels separated from those who have passed onwards,
but the Devachan has a complete conviction
“that there is no such thing as Death at all”,
having left behind it all those vehicles over which Death has power.
Therefore, to its less blinded eyes,
its beloved are still with it;
for it, the veil of matter that separates has been torn away.
(A “Devachan” is one who, after death, dwells in Devachan or The Mental Plane. The individuated Soul spends more of what humans call time in Devachan than on earth. Life in Devachan is ultimately more familiar, more real than life on earth. Part of individuated consciousness dies in Devachan to be born (embodied) on earth and is reborn in Devachan upon earthly death.}
Annie Besant: Death-- And After?
We are with those whom we have lost in material form,
and far, far nearer to them now than when they were alive.
And it is not only in the fancy of the Devachan,
as some may imagine, but in reality.
For pure divine love is not merely the blossom of a human heart,
but has its roots in eternity.
Spiritual holy love is immortal,
and Karma brings sooner or later all those who loved each other
with such a spiritual affection to incarnate once more in the same family group.
Annie Besant: Death-- And After?
I asked the japonica flowers:
“Are you the same as the flowers that died in the frost or are you different flowers?”
The flowers replied to me: “We are not the same and we are not different.
When conditions are sufficient we manifest
and when conditions are not sufficient we go into hiding.
It’s as simple as that.”
Thich Nhat Hanh No Death, No Fear
The reality of our afterlife
is far more exciting than my humble words can express.
We are all approaching a magnificent journey of consciousness beyond the body.
For many of us, the time has come to expand our awareness
beyond the beliefs of our youth and explore our own amazing spiritual existence.
Always remember that we are powerful beings
who possess the ability not only to create our current environment,
but to shape our continuing existence beyond this life as well.
William Buhlman and Susan Buhlman: Higher Self Now: Accelerating Your Spiritual Evolution
Just Published:
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As a little girl raised in Switzerland,
I could never, not in my wildest dreams--
and they were pretty wild--
have predicted one day winding up the world-famous author of On Death and Dying,
a book whose exploration of life’s final passage
threw me into the center of a medical and theological controversy.
Nor could I have imagined that afterward
I would spend the rest of my life explaining
that death does not exist.
Elisabeth Kubler-Ross: The Wheel of Life: A Memoir of Living and Dying
The only incontrovertible fact of my work
is the importance of life.
I always say that death can be one of the greatest experiences ever.
If you live each day of your life right,
then you have nothing to fear.
Elisabeth Kubler-Ross: The Wheel of Life: A Memoir of Living and Dying
After the human being has passed the Gate of Death,
he experiences his thought-life, his thinking, in a different way.
In our life between birth and death
we experience thoughts within our soul, we think.
And these thoughts, between birth and death,
are no more than images of an outer reality.
When the human being has laid aside his physical body,
then thought becomes an outer reality.
This is the first experience in the spiritual world for someone who has died;
he perceives his thoughts to be, as it were, set free from himself.
They are outside and beyond his soul,
just as, in the life between birth and death, sensory objects are outside and beyond us.
The whole thought-world which the human being has gathered
to himself between birth and death becomes an objective world.
They do not separate from us by sinking down into an unformed darkness;
they become independent and form a thought-world outside us.
Rudolf Steiner: Life Beyond Death: Selected Lectures
Death destroys the personality
but it cannot annihilate the individuality.
Individuality isseparate and has distinct existence.
It is something which is beyond the body.
It has no relation to your personality at all.
It is the sense of ‘I’.
It is like a continuous current.
It is the continuity of the one thought, the thought of ‘I’.
All other thoughts are centred round this ‘I’.
I was a boy. I become a man. I was a doctor. I ate. I drank. I spoke.
I meditated. I talked.
I went to America, England, France and Germany.
The same ‘I’ has gone through all these experiences.
‘I’ is the dweller in this body.
‘I’ is the same in childhood, youth and old age.
Personality changes
but your individuality, the sense of ‘I’ can never change
because the sense of ‘I’ will continue to exist with you.
After leaving this physical body
the sense of ‘I’ continues to exist.
After death you take the sense of ‘I’ with you.
Even in dream you have the sense of ‘I’ within.
Even in deep sleep you have the sense of ‘I’.
Sivananda: What Becomes of the Soul After Death
I have been walking in a dream,
dreaming as if there were a dream,
resisting as if there were something to resist,
but now I resist no longer as there is no other:
no karma, no self, no void, no wombs,
no male, no female, no birth, no death, no labyrinth,
no reality, no unreality.
Only my own endless endlessness remaining
with no beginning and no end.
Now it is finished, and I am done with my desire,
aggression, resistance, attractions, thoughts, experience.
I am ready now to be what I am.
I am that I am.
There is no other.
John C. Lilly; E. J. Gold; Claudio Naranjo: American Book of the Dead
Certainly the birth of a child
is really basically just as incomprehensible,
but this transformation is projected into,
rather than out of, your sphere of understanding.
What you call death
is merely the transformation of your own energy
onto a sphere that cannot be perceived by the outer senses.
Jane Roberts The Early Sessions: Book 2 of The Seth Material
What you consider death has no more basic reality
than has your idea of time and space.
Death really represents a blind spot in your present ability
to perceive energy transformation, and even value fulfillment.
Death merely represents the termination of your own perception,
that is, the termination of your understanding.
Your ability here amounts to a complete dwindling of comprehension.
Your senses are not equipped to perceive
the transformation of energy from one form to another.
Jane Roberts The Early Sessions: Book 2 of The Seth Material
The completely spiritualized mind-body is a Tathagata,
who doesn’t go anywhere when he dies,
for the good reason that he is already, actually and consciously,
where everyone has always potentially been without knowing.
The person who has not, in this life, gone into Thusness,
into the eternal principle of all states of being,
goes at death into some particular state,
either purgatorial or paradisal.
Aldous Huxley:The Perennial Philosophy:
An Interpretation of the Great Mystics, East and West
Prajapati taught Indra the highest truth of the Self.
“This body,” he said, “is mortal, forever in the clutch of death.
But within it resides the Self, immortal, and without form.
This Self, when associated in consciousness with the body,
is subject to pleasure and pain;
and so long as this association continues,
no man can find freedom from pains and pleasures.
But when the association comes to an end,
there is an end also of pain and pleasure.
Rising above physical consciousness,
knowing the Self as distinct from the sense-organs and the mind,
knowing Him in his true light,
one rejoices and one is free.”
From the Chandogya Upanishad
This is a plea –
to my family, my carer, doctors and specialists;
to my friends and neighbours, and the people I’m yet to meet:
start talking about death as much as you talk about life.
Think of death as something you can control,
where you can live out your last wishes
safe in the knowledge that the ones left behind will be able to cope without you.
Start talking to your children about death as a natural process,
not something to be scared of.
Children are taught about sex, drugs and taxes,
but not how to cope with death.
We need to have conversations about dying –
because yours could happen before mine.
Mandy Paine
https://www.theguardian.com/healthcare-network/2016/may/12/i-am-dying-want-talk-family-carer-doctors-death
Sunset is only an appearance,
for what is sunset here is sunrise elsewhere.
In reality, the sun never sets.
Likewise, there is no death.
Death is only an illusion, an appearance.
For death here is birth elsewhere.
Sadhu Vaswani
dedicated to Betsy Davis.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/inspired-life/wp/2016/08/16/a-terminally-ill-woman-had-one-rule-at-her-end-of-life-party-no-crying/
Escape from the round of earthly reincarnation is possible
when the soul learns the truth regarding its own nature
and its relation to the Whole.
When it perceives the illusory nature of the phenomenal universe,
and realizes that the spiritual world is the only real one,
then do the ties of the material life begin to slip away,
and to soul begins to struggle free from its confining bonds.
There exists an infinite scale of being,
composed of realm after realm,
ever rising higher and higher and higher.
The soul is destined to move on and on and on toward the Infinite.
Yogi Ramacharaka: The Life Beyond Death
“Oh, Sang Hu came;
Oh, Sang Hu came!
Now he’s gone back
to being what he truly is,
While we must go on being human!”
(Song sung by friends beside Tzu Sang Hu’s corpse)
Sam Hamill: The Essential Chuang Tzu
If you search outside of yourself
for answers to life’s mysteries
you will never find them.
You can study great books and gather vast knowledge
but still the answers will not be revealed.
Everything you seek resides within you.
The answers are part of your own true nature.
Without searching or studying or striving
you already know that life is fleeting and precious.
You already know the Way of Death.
Karen Wyatt MD
The Tao of Death: The Secret to a Rich & Meaningful Life
HOW AM I TO KNOW THAT THIS LIFE IS NOT MERELY A DELUSION?
How am I to know that to despise death
is not merely to be like one exiled in his youth
and who now can find no way home?
Beautiful Lady Li was the daughter of a petty knight of Ai.
When Chin first got her, she drenched the whole front of her gown with tears.
But once she arrived at the palace and shared the emperor’s bed
and feasted on his fatted calves, she regretted her tears.
How do I know that the dead do not regret
clinging so ignominiously to life?
Chuang Tzu
If I were a writer of books,
I would compile a register, with a comment,
of the various deaths of men:
he who should teach men to die
would at the same time teach them to live.
Michel de Montaigne: “That to Study Philosophy Is to Learn to Die”
Verse 46
When society understands the Way of Death
there is no futile attempt to prolong life
and no harsh treatments to wage a war with Death.
Life is celebrated and fully embraced
when there is harmony with Death.
Clinging too desperately to life causes suffering.
Fearing the ups and downs of life results in unhappiness.
Desiring immortality leaves life unfulfilled.
All of these false paths can be avoided
by finding contentment with life just as it is
and receiving Death whenever it arrives.
Karen Wyatt MD: The Tao of Death: The Secret to a Rich & Meaningful Life
At death one does not simply cease to exist
as the individual one has known oneself to be;
one does not enter into an utterly strange and entirely unfamiliar condition.
Rather the situation is a continuation of one’s present life in extended phases.
No sudden changes take place at death,
on the contrary, one remains after death exactly what one was before,
except that one no longer has a physical body.
One has the same intellect, the same disposition, the same virtues and vices;
the loss of the physical body no more makes one a different individual,
than would the removal of an overcoat.
Moreover, the conditions in which one finds oneself
are those which one’s own thoughts and desires have already created for oneself.
There is no reward or punishment from outside,
but only the actual result of what one has done, said, and thought,
while living in the physical body.
This is the first and most prominent fact to appreciate:
that after death there is no strange new life,
but a continuation under changed conditions,
of the present physical-plane life.
Anil Sharma: Life Beyond Death
There is no need to fear this passage
from one’s inferior personality to one’s higher individuality.
It is not a retrogression towards less than what one already is,
or total annihilation, but advance towards more than what one is at present,
towards true fulfillment.
The individual consciousness is not lost.
It is expanded, increased, enlarged.
Anil Sharma: Life Beyond Death
How the Afterlife Dawns
1. The physical body stops functioning. The dying person may not be aware of this but eventually knows that it has occurred.
2. The physical world vanishes. This can happen by degrees; there can be a sense of floating upward or of looking down on familiar places as they recede.
3. The dying person feels lighter, suddenly freed of limitation.
4. The mind and sometimes the senses continue to operate. Gradually, however, what is perceived becomes nonphysical.
5. A presence grows that is felt to be divine. This presence can be clothed in a light or in the body of angels or gods. It can communicate to the dying person.
6. Personality and memory begin to fade, but the sense of “I” remains.
7. This “I” has an overwhelming sense of moving on to another phase of existence.
Deepak Chopra: Life After Death: The Burden of Proof
Are you a young or an old soul?
In other words, have you been around a long time or a short time?
All souls have been around for the same degree.
Some of us have chosen, for our own personal reasons,
to incarnate into the body more often than others.
That is where they get the term “old or young soul.”
Some are young in terms of Earthly experience.
I have found that I like to do what I can in a tangible way
to help not only myself but others.
Thus I have a tendency to keep coming back over and over.
Then a young soul would be one that has not had much Earth experience?
Yes, or just experience in the other realms,
because Earth is not the only realm of consciousness.
Dolores Cannon
Between Life and Death: Conversations With A Spirit
Like the moon,
so life surely has a side that is constantly turned away from us,
and which is not life’s opposite,
but its completion to perfection, to plenitude,
to the truly whole and full sphere and globe of Being.
I shall not say that one should love death,
but one should love life with such magnanimity,
and without calculating exceptions,
that one involuntarily always includes death (as the averted half of life)
and loves it along with life.
It is thinkable that death stands infinitely nearer to us than life itself.
Ranier Maria Rilke: Letters
Life is a dream walking
Death is a going home.
Chinese proverb
Freedom from attachment is freedom from death.
Freedom from attachment
is freedom from the wheel of birth and death.
Freedom from attachment
makes you capable of entering into the universal Light
and becoming one with it.
And that is the greatest blessing,
the ultimate ecstasy beyond which nothing else exists.
You have come home.
OSHO:
Death: The Greatest Fiction
If you are not attached to anything,
death can come this very moment
and you will be in a very welcoming mood.
You will be absolutely ready to go.
In front of such a person, death is defeated.
Death is defeated only by those who are ready
to die any moment, without any reluctance.
They become the immortals.
They become the buddhas.
OSHO
Death: The Greatest Fiction
When you are dead,
you will be back in the primordial state of rest
which existed before you were born,
that stillness before all experience.
It is only the false sense of a limited, separate “me”
that deprives life of its meaning
and gives death an ominous significance
which it really does not have.
Ramesh S. Balsekar: A Net of Jewels
For the liberated mind,
death is realized as the unknown potential
from which has arisen the birth and life itself.
The event of death is seen
as just another moment in life,
complete and unknown until it arrives.
Ramesh S.Balsekar: A Net of Jewels
To fear death, my friends,
is only to think ourselves wise, without being wise:
for it is to think that we know what we do not know.
For anything that men can tell,
death may be the greatest good that can happen to them:
but they fear it as if they knew quite well that it was the greatest of evils.
And what is this but that shameful ignorance
of thinking that we know what we do not know?
Socrates
When the ego disappears,
that is the sign of the "ultimate experience."
Ego is not the Reality,but appears as such.
Everything is Consciousness.
It is not necessary to say, "I am Brahman."
Birth and death belong only to this "I."
The five elements and Consciousness remain as they are,
but the subtle body which calls itself "I," and which is full of desire,
eventually succumbs to death.
When someone tells us, "Wamanrao has passed away,"
it only means that the name is dead.
He came therefore he died.
Eradicate from your mind that you are some particular "I."
Shri Sadguru Siddharameshwar Maharaj : Amrut Laya - The Stateless State
If a person dies,
clinically or permanently,
with a fistful of unexamined, dogmatic assumptions,
it can cause an array of complications in the immediate afterlife,
whereas just a jot of open-mindedness
leads to experiences that are full, deep, and transcendent.
The living receive outstanding boons from direct experience with the afterlife.
Direct experience of any kind
will bring you into contact with your immortal self.
That alone will lessen, if not eradicate, the fear of death.
Julia Assante, PhD: The Last Frontier: Exploring the Afterlife and Transforming Our Fear of Death
Most of us are frightened of dying
because we don't know what it means to live.
We don't know how to live,
therefore we don't know how to die.
As long as we are frightened of life
we shall be frightened of death.
Krishnamurti: Freedom from the Known
Instead of feeling helplessly attracted to death,
those who have met it directly in near-death experiences,
even if they were negative experiences,
as well as those who have been visited by the dead
feel a renewed love of life and a profound sense of purpose.
Julia Assante The Last Frontier: Exploring the Afterlife and Transforming Our Fear of Death
Death is only an experience
through which you are meant to learn a great lesson:
you cannot die.
Paramahansa Yogananda
You see infinite life as being a process
of going between carnate and discarnate states.
If you saw infinite life as being a continuous flow
without the need for interruption,
then that would be the way you would experience it.
Too simple?
If you truly had no problem with this,
you would never die.
Tom Carpenter: Dialogue on Awakening
Should you at this moment
absolutely discard the very firm belief that you hold which says,
"I was born; I will die, there is a beginning; there is an end, there are transitions,"
you would no longer experience death.
The meaning of that which you believe
is transferred into those things you experience within your physical life.
If there is no longer meaning to beginning and end,
to birth and death,
how could you possibly experience it?
Tom Carpenter: Dialogue on Awakening
Soul, mind, and ego are mere words.
There are no true entities of the kind.
Consciousness is the only truth.
Forgetfulness of your real nature is the real death:
remembrance of it is the true birth.
It puts an end to successive births.
Ramana Maharshi
Death Is A Word
You cannot be frightened of the unknown
because you do not know what the unknown is
and so there is nothing to be frightened of.
Death is a word,
and it is the word, the image, that creates fear.
So can you look at death without the image of death?
As long as the image exists from which springs thought,
thought must always create fear.
Krishnamurti: Freedom from the Known
You grieve for those that should not be grieved for.
The wise grieve neither for the living nor the dead.
Never at any time was I not.
Nor thou, nor these princes of men.
Nor will we ever cease to be hereafter.
For the unreal has no being and the real never ceases to be.
Bhagavad Gita
Death is not our shadow, it is our guide.
Gurumayi Chidvilasananda
Hope and beliefs alone are not an effective spiritual plan
for our transition of consciousness at death.
We have the ability to break free from the institutional indoctrination
and become an active explorer of consciousness during our life and at death.
A pivotal shift of awareness is now occurring worldwide
as millions realize that we design not only our current reality,
but our afterlife as well.
As spiritual beings we are not victims at death,
we are empowered to design and experience
an enhanced spiritual transition of consciousness.
William Buhlman: Higher Self Now! Awakening to the Infinite Journey of Soul
Death and birth are the biggest acts of creation
because these are the moments in the Eternal Life Cycle
when Essential Energy transmutes itself to produce specific manifestations
in the spiritual realm (at death) or in the physical realm (at birth).
Neale Donald Walsch: Home with God
Everyone has to die; so die as your true nature.
Why die as a body?
Never forget your true nature.
It may not be acceptable to many, but it is a fact...
this body has nothing to do with you.
If you must have an ambition have the highest,
so that at least while dying, you will be the Absolute.
Decide that now firmly, with certainty and conviction.
Giving up the body is a great festival.
Nisargadatta Maharaj
You always have access to those you love,
be they “living” or “dead.”
And you can just as easily communicate with those who are dead
as with those still in physical form.
The only thing preventing you from communicating with them is your belief you cannot.
They are always with you.
They are always giving you signs they have not gone away.
You planned the relationships you have in your physical lifetimes
before you became physical.
Your spirits thought there might be some fun
in playing around with each other in the physical.
And so you came together to do whatever you chose to do.
Those partnerships, those relationships are forever.
Even after one or both of you “die,”
you still have a long way to go.
You still have much to do together.
For you never lose those you love.
You will all meet again on the far shore.
John Cali: Channeling Spirit
You have all had many lives and many loves.
Those you love in this lifetime have been with you in other lifetimes.
Those lifetimes can be what you label “past” or “future.”
In the spiritual realms there is no time, only the eternal now.
We’re aware of the challenge and difficulty you have with physical death.
But there truly is no death because you go on forever.
Yes, you come and go into and out of your various physical bodies.
And those bodies appear to change as you move through linear time.
But you—your true eternal self—are unchanging.
The next time you “lose” a loved one to physical death,
remember you never change, you go on forever.
That loved one can be another human, a pet, any being you feel love for.
All are truly one, no matter what form they may take in a physical lifetime.
Their true selves—their spirits—live on forever.
They cannot die—you cannot die.
John Cali: Channeling Spirit
Once one knows one’s true nature,
the death of the physical body becomes irrelevant--
death is no longer real.
The masters reassure us that this process of self-realization or nirvana
is not an annihilation, not something to fear.
They liken the final state to the merging of a raindrop into the ocean--
existence remains,
but one’s limitations and sense of separateness dissolve.
Sushila Blackman: Graceful Exits: How Great Beings Die
There is a spiritual body and a material body,
and they do not interfere with each other.
It is the nature of consciousness to take form,
and there must be some form on every plane if there is to be self-realization.
But when, by reason of any fact,
this human form is no longer a fit instrument
through which the soul may express on this plane,
then the Spirit definitely severs itself from this form
and “passes to inherit a residence afresh.”
Just as nature has provided that when we enter this life we are met by loving friends,
so no one passes into the next life alone.
Ernest Holmes
Life is and cannot produce death.
Death is naught but evolution,
progress and transition
from one state to another.
In life, in thought and in act
we should cease contemplating death
and realize life and more life.
Life is a continuous program.
Ernest Holmes
Most humans mistakenly believe that they experience their soul after death;
but most simply shift their awareness to their inner energy body.
William Buhlman: Adventures in the Afterlife
In the first stage of death,
the soul comes to understand
that the body with which it spent physical life is not real.
That is, it is not who the soul really is.
In the second stage of death,
the soul comes to understand that the mind,
with all its thoughts, is not real.
That is, it is not who the soul really is.
ALL the thoughts of the limited mind,
emerging from the limited perspective of human experience,
are impacted greatly in the second stage death,
precisely because the perspective of the soul in the Afterlife
is so much greater than and so different from what it was
when the soul was with the body.
It is from the place of this enhanced perspective
that the soul begins to create and experience itself.
As soon as the soul sees and realizes that it is not a body,
its perspective shifts greatly, as you can imagine.
This is, in fact, what propels the soul into the third stage of death,
when all thoughts— not just “bad” thoughts,
but even their own thoughts of “heaven”--
are dropped away, and Ultimate Reality is experienced.
Neale Donald Walsch: Home with God
Right now we have a physical body,
but we also have a spiritual body
that is the mirror image of the one we see.
That spirit body goes with us when we die,
as do our mind and our personality.
The only thing that's different after our heart beats for the final time
is that we are no longer clothed in skin and bones.
Otherwise, nothing changes!
The "you" that you know,
the "I' that began at the moment of your conception within Life Consciousness,
will continue into eternity.
Janet Nohavec: Where Two Worlds Meet
When a person’s in an absolutely extreme situation,
and they accept it, there is a possibility of a natural satori.
You see this is always the opportunity presented by death.
That if one can go into death with eyes open,
and have somebody help you if necessary, to give up before your die,
this extraordinary thing can happen to you.
So that from your standpoint in that position at that time, you would say,
“I wouldn’t have missed that opportunity for the world – now I understand why we die.
The reason we die is to give us the opportunity to understand what life’s all about –
by letting go, because then we come to a situation that the ego can’t deal with.
When we are no longer hypnotized by that,
then our natural consciousnesses can see clearly what all this universe is for.
So therefore we have missed this golden opportunity
by institutionalizing death out of the way,
instead of having a socially understood acceptance of death and rejoicing in death.
Alan Watts: A Natural Satori
The only incontrovertible fact of my work
is the importance of life.
I always say that death can be one of the greatest experiences ever.
If you live each day of your life right,
then you have nothing to fear.
Elisabeth Kübler-Ross
The Wheel of Life: A Memoir of Living and Dying
Oh! if I could tell you of the wondrous destiny of man!
If I could describe to you in word-pictures
what happens to the human being after death,
your hearts would leap with glad exultation
at the recognition of a truth
that you have instinctively known
but have not known how to formulate in words.
G. de Purucker: What Death Really Is
The level of awareness in the Afterlife
precludes the possibility of anyone willfully choosing what is not real.
And the soul would know and understand immediately
that the concept and the idea and the experience of “suffering” is not real.
In the first stage of death,
the soul comes to understand that the body with which it spent physical life is not real.
That is, it is not who the soul really is.
In the second stage of death,
the soul comes to understand that the mind, with all its thoughts, is not real.
That is, it is not who the soul really is.
ALL the thoughts of the limited mind,
emerging from the limited perspective of human experience,
are impacted greatly in the second stage death,
precisely because the perspective of the soul in the Afterlife
is so much greater than and so different
from what it was when the soul was with the body.
Neale Donald Walsch: Home with God
Everybody is afraid of death
for the simple reason that we have not tasted of life yet.
The man who knows what life is,
is never afraid of death;
he welcomes death.
Whenever death comes he hugs death,
he embraces death,
he welcomes death,
he receives death as a guest.
To the man who has not known what life is,
death is an enemy;
and to the man who knows what life is,
death is the ultimate crescendo of life.
Osho,
Walking in Zen, Sitting in Zen
Hope is not an effective preparation for the afterlife.
When else in life would you just hope things all work out?
You plan your meals everyday!
Let’s plan our transition of consciousness.
Let’s get educated, knowledgeable, create a personal plan
and make it the best possible transition.
Move beyond the antiquated beliefs and obtain first hand knowledge.
We have the capacity to obtain the answers.
We no longer need to depend on archaic, dark age belief systems.
We are powerful spiritual beings.
We exist in every dimension of the universe.
It’s up to us to become explorers of consciousness,
and get off of dependence upon the manipulative beliefs that dominate our society.
We have to grow up spiritually and become mature spiritual explorers of consciousness. Otherwise we will always be, let’s just say, behind the eight ball
when it comes to making our transition in our evolutionary cycle.
excerpt from William Buhlman interview on Bob Olsen's AfterLifeTV
http://www.afterlifetv.com/2015/02/05/new-william-buhlman-interview/
“O nobly-born,
when thy body and mind were separating,
thou must have experienced a glimpse of the Pure Truth,
subtle, sparkling, bright, dazzling, glorious,
and radiantly awesome, in appearance like a mirage moving across a landscape in spring-time
in one continuous stream of vibrations.
Be not daunted thereby, nor terrified, nor awed.
That is the radiance of thine own true nature.
Recognize it.”
The Tibetan Book of the Dead
"Everyone should practice in many ways
to gain release from this element (the body),
so that one might not wander aimlessly
but rather might recover one's former state of being."
Epistle to Rheginus,
a third or fourth century, C.E.,letter
from a Perennialist teacher to a student
Humans are so fixated on matter they see but a sliver of reality;
they remain unconscious of the enormous multidimensional training ground.
They believe they are in reality,
when instead they are but temporary visitors
in a well-designed, virtual construct created for the education of consciousness.
Your self-identity remains anchored in form
and this obstructs your perception, slowing your progress.
Consciousness has no form.
You create all the obstacles you encounter and only you can remove them.
Your body is a temporary energy vehicle of soul,
created and maintained by your subconscious thoughts.
When you consciously confront the projected image of your own thought creation
it will lose its integrity, its cohesion of form.”
William Buhlman: Adventures in the Afterlife
We must learn to evolve beyond the body with some skill.
That’s where we’re all headed, let’s face it.
We’re all moving beyond the body.
William Buhlman
Medicine should give up the quest to conquer nature,
and revert to its traditional, creaturely role
of accompanying the dying:
the doctor as amicus mortis.
It is as difficult, however, to advise someone how to die,
as it is to advise them how to live.
Death cannot be sanitised or workshopped.
We are frail and vulnerable animals
yet we have come to believe that everything that happens to us
– including death –
is our fault, our doing, our responsibility.
Human agency has replaced the power of nature...
Seamus O’Mahony
Consultant Physician
Cork University Hospital
So much of our communication with people is done without words,
but I think this is especially so with the very ill.
The patient who says soon after her admission,
“It is marvelous to begin to feel safe again,”
has been met by the atmosphere and by the things she looks at
just as much as by the nursing and by the drugs and relief she is given…
We will see patients able to listen, perhaps for the first time,
to something that has been said to them all their lives,
but for which they have somehow never had time for real attention.
Dame Cicely Saunders (founder of modern hospice movement)
Awake at the Bedside: Contemplative Teachings on Palliative and End-of-Life Care
Koshin Paley Ellison and Matt Weingast
In the end, when there’s nothing left to hold on to
— when everything else is being let go of --
kindness, compassion, and love are really all that remain.
These are the qualities that awaken at the bedside.
Koshin Paley Ellison and Matt Weingast:
Awake at the Bedside: Contemplative Teachings on Palliative and End-of-Life Care
KPE: I set out to create this book,
I wanted to have all the voices of people on the ground doing the work--
from the pioneers of hospice and grief work
to contemporary contemplative teachers and caregivers.
Matt, my co-editor and dear friend, and I culled together all those we love and feel nourished by. We did this because this is the approach to contemplative care--
we can’t do it alone in a singular voice.
This is what is new and old.
We used to value community more.
So, this book is about remembering
there are so many vital voices to nourish and support us.
To do this well, we need each other.
So, this book’s approach is a reminder
of community and practice and to engage fully.
How do we each do that?
As one of the marvelous contributors writes,
“Feast on your life.”
NDP: What has been your biggest challenge with people in the medical community concerning end-of-life issues?
KPE:The biggest challenge is the treatment of people as people.
This is not a new event.
It turns out that the oldest stories in the world
are about people treating each other in challenging ways.
Of course, we also live in a time when we send the sick to hospitals,
the elderly to nursing homes and the dying to hospices.
Old age, sickness and death are such powerful teachers.
So, the book and our organization are about doing the radical pivot--
turning towards what we fear and being a source of compassion and wisdom
in the places of great suffering.
We will all get older, get sick and die.
The historical Buddha reminds us that our actions are our only true belongings.
So, we have the unique opportunity to engage through study, care and meditation.
We have the opportunity to plunge fully into life.
What will you do with your days?
This is the great question to live with each day.
Koshin Paley Ellison interviewed by Nancy Doyle Palmer about new book: Awake At The Bedside
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/nancy-doyle-palmer-/awake-at-the-bedside-zen-_b_10096396.html
Our current concepts of death and dying
are a based on some very old assumptions.
Many of us still look upon death as the end of life.
Our vocabulary is filled with statements indicating the finality of death:
“the last breath,” “the final moments,” on so on.
Out-of-body experiences provide substantial evidence
that when someone dies, that person has in fact
only changed their vibratory rate and the density of their body.
The person is still very much alive and well.
William L.Buhlman The Secret of the Soul
What we truly are is the dimension beyond space-time in which manifestion appears:
the formless, intemporal PRESENCE
which witnesses the appearance and disappearance of the phenomenal manifestation
(including ourselves as part of it) as one would witness a dream.
It is only after a deep understanding that THIS total manifestation,
which spontaneously arises in THAT formless potential
and in due course merges therein—which is our real nature--
that conceptualizing will cease to bother us
with its imagined horrors, including that of death.
Ramesh S. Balsekar: Explorations into the Eternal
Since the fear and horror of death is so instinctive,
how is it possible to “accept” the phenomenon of death?
How is it possible not to resist the very idea of death?
Suicide must be regarded as an exceptional aberration,
otherwise every living thing seems to resist death
until it has to surrender to it out of sheer lack of strength to resist it any longer.
The answer to this questionable doubt is that it is only conceptualization
that brings about the worries and fears about death
or anything else that is uncertain and unknown.
It is only human beings who seek security
in a life the very basis of which is insecurity
because they think, they imagine, they conceptualize and they objectivize.
It would seem reasonable that if this conceptualization is stopped--
as do the sages, the spiritual adepts or masters--
we would remain in the natural stream of life like plants
who live and grow and die normally and naturally
in the totality of phenomenal manifestation.
Ramesh S. Balsekar: Explorations into the Eternal
Only that which you can take with you when you leave the body is important.
That means, except meditation, nothing is important.
Except awareness, nothing is important,
because only awareness cannot be taken away by death.
Everything else will be snatched away,
because everything else comes from without.
You will be taking with you only whatsoever awareness you have attained.
That is your only real wealth.
OSHO
“We need to make talking about death as natural as talking about the weather.”
William Armstrong
Healthwatch Norfolk (U.K.) Chairman
The “self” that needs protection is not real.
The body, valueless and hardly worth the least defense,
need merely be perceived as quite apart from you,
and it becomes a healthy, serviceable instrument
through which the mind can operate until its usefulness is over.
Who would want to keep it when its usefulness is done?
ACIM: Lesson 135
And so, you hear of some who were killed in what seems a random fashion …
an accident or so-called “act of God,” and this brings a bit of fright.
“That could have been me,” you think
as you realize how quickly life can change and death can come.
Of course this is frightening to you when you cling to human awareness,
where change is not embraced and death is perceived as an ending.
What if death were celebrated as are births in your world?
They are births into our world,
and the soul’s return from a long journey is celebrated.
You are welcomed with open, loving arms.
What you really fear is the unknown.
To most humans, change and death are laden with this.
To those who are attuned to the soul,
change is natural and a welcome part of growth and learning.
Death is but a passage.
It carries no fear, no stigma, no meaning, really,
except that which you ascribe to it.
Could you not do with a bit less fear in your life?
Sanaya/Suzanne Giesemann
The fact that Life happens,
to each of us, is what matters most.
Good, bad, ugly, boring, short,
long, actually makes no difference, in the overall scheme of things.
It is the experience of living, of physical life,
which our souls crave, that brings us here time after time, nothing else.
With no attachment to the “what” of living,
I discovered that every day becomes a good day to die.
Teri "CricketSings" Heinichen Owens
Do you wish to know where they have gone?
Close your eyes.
Turn off the noise. Quiet the mind.
Close out the human world,
and shift your focus to a state of expectancy.
Know what your heart already knows:
There is more.
Now sit and ask to be shown another way of being,
another way of knowing.
Do this often,
knowing that the human does not know what to expect,
and so you set your expectations aside and you experience.
This is the doorway that when opened will lead you to know
that your loved ones not only await you, but are right there …
in the silence.
Suzanne Giesemann
To those who keep the focus quite firmly fixed on the physical world,
the death of one you hold dear comes as a shock.
Even if you had prepared for it,
it seems to you that one moment they are there and the next they are gone.
“How can that be?” you ask. “How can they no longer exist?”
And this is the challenge for those focused only on this reality.
It is like dreaming at night and thinking your dreams are real.
They are quite real when you are having them,
and then you awaken, and with surprise you say,
“But it seemed so real!”
This will be your reaction as well
when you awaken from this physical dream
and find yourself face to face with those you held so dear.
Suzanne Giesemann
When I say I have made a show called Learning How To Die,
lots of people respond with: ‘What do you know about it?’
I think this happens because I am 25 and don’t look like I am dying.
To be clear: I am not dying.
Feels funny saying I am not dying because aren’t we all really?
One day we will be dead;
surely before we are dead we are dying?
I would argue that you do living and dying at the same time!
I feel at this point I need to tell you that my Dad is dying.
He has terminal prostate cancer.
Strangely, I feel like I have to tell you this bit
to stop you from getting irritated at a 25-year-old yabbering on
about what she thinks dying is.
I don’t like that I feel the need to justify my reflections on death
with the ‘trophy’ of experiencing someone dying.
But I think that’s how things work
or, at least, it’s how I have experienced things to work;
we talk about death only in the presence of death,
at funerals, in hospitals, at the anniversary of someone’s death.
I think we are a bit snobby about death,
like it’s some exclusive club that only happens on certain days, invite only.
It’s weird; death is the one thing we all have in common
but we refuse to make it a common topic of conversation.
Luca Rutherford
British Writer, Performer
Learning How to Die
“Life” has nothing to do with body and with this material plane;
Life is our conscious existence,
unbroken, unbreakable,
and the brief interludes in this Life,
during which we sojourn on Earth,
are but a minute fraction of our conscious existence,
and a fraction, moreover, during which we are less alive,
because of the heavy coverings which weigh us down.
Annie Besant: Death--And After?
YOU ARE TOTALLY FREE
I know that you are consciousness itself, not the conscious being.
Consciousness is not a quality attached to you,
you are consciousness.
You are totally free.
So proceed from anywhere.
Either be more free or be more conscious,
and the other will result automatically.
Be more free, and you will be more conscious.
You cannot be more free unless you are more conscious.
Be more conscious and you will be more free.
You cannot be otherwise, because consciousness creates freedom.
And when you are absolutely conscious,
you are absolutely free.
Then there is no cause and no purpose for you to exist.
Osho
Let’s have no sadness—furrowed brow
There’s nothing new in dying now
Sergei Esenin
"The 'I' is eternal.
It passes unharmed through the fire, the air, the water.
Sword and spear cannot kill or wound it.
It cannot die.
The trials of the physical life are but as dreams to it.
Resting secure in the knowledge of the 'I,'
Man may smile at the worst the world has to offer,
and raising his hand he may bid them disappear
into the mist from which they emerged.
Blessed is he who can say (understandingly) 'I'."
William Walker Atkinson: Raja Yoga
Do I fear death?
Not at all.
I've seen far too many near-death experiences to fear death.
I've also seen too many end-of-life experiences to fear death.
Now, do people fear death?
Yes.
Why?
Because they haven't done the process of dying.
Most people are afraid of the process of dying, rather than the switching off.
But if they looked at the data, their fear of death would go.
If you accept that the near-death experience,
particularly in cardiac arrest, is a good model for dying,
you have nothing to fear at all.
You're looked after the whole way.
So when your time comes, enjoy.
Peter Fenwick quoted in Death Makes Life Possible by Marilyn Schlitz
Since my death,
I’ve witnessed many strange environments and behaviors.
The old maxim, “as above, so below,”
is more accurate than I believed possible.
There are millions of realities
and they are all created by the thoughts of the inhabitants.
I was shocked to see that people
continue to live much as they did before their death;
their self-created issues and imperfections continue in the afterlife.
After death only the density of the body has changed;
the mindset of the individual remains the same.
William Buhlman: Adventures in the Afterlife
All the forms you have ever experienced
are merely the outer vehicles of consciousness.
These external forms of energy will melt away
as you move inward within yourself.
The greatest secret of the universe is you.
You are the inner-dimensional portal to the entire spiritual universe.
Focus on your presence.
William Buhlman: Adventures in the Afterlife
There may be a feeling of floating or flying,
similar to sensations people often have in dreams.
There is an awareness of great calmness and tranquility,
a sensation of relief and utter ease.
One might even wonder,
“What was all the worry about?”
Philip Kapleau: The Zen of Living and Dying
Life never dies.
At death, only forms die.
Life that was in-formed then takes another form.
So what are you afraid of?
You are independent of everything.
However, you'll never see yourself as independent of everything
until you release your grip on everything.
Take that first step.
You won't fall; you'll float.
Roy Melvyn: Life Never Dies
Let me capitulate in some detail the masters’ accounts
of the stages of the journey from death to rebirth.
During the first stage the most striking element
is the thought of how easy it is to die.
Unlike the sometimes prolonged act of dying,
death itself is as simple, easy,
and natural as a leaf’s fluttering off a tree.
Philip Kapleau: The Zen of Living and Dying
Men come and they go
and they trot and they dance,
and never a word about death.
All well and good.
Yet when death does come—to them, their wives, their children, their friends
—catching them unawares and unprepared,
then what storms of passion overwhelm them, what cries, what fury, what despair! . . .
To begin depriving death of its greatest advantage over us,
let us adopt a way clean contrary to that common one;
let us deprive death of its strangeness,
let us frequent it, let us get used to it;
let us have nothing more often in mind than death. . . .
We do not know where death awaits us:
so let us wait for it everywhere.
To practice death is to practice freedom.
A man who has learned how to die has unlearned how to be a slave.
-Montaigne
Being around dying people will almost force you
to establish a relationship with your own fears about death.
If you really want to help someone who is dying,
especially with their fear of death, you have to relate to your own trepidations.
By becoming familiar with your own fears, and developing fearlessness,
you will naturally convey that fearlessness to the dying person.
Your fearlessness is contagious.
It can provide exactly what the dying person needs.
Andrew Holecek: Preparing to Die:
Practical Advice and Spiritual Wisdom from the Tibetan Buddhist Tradition
After the death of his son Tarma Dode,
a student asked the great accomplisher Marpa, who brought the Kagyü lineage to Tibet:
“How are you?” Marpa replied, “Miserable.”
The man was stunned. He asked, “Miserable?”
But Marpa laughed. He said, “Yes, but with a difference,
and the difference is that the misery is voluntary.
Sometimes, in order to have a taste of the world, I move out into it,
but I stay the master at the same time.
At any moment I can go back inside, and it makes sense to move within the opposites.
Then one stays alive.”
Marpa added, “Sometimes I move into the grief,
but grief is nothing that happens to me.
I see it and stay untouched.”
Lama Ole Nydahl: Fearless Death - Buddhist Wisdom on the Art of Dying
If one is able, at least conceptually,
to see the process of dying like changing one's clothes,
it becomes easier for everybody.
After a life lived together, one surely shares lasting insights and experiences
and this creates the opportunities to meet again in future lives.
What one now thinks of one another,
how one meets, and what one wishes for others--
all of this essentially shapes the common future.
Lama Ole Nydahl: Fearless Death - Buddhist Wisdom on the Art of Dying
Interestingly, if you look back at your death-scene as you leave it,
you will find that the room and your relatives are becoming shimmery and insubstantial.
The post-death levels are not like stripes,
but they are more like a rainbow of colors whose margins blend into one another.
So as you enter the post-death levels, your perspective shifts.
Your new body and your new environment become reassuringly solid,
while the formerly solid level you are leaving grows insubstantial and fades away.
Roberta Grimes: The Fun of Dying
“It is very beautiful over there.”
Last words of Thomas Alva Edison
. . . death is nothing to us.
For all good and evil consists in sensation,
but death is deprivation of sensation.
And therefore a right understanding that death is nothing to us
makes the mortality of life enjoyable,
not because it adds to it an infinite span of time,
but because it takes away the craving for immortality.
For there is nothing terrible in life for the man who has truly comprehended
that there is nothing terrible in not living.
[Death] does not then concern either the living or the dead,
since for the former it is not, and the latter are no more.
That which gives no trouble when it comes, is but an empty pain in anticipation.
Epicurus
While materialism permits us to bring to life
only relationships between souls confined to their earthly existence,
spiritual science opens the way for free communication and exchange
between souls on the earth and souls that dwell beyond the earth in the other world.
The dead will live with us.
And, when that happens, what we may call the passage through the gate of death
will often after a time be experienced as merely a change in the form of existence.
The whole transformation in the life of spirit and of soul that will take place
when such things become common knowledge will be of enormous significance.
Rudolf Steiner: Staying Connected
We must regain the understanding
that we are not on earth just to build things in the physical universe
during our physical existence.
We must understand that during our whole existence
we are connected to the whole world.
Those who have passed through the gates of death
want to work with us on the physical world.
This working together only appears to be a physical collaboration,
for everything physical is only an outer expression of spirit.
Materialism has alienated human beings from the world of the dead.
The time must come when we no longer alienate ourselves from the dead
for it is our alienation that prevents them from spiritualizing the physical world.
Rudolf Steiner: Staying Connected
"George, can you tell me what happens at the moment of death?”
“I can tell you what changes your spirit will undergo,
but I cannot tell you what you will experience,
as that will vary from individual to individual.
No one can tell you what unique experience you will receive;
that is for you alone to look forward to.
“The first thing you will discover is that you still exist.
You still think, you feel emotion.
Instantly you will discover too that you are not what you were
while you occupied that human body.
You will realize that your senses have undergone an expansion-
your sight is not limited to that which your human eyes could see,
your hearing is not limited to that which your human ears heard.
Now you are aware of new senses.
The sense of knowing.
A new consciousness.
Great joy comes with these discoveries, on a personal level.”
Karen Peebles: The Bridge Between Worlds
(conversations with her deceased Uncle George)
The whole must be seen as of more vital importance than the part,
and this not as a dream, a vision, a theory,
a process of wishful thinking, a hypothesis or an urge.
It is realized as an innate necessity and as inevitable.
It connotes death,
but death as beauty, as joy, as spirit in action,
as the consummation of all good.
Alice Bailey and Djwhal Khul: Esoteric Healing
So it happens that once people wake up in the next world
and begin to get used to the conditions,
they usually have a great sense of physical well-being,
and a most interesting and instructive life.
The conditions of living are utterly different from ours.
There is no money as we understand it because,
thought being immediately demonstrated,
there is no need to purchase objective possessions.
What you are able to think of clearly, you have.
The chief difference between the two worlds is, once more,
that results come so much more slowly in this world,
owing to the inertia of physical matter,
which over there they do not have to meet.
Emmet Fox: Life After Death Described and Explained
People have sometimes attended their own funerals before passing over.
It is worthy of note that, since death makes no general change in us,
those who possess a sense of humor retain it,
and those who do not, continue in the lack;
and on such an occasion as this,
those who do possess that useful gift are sometimes much amused at the proceedings,
and those without it react also as might be expected.
Emmet Fox: Life After Death Described and Explained
Any answer to death that an individual seeks and finds satisfactory depends,
in the last resort, on the individual’s attitude to life,
the intensity of his fear of death,
and the particular kind of his death-fear.
It is obvious, too, however, that such an answer cannot be merely speculative,
but must actually be accepted, made one’s own.
And it must be added that an answer to death found satisfactory at one time
may not be so at another.
Thus there can be no universal answer,
least of all a universally valid one.
A genuine reconciliation with death may not in fact be possible for some;
for others almost any argument may modify their apprehension of death
and free them from despair at its inevitability and apparent absurdity.
Jacques Choron: Death and Western Thought
I enjoy life twice as much as others do.
Now that I see my life limited in time,
I want to extend it in weight.
I want to arrest the speed of its flight by the speed of my grasp
and by the vigor of my use to compensate for the haste of its flow.
To the extent that the possession of life is short,
I have to make it the more profound and full.
---Montaigne
We can say about everything experienced in the human realm in yonder world
that it is much more intimately connected with the life of the soul.
When the dead become acquainted with a soul,
he gets to know this soul as if he himself were within it.
After death, knowledge of another soul is as intimate
as knowledge here on earth of our own finger, head or ear--
we feel ourselves within the other soul.
The connection is much more intimate than it can ever be on earth.
Rudolph Steiner: Death As Transformation
Why not welcome Transition?
Learn to glory in experience,
which is the gift of wise old age,
and look forward to the Great Adventure which awaits you.
You know well---in your highest moments--
that Transition means realization without any physical plane limitations.
Alice Bailey. Djwhal Khul: Discipleship in the New Age-Volume Two
Even Zen masters have their individuality,
and their ways of leaving this world are different from one another.
Master Gempo Yamamoto's way of passing away is specially interesting.
After the Master reached his ninetieth birthday,
he was thinking of closing the curtain of his puppet show in this world.
He began fasting a number of times.
At one o'clock on the night of June 3,
the Master requested a cup of wine from his attendant monk,
took it and showed his enjoyment.
After ten minutes he said briefly:
"I am going out on a journey, prepare my clothing,"
and lay down and passed away at 1:15 AM in his ninety-sixth year.
Someone said that it was suicide,
but it is quite sure it was not a usual suicide.
The fruit was ripe enough.
Unusually ripe fruit falls down unintentionally,
but this fruit fell down intentionally, being ripe enough.
Professor Koji Sato
It is time now--
it is long past time--
to talk about death as the adventure that it is.
Learn the truth for yourself,
and tell everyone you know.
With 160,000 people dying daily,
it is tragic that in the twenty-first century
so many still die in ignorance and fear.
Roberta Grimes: The Fun of Dying
Death and limitation are synonymous terms.
When the consciousness is focused in form
and identified entirely with the principle of limitation,
it regards freedom from form life as death.
Alice A. Bailey. Djwhal Khul: Esoteric Astrology
And then a Word sounds forth.
The descended (human being), radiating point of light ascends,
responsive to the dimly heard recalling note,
attracted to its emanating source.
This man calls death
and this the soul calls life.
Alice A. Bailey. Djwhal Khul: Esoteric Healing
It is Heidegger who has offered the most intellectually consistent
and rigorous account of death in modern philosophy.
Heidegger’s own approach to death
stresses that how we understand death
will depend on the attitude we take towards it,
so that what we say about death is in complex and intimate ways
interrelated with how we feel, think, and talk about ourselves,
about how we are.
Professor George Pattison: Heidegger on Death: A Critical Theological Essay
Then we come again to this extraordinary question of the nature of death.
That must be answered,
neither with fear, nor by escaping from that absolute fact,
nor by belief, nor hope.
There is an answer, the right answer,
but to find the right answer one has to put the right question.
But you cannot possibly put the right question
if you are merely seeking a way out of it,
if the question is born of fear, of despair and of loneliness.
Then if you do put the right question with regard to reality,
with regard to man's relationship to man,
and what that thing called love is,
and also this immense question of death,
then out of the right question will come the right answer.
From that answer comes right action.
Right action is in the answer itself.
And we are responsible
Krishnamurti: Talks in Europe 1968
IT is one of the many evils resulting from the absurdly erroneous teaching
as to conditions after death which is unfortunately current in our western world,
that those who have recently shaken off this mortal coil
are usually much puzzled and often very seriously frightened
at finding everything so different from what their religion had led them to expect.
The mental attitude of a large number of such people
was pithily voiced the other day by an English general,
who three days after his death met one of the band of helpers
whom he had known in physical life.
After expressing his great relief
that he had at last found someone with whom he was able to communicate,
his first remark was: “But if I am dead, where am I?
For if this is heaven I don’t think much of it;
and if it is hell, it is better than I expected.”
Charles Leadbeater: Invisible Helpers (1899)
Maurice Sendak sat with the people he loved as they were dying and drew them.
To some, this might seem like a perverse or weird thing to do,
but I understand it completely and intuitively.
In fact, I am doing something like it myself.
Katie Roiphe; The Violet Hour: Great Writers at the End
He monitored his death with indifferent curiosity.
“How am I doing, doc?” he would ask any one of his medical friends.
He seemed incapable of or uninterested
in doing anything that might ‘prolong the misery’;
that was his assessment of the usual medical treatment we seek
in order to sustain life in a constant battle of ideas versus the natural order.
Seeking medical help in any form was out of the question,
so it took a while to realize that he might actually die,
because of his indifference to the outcome of his situation.
To the end of his days there was a wild card up his sleeve.
He’d come close to dying more than once in his life already.
The fact is, by all accounts,
he’d already died and been re-born years before,
not spiritually, but literally, physically.
Louis Brawley: Goner: The Final Travels of UG Krishnamurti
Life is a long affair,
seventy, eighty, a hundred years.
Death is in one moment.
It is an atomic phenomenon, concentrated.
It is more vital than life because life is spread out.
Life can never be as intense as death can be,
and life can never be as beautiful as death can be,
because it is spread out.
It is always lukewarm.
At the moment of death the whole of life has come to a boiling point.
Everything evaporates from this world to the other,
from the body to the bodiless.
It is the greatest transformation that happens.
One should be silent,
one should be respectful,
one should not be wavering,
because it will happen in a single moment
and you may miss it.
Osho The Empty Boat: Encounters with Nothingness
One should be watchful when a wise man dies
because he dies in a different way.
An ignorant man cannot die that way.
You have your life and you have your death.
If you have been foolish in your life,
how can you be wise in your death?
Death is the outcome, the total outcome,
the conclusion.
In death your whole life is involved,
in essence your whole life is there,
so a foolish man dies in a foolish way.
Life is unique, death is also unique.
Nobody else can live your life
and nobody else can die your death,
only you.
It is unique, it never happens again.
Styles differ, not only in life but also in death.
Osho : The Empty Boat: Encounters with Nothingness
The Buddhist Bardo teachings tell us
that unless we are comfortable with the idea of death, and all it implies,
we won’t be able to enjoy our lives fully.
Embracing death and its unlimited boundless freedom
should be our life’s most important work.
Knowing that we will all die one day
focuses the need to live in the present.
If we can begin to master this
we can die like a newborn baby,
free of all worries and fear.
Felicity Warner: A Safe Journey Home: The simple guide to achieving a peaceful death
Creating our own good ‘philosophy’ about death
and addressing the big thoughts from the safety of our own inner world,
while we are still well,
certainly gives us strength when helping others.
Some say that facing these fears is an essential part of dying,
and that from working through them
we may reach a stronger and safer place.
Death is so much a matter of perspective –
its illusionary nature can provide us with pertinent clues
about the extraordinary nature of life.
Felicity Warner: A Safe Journey Home: The simple guide to achieving a peaceful death
And if I think of others whose deaths I have witnessed or heard of,
it is always the same: they have all died their own deaths.
Those men who carried their death inside their armour, like a prisoner;
those women who grew very old, and tiny,
and then departed this life discreetly and magisterially,
in an immense bed, as if on a stage, in the presence of their whole family, the servants and the dogs.
Even the children, the very young ones too, did not die simply any child's death,
but summoned up all their command and gave death to what they already were
and what they would have been.
And what a rueful beauty was lent the women at times
when they were pregnant and stood, hands involuntarily resting on their large bellies,
in which there was a twofold fruit: a child, and a death.
Did not the replete, almost nourishing smile on their faces,
free of all else, come from their intermittent notion that both were growing?
Rainer Maria Rilke: The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge
Genghis Khan conquered more than twice as much as any other man in history. Genghis Khan passed away in his camp bed,
surrounded by a loving family, faithful friends, and loyal soldiers,
or, in the words of the Mongols,
who have an abhorrence of mentioning death or illness,
he “ascended into heaven.”
At burial, Genghis Khan disappeared silently
back into the vast landscape of Mongolia from whence he came.
His followers buried him anonymously
in the soil of his homeland without a mausoleum,
a temple, a pyramid, or so much as a small tombstone
to mark the place where he lay.
According to Mongol belief,
the body of the dead should be left in peace
and did not need a monument
because the soul was no longer there….
Jack Weatherford: Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World
The next world is actually all around us here.
The so-called dead are carrying on their lives
right here where we are now,
but in their own world
and in their own way.
Emmet Fox: The Emmet Fox Reader
If I were you
I would work on the righteousness and purity of Spirit.
Every day you squeeze five minutes out of your day
— I know it is going to be hard --
to be totally present and say, “Holy Spirit, my Holy Spirit,
of this day I do beseech you to present to me the quagmire of my dishonesty
and feed it to me until I have consumed it all and there is none left.”
Hard to do, but if you are going to go into immortality,
you don't have any other choice
because that is what is keeping you from that.
Ramtha: Crossing the River
We were born alone and naked.
As our life unfolds we go through all manner of antics:
needing, having, losing, suffering, crying, trying …
but then we die, and we die alone.
It does not make any difference whether we are rich or poor,
known or unknown.
Death is the great leveler.
Our relationships with one another are like the chance meeting of two strangers in a parking lot.
They look at each other and smile.
That is all there is between them.
They leave and never see each other again.
That is what life is--
just a moment, a meeting, a passing, and then it is gone.
If you understand this, there is no time to fight.
There is no time to argue.
There is no time to hurt one another.
Whether you think about it in terms of humanity,
nations, communities, or individuals,
there is no time for anything less than truly appreciating
the brief interaction we have with one another.
Chagdud Tulku Rinpoche: Life in Relation to Death
You exist in time, but you belong to eternity.
You are a penetration of eternity into the world of time.
You are deathless, living in a body of death.
Your consciousness knows no death, no birth.
It is only your body that is born and dies.
But you are not aware of your consciousness;
you are not conscious of your consciousness.
And that is the whole art of meditation:
becoming conscious of consciousness itself.
OSHO
It takes time to talk about all the subjects important to us
and to let what we learn trickle into our brains.
Remember, those synaptic pathways are formed over time,
not in a moment.
And the more we open ourselves to thinking about death,
the more we find there is to learn.
Susan Abel Lieberman. Death, Dying and Dessert. Reflections on Twenty Questions About Dying
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
To seek life, it must be destroyed:
the one seeking real LIFE must himself die.
Ramesh S. Balsekar: A Net of Jewels
You really have no right to defend yourself against death--
either your own or someone else's.
Every moment of your living
should take the inevitability of death totally into account.
If you are living consciously,
then (when you are obliged to encounter the death of someone else)
you are equipped to be as free as possible of the ego-based ritualization.
You do not defend yourself against the mere fact of the death--
but (rather) you participate in the entire affair,
even continue to engage in that relationship,
with the least possible impediment created by your own reaction,
your own un-Happiness relative to death,
your own presumption of separation.
Adi Da Samraj: Easy Death
You are going to die.
There is no doubt about that.
And everybody you know is going to die.
Thus, it is your business, while alive,
to confront and understand the great fact of death
and be free of egoic ritualization relative to it.
Part of the essential matter associated with Spiritual life
is to deal with that very disease, that very ritual response to death--
so that you are free to die and to change (altogether),
and also free to have others do the same thing in your lifetime.
Adi Da Samraj: Easy Death
Visitor: When the beingness leaves the body, can we call it death?
Maharaj: Death is the wrong word. We can call it liberation.
When hot water cools, we do not call it death.
The cooling of the body, when beingness is no more, is similar.
Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj: Nothing is Everything
Before your last physical birth,
while you still resided in the realms of spirit,
you or your guardian angel decided it was tine to make another journey to Earth
and, at the time, you knew the highlights of your mission.
You also knew how long you would remain.
The timing of your birth and death were recorded
as a built-in cosmic clock in the heart seed atom.
Earlyne Chaney: The Mystery of Death & Dying: Initiation at the Moment of Death
There is a science to death—there is a right way to die.
There is an art to it.
Mastering the techniques of dying
makes death a certain opportunity for the ultimate liberation.
Earlyne Chaney: The Mystery of Death & Dying: Initiation at the Moment of Death
Michel de Montaigne once wrote:
“To begin depriving death of its greatest advantage over us
let us deprive death of its strangeness,
let us frequent it, let us get used to it. . . .
A man who has learned how to die has unlearned how to be a slave.”
Learn how to die, unlearn death’s strangeness,
become its master.
It is not death that has a profound stranglehold over us but the fear of death.
Erica Brown: Happier Endings: A Meditation on Life and Death
"Dying one's own way" becomes a common theme in dying well,
whether that way is to accept death or to fight it,
to confide in counselors or to let God decide one's fate.
In actual life situations, the value of "dying one's own way"
encourages the creation, modification, and combination of elements of cultural scripts.
That people construct individual ways to die
by creatively drawing on multiple scripts and then negotiating their meanings with important others
may fulfill postindustrial cultural demands for diversity,
but it also results in a degree of unpredictability
that challenges professionals trained in reductionist thinking.
Living in a global postindustrial world offers us many ways to die,
but also requires that we have our individual approaches
that contribute to the perception of our "selves" as unique,
even if the mixtures we uniquely create
make us unpredictable to medical staff, to bioethicists, or to chaplains.
Susan Orpett Long: Final Days: Japanese Culture and Choice at the End of Life
Great yogis who have mastered Dzogchen awareness meditation
are able to liberate themselves directly into the great clear light at the moment of death.
Practitioners who have at least developed the capacity for occasional lucid dreaming
may still recognize the apparitions that arise within the sidpa bardo as illusory.
Reportedly, at the moment of death when the mental body is uncoupled from the physical body,
all experiences are magnified by a factor of seven.
At these moments there is still a possibility to achieve liberation.
Michael Katz, introduction to: Chogyal Namkhai Norbu: Dream Yoga and the Practice of Natural Light.
{to die while still embodied..}
Since the first moment of separation the person has been ever-present.
Then suddenly in a split second the sense of "I" drops away completely.
There is no gradual transcendental diffusion of the person
but its complete disappearance.
And the unimaginable has happened,
the total absence of self has been seen.
The void has been recognized.
All concepts of space and time become meaningless.
There is only omnipresence.
Here and there are seen to be the same.
After this it is very difficult to take your previous life seriously.
Richard Sylvester: I Hope You Die Soon: words on non-duality
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
We pretend that we’ve lost paradise
only for the joy of finding it again.
When paradise is regained,
it’s realised that it was never lost.
But as long as we’re searching for paradise,
it is impossible to notice that this is already it.
Richard Sylvester: The Book of No One: Talks and Dialogues on Non-Duality and Liberation
Awareness is eternal,
it knows no death.
Only unawareness dies.
So if you remain unconscious, asleep,
you will have to die again.
If you want to get rid of this whole misery
of being born and dying again and again,
if you want to get rid of the wheel of birth and death,
you will have to become absolutely alert.
You will have to reach higher and higher into consciousness.
OSHO
Life never dies.
At death, only forms die.
Life that was in-formed then takes another form.
So what are you afraid of?
You are independent of everything.
However, you'll never see yourself as independent of everything
until you release your grip on everything.
Take that first step.
You won't fall;
you'll float.
Roy Melvyn: Life Never Dies
As a meditator
one tries to approach one's own timeless nature
in each state of absorption,
but usually remains trapped
and influenced by changing experiences.
Only after years of practice
can the state be experienced
that one simply gets as a gift in death.
Lama Ole Nydahl
Buddhist masters see death not as an isolated event
but as one more change in a never-ending cycle of changes.
Death is a potent reminder to use life well.
Knowing death is looming offshore,
we shouldn’t wait until it overpowers us before developing
the meditative skills necessary to achieve
the great potential of the mind at the moment of death.
Chagdud Tulku Rinpoche Life in Relation to Death
"Birth is much more of a shock than death.
Sometimes when you die you do not realize it,
but birth almost always implies a sharp and sudden recognition.
So there is no need to fear death.
And I who have died more times than I care to tell,
speak these words to tell you so."
Seth
Actually, death and birth are not two events,
they are two ends of the same phenomenon --
just like two sides of the same coin.
If a man can have one side of a coin in his hand,
the other side will be in his hand automatically.
It's not possible to have one side of a coin in my hand
and then wonder how to get the other side --
the other side becomes available automatically.
Death and birth are two sides of the same phenomenon.
If death occurs in a conscious state,
then birth inevitably takes place in a conscious state.
If death occurs in an unconscious state,
then birth happens in a state of unconsciousness too.
If a person dies fully conscious at the time of his death,
he will be filled with consciousness at the moment of his next birth also.
OSHO
To cut the root of all suffering,
Buddha advises us to focus on that which is beyond birth or death,
which has never arisen and will never disappear.
He points not to the pictures but to the mirror itself,
shows us the ocean beneath the waves.
No conditioned experience or outer situation can truly satisfy.
Only mind's open, clear, and limitless light
is totally blissful and absolute.
His teachings, be it on life, rebirth, and what is in between,
aim only to share this certitude.
Lama Ole Nydahl
And at last my own death will steal upon me . . .
A gentle, painless death,
far from the sea when it comes
To take me down,
borne down with the years in ripe old age
With all my people here in blessed peace around me.
Homer: on the reunion of Penelope and Odysseus
The experience of dying is the most commonly overlooked measure
of our wider history as human beings as we attempt –
sometimes successfully, sometimes tragically –
to live out a life that is always both inherited from, and intimately tied to other people.
The reflecting pool at the end of life reveals
the wider context and conditions of our dependency on these others.
In good and comforting ways,
or simply sorrowful ones,
the moral and social quality of our living is truly measured
by the pattern of our comings and goings.
Allan Kellehear: A Social History of Dying
“Paradise--
I see flowers
from the cottage where I lie.
Yaitsu— Death Poem 1807
quoted from: Karen Wyatt: What Really Matters: 7 Lessons for Living from the Stories of the Dying
Weary not of us, for we are very beautiful;
it is out of very jealousy and proper pride that we entered the veil.
On the day when we cast off the body’s veil from the soul,
you will see that we are the envy and the despair
of men and the Polestars.
We are not that beauty who tomorrow will become a crone;
till eternity we are young and heart-comforting and fair of stature.
If that veil has become worn out,
the beauty has not grown old;
the life of the Veil is transient and we are boundless life.
Rumi
The worst kind of solitude when you're dying
is not being able to say to the people you love that you're going to die.
To feel your death approaching and not to be able to talk about it
or to be able to share with others what this leave-taking inspires in you
often results directly in mental breakdown, a kind of delirium,
or some manifestation of pain that at least gives you something you are allowed to talk about.
Usually the dying person knows.
What they need is some help in being able to articulate that knowledge.
But everyone else's distress makes it hard for them to talk–
the dying are in essence being forced into a position of having to protect their survivors.
Once they are able to say 'I am going to die' they become, in Marie de Hennezel's words,
'not the victim of death but rather the protagonist in their own dying'.
Elizabeth Fenwick: The Art of Dying
Death is but Birth progressed into consummation.
In birth the child comes forth out of darkness into the light of the sun.
In death the child is born into the greater light of the Heavens of God— no more, no less.
Death therefore ends nothing
but carries forward what has been begun and,
as it stands between the earth phase of life and the life of the Spheres,
so it is a sacred thing enshrining a transaction blended of both,
and so a Sacrament, as we use and understand that word.
G. Vale Owen: The Life Beyond the Veil
Failure is important.
Picking your broken self up for one more ride is necessary.
Be thankful for your fragile, yet resilient self.
This isn’t a race to win a medal at the end.
There is no grand prize waiting for us.
There is simply the ride and our own personal legends that follow quietly in our footsteps.
The beauty in the every day
and the frailty in the moments that just flicked out of reach.
Through failure, build the courage to live your life so powerfully
that when Death finally comes to your door,
he knocks gently and asks for permission to enter the room.
Renee Robyn
reneerobynphotography.com
Let the dead live in peace.
Don't cling to your family and friends, don't let your sorrow at their depatrure hold them down
and, above all, don't try to communicate with them by calling them back.
This only troubles them and prevents them from breaking free.
Pray for them, send them your love,
think of them becoming freer and freer and rising higher and higher towards the light.
If you really love them, be certain that you will be with them again one day.
That is the truth.
How many times have I already told you this:
where your heart is, there you will be one day.'
Omraam Mikhaël Aïvanhov
Dying changes what life means
if you are willing for it to be so,
and only if you are willing to pay,
to lose your old ideas,
often by handfuls at a time.
Dying must be allowed to change everything.
Stephen Jenkinson
If we cannot be present during sleep,
if we lose ourselves every night,
what chance do we have to be aware when death comes?
If we enter our dreams and interact with the mind’s images
as if they are real, we should not expect to be free in the state after death.
Look to your experience in dreams to know how you will fare in death.
Look to your experience of sleep to discover whether or not you are truly awake.
Tenzin Wangyal Rinpoche: The Tibetan Yogas of Dream and Sleep
When one sleeps or when one dies, all is well.
We are here because we are passing through one phase of our aeon-long evolutionary journey.
We have become human from lower stages of our own line of evolutionary unfoldment.
And as we evolve we shall become godlike.
Man has the instinct of eternity in his breast.
He senses that all of him is of the Universe.
So whether we sleep, or whether we die,
all is well,
and because we have come here now,
that means we have come here before and will come again,
as we follow the universal rule of cyclic round.
G. de Purucker: What Death Really Is
When someone dies with whom you have a relationship,
the conditions of your relationship have changed--
because one of you no longer has the medium of the gross body
through which to live the relationship.
You will live through your own gross body,
but the gross body of the other person has ceased.
The person who communicated through that gross body-mind
is no longer present in that familiar form.
Maintain feeling attention.
Do not recoil.
That one is dead, and you tend to feel only separation
and your recoil into sorrow, anger, and fear.
Simply permit the relationship to exist.
If you do not recoil, you will remain sensitive to the present condition of the relationship.
You will be able to feel and consciously participate in that relationship,
however it may be communicated to you.
Adi Da Samraj: Easy Death
So let the lightning shatter into dust
Our senses’ houses:
We shall build soul-houses
On iron-firm,
light-woven knowledge,
And outer downfall
Shall be the dawning
Of the inmost soul.
Rudolph Steiner
excerpt from To the Friends in Berlin
Death is a moment of change.
If you cannot deal with change in the ordinary round of days,
you will have great difficulty dealing with somebody’s death—as well as with your own.
A moment of change, such as the death of another, propels you into Mystery.
You must confront a wall of ending that you cannot cross.
Whatever may be available psychically to your experience
you still cannot cross the barrier.
No form of conditioned knowledge enables you to cross it.
You are projected into the Divine Mystery
That is altogether True of you, even in the present moment.
Adi Da Samraj: Easy Death
Nirvana is where there is no birth, no extinction;
it is seeing into the state of Suchness,
absolutely transcending all the categories constructed by mind;
for it is the Tathagata’s inner consciousness.
Lankavatara Sutra
“My greatest pleasure is to go there [the cemetery] to say my beads,
and meditate on that unending happiness which so many of them are already enjoying.”
Father Damien of Molokai
Since time immemorial I have been free.
Birth and death are only doors through with I come in and come out.
Birth and death are only a hide and seek game.
So take my hand, smile to me,
say good bye, so that we’ll meet again.
We have already met at the base,
and we’ll meet one another in all walks of life.
from the Pali Canon
The study of dying is like gazing into a reflecting pool.
The waters there reflect back to us the kinds of people we have become.
Behind the fragile and temporary images of our individual selves
that appear on its surface exist suggestions of less familiar company –
strange tides of history, cultural undertows that sweep in and out of our lives.
The ripple of these forces tug and work at our identities,
at first to create them,
and finally to test them before their eventual dismissal at death.
These are influences so subtle, indeed so intimate in our day-to-day lives,
that we often barely notice their workings underneath the modern obsession
to present ourselves to others as distinct and individual.
Yet, dying conduct shows their power over us in sharp relief.
Allan Kellehear: A Social History of Dying
Developing a conscious relationship with the experience of sleep
spontaneously develops a conscious relationship with the experience of death.
Through learning to sleep consciously,
one learns to die consciously.
Thanatos
The moment of waking is especially favourable
for the dead to approach us.
At the moment of waking,
very much comes from the dead to every human being.
A great deal of what we undertake in life
is really inspired in us by the dead
or by beings of the higher hierarchies,
although we attribute it to ourselves,
imagining that it comes from our own soul.
Rudolf Steiner: The Dead Are With Us
All of you sitting here now
are in constant communication with the dead,
only ordinary consciousness knows nothing of it
because it lies in the subconscious.
Clairvoyant consciousness does not initiate anything new
but merely brings to consciousness what is present all the time in the spiritual world.
All of you are in constant communication with the dead.
Rudolf Steiner: The Dead Are With Us
W. Somerset Maugham said:
" Death is a very dull, dreary affair,
and my advice to you is to have nothing whatsoever to do with it.”
Death is neither dull nor dreary
when welcomed as the ecstatic affirmation
of what makes life worth living.
Thanatos
When we put a question to the dead, or say something to him,
what we say comes from him, comes to us from him.
He inspires in our soul what we ask him, what we say to him.
And when he answers us or says something to us,
this comes out of our own soul.
It is a process with which a human being in the physical world is quite unfamiliar.
He feels that what he says comes out of his own being.
In order to establish communication with those who have died,
we must adapt ourselves to hear from them what we ourselves say,
and to receive from our our own soul what they answer.
The dead are always there,
always among us and around us,
and the fact that they are not perceived is largely due
to lack of understanding of this reversed form of communication.
Rudolf Steiner: The Dead Are With Us
To everyone who may, like myself, have been for half a long lifetime
in familiar touch with those conditions of human life
lying beyond the change commonly called death,
there is something inexpressibly ludicrous
in the grave discussion as to whether there is or is not any continuity
of consciousness for us after we have each done with our respective physical bodies.
The matter has nothing to do with opinions or arguments.
For vast multitudes all over the civilised world
the continuity of life in the case of friends who have passed on--
the invariable operation of the laws which govern the immediate future--
is personal knowledge gained by the exercise of faculties of superphysical sense
which, though not yet exercised by all, are so frequently available that all
who have enough intelligence to do so can profit by them.
Life "beyond the grave," to use an old-fashioned phrase,
is a controversy which ought to be regarded as no less out of date
than a dispute as to whether the earth is round or flat.
A.P. Sinnett: What Happens After Death
In a sense, truly, there is no afterlife,
there’s just life in different forms, that’s all.
There is no afterlife,
you will always be alive, forever.
You are an eternal being.
You may change your form, you may change your dimension,
you may change your experience,
but there is no afterlife.
Bashar: Dream A Little Dream
Many of your die kicking and screaming
because you have trained the ego to think of death as an actual annihilation of identity,
and it’s not.
So as long as the ego thinks that when you die you actually cease to exist,
it’s going to go into survival mode and it’s going to panic,
and it’s going to kick and scream and resist all the way.
But if you start to train the ego to understand that ‘you are a part of me,
I will always have you at my side, I will never abandon you,
you will always be there with me, you will always be all right,’
in that then, the ego can relax
and can understand that you are not discarding it,
that its not going to cease to exist,
it has a place in your total consciousness.
And then you won’t panic and you won’t resist the idea of going into spirit,
which is just another phase of Life.
Bashar: Dream A Little Dream
To die “naturally” is to find a way to have a graceful death
when the prognosis is terminal and further treatments are of questionable value.
It is not a rejection of medical science,
but rather an attempt to use the sophistication of modern medicine to treat
—in a different, better way—those who are seriously ill or near death.
Like natural childbirth, natural dying is a way to cope with one of the great milestones in life,
a movement searching for ways to bring closure to lives well lived,
and to help us appreciate that all of life is about connections,
relationships, and unconditional love.
It is helping us feel comfortable again holding, kissing,
caressing loved ones as they die,
and reinvesting death with a new kind of sacredness.
Marilyn Webb: The Good Death: The New American Search to Reshape the End of Life
When I came to in my body it was dreadful, so dreadful….
The experience had been so beautiful that I didn’t want to come back.
I had wanted to stay there…and yet I came back.
From that moment it was a real struggle to live my life inside my body,
with all the limitations I experienced at the time….
But later I realized that this experience was in fact a blessing,
for now I know that the mind and body are separate
and that there’s life after death.
Pim van Lommel: Consciousness Beyond Life: The Science of the Near-Death Experience
Life has to continue, not “you” have to continue.
Life is not your lifespan or your children’s lifespan
or the lifespan of what you hold dear.
How about holding dear the fact that nothing you hold dear lasts?
How about holding that close to your bosom?
That’s making meaning of the end of life,
the willingness to do that.
Stephen Jenkinson
I have sat with hundreds of dying people and their families
and had the burdensome privilege of trying to help them die.
I saw that what passed for a fitting and deserved dying
was very often sedated dying or managed dying
or defeated dying or collapse.
I saw far too many people with well-controlled pain and symptoms
die in an unarticulated, low-grade, grinding, and unspectacular terror anyway.
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
One must seriously examine the origin of the arising of fear,
where fear abides,
and where it ceases,
in order to be completely free from the fear of death.
Anyen Rinpoche: Dying with Confidence: A Tibetan Buddhist Guide to Preparing for Death
An attitude of utter self-surrender to a perfectly natural happening
should have the incidental advantage regarding the actual process of death
inasmuch as the inherent relaxation in such an attitude
would make the death-process that much easier and more bearable physically,
instead of the tension inherent in the attitude of resistance and recoil
that would make the process that much more difficult and more painful.
An attitude of relaxed cooperation with what is happening (and cannot be avoided)
can only be the result of a deep understanding of one’s true nature.
It is only the conviction that we are the timeless, spaceless noumenon
and not the temporal and finite appearance that this body is,
that would make such an attitude possible.
Ramesh S. Balsekar: Explorations into the Eternal
For many, the diagnosis of a terminal illness or the experience of that illness
serves as a roar of awakening.
It ends the routine and indifference.
People are no longer paralyzed by the fear
that moving beyond their status quo means risking death.
They know that death is inevitable and therefore
experience a new freedom to live authentically.
Because they know they cannot escape death,
they embrace life—their own life.
The “prescription” of how to live given by family, culture,
profession, religion, or friends loses its grasp.
In this way, knowing that you have a terminal illness is of value.
David Kuhl, M.D.: What Dying People Want: Practical Wisdom for the End of Life
A correct grasp of how to die
necessarily produces an expanded philosophy of how to live more abundantly,
however short or long your time of physical life.
Anya Foos-Graber: Deathing
A conscious death allows you to utilize the death process
in a way that transforms what appears to be a mere biological disfunction, or accident,
into a spiritual art form--
the tool for the transformation of consciousness that it should be.
Conscious dying has effects exponentially powerful,
benign and beneficial to the individual, society and all life.
Anya Foos-Graber: Deathing
You have during your lifetime looked in the direction of the bridge that spans our worlds
and decided it is too frightening to look at for very long.
You have been told not to look, taught to fear that sight.
Okay. That was then. This is now.
When you come to the bridge, in your time, you will arrive heavily burdened by life,
by density, by duality, by the calculation of time, by unsubstantiated fears.
Loath will you step onto it, shaking will you set your weight on the bridge, but wait!
each step the weight will lift, when you see that you are not dying, not dead, but living still.
With every pace, the dawning of incredible new thoughts rise within your understanding.
Fear falls from you like dry leaves.
You travel now on the wings of knowledge, across that bridge,
laughing, as a child would laugh running toward the arms of a parent,
lighthearted, you are coming home.
The bridge you have called Death,
and when you have thought about it at all you have misunderstood it.
That’s okay. No one told you. That was then.
-but never forget that you have been told,
and that this is now, this is now, my friend,
and now you have been freed from the greatest fear known to mankind.
Karen Peebles: The Bridge Between Worlds
(Conversations with her deceased uncle)
The breathing of the dying man grew fainter and fainter
until it ceased altogether.
Then again I witnessed what had now become a familiar spectacle to me,
the formation of the spirit body above the discarded earthly body.
When it was complete the angel child grasped the hand of the now angel father,
each gazed into the eyes of the other with an expression of tender affection,
and with faces aglow with joy and happiness they vanished.
Later on in the day, the widow (Mrs. Campbell) said to me
"I am very glad my dear husband saw B. before he died;
it was natural that B. should come for him to take him to the angels,
for they loved each other dearly.
I shall now be able to think of them as always together and happy.
And when I receive my summons
I know that they will both come for me.”
Sir William Barrett: . Deathbed Visions
I have changed, and yet I have not changed.
My mind is still the same, eager and thirsting for knowledge
as when I was in the third dimension of earth life,
only now the frontiers of revelation are open and welcoming,
avenues of research lead into domains of the Spirit which,
even in my most aspiring dreams, had never manifested themselves.
I am free, as far as my progress will allow,
and believe me, the barriers are in one’s own consciousness,
to pursue my explorations into the nature of Eternity.
The only hindrances to progress are from one’s limited reception of Light.
Helen Greaves: Testimony of Light: An Extraordinary Message of Life After Death
The Perception of an Unearthly Environment
People often find themselves in a dazzling landscape
with gorgeous colors, remarkable flowers,
and sometimes also incredibly beautiful music.
Some see cities and splendid buildings.
What I saw was too beautiful for words:
I was looking at a magnificent landscape
full of flowers and plants that I couldn’t actually name.
It all looked hundreds of miles away.
And yet I could see everything in detail—even without glasses, although in real life I have bad eyesight.
It was both far away and close.
Exceptionally beautiful.
The best way to describe it would be: a heavenly sight.
I arrived in a royal realm, or at least that’s what it smelled like.
The atmosphere, insofar as you could call it that, was divine,
a flowery, sweet-smelling environment,
which was completely three-dimensional and about a thousand times more beautiful
than my favorite holiday destination in spring.
Pim van Lommel: Consciousness Beyond Life: The Science of the Near-Death Experience
Think of it, you who have scarcely ever a comfortable moment,
you who in the stress of your busy life can hardly remember
when you last felt free from fatigue;
what would it be to you never again to know
the meaning of the words weariness and pain?
We have so mismanaged our teaching in these Western countries
on the subject of immortality that usually a dead man
finds it difficult to believe that he is dead,
simply because he still sees and hears, thinks and feels.
'I am not dead', he will often say,
'I am alive as much as ever, and better than I ever was before'.
Of course, he is;
but that is exactly what he ought to have expected,
if he had been properly taught.
C.W. Leadbetter: Life After Death
This is the first and most prominent fact --
that we have not here a strange new life,
but a continuation of the present one.
We are not separated from the dead,
for they are here about us all the time.
The only separation is the limitation of our consciousness,
so that we have lost, not our loved ones,
but the power to see them.
C.W. Leadbetter: Life After Death
At the moment of death
your physical body and your spiritual body start separating.
Ordinarily, they are so involved with each other
that you don’t feel their separation.
But at the moment of death,
just before death happens,
both the bodies start getting unidentified with each other.
Now their ways are going to be different;
the physical body is going to the physical elements,
and the spiritual body is on its pilgrimage onwards,
to a new birth, in a new form and in a new womb.
Osho: The Art of Living and Dying
“Then I had this magnificent, wonderful vision.
There were the gates.
I had always envisioned that the entrance to my paradise
would be through these magnificent gates.
They’re gates of life—of light.
They’re living gates. They’re moving all the time.
They’re not wrought iron or stone or wood.
There was this beautiful gate opening,
and there were all of my family coming backward and forward to greet me.
“I said, ‘Do you always have to go through gates like that?’
And they said, ’No, this is because this is what you have always thought,
and you will have what you have imagined.
You built this.
This is yours—the gateway—your entrance of light.”
A.D. Mattson: Witness from Beyond
Let’s never forget, as we reach for knowledge of the deeper world,
that the inhabitants of that deeper world are reaching out to us.
By my observation, the residents of the Other Side
expend much more thought and energy in trying to contact us
than most of us ever expend on trying to communicate with them.
And like Dante—who failed to see or hear Beatrice over all the years
she was trying to call him awake in dreams and visitations--
we often spend much of our lives deaf and blind
to the fact that our authentic spiritual mentors are constantly calling to us.
Robert Moss: The Dreamers Book of the Dead:
A Soul Traveler’s Guide to Death, Dying, and the Other Side
