Welcome to Death Knells
The Death of Fearing Death
This site shares Death Knells to misconceptions about Death.
Living beautifully and dying beautifully,
Death is fearlessly embraced as the Birth of new Life awareness.
Living beautifully and dying beautifully,
Death is fearlessly embraced as the Birth of new Life awareness.
John Hayes, a psychotherapist in his fifties
who was one of the first volunteers at Hopkins,
"felt like mysteries were being unveiled
and yet it all felt familiar
and more like I was being reminded of things I had already known.
I had a sense of initiation
into dimensions of existence most people never know exist,
including the distinct sense that death is illusory,
in the sense that it is a door we walk through
into another plane of existence,
that we’re sprung from an eternity
to which we will return.
Michael Pollan: How to Change Your Mind:
What the New Science of Psychedelics Teaches Us
About Consciousness, Dying, Addiction, Depression, and Transcendence
Grief recurs and spins,
a Möbius strip of memory going on and on in a loop.
You aren’t in denial about the death.
You just keep remembering that it happened.
Sallie Tisdale: Advice for Future Corpses (and Those Who Love Them):
A Practical Perspective on Death and Dying
Whether we cling to it or flee it,
what happens to the emptied body feels momentous.
As long as we will continue to live,
we will remember what happened to the body of the one who died.
The beloved lies before you, completely revealed.
All of aging, every success and every injury,
the ragged ending of illness or trauma,
all of the lived life, is revealed.
The corpse is a mirror; we are its reflection.
When we see another exactly as he is,
exactly as she is,
we see how much alike we are.
Love is really the only possible response.
Sallie Tisdale: Advice for Future Corpses (and Those Who Love Them):
A Practical Perspective on Death and Dying
Man is born of eternal day,
not because he wills or wishes it,
not because he labors or strives toward it,
not because he earns it as a reward,
but simply because the Spirit has breathed life into him.
And the Spirit which has breathed this life into him
has breathed Its own Life
and cannot unbreathe It or take It away.
If we would only let go of our theological nonsense
and let our soul commune with the Universe,
it would tell us all these things
because we already know them inwardly.
Ernest Holmes: You Will Live Forever
A consideration of history will come about in the future
which will take account of the forces
of those who have passed through the portal of death
and are living in their soul nature
in the world between death and a new birth.
An entirely new color range will be imparted to the culture of humanity
through a consciousness of the total humanity,
including the so-called dead humanity.
Rudolph Steiner: Earthly Death and Cosmic Life
90% of a “Positive Passing” is planning ahead.
No matter what the actual disease process,
if someone has made their own choices
for what they want or what they do not want for end of life care
and if the loved ones have the basic skills
on how to care for their loved one in this last phase-
the overall experience can be better by 90%!
It is that important.
When is the time to do our advance directives
and to learn the skill of how to care for someone who is dying?
BEFORE anyone gets ill.
Suzanne O’Brien RN:
Creating Positive Passings:
End of Life Doula, Level 1, Caregiver Training
The poet Marie Howe imagines the moment of death not as an ending,
the halting of something, but as a point of completion.
A totaling of a life.
The eternal memory of the tired satisfaction at the end of a good day,
a satisfaction never before known:
At last / someone has knotted the lace of your shoe so it won’t ever come undone.
I am not who I was fifty years ago,
or ten years ago, or last year, or yesterday.
I am not the person who wrote this sentence.
Which of me will die?
This moment in which everything, everything, everything changes at once
is one of great mystery, great power,
like no other moment in all of time.
Sallie Tisdale: Advice for Future Corpses (and Those Who Love Them):
A Practical Perspective on Death and Dying
Our lives as we live them day by day
create the person we will be at the moment of death.
You see this at the bedside of a dying person.
You see it in the way a body rests or fights,
in the lines of the face, in the faint shadow of a smile
or a scowl, worry or peace.
With every passing day,
we create the kind of death we will have.
Sallie Tisdale: Advice for Future Corpses (and Those Who Love Them):
A Practical Perspective on Death and Dying
So living is dying.
You understand?
Living means that every day you are abandoning everything
that you are attached to.
Can you do this?
A very simple fact but it has got tremendous implications.
So that each day is a new day.
Each day you are dying and incarnating.
There is tremendous vitality, energy there
because there is nothing you are afraid of.
There is nothing that can hurt.
Being hurt doesn't exist.
Krishnamurti: The Future is Now
When someone's body can no longer perform its functions in the natural world
in response to the thoughts and affections of its spirit
(which it derives from the spiritual world),
then we say that the individual has died.
This happens when the lungs’ breathing and the heart's systolic motion have ceased.
The person, though, has not died at all.
We are only separated from the physical nature that was useful to us in the world.
The essential person is actually still alive.
I say that the essential person is still alive
because we are not people because of our bodies
but because of our spirits.
After all, it is the spirit within us that thinks,
and thought and affection together make us the people we are.
Emanuel Swedenborg:
Afterlife: A Guided Tour of Heaven and Its Wonders
Consciousness is consciousness no matter who is interpreting it.
The soul returns to its original state as pure consciousness,
a drop of bliss in the ocean of bliss.
Here, the quarrels of religion end.
Like all earthly attachments, they fall away.
This state of unity attracts the dying person toward it.
Through the magnetism of the soul,
one is drawn to the next stage of a personal dream
that is universal at the source.
Deepak Chopra: Life After Death: The Burden of Proof
It is never too early to start thinking about your own death
and the deaths of those you love.
I don’t mean thinking about death in obsessive loops,
fretting that your husband has been crushed in a horrific car accident,
or that your plane will catch fire and plummet from the sky.
But rational interaction,
that ends with you realizing that you will survive the worst,
whatever the worst may be.
Accepting death doesn’t mean that you won’t be devastated
when someone you love dies.
It means you will be able to focus on your grief,
unburdened by bigger existential questions like
“Why do people die?” and “Why is this happening to me?”
Death isn’t just happening to you.
Death is happening to us all.
Caitlin Doughty: Smoke Gets in Your Eyes:
And Other Lessons from the Crematory
Look, denial is fine.
It is normal to deny death.
We are wired that way.
But just, for a little bit, step outside of denial,
get your paperwork in order,
think about the options that face us,
think about the fact that each of us will, in time, die.
Talk with the people who are important to you.
Get your hands around death and dying and then, if you wish,
step right back into denial.
Susan Abel Lieberman. Death, Dying and Dessert.:
Reflections on Twenty Questions About Dying
Man’s dream body is still with him, of course,
but the physical body now obscures it.
The dream body cannot be harmed while the physical one can --
as man quickly found out
as he transformed his experience largely from one to the other.
In the dream body man feared nothing.
The dream body does not die.
It exists before and after physical death.
In their dream bodies men had watched the spectacle
of animals “ killing ” other animals,
and they saw the animals ’ dream bodies emerge unscathed.
They saw that the earth was simply changing its forms,
but that the identity of each unit of consciousness survived --
and so , although they saw the picture of death,
they did not recognize it as the death
that to many people now seems an inevitable end.
Jane Roberts:
Dreams, “Evolution,” and Value Fulfillment
Volume One
The Garden of Eden legend represents a distorted version
of man’s awakening as a physical creature.
He becomes fully operational in his physical body ,
and while awake can only sense the dream body
that had earlier been so real to him.
He now encounters his experience from within a body
that must be fed, clothed, protected from the elements --
a body that is subject to gravity and to earth’s laws.
He must use physical muscles to walk from place to place .
He sees himself suddenly, in a leap of comprehension,
as existing for the first time not only apart from the environment,
but apart from all of earth’s other creatures.
The sense of separation is, in those terms,
initially almost shattering.
Jane Roberts:
Dreams, “Evolution,” and Value Fulfillment
Volume One
In the terms of your earthly experience,
it is a metaphysical, a scientific, and a creative error
to separate matter from consciousness,
for consciousness materializes itself as matter in physical life.
In the beginning, then, there was a dream world,
in which consciousness formed a dream of physical reality,
and gradually became awake within that world.
Your consciousness will survive your body’s death,
but it will also take on another kind of form --
a form that is itself composed of “ units of consciousness. ”
Jane Roberts:
Dreams, “Evolution,” and Value Fulfillment
Volume One
A curious delusion seems to prevail in many quarters
that the mere fact of death at once turns a demon into a saint--
that, whatever a man' s life may have been,
the moment he dies he becomes practically an angel of goodness.
No idea could possibly be further from the truth,
as those whose work lies in trying to help the departed know full well.
The casting off of a man' s physical body
no more alters his disposition than does the casting off of his overcoat;
he is precisely the same man the day after his death
as he was the day before,
with the same vices and the same virtues.
C. W. Leadbetter:
The Hidden Side of Things
No one who has experienced death
ever mourns the death of anyone.
Neale Donald Walsch:
The Complete Conversations with God
I was born when it was time to be born,
and I shall die when it is time to die.
If we are in peace with time
and follow the order of things,
neither sorrow nor joy will move us.
The ancients called this ‘freedom from bondage.’
Those who are entangled with the appearance of things
cannot free themselves.
But nothing can overcome the order of nature.
Why should I be upset?
The Taoist Master Yu
Sushila Blackman:
Graceful Exits: How Great Beings Die
In his interview with Ernest Becker on his deathbed,
Sam Keen asked him
how he thought about himself as he was dying.
Becker said this:
“Well, I suppose the most immediate thing I feel
is relieved of the burden of responsibility for my own life,
putting it back where it belongs,
to whoever, whatever hatched me.
I think this is the most immediate thing I feel,
a great sense of relief
and trust that eggs are not hatched in vain.”
Karen Speerstra, Herbert Anderson:
The Divine Art of Dying: How to Live Well While Dying
In the Bardo of this life,
we may be very earnest in our contemplation
of mind’s ultimate nature,
and try with great effort
to gain some experience of it through meditation.
At the time of death, however,
this very experience arises effortlessly.
When we finally reach the point
of the dissolution of all dualistic appearances,
we experience a moment of complete awareness,
a moment of vivid clarity.
It is like a shift in the weather,
when the sky clears up;
the dense covering of clouds is gone,
and suddenly we see the vast sky.
At this moment,
mind arrives directly at its own ground.
It is just like coming home.
Dzogchen Ponlop: Mind Beyond Death
Death is a natural transition
of consciousness to our higher-vibrational energy body.
At the moment of death,
we experience the transfer of our consciousness
from our dense outer vehicle (the physical body)
to our more subtle (astral) energy body.
We are immortal as soul,
so death is the ultimate illusion.
William Buhlman:
Adventures in the Afterlife
All your life you think you are your body.
Some of the time you think you are your mind.
It is at the time of your death t
hat you find out Who You Really Are.
Neale Donald Walsch:
The Complete Conversations with God: An Uncommon Dialogue
We have learned that we are powerful, creative, and immortal souls,
capable of molding our reality in every dimension of the universe.
We have learned that death is an illusion
and our spiritual evolution continues
far beyond the limits of matter and form.
This is an amazing quest;
a spiritual journey through multiple thought-responsive dimensions.
By developing our creative abilities and exploring our inner self,
we awaken to the profound nature of our spiritual potential.
Our continuing life beyond the physical
is an exciting journey of consciousness,
for we create the adventures we experience,
now and forever.
William Buhlman
explore William and Susan Buhlman's online death illuminating "Our Incredible Journey"
course:
https://www.monroeinstitute.org/node/4014
We are immortal beings
who have extended our conscious awareness
throughout the entire breadth of our multidimensional universe.
We are courageous explorers
who have chosen to learn and evolve
through the use of temporary vehicles of consciousness.
Each life experience is orchestrated by us
for our continuing education.
We learn and grow at our own pace
through total immersion of our consciousness
in many different thought-responsive environments.
This remarkable system of spiritual evolution
is extremely demanding but also exceedingly effective,
because all of us, without exception,
will eventually graduate from the vast training grounds of form.
William Buhlman
explore William and Susan Buhlman's online death illuminating "Our Incredible Journey"
course:
https://www.monroeinstitute.org/node/4014
Maybe I’d produced all I was meant to.
Maybe the fire of my life was coming to its own natural conclusion.
Why try to fan it into life again,
particularly if its initial joy had forever vanished?
Maybe that course was better
than the determination and painful discomforts
that might be necessary to prolong lifely existence.
I thought it could all happen so easily and naturally and painlessly
that there would be no one point where you could say
“ Now she lives and now she doesn’t.”
I was consciously aware of thinking how easy it might be
to let my desires drop one by one,
to let myself simply drift off into an unastonished death.
Jane Roberts:
Dreams, “Evolution,” and Value Fulfillment, Volume One
When all the layers of false identity have been stripped off,
there is no longer any version of that old self.
What is left behind is pure consciousness.
That is our original being.
That is our true identity.
Our true nature is indestructible.
Awakening to our true nature is the key
to unlocking the door of the paradise that lies within each of us.
Paradise is our primordial pure consciousness,
which is free of all limitations
but embodies the infinity of the divine.
I remember seeing a bumper sticker that said,
“I believe in life before death."
To me this means that we don't have to imagine a future paradise.
Paradise can happen right here, right now,
while we're in this human incarnation.
The choice is ours.
Anam Thubten. No Self No Problem
William Blake said to his friend Crabbe Robinson :
There is nothing like death .
Death is the best thing that can happen in life ;
but most people die so late
and take such an unmerciful time in dying .
God knows , their neighbors never see them rise from the dead .
To the outer man of sense ,
who knows nothing of the inner man of Being ,
this is sheer nonsense .
But Blake made the above quite clear
when he wrote in the year before he died :
William Blake — one who is very much delighted with being in good company .
Born 28 November 1757 in London
and has died several times since .
Neville Goddard: Awakened Imagination
“ I feel no bitterness or need for inveighing against fate.
This is only our human condition — common to all.
I can only yield to this suffering without need to blame,
resent or be defeated.
It has come and that is --
just as clouds come over the mountain. ”
Dorothy Dushkin
witnessing her daughter’s death
Emily K. Abel: The Inevitable Hour
One has to die to everything one knows--
which is consciousness,
which is the past,
which is the accumulated result of time.
Because it is only in death,
in total death,
that there is something new,
that there is a total silence
in which a different kind of life can be led.
J. Krishnamurti: The Collected Works of J. Krishnamurti:
1965-1966: Volume 16: The Beauty of Death
When you glimpse heaven,
Earth as you have known it loses its appeal.
Nearly everyone who has had a near-death experience
reports that they no longer fear death.
They realize that you cannot truly die.
Death is not a scary place to go,
but a blessed release.
Earth, under the advisement of ego,
is a far scarier domain.
Alan Cohen: A Course in Miracles Made Easy:
Mastering the Journey from Fear to Love
There was a time when you were not a body or an ego.
You were a powerful spiritual being
united with God and the entire universe.
You knew who you were
and enjoyed all the benefits of a divine being.
Then a moment came when you ceased to know yourself as a spirit,
and you began to regard yourself as a body.
That moment occurred in the womb,
at the time of your birth, or soon thereafter.
You underwent a crucial identity shift.
You did not cease to be a spiritual being;
you ceased to know yourself as a spiritual being.
Alan Cohen: A Course in Miracles Made Easy:
Mastering the Journey from Fear to Love
Here are five reasons to have a Spiritual Directive
documented for your transition.
1. We do not always have the gift of time to design our spiritual
preferences, communicate them to our loved ones, and develop the action plan to see them through. So prepare now.
2. Your emotional state during your transition or that of a loved one may interfere with spiritual focus and intention. Learn how to raise your emotional frequency to support a higher vibration during transition.
3. Other people may have belief systems that they can impose during your transition.
If you do not have documented directives, then you may have religious practices conducted during your transition that are not compatible with you.
4. The medical event can become the priority over the spiritual one. Many people lose sight of the opportunity to impact our spiritual evolution through actions taken during our transition.
It is not just a medical situation but a spiritual one as well.
5. So often we hear about the regrets of the living because they were just not sure what to do at the end. Give a gift to your loved ones by providing clear direction for them to follow as you prepare for your non-physical journey.
This is a significant opportunity for you to use your physical life experiences, the transition to the non-physical and all that follows beyond this life as a catalyst for spiritual evolution. I encourage you to use the tools that are available to make this journey a launch pad to your Higher Self.
Click Here for a Spiritual Directive Planning Worksheet
William Buhlman
www.astralinfo.org
A Course in Miracles tells us repeatedly that death is not real.
There is only life;
death exists only at the surface level of forms and appearances.
Death is the universe’s way of clearing out what has served its purpose,
to make way for the next act of purpose.
When the body has completed its mission,
it will gently be laid aside
Alan Cohen: A Course in Miracles Made Easy:
Mastering the Journey from Fear to Love
Our soul, which is that part of us
that remains in the spirit world while our spirit inhabits a physical body,
ultimately decides our time of death.
So, for instance, if a person’s soul knows
that she is more likely to hang on to life and resist crossing over into the afterlife
while loved ones are in the room with her,
that soul will influence death while those loved ones have temporarily left the room
(perhaps to go eat or talk to the doctor)
or before those loved ones arrive in the first place.
Alternatively, if one’s soul knows that a family member
is not emotionally equipped to be present at the time of their death,
the soul will influence death when that family member has left the room
(or before that family member arrives)--
possibly in cooperation with that family member’s spirit guides.
Bob Olson: Answers about the Afterlife:
A Private Investigator’s 15-Year Research Unlocks the Mysteries of Life after Death .
Since his physical death,
my father has assisted my research and writing
from his home in the spiritual dimension
and has attended every one of my readings with mediums.
His example has taught me that our human experience
does not end upon our physical death;
but rather, it continues with our ongoing interactions
with loved ones on the physical plane.
Bob Olson: Answers about the Afterlife:
A Private Investigator’s 15-Year Research Unlocks the Mysteries of Life after Death .
I heard from a man in his early forties with serious heart problems.
He wrote to tell me about Krishnamurti,
a spiritual leader in India who died in 1986.
Krishnamurti was once asked what is the most appropriate thing to say
to a friend who was about to die.
He answered: “Tell your friend that in his death,
a part of you dies and goes with him.
Wherever he goes, you also go.
He will not be alone.”
In his email to me, this man was reassuring:
“I know you are not alone.”
Randy Pausch: The Last Lecture
In what is probably the most celebrated example
of controlled cell death during human development in the womb,
the hand of the fetus changes from a flat paddle to separate digits.
Deaths that involve the executing power of mitochondria
eliminate cells in the in-between zones of what will become the future fingers.
Cell death is here a sculptor of development.
Unlike a sculpture of marble or wood,
in which the deleted scraps lie around the floor to be swept up and thrown away,
in this cell death process
the material is recycled into other cells.
Tyler Volk: Death & Sex
The meanings of life aren’t inherited.
What is inherited is the mandate to make meanings of life by how we live.
The endings of life give life’s meanings a chance to show.
The beginning of the end of our order, our way, is now in view.
This isn’t punishment,
any more than dying is a punishment for being born.
Stephen Jenkinson
In the entire fabric of your existence,
this life is a brilliant, eternally unique and precious portion,
but only a portion,
from which you emerge with joy and understanding
whether you die tomorrow or in years to come.
The choice of life and death is always yours.
Life and death are but two faces
of your eternal, ever-changing existence.
Feel and appreciate the joy of your own being.
Many live into their nineties without ever appreciating
to that extent the beauty of their being.
You have lived before, and will again,
and your new life, in your terms, springs out of the old,
and is growing in the old and contained within it
as the seed is already contained within the flower.
We are all travelers, whatever our position….
Jane Roberts: The Nature of Personal Reality
It is natural to live after death,
and natural to return the body to earth
and [then to] form another.
When you imagine a life after death as unnatural or supernatural
then you feel divorced, cut off and bewildered.
You must try to understand that there are different kinds of nature within Nature
— and a capital for the last one.
Your physical life — your human nature — is, in your terms,
dependent upon a time when you were not.
You must realize that not being in that connotation
is quite as natural as physical being.
Your existence before and after death
is as much a normal phenomenon as your present life.
Jane Roberts: The Nature of Personal Reality
Departed ones have "come to pass."
Life goes not backward but forward.
They should be permitted to move on to their next experience.
Any kind of holding on in an attempt to make contact with them
can serve only to hold them back in their journey.
And the psychic dabbling
can certainly keep you unnerved and confused,
holding you back from your own need
to walk on to the next step in your own growth.
Eric Butterworth: In the Flow of Life
Death is not a dead-end street,
either for the one who passes
or the one who remains behind.
Let there be no sad good-byes.
How much better to bid our friend,
"Good morning—and Godspeed on your way."
There is no need to wallow in grief.
There are those who hold that grief is a mark of respect,
almost like a duty that you should perform.
This is nonsense!
Of course it is natural to have feelings of sadness,
but the sadness should be tempered with the joy of knowing
that your loved one is in the flow of life
and that he or she goes onward to meet his or her good.
Any prolonging of grief,
any attempt to hold on to one who has passed,
is a mixture of guilt and anger,
and it is to be totally out of the flow of life yourself.
Eric Butterworth: In the Flow of Life
Don't wait until an experience of bereavement comes to search for answers.
Get a well-rounded insight into life that actually includes death.
Reflect much on the idea of the flow of life
that cannot be locked in between birth and death.
Break down the barriers by knowing that on the other side of birth
is a flow of life that has “come to pass,"
and on the other side of death is a flow of life
that leads to new birth.
Get the sense of being radiantly alive
in a continuing and eternal experience in the flow.
Eric Butterworth: In the Flow of Life
Ego fears both the past and the present.
It fears the past
because it has already lost control of the past.
It fears the future
because it is not yet in control of it.
It seeks continuity of identity,
yet it is forced to realize that the “I” of today
is hardly the “I” of thirty years ago.
It is the ego which so strongly fears death.
Jane Roberts: The Early Sessions:
Book 3 of The Seth Material
Your death was made when you were made,
born when you were born,
endured what you have endured.
It is your adversary – your executioner –
only when you grant your death no honor,
no place in the order of things,
no truth,
no seat at the head table in the banquet hall of your life.
It is your angel
when you begin to see how your death moves and speaks so much like you,
when you make sure there is always an empty seat at the head table
even when the other guests don’t understand why you’ve done so.
Stephen Jenkinson
Even the writers I was researching
—people who lived in structure, plots, words --
mostly did not find their way to conversations
that offered a satisfying ending.
They left things messy, unresolved, dangling.
Part of the problem is that some silences are too wide to narrate.
Words,
even if the right ones miraculously presented themselves,
would not be enough.
The confession and forgiveness we want to fill the room
do not spring up more naturally in extremis, under duress.
It may be the last chance for the dying person to clarify,
but clarity doesn’t necessarily come.
In this way, death is a lot like life.
Katie Roiphe
author of “The Violet Hour: Great Writers at the End”.
from New York Times article, Dying, With Nothing to Say
LÓPEZ LECUBE: Borges, how do you imagine your death?
BORGES: Ah, I’m waiting for it very impatiently,
I’m told that it will come
but I feel as though it won’t,
that I’m not going to die.
Spinoza says that we all feel immortal,
yes, but not as individuals,
I assume, rather immortal in a pantheist way,
in a divine way.
When I get scared, when things aren’t going so well,
I think to myself, “But why should I care what happens
to a South American writer, from a lost country like the Republic of Argentina
at the end of the twentieth century?
What possible interest could that hold for me
when I still have the adventure of death before me....
Jorge Luis Borges:
The Last Interview: and Other Conversations
The death process is about reestablishing your identity.
The first stage of the death process releases you from your body,
and any thoughts that you may still have
that identify you with the body and its appearance.
The second stage of the death process releases you from your mind,
and any thoughts you may still have
that identify you with the mind and its contents.
The third stage of the death process releases you from your soul,
and any thoughts you may still have
that identify you with your soul and its individuality.
Here, in the Total Immersion of Self,
you come to a place where Knowing and Experiencing are one,
and where what you Know and Experience
is that you are not your body,
you are not your mind,
and you are not your soul.
You are something much greater.
You are the sum total of the energies that produce all three.
In death, all of your individual identities are shed,
ending the separation OF you FROM you, at last.
Neale Donald Walsch:
Home with God: In a Life That Never Ends
“Death” is the energy that propels you
through the Core of Your Being and into your next reality.
“Birth” and “death” are moments of Pure Creation
because they align or “fine-tune” the energy that is Life Itself,
increasing the vibration of its frequency and manifesting as matter in the physical world,
or decreasing the vibration and manifesting as invisible energy in the spiritual realm.
It is in this way that entire universes are born.
It is in this way that you were born.
Neale Donald Walsch:
Home with God: In a Life That Never Ends
Many a man who shows a brave front to the world,
and laughs and smiles with the best,
is yet groaning inwardly all the while
under the oppression of a secret horror,
knowing that death must come,
dreading lest the sword should fall.
Yet all this is quite unnecessary,
and comes only from ignorance,
as indeed does all fear;
for those who comprehend death
feel no dismay at its approach.
They know that man does not die,
but simply lays aside his body
as one lays aside a worn-out suit of clothes;
and to them one process is no more terrible than the other.
The man who in this twentieth century
does not yet know the facts about death,
is merely the man who has not taken the pains to look into the matter,
and if he suffers from fear of that which does not exist,
he has only himself to blame.
C. W. Leadbeater:
The Hidden Side of Things
Gerson Leiber, an American modernist painter
whose ambitions were stunted until he attended art school in Budapest,
where he had served in the Army during World War II,
died on Saturday at his home in Springs, N.Y.,
a hamlet in East Hampton. He was 96.
He died of a heart attack
hours before his wife of 72 years, Judith Leiber,
the renowned handbag designer,
died, also of a heart attack, at 97.
They were buried together on Monday.
Jeffrey Sussman, the couple’s biographer and spokesman,
said Mr. Leiber, who had congestive heart failure,
told his wife on Friday night,
“Sweetie, it’s time for both of us to go.”
Richard Sandomir
New York Times
For as long as you are alive in this body,
you will have a mind,
which means you are always dreaming.
Don't be afraid to dream,
but also don't be afraid of the end of the dream.
Enjoy it all!
You are alive,
but your body is already dead.
So, there is no need to be afraid of death.
Instead, go and conquer the fear of being alive.
don Miguel Ruiz Jr.:
don Miguel Ruiz’s Little Book of Wisdom:
The Essential Teachings
Last words are supposed to be especially important
as a clue to the meaning of it all.
Henry James said something like
“Now, at last, the distinguished thing”--
sticking to the end with his Jamesian style of elegant moroseness.
Beethoven is supposed to have said
“More light! More light!”
That's better, not so pretentious,
and full of Beethovenesque imperative.
William Saroyan commented that he knew all men are mortal,
but didn't think it applied to him.
“Now what?” he asked.
That was proper and fine.
But I most admire the last words of Alfred Jarry,
author of King Ubu,
who noticed his admirers gathered around him,
hoping for a final revelation,
although he could barely utter a sound.
When someone bent an ear to his lips to catch his dying revelation,
Jarry whispered:
“Any-body got a toothpick?”
Herbert Gold: Not Dead Yet:
A Feisty Bohemian Explores the Art of Growing Old
Try imagining your death and practicing it once a day for a week.
Lie down on a bed or the floor and say, “I’m dying.”
Imagine the various stages of it all:
getting bad news, being at the hospital, feeling lousy,
seeing the faces of your family and friends as they react to the news,
and then peacefully taking that last breath.
Meditate on that for a while,
imagining that you will actually be taking your last breath someday.
Be aware of what thoughts and sensations arise.
Be in your body.
Let your mind ramble.
Then think, “Okay, this breath is going to be my last one.”
Breathe in, breathe out, and tell yourself goodbye
(then get back up and do the laundry or jumping jacks or whatever!).
I know this might sound creepy and possibly depressing,
but I swear, after a week of this,
you will literally have a different relationship with death.
If we practice death daily,
we can put into motion all that we’ve practiced when the time comes.
Laura Pritchett: Making Friends with Death:
A Field Guide for Your Impending Last Breath
(to be read, ideally, before it’s imminent!)
One of the most important things we can do
is to actually imagine our own death, and then practice it.
Death doesn’t just happen once.
Well, okay, it does,
but many experts and folks interested in dying well
spend time practicing their death,
so that when the real one comes
they’re a little more . . . well, practiced.
Just like you practice violin, or basketball,
or jokes in order to get the punch line right (okay, I do that one),
you can practice death.
And practicing death does not invite the Grim Reaper!
Laura Pritchett: Making Friends with Death:
A Field Guide for Your Impending Last Breath
(to be read, ideally, before it’s imminent!)
When you learn the proper interpretation of the word death,
you will see that it becomes a friend,
for it is a cleansing process.
It is a letting go completely and ascending to a place
where the former things cannot enter in
and have nothing whatsoever to do with the present manifestation.
Instead of getting rid of things temporarily,
man dies completely to the idea and its manifestation.
In the new place,
he finds himself as incapable of experiencing his former limitations
as an eagle flying over the abyss would have
in experiencing the cramped quarters of the eggshell from which it evolved.
Walter C. Lanyon:
The Temple Not Made with Hands
Many are seeking the new birth,
but they do not want to go through death to get it.
In other words, they want to hold on to old ideas
and at the same time try to express new capacities.
It is quite as impossible for a caterpillar to fly
as it is for an egg;
both must perform the death
upon the thing of which they want to be rid
and re-embody themselves with the new idea
before they can attain the expression they are seeking.
Walter C. Lanyon:
The Temple Not Made with Hands
So what are we?
Are we the tonal, or are we the nagual?
Are we matter, or are we life?
Humans have been asking this in different ways for thousands of years,
without realizing the simplicity of the truth.
The truth is life and death,
a simple binary formula
whose mathematical symbols are 0 and 1.
In the language of science,
this means energy and matter.
In religious storytelling,
it is God . . . and creation.
A nagual man knows himself
to be the force that creates existence and moves matter.
He sees that all else is temporal.
All else—like thought, like words--
is a mirror distortion.
To know these things is to know truth.
Don Miguel Ruiz:
The Toltec Art of Life and Death: A Story of Discovery
Here’s what I learned from the deaths in this book:
You work. You don’t work.
You resist. You don’t resist.
You exert the consummate control.
You surrender. You deny.
You accept.
You pray. You don’t pray.
You read. You work.
You take as many painkillers as you can.
You refuse painkillers.
You rage against death.
You run headlong toward it.
In the end the deaths are the same.
They all die.
The world releases them.
In the actual moment, you do not have a choice.
Grace finds you.
Acceptance hunts you down.
Katie Roiphe: The Violet Hour:
Great Writers at the End
“The organism wishes to die only in its own fashion.”
As Freud had written, he died in the manner he chose to die,
at the time he wanted to die.
He chose and controlled something
most of us are not privileged to choose and control.
He imagined for himself this death.
It looked to others like he had fallen asleep.
He stopped breathing in the early hours.
Anna wrote, “I believe there is nothing worse
than to see the people nearest to one lose the very qualities
for which one loves them.
I was spared that with my father,
who was himself to the last minute.”
He was so much himself to the last minute
that Anna would feel as if he were just off on one of his journeys,
with her keeping things in order until he came back.
Katie Roiphe: The Violet Hour:
Great Writers at the End
“All too often,”
wrote philosopher Robert C. Solomon,
“we approach death with the self-indulgent thought
that my death is a bad thing
because it deprives the universe of me.”
Yet if we think about it,
the universe survives the deaths
of about fifty-five million unique individuals a year quite nicely.
Barbara Ehrenreich:
Natural Causes:
An Epidemic of Wellness, the Certainty of Dying,
and Killing Ourselves to Live Longer
You can think of death bitterly or with resignation,
as a tragic interruption of your life,
and take every possible measure to postpone it.
Or, more realistically,
you can think of life as an interruption
of an eternity of personal nonexistence,
and seize it as a brief opportunity
to observe and interact with
the living, ever-surprising world around us.
Barbara Ehrenreich:
Natural Causes:
An Epidemic of Wellness, the Certainty of Dying,
and Killing Ourselves to Live Longer
Today, I woke before daylight
to an invitation from Death.
Like my Aztec ancestors,
I welcome it with the gratitude of a warrior
who has fought well and wishes for a safe homecoming . . .
and a long rest.
Don Miguel Ruiz:
The Toltec Art of Life and Death: A Story of Discovery
A personal legacy
is the compilation of all the experiences in our life.
It is the sum of all our actions, all our reactions,
all our emotions and feelings.
It is what we give to those who remain,
after we leave our physical body.
A legacy is all that we are,
the totality of ourselves.
Through the memories others have of us, our legacy is determined . . .
and the more authentic we are,
the brighter that legacy will be.
Don Miguel Ruiz:
The Toltec Art of Life and Death: A Story of Discovery
Come lovely and soothing death,
Undulate round the world, serenely
arriving, arriving,
In the day, in the night, to all, to each
Sooner or later, delicate death.
Walt Whitman
What a waste!
Born into times so fortunate
that I must die lying at home on the tatami!
Samurai Poet
18th Century
Most of the good deaths I have seen as a doctor
have involved the whole family
working towards exactly the same end –
singing, if you like, from the same hymn sheet.
I’ve always admired families who are absolutely determined
to let their loved one decide how he or she wants to die.
As far as they are concerned,
if the star of the show knows what they want,
the family’s only job is to help them get on with it.
It is so crucial not just to think about your own end,
but to engage your family in the bigger picture.
If you don’t, there is a real risk that protective instinct,
rather than pragmatic acceptance, will take over.
John Humphrys:
The Welcome Visitor: Living Well, Dying Well
Death is not waiting for us at the end of a long road.
Death is always with us,
in the marrow of every passing moment.
She is the secret teacher hiding in plain sight.
She helps us to discover what matters most.
And the good news is
we don’t have to wait until the end of our lives
to realize the wisdom that death has to offer.
Reflecting on death can have a profound and positive impact
not just on how we die,
but on how we live.
Frank Ostaseki: The Five Invitations:
Discovering What Death Can Teach Us About Living Fully
Life and death are a package deal.
You cannot pull them apart.
In Japanese Zen, the term shoji translates as “birth-death.”
There is no separation between life and death
other than a small hyphen, a thin line that connects the two.
We cannot be truly alive
without maintaining an awareness of death.
Frank Ostaseki: The Five Invitations:
Discovering What Death Can Teach Us About Living Fully
Here Are Some Things You Might Say to Your Doctor
Please tell it to me like it is.
I want to know what you really think so I can plan.
You see a lot of patients with [name the disease,
what is the pathway my disease is likely to take?
Would you be surprised if I were alive in five years?
One year? Six months?
What are the benefits and burdens of the treatment you are suggesting?
What are the alternatives?
What happens if we don’t pursue them?
What would you choose to do if this were you, your wife, your father?
Jessica Nutik Zitter: Extreme Measures:
Finding a Better Path to the End of Life
As an ICU physician,
I see many cases where patients’ bodies are being kept alive--
whether by breathing machines, feeding tubes, dialysis, and/or antibiotics--
despite poor prognoses for recovery or return to their previous function.
I so often wish that these patients
had given some indication to a loved one or a doctor
of how they would feel about being kept alive in this condition.
Surveys show that almost no one wants that,
and yet without a clear opt-out,
we doctors feel obligated to keep such patients alive.
We’ve achieved amazing things in modern medicine.
Our tools can bring the dying back to life.
But too often they serve to take life away from the dying.
Jessica Nutik Zitter: Extreme Measures:
Finding a Better Path to the End of Life
Just as each life matters, each death also matters.
Everything matters.
If we support even one person
in having a more sacred, dignified, and reverent death,
we make a huge contribution to this shift of consciousness.
If the only person we ever midwife
through this mystifying transition is ourselves,
we’ve done something powerful for the planet.
We’ve performed a major act of alchemy,
changing fear into awe, suffering into transformation.
We’ve been conduits for sacred magic.
That is no small act.
Joellyn St. Pierre: The Art of Death Midwifery:
An Introduction and Beginner’s Guide
How much of our lives is predicated on the fear of death?
The more we are in the presence of the dying,
the more we prepare for our own eventual death.
The more we prepare for our own transition,
the more likely we will be able to embrace this inevitable change of forms
with greater consciousness and grace.
If the only person we ever serve as death midwife
turns out to be ourselves,
that alone would cause a major shift in cosmic consciousness
and be a blessing to all.
Joellyn St. Pierre: The Art of Death Midwifery:
An Introduction and Beginner’s Guide
If you wait till symptom time
to start practicing accepting your death,
honey, you've waited too long.
Stephen Jenkinson
Nothing you can lose by dying
is half as precious as the readiness to die,
which is man’s charter of nobility.
George Santayana
I sat in the sunlit waiting room with the doctor in charge of my father
and we talked not of life, but of death.
He took me aback by quoting from the Victorian poet Arthur Hugh Clough.
They were words that, I believe,
should be inscribed on the wall of every doctor in the land
who might one day have to deal with someone like my father:
‘Thou shalt not kill; but need’st not strive officiously to keep alive.’
John Humphrys: The Welcome Visitor:
Living Well, Dying Well
The reason that the passing of a loved one is such a shattering experience
is that our frame of reference is too small.
Unless we have a view of life that transcends or includes death,
there will be fear and dread about our own lives
and confusing bereavement in facing the passing of another.
The you that transcends the body
is a time-space parenthesis in the universal dimension of eternity.
Life is whole; the universe is whole.
Even though we may experience this wholeness “in part,"
there is that of us that is changeless and deathless,
that is integrally and eternally involved in the universe.
If death comes,
it must be a part of that wholeness,
not a deviation from it.
Eric Butterworth: In the Flow of Life
We have been conditioned in our culture
to think of life as beginning with birth
and moving downhill inexorably toward death.
The clergy have droned,
"From the day we are born we begin to die."
This is the "great lie" that we must erase from consciousness.
Life does not grow old.
Life does not deteriorate.
Life does not die.
Life is an eternal, dynamic, flowing process.
Eric Butterworth: In the Flow of Life
— could anything be more perfect than the butterfly ,
the released beauty,
as it leaves behind a crumpling, damp chrysalis
to dry and wither, empty now, and blow away as ashes or fall as dust ?
Could anything be more true than the Monarch itself,
vibrating and migrating in decibels and reverberations
beyond our senses and imagination,
imprinted with the map, the code, the secret of Home ?
Homing, coming … home, come … come,
home … coming home … home coming.
Ellyn Peirson: After the Interlude:
A Dialogue about Death and Beyond
“Do not complain and cry and pray,
but open your eyes and see.
The light is all about you,
if you would only cast the bandage from your eyes and look.
It is so wonderful, so beautiful,
so far beyond what any man has dreamt of
or prayed for,
and it is for ever and for ever.”
Quote from "The Soul of a People"
Charles Leadbetter: The Devachanic Plane
Decisions made at the end of life
are often ambiguous and complicated by unexpectedly powerful emotions.
Families that have not learned to live with mystery and ambiguity
are sometimes torn apart by the complex decisions
that must be made when a family member is irreversibly ill or dying.
Our willingness to live with wonder and mystery
as dimensions of both living and dying
is a spiritual practice that will make it easier
to embrace end-of-life decisions already made
when one’s life situation was less ambiguous.
Karen Speerstra; Anderson, Herbert Anderson:
The Divine Art of Dying: How to Live Well While Dying
Intellectual forces assist us after death.
They help to render our conscious experience
of the period between death and a new birth particularly clear.
In fact, the more we endeavor to think clearly and truly
during our physical existence,
the greater our efforts to acquire a true knowledge of spiritual realities,
the brighter and clearer will be our consciousness
between death and a new birth.
Rudolf Steiner:
Life between Death and Rebirth
After death many things appear vividly before the soul
of which it had no inkling during life.
A host of things that one has not experienced
confronts one after death.
What appears ludicrous
actually becomes reality after death.
A whole world of which one is not aware in life
then comes to expression.
Rudolf Steiner:
Life between Death and Rebirth
What could be more uplifting than to know
that we can discover the fount of our life between death and rebirth.
We can discover our kinship with the whole universe!
What could give us greater strength for our duties in life
than the knowledge that we bear within us
the forces pouring in from the universe
and must so prepare ourselves in life
that these forces can become active in us when,
between death and rebirth,
we pass into the spheres of the planets and of the Sun.
Rudolf Steiner:
Life between Death and Rebirth
Death is not traumatic to the dying.
One moment you are alive
and then you are not,
and there is little difference except you are free.
Fear has told you that you will not have enough time
to complete whatever you have come to do.
Fear is wrong.
No physical body dies one moment before the soul is ready,
nor one moment after.
Pat Rodegast: Emmanuel’s Book III:
What Is an Angel Doing Here?
While a man is going about on Earth,
he regards his physical body and his etheric body --
of which he knows little,
but at least he feels it in his powers of growth,
as his own body,
but he has no right to do so.
Only his Ego and his astral body are his.
Everything present in his physical body and etheric body --
even while he is on Earth --
is the property of the divine-spiritual Beings
who live and weave within them,
and continue their work while the man is absent in sleep.
Rudolph Steiner
Do not let your imagination paint death through the mind’s palette.
Grieve for the loss of the physical embodiment
of a Love you have always known,
and mourn it to the depths of your human despair,
but do not believe it.
The loss is temporary.
Dying is not failure.
It is the means by which you can rid yourself of the physical body.
You die into no danger, no illness,
no falsity, no betrayal, no guesswork.
You remain.
Pat Rodegast: Emmanuel’s Book III:
What Is an Angel Doing Here?
Death is a release into the joy of Homecoming.
You are born into a world that insists upon death.
From the human point of view, death is a defeat.
Death is not your enemy.
It is your ticket Home.
Pat Rodegast: Emmanuel’s Book III:
What Is an Angel Doing Here?
Every death is brought about
by the culmination of the vibration of the Being.
There is not an exception to that.
No one, beast or human,
makes their transition into the Non-Physical
without it being the vibrational consensus
that is within them,
so every death is a suicide
because every death is self-imposed.
Esther Hicks: Ask and It Is Given
The best reason
to make your transition into the Non-Physical
is not because the physical is miserable.
It is because you have a sense of completion in physical--
and you are looking for another vantage point.
Death is a withdrawal of Consciousness;
it is like taking attention from here
and putting it there.
Esther Hicks: Ask and It Is Given
Truth, even bitter, difficult truth,
doesn't necessarily condemn a person to unrelenting sorrow.
Truth can be freeing.
Yes, it may initially cause sadness,
but accepting death can inspire deep inner work
and healing of relationships.
Jack went through an amazing transformation
in the last weeks of his life.
His relationships were never more loving.
Sheila and the girls spent an incredible amount of time with him.
Even with his continued decline and the changes in his face and body,
he always seemed joyous.
Everyone felt it when they were at his bedside.
He told me he was grateful to the cancer
for teaching him how to appreciate every moment
and helping his family to learn that as well.
He was truly at peace.
One of his daughters told me
she felt like they were living inside a rainbow.
Henry Fersko-Weiss: Caring for the Dying:
The Doula Approach to a Meaningful Death
Just before death
when the body separates from the soul,
a tremendous experience happens
which happens only to the mystics, to the meditators.
To them it does not happen by accident,
they have been preparing for it.
Their meditation is nothing but an effort
to disidentify themselves with the body.
The meditator experiences death many times consciously
so that when death comes
it is not a new experience.
The meditator has always died with laughter.
Osho:
The Art of Living and Dying
When I asked him once
what was the essential character of the seers of the new cycle,
he said that they are the warriors of total freedom,
that they are such masters of awareness, stalking, and intent
that they are not caught by death, like the rest of mortal men,
but choose the moment and the way of their departure from this world.
At that moment they are consumed by a fire from within
and vanish from the face of the earth,
free,
as if they had never existed.
Carlos Castaneda: The Fire from Within
Let us evermore,
amidst our jollity and feasting,
set the remembrance of our frail condition before our eyes,
never suffering ourselves to be so far transported with our delights,
but that we have some intervals of reflecting upon,
and considering how many several ways
this jollity of ours tends to death,
and with how many dangers it threatens it.
The Egyptians were won’t to do after this manner,
who in the height of their feasting and mirth,
caused a dried skeleton of a man to be brought into the room
to serve for a memento to their guests.
Michel de. Montaigne:
The Complete Essays
What we are experiencing now is an illusion,
like a dream.
We are in dream right now.
From the point of view of tomorrow,
it is not real.
When we look at our experience of a nighttime dream from the waking state,
we can see how solid and believable those appearances seemed
from within the dream state.
However, when we wake up from that dream,
those appearances are no longer there.
It was all just an illusion.
In the same way, the illusion of a solid and real world
dissolves when we wake up from this dream of samsara
into the state of awakening or buddhahood.
Dzogchen Ponlop: Mind Beyond Death
Just as what you call “death”
is not the end of your life experience,
what you call “birth”
was not the beginning.
You are Eternal Consciousness
expressing yourself in an endless,
glorious dance of Consciousness.
You will never cease to be.
Jerry and Esther Hicks: The Amazing Power of Deliberate Intent:
Living the Art of Allowing
Only the essence of the life that has passed
can appear before the consciousness at the time of death.
What is death?
Isn’t it the fulfillment of life itself?
How can it be in opposition to life?
It is only an extension of it.
It is only the fruit of life.
Osho
Earthen Lamps
Very little experience of these higher (Devachanic) planes
is needed to alter fundamentally the student’s conception
of the change which takes place at death ;
he realizes immediately on the opening of his consciousness
even in the astral , and still more in this mental world ,
that the fulness of true life
is something which can never be known down here ,
and that when we leave this physical earth
we are passing into that true life ,
not out of it .
Charles Webster Leadbeater:
The Devachanic Plane
When a water bubble
On the ocean bursts,
It returns to the ocean.
This is death;
All deaths.
Your death and my death.
Returning to the Source,
What is there to fear?
Wu Hsin:
Aphorisms for Thirsty Fish
Do not become preoccupied with
What occurs after death unless
There is willingness to die today.
This death, which is only
The death of identification, is
The doorway to liberation.
Wu Hsin:
Aphorisms for Thirsty Fish
The world eternal turns round;
all things therein are incessantly moving,
the earth, the rocks of Caucasus, and the pyramids of Egypt,
both by the public motions and their own.
Even constancy itself is no other
but a slower and more languishing motion.
I cannot fix my object;
’tis always tottering and reeling by a natural giddiness;
I take it as it is at the instant I consider it;
I do not paint its being,
I paint its passage.
Michel de Montaigne
When we who care are not afraid to die,
we will be better able to prepare the dying for death
and deepen their communion with others.
We all are born as fragile beings;
we all die as fragile beings.
We need each other
to live well and to die well .
Henri J. M. Nouwen: Our Greatest Gift:
A Meditation on Dying and Caring
Beings who have achieved the highest level of Mahamudra
have completely transcended meditation
and for them there is total freedom immediately after death.
For instance, Milarepa,
who attained the state of non-meditation,
understood that the nature of mind is voidness.
For him there was no more need to meditate,
to learn, or to do practice :
He was enlightened.
Lama Lodu. Bardo Teachings:
The Way Of Death And Rebirth
What happens to the consciousness of a person who dies
while they are asleep, or in the astral body?
There are many subtle forces
which come under the category of consciousness.
Even during sleep or a trance state,
while some components of consciousness may be separated from the physical body,
other forces remain.
If the body is disturbed,
these forces cause awareness to return instantly,
to participate in the fate of the physical body.
For this reason,
it is not possible to die
without knowing that death is taking place.
Lama Lodu. Bardo Teachings:
The Way Of Death And Rebirth
The difference between death cleaning and just a big cleanup
is the amount of time they consume.
Death cleaning is not about dusting or mopping up;
it is about a permanent form of organization
that makes your everyday life run more smoothly.
Margareta Magnusson: The Gentle Art of Swedish Death Cleaning:
How to Free Yourself and Your Family from a Lifetime of Clutter
I am death cleaning,
or, as we call it in Swedish, döstädning.
Dö is “death” and städning is “cleaning.”
In Swedish it is a term that means that you remove unnecessary things
and make your home nice and orderly
when you think the time is coming closer for you to leave the planet.
Some people can’t wrap their heads around death.
And these people leave a mess after them.
Did they think they were immortal?
Margareta Magnusson: The Gentle Art of Swedish Death Cleaning:
How to Free Yourself and Your Family from a Lifetime of Clutter
It's like your conscious desire to die
is fighting against your base instinct of self-preservation.
Leads to that weird feeling of wanting to “die without dying."
I just want to disappear for a while
without having to kill myself to do it.
My theory is if for just one moment in your life you’re glad to be alive
it’ll all have been worth it.
Reddit Posts
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To care for the dying
means to help them live their dying
as a way to gather around them not only those who come to visit,
not only family and friends, but all of humanity,
the living as well as the dead.
When we say that it is not good for a human being to die alone,
we touch a deep mystery.
In our death,
we need to be, more than ever, in communion with others.
The passage of our life is the passage that,
more than any other passage,
needs to be made with others.
Henri J. M. Nouwen:
Our Greatest Gift: A Meditation on Dying and Caring
If there is one thing I have noticed time and again,
it’s that death and dying has a way of breaking down barriers,
allowing us—for a moment--
to find common ground in our humanity.
It has a way of taking a church that officially excludes the LGBTQ community
and enabling them to see the importance of people over opinion.
Caleb Wilde: Confessions of a Funeral Director:
How the Business of Death Saved My Life
…is it possible to befriend our dying gradually
and live open to it,
trusting that we have nothing to fear?
Is it possible to prepare for our death
with the same attentiveness
that our parents had in preparing for our birth?
Can we wait for our death as for a friend
who wants to welcome us home?
Henri J. M. Nouwen: Our Greatest Gift:
A Meditation on Dying and Caring
Death creates its own culture.
Here, language is spoken with fewer words
and more tears, hugs, and contemplation.
The regular dress code doesn’t exist,
and the norms and mores of society are put on hold.
Here, in this sacred space,
God seems nearer;
family and friends surround you;
you can let your emotional inhibitions go.
This is the world that was never meant to be
and yet is everything you wish it could be..
it seems we have to go back through death
to get to Eden.
Caleb Wilde: Confessions of a Funeral Director:
How the Business of Death Saved My Life
Over the past eighty-plus years,
I’ve gone through many deaths and resurrections, as we all have.
Every time I’ve died to an old belief
and had the slightest change of consciousness
I have become a different self,
a different tapestry, than the one I was before,
and after each subsequent resurrection
I have had, to some extent, to rediscover myself.
After a resurrection
I appear outwardly to be the same person that I was,
but inside I am quite different.
My spiritual experiences define my inner being;
therefore, after changes occur,
it takes me some time to understand and get used to
the new person into which I have evolved.
Walter Starcke:
The Third Appearance: a crisis of perception
…self is lost in that of attaining for itself
the nearer and nearer approach that builds in manifested form,
whether in the Pleiades, Arcturus, Gemini, or in Earth…
as light, a ray does not end,
lives on and on,
until it becomes one in essence with the source of light.
As the entity moves from sphere to sphere,
it seeks its way home,
to the face of the Creator,
the first cause.
Edgar Cayce: Beyond Death:
Visions of the Other Side
There is an invisible something;
call it the Christ,
call it God,
call it the Father within,
call it what you will–
the spirit of God within man,
the transcendental Consciousness,
or that transcendental Presence–
but realize that it is invisible, it is infinite,
and it is closer to you than breathing.
If you mount up to heaven, it goes there with you;
if you make your bed in hell, you will find it there;
if you “walk through the valley of the shadow of death,”
you cannot fear because it is with you.
“The kingdom of God is within you.”
You live and move and have your being in God (Consciousness),
and God lives in you.
Joel S. Goldsmith:
Man Was Not Born to Cry
"What happens to me after death?"
The question dissolves
when it is seen that I am a dreamed character.
Then it is seen that there is no ‘me’ who dies,
no 'after'
because time is created only in the dreamed mind
and no 'death'
because death is simply the awakening from the dream.
Richard Sylvester: I Hope You Die Soon
The Way of the Samurai is found in death.
Meditation on inevitable death should be performed daily.
Every day without fail one should consider himself as dead.
This is the substance of the way of the samurai.
Yamamoto Tsunetomo
Only that which you can take with you
when you leave the body is important.
That means, except meditation, nothing is important.
Except awareness, nothing is important,
because only awareness cannot be taken away by death.
Everything else will be snatched away,
because everything else comes from without.
Only awareness wells up within.
You will be taking with you
only whatsoever awareness you have attained.
That is your only real wealth.
Osho
As we think, act, and live here today,
we built the structures of our homes
in spirit realms after we leave earth,
and we build karma for future lives,
thousands of years to come,
on this earth or other planets.
Life will assume new dignity,
and labor new interest for us,
when we come to the knowledge
that death is but a continuation of life and labor,
in higher planes.
Edna Wheeler Wilcox
Death has nothing to do with going away.
The sun sets
The moon sets
But they are not gone.
Rumi
From now there shall be no fear left for me in this world,
and thou shalt be victorious in all my strife.
Thou hast left death for my companion
and I shall crown him with my life.
Thy sword is with me to cut asunder my bonds,
and there shall be no fear left for me in the world.
Rabindranath Tagore: Gitanjali
"the souls of men are divine,
and when they have quitted the body
a return to heaven is open to them,
least difficult to those who have been most virtuous and just"
Now if it be true that in proportion to a man's goodness
the escape from what may be called the prison and bonds of the flesh is easiest,
whom can we imagine to have had an easier voyage to the gods than Scipio?
I am disposed to think, therefore,
that in his case mourning would be a sign of envy rather than of friendship.
If, however, the truth rather is that the body and soul perish together,
and that no sensation remains,
then though there is nothing good in death,
at least there is nothing bad.
Marcus Tullius Cicero:
Treatises on Friendship and Old Age
And I ask you,
would you not say that one was the greatest of fools
who believed that a lamp was worse off when it was extinguished
than before it was lighted?
We mortals also are lighted and extinguished;
the period of suffering comes in between,
but on either side there is a deep peace.
For, unless I am very much mistaken, my dear Lucilius,
we go astray in thinking that death only follows,
when in reality it has both preceded us
and will in turn follow us.
Whatever condition existed before our birth, is death.
Seneca: Letters from a Stoic
You are younger;
but what does that matter?
There is no fixed count of our years.
You do not know where death awaits you;
so be ready for it everywhere.
Seneca: Letters from a Stoic
The Death of Etsugan
At daybreak he took a bath and then,
while sitting dignified in Zen meditation,
recited his last poem:
Buddha came down from the mountain,
I ascended it. Always I’ve
Run counter to his teaching,
And now I’m bound for hell—ha-ha!
Man’s inquisitiveness is sheer nonsense.
He then closed his eyes and, still sitting, died.
Sushila Blackman:
Graceful Exits: How Great Beings Die
Quantum physics places consciousness
at the centre of all reality.
However, what is being missed
is how consciousness actually ‘creates’ this reality.
Each individual human being can expect
to exist for 100 years at most.
At that time his, or her, consciousness
seems to simply disappear.
How can we on one hand proclaim
that consciousness brings the universe into existence
while on the other acknowledge
that that consciousness is finite.
It simply does not make sense.
Human personality must, in some yet unknown way,
be able to effect reality before birth and after death.
Anthony Peake:
Is there Life after Death?
The fear of death is
The penalty for accepting
The idea of individuality.
When the particular is seen to be
No different than the universal
The fear of death is gone.
Wu Hsin:
In the Shadow of the Formless
Death
I die a little each day
One dies many times in a lifetime
Before the liberating death
The many deaths are the events which plunge us into darkness
A difficult time and journey until we enter the rebirth canal
And climb back into the light to be born again
It gets harder to do the larger our ego gets
And the more we accumulate
But each death brings an opportunity for our rebirth
If we have the courage
Dying is easy
Living can be difficult and painful
One day there will be a gift for us all
Death
Until then I will keep crawling to the light each time I die
Bernie Siegel, MD
Spending time in a house where someone is dying
always reminds me to take in life fully.
To pay attention to the practical and the mysterious,
to the universal and the personal,
to what can be said in words
and what remains in the heart.
Fran Smith: Changing the Way We Die:
Compassionate End of Life Care and The Hospice Movement
It is only
The sense of a separate me
That is born.
The dissolution of this sense is
Its very death.
One need not die
To achieve this.
Wu Hsin:
In the Shadow of the Formless
Various cultists and healers usually take the position
that it is of major importance that the physical vehicle
be rendered free from disease and clutched away
from the processes of death.
It might, however, be desirable (and it often is)
that the disease be permitted to do its work
and death open the door
to the escape of the soul from imprisonment.
The time comes inevitably to all incarnated beings
when the soul demands liberation
from the body and from form life,
and nature has her own wise ways of doing this.
Disease and death must be recognised as liberating factors
when they come as the result of right timing by the soul.
Alice A. Bailey: Esoteric Healing
When it comes to death,
do not think about death,
do not fear death,
but die to every moment.
When St. Paul said, “Die unto death,”
he meant die to the past in every moment.
Step into what is happening right now,
and you die to both the past and the future.
If you can do this right now,
you can conquer the fear of death.
Deepak Chopra: Power, Freedom, and Grace:
Living from the Source of Lasting Happiness
One of the biggest misconceptions
is that the soul resides in the body.
People may say,
“This person died, and the soul has left,”
but it’s not true.
The soul is not inside the body.
The soul projects itself as the body and the mind.
It finds a location in space-time,
and broadcasts or telecasts itself through the body.
My soul is merely localizing or expressing itself through my body.
To believe that our soul is “inside a body, looking out”
is a convincing but socially induced hallucination.
Deepak Chopra: Power, Freedom, and Grace:
Living from the Source of Lasting Happiness
Sudden death –
however much we may wish for it
as preferable to being racked by our own body --
is a reminder
that we are never at any time insulated
by a guaranteed distance from the end of ourselves.
Death has no obligation to serve notice.
Raymond Tallis: The Black Mirror:
Looking at Life through Death
When the mind is dropped
and meditation has arisen,
then you see the total.
Then you see the whole as it is,
all the aspects together.
Then summer and winter are not separate;
then spring and fall are not separate.
Then you will see that birth and death
are two aspects of the same process.
Osho. The Path of Love
The unspeakable Nothing
italicizes at least some of the Everything that is life.
While death destroys us in fact%2