Archive FiveIf 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 |
