Welcome to Death Knells
The Death of Fearing Death
This site shares Death Knells to misconceptions about Death.
Living beautifully and dying beautifully, our awareness expands, our essence ascends.
And Death is embraced as Birth into new awareness of Life.
Living beautifully and dying beautifully, our awareness expands, our essence ascends.
And Death is embraced as Birth into new awareness of Life.
Archive Four
WHAT HAPPENS WHEN YOU DIE
Well, first of all, you won’t.
Which is all you really have to know about death
and why it’s the first thing “dead” people want to tell you.
Many of them found this hard to believe themselves at first,
gazing upon their own funerals, lingering around their old stomping grounds,
stunned and amazed as they gestured and shouted to the friends left behind.
There’s an abrupt disconnect, of course,
that comes from leaving behind all things time and space
and learning to maneuver in the unseen.
The nature of this transition depends entirely on the beliefs of the dearly departed at the time of transition, because their beliefs and thoughts carry over to their new environs.
Mike Dooley: The Top Ten Things Dead People Want to Tell YOU
At the death of a parishioner, Master Dogo, accompanied
by his disciple Zengen, visited the bereaved family.
Without taking time to express a word of sympathy,
Zengen went up to the coffin, rapped on it, and asked Dogo,
"Is he really dead?"
"I won't say," said Dogo.
"Well?!" insisted Zengen. "I'm not saying, and that's final!" said Dogo.
On their way back to the temple, the furious Zengen turned on Dogo and threatened,
"By god, if you don't answer my question, why I'll beat you!"
"All right," said Dogo, "Beat away."
A man of his word, Zengen slapped his master a good one.
Some time later, Dogo died, and Zengen,
still anxious to have his question answered,
went to the master Sekiso, and after relating what had happened,
asked the same question of him.
Sekiso, as if conspiring with the dead Dogo, would not answer.
"By god!" cried Zengen. "You too?"
"I'm not saying," said Sekiso, "and that's final."
At that very instant Zengen experienced an awakening.
Osho
There is a Tibetan chant for the dying,
in which the loved ones say over and over again,
“Nothing to hold to, nothing to do.”
What this symbolizes is the idea of moving from Doing to Being.
It seems to me that this process ought to be part of all living--
that one can become accustomed to Being long before it becomes a task related to dying….
Eda LeShan
Death is nothing at all.
It does not count.
I have only slipped away into the next room.
Nothing has happened.
Everything remains exactly as it was.
I am I, and you are you, and the old life that we lived so fondly together is untouched, unchanged.
Whatever we were to each other, that we are still.
Call me by the old familiar name.
Speak of me in the easy way which you always used.
Put no difference into your tone.
Wear no forced air of solemnity or sorrow.
Laugh as we always laughed at the little jokes that we enjoyed together.
Play, smile, think of me, pray for me.
Let my name be ever the household word that it always was.
Let it be spoken without an effort, without the ghost of a shadow upon it.
Life means all that it ever meant.
It is the same as it ever was.
There is absolute and unbroken continuity.
What is this death but a negligible accident?
Why should I be out of mind because I am out of sight?
I am but waiting for you, for an interval, somewhere very near,just round the corner.
All is well.
Nothing is hurt; nothing is lost.
One brief moment and all will be as it was before.
How we shall laugh at the trouble of parting when we meet again!
Henry Scott Holland
Learn about yourself.
Your consciousness will give yo the appropriate answers to immortality.
There is no definition of what constitutes a good death.
To die at a young age in ancient Greece was considered a blessing.
Today it is looked upon as a tragedy.
Conscious dying is, in my opinion, the best death.
Dr. Bruce Goldberg: Peaceful Transition: The Art of Conscious Dying & the Liberation of the Soul
There are those who seek to control your behavior for many different reasons,
who even wish to control your behavior regarding your own personal experience,
but their frustration level is great because they have no way of controlling others,
and every attempt at that control is futile, wasted effort.
So, many are uncomfortable with the idea of people
deliberately removing themselves from this physical experience by way of “suicide,”
but we want you to understand that even if you do that,
you do not cease to exist,
and whether you depart this physical experience by way of deliberate “suicide”
or by way of not-deliberate release,
the Eternal Being that you are continues to be
and looks back on the physical experience you have just left behind
only with love and appreciation for the experience.
Abraham
Even if death were to fall upon you today like lightning,
you must be ready to die without sadness and regret,
without any residue of clinging for what is left behind.
Remaining in the recognition of the absolute view,
you should leave this life like an eagle
soaring up into the blue sky.
Dilgo Khyentse Rinpoche
“Why are so many people more readily appalled by an unnatural form of dying
than by an unnatural form of living?”
Norman Cousins: Saturday Review, June 14, 1975
If one wants to die peacefully,
one must begin helping oneself
long before one’s time to die has come.
Swami Muktananda
The first thing that we must realize about death
is that it is a perfectly natural incident in the course of our life.
That ought to be obvious to us from the first,
because if we believe at all in a God who is a loving Father
we should know that a fate which, like death, comes to all alike,
cannot have in it aught of evil to any,
and that whether we are in this world or the next
we must be equally safe in His hands.
This consideration alone should have shown us that death
is not something to be dreaded,
but simply a necessary step in our evolution.
C. W. LEADBEATER: THE LIFE AFTER DEATH AND HOW THEOSOPHY UNVEILS IT
No more birth, nor old death;
these were just ideas.
If you should come again to help a few more to find the way, so be it;
but you are not a body,
you are love,
and it matters not where love appears to be.
For being love, it cannot be wrong.
Gary Renard.: Your Immortal Reality: How to Break the Cycle of Birth and Death
The expression of ineffable peace
seen on the faces of the dying
is because the brain reflects some feeble glimmers
of what the inner self is experiencing,
and the brain reacts upon the nerves and muscles.
The inner peace shines out on the faces of those who are passing on.
G. de Purucker: What Death Really Is
The body may be still, the last breath exhaled,
and the heart may have ceased to beat.
But the brain for some time still remains active.
These moments are for what is known as the panoramic vision.
Noise of any kind disturbs this viewing of life’s unfolding picture.
Be quite, be still, all who assist at the deathbed of the dying,
so that the entity passing into the brighter spheres
may have its train of though untouched by anything of earth.
Let there be no noise, no weeping.
Let there be utter silence and an atmosphere of peace.
This is rich in kindness and understanding.
G. de Purucker: What Death Really Is
We are with those whom we have lost in material form,
and far, far nearer to them now than when they were alive.
For pure divine love is not merely the blossom of the human heart,
but has its roots in eternity.
We say that love beyond the grave,
illusion though you may call it,
has a magic and divine potency which reacts on the living.
H.P. Blavatsky: The Key to Theosophy
Sleep and death are brothers, according to the old Greek proverb.
However, they are not merely brothers, born of the same fabric of human consciousness,
but are in all verity one, identical.
Death is a perfect sleep,
with its interim awakenings of a kind, such as in the devachan,
and a full human awakening in the succeeding reincarnation.
Sleep is an imperfect fulfillment of death,
nature's prophecy of the future death.
Nightly we sleep, and therefore nightly we partially die.
G. de Purucker Fountain-Source of Occultism
I believe there are two sides to the phenomenon known as death, this side where we live, and the other side where we shall continue to live. Eternity does not start with death. We are in eternity now.
Norman Vincent Peale
Your soul knows the means of your death
are just as significant as the means of your birth.
Or, put another way, the mother who gave birth to you
is no more precious than the person who brings death to you.
Both are precious.
And both are friends, lovers, angels.
Both are eternal companions you have known forever.
Of course, ultimately, you are the only one who brings death to yourself.
No one else has that power over you.
But you may well choose to die at the hand of another, or from some dis-ease.
Or you can die peacefully in your bed, in a state of perfect health.
You all have the ability to do that.
When you have truly integrated these ideas into your thinking,
your life, and your being, you will be totally free.
You can do it in this lifetime.
You can die when and how you choose.
Spirit
Channeled through John Cali
The death-warning had nothing dismal about it for her;
no, it was remission of exile,
it was leave to come home.
Mark Twain: Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc
Oh there is no such thing as death,
but when you have that experience that you call death
you release your habits of thought
that are the only thing hindering you
from being what life has caused you to become.
Abraham
The knowledge of our true nature would misidentify us from our bodies and would enable us to witness, with perhaps a certain amount of wondrous curiosity, the actual death-process—the disappearance of what had appeared as a phenomenon in consciousness—without any tension or involvement.
Ramesh Balsekar: Explorations Into the Eternal
Please listen to Brittany Maynard discuss her decision to die with dignity:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yPfe3rCcUeQ#t=23
An attitude of utter self-surrender to a perfectly natural happening
should have the incidental advantage regarding true 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 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 Balsekar: Explorations Into the Eternal
I am trying to unite what is divine in me
with what is divine in the universe.
Plotinus on his deathbed
The principal theme of all the great Mystery schools of antiquity, and of the ceremonials which reflected in dramatic form these inner teachings, was the 'adventures' which the human entity enters upon when the physical body is cast aside. The strongest emphasis was upon the fact that death and sleep are fundamentally the same, not different except in degree; that sleep is an imperfect death and death is a perfect sleep. This is the main key to all the teachings on death; because if we understand what happens during sleep, we will have the Ariadne's thread to a relative comprehension of what takes place at, during, and after dying.
Gottfried De Purucker: Death and the Circulation of the Cosmos
Part of your energy was left behind in the spirit world at the time of incarnation.
When your love arrives back home again,
you will already be there waiting with that portion of your energy which was left behind.
This same energy is held in reserve for unification with the returning soul.
One of the significant revelations of my research was to learn
that soulmates are never truly apart from each other.
Michael Newton--Destiny of Souls: New Case Studies of Life Between Lives
When souls are in the spirit world preparing for a new life,
they laugh about being in rehearsals for their next big stage play on Earth.
They know all roles are temporary.
Michael Newton--Destiny of Souls: New Case Studies of Life Between Lives
"Death is a part of life as much as birth,
and is as inevitable as eating, eliminating, sleeping and breathing.
The human body is going to breathe and just as surely as it breathes,
it's going to stop breathing.
It is not something to be overcome or fought against.
"If you fight against death
you totally misunderstand the miraculous nature of life.
Death is a miracle
and if life is beautiful,
then death is equally beautiful."
E. J. Gold. THE GREAT ADVENTURE: Talks on Living, Dying, and the Bardos
To live well, we must practice death.
We bring courage and clarity to life choices
when we are aware that death is always with us,
and that we should be ready to meet it any day.
Robert Moss
Whenever someone really presses the issue of what happens after we die,
my response comes in the form of a question:
“Who are you?”
You have to know where you are right now,
in order to know where you will be tomorrow,
and the afterlife is just a special kind of tomorrow.
Deepak Chopra: Life After Death
You are quite consciously holding yourself in physical reality,
if that is where you find yourself to be.
A very small shift is all that is required to go into non-physical existence.
The difference between physicial reality and non-physical reality,
what you call physical life and physical death,
is not as large as you think.
It is a very, very short step between your physical vibration,
that which makes you physical,
and that which allows you to be non-physical.
A very short step, very short...
Bashar
Death is a great gift,
because it throws open all the doors and windows.
Dying forces us outside the wall.
Instead of seeing the familiar things we’ve assiduously collected and labeled as reality,
we must start over.
However, the rishis assert that we don’t enter the Akashic field empty-handed.
Whatever our dream is right now,
that dream continues.
Deepak Chopra: Life After Death
Even if death were to fall upon you today like lightning,
you must be ready to die without sadness and regret,
without any residue of clinging for what is left behind.
Remaining in the recognition of the absolute view, you should
leave this life like an eagle soaring up into the blue sky.
Dilgo Khyentse Rinpoche
Awareness of death is the very bedrock of the path.
Unless you have developed this awareness
all other practices are obstructed.
The Dalai Lama
In my long life I have seen several cases where the Tree appeared
announcing a death which was still far away;
but in none of these was the person in a state of sin.
No; the apparition was in these cases only a special grace;
in place of deferring the tidings of that soul’s redemption till the day of death,
the apparition brought them long before, and with them peace –
peace that might no more be disturbed –
the eternal peace of God.
I myself, old and broken ,
wait with serenity;
for I have seen the vision of the Tree.
I have seen it, and am content.
Mark Twain: Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc
The average earth-dweller has no notion
what kind of place “the next world” can possibly be,
usually because he has not given much thought to the matter.
How those very same people regret their indifference
when they eventually arrive here in the spirit world!
“Why,” they cry, “were we not told about this before we came here?”
Anthony Borgia The World Unseen (Life on Other Worlds)
. . . and I will leave. But the birds will stay, singing:
and my garden will stay, with its green tree,
with its water well.
Many afternoons the skies will be blue and placid,
and the bells in the belfry will chime,
as they are chiming this very afternoon.
The people who have loved me will pass away,
and the town will burst anew every year.
But my spirit will always wander nostalgic
in the same recondite corner of my flowery garden.
Juan Ramon Jimenez: The Definitive Journey
Carlos Castaneda: Journey To Ixtlan
"The pure mind sees things as they are –
bubbles in consciousness.
These bubbles are appearing, disappearing and reappearing –
without having real being.
No particular cause can be ascribed to them,
for each is caused by all and affects all.
Each bubble is a body and all these bodies are mine.”
Nisargadatta Maharaj
Our experiences after death are shaped and colored by our imagination,
or lack of imagination.
William Blake rightly insisted, with poetic vision,
that “the world of imagination is the world of eternity.
It is the divine bosom into which we shall all go after the death of the vegetative body.”
Robert Moss: The Dreamer’s Book of the Dead
Accepting death as a natural part of life sounds simple--
all that stands in our way is fear of dying well—and of living well.
Although fear can be a terrible obstacle as death approaches, it can also be an ally….
Fear can help us see what is truly important, and compel us to prioritize.
Within our fear, we may discover, are precious seeds of wisdom.
Because of this, I am very careful not to make judgments about a person’s attitude toward dying—--
be it fear, denial, sorrow, defiance, acceptance or liberation.
Joan Halifax: Being With Dying
To understand death,
one must understand identity.
Know that you are not that which appears to die.
Know that you existed prior to embodiment.
Know that you exist after your body is shed.
Identify with that which you truly are.
Do not pretend to die as that which you appear to be.
Thanatos
Birth and death,
or appearing and disappearing,
are the two opposite sides of the same state of Consciousness.
When one comes,
the other goes,
and conversely when one goes,
the other comes.
Shri Sadguru Siddharameshwar Maharaj: Amrut Laya - The Stateless State
Those who are enjoying the heavenly rest
in this region (the mental plane) after death,
are so entirely secluded within the world of their own thought
that nothing outside of that can affect them,
and they are consequently absolutely safe.
Thus is justified the grand old description of the heaven-world as the place
"where the wicked cease from troubling, and the weary are at rest."
Charles Leadbeater: The Devachanic Plane or The Heaven World, Its Characteristics And Inhabitants
So whatsoever form you think you are, you are mad.
You are formless.
You don’t belong to any form,
and you don’t belong to any body,
you don’t belong to any caste, religion, creed;
you don’t belong to any name.
And unless you become formless, nameless, you will never be sane.
Osho: The Empty Boat
At the moment of death,
our soul rises out of its host body.
If the soul is older and has experience from many former lives,
it knows immediately it has been set free and is going home.
These advanced souls need no one to greet them.
However, most souls I work with are met by guides just outside Earth’s astral plane.
Michael Newton: Destiny of Souls: New Case Studies of Life Between Lives
He whom we think we have lost,
has only been sent on ahead.
Seneca
The way to the underworld is straight
Whether one starts from Athens or the Nile.
Don't worry about dying far from home.
A fair breeze blows from every quarter
Right to the land of the dead.
Greek epitaph
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.
Seneca: Letters From a Stoic
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.
The mystic calls a change of consciousness "death."
Neville Goddard: Awakened Imagination
Whether “we” continue to exist after death or not,
does not depend on what we think about it.
The reality of the universe is the reality of the universe.
Death is a reality, and consciousness is a reality.
What happens to consciousness after death is a reality.
It either continues without depending on the brain through which it once worked, or it does not.
This continuation does not depend on what we think about it,
on how much we understand it, nor upon how well our language expresses its real nature.
Now we can study that reality to some degree,
because some people do come back from what we have defined as death.
Jonathan Watts and Yoshiharu Tomatsu: Never Die Alone: Death as Birth in Pure Land Buddhism
Dreams are real as long as they last.
Can we say more of life?
Havelock Ellis
When one is not,
Where is the world?
In the absence of body-consciousness,
What can one say about the world?
Can't one see that body-consciousness and world-consciousness
Rise and set together?
That which perceives each,
Prior to both, is what one is.
Wu Hsin: Being Conscious Presence (The Illumination of Wu Hsin)
We don’t have any pat answers.
The church is still pre-Copernican in its attitude toward death.
The medieval picture of heaven and hell hasn’t been replaced with anything more realistic,
or more loving.
Perhaps for those who are convinced that only Christians of their own way of thinking are saved
and will go to heaven, the old ideas are still adequate.
But for most of us, who see a God of a much wider and greater love
than that of the tribal God who only cares for his own little group,
more is needed.
And that more is a leap of faith, an assurance that
that which has been created with love is not going to be abandoned.
Love does not create and then annihilate.
But where Joy Davidman,( Lewis’s wife) is now, or where my husband is,
no priest, no minister, no theologian can put into the limited terms of provable fact.
“Don’t talk to me about the consolations of religion,” Lewis writes,
“or I shall suspect that you do not understand.”
Madeleine L’Engle, introduction to C.S. Lewis: A Grief Observed.
Dr. James Beattie, a cardiologist who works at the East of England NHS Foundation Trust in Birmingham, believes hospitals should let more elderly patients die and “quality of life” should be given more consideration.
According to an article in the Daily Mail, Beattie said that society no longer accepts
mortality and is much less familiar with death.
‘If a person is in hospital, particularly an elderly person with multiple co-morbidities, if they have a cardiac arrest it’s a sign they are in decline,’ he told Radio 4.
‘It’s their act of dying and they should not be resuscitated, they should be allowed to die.’
Dr Beattie, who works at the East of England NHS Foundation Trust in Birmingham, explained that the chance of an elderly person leaving hospital after being resuscitated is around 5 per cent.
But he said the issue was a difficult one because people today are less likely to think and talk about death thanks to advancements in modern medicine, which mean that people are living longer.
‘Society these days is much less familiar with death,’ he said, adding:
‘Our great-grandparents and to some extent our grandparents
grew up with people dying before the days of antibiotics.
‘That’s denied these days. People died at home.
Death is now becoming something in hospitals and care homes,
somewhere removed from the family and the home.’
He went on to say: ‘We need to make it a more natural expectation.
Life is 100 per cent mortality and we need to get used to that.'
Daniel Martin: The Daily Mail 8 August
Give over to me the decision you had made
before entering the dream.
Gloria Wapnick;Kenneth Wapnick: Awaken from the Dream
The spirit world is at all times
a place where human beings can live
in such comfort and happiness
as they were meant to do from the beginning.
We do not, therefore,
spend our eternity in constant “prayer and praise,”
because that, as a mode of life, would be no life at all,
not even mere existence.
We are deeply thankful that we are ourselves,
and not as others would have us to be.
Anthony Borgia; The World Unseen (Life on Other Worlds)
Diane Murdock's The New Art of Dying challenges us to pause in our life passage, regardless of death's proximity, and recognize that "we can become masters in creating our own peaceful exit".
The New Art of Dying reveals options through which we can personalize responses to death's increasingly complicated medical and legal landscape and how best to reconcile death's demands upon the dying, their family, friends and caregivers.
The New Art of Dying affirms our birthright to ensure our vision of a good death. Through a comprehensive explanation of drafting advance medical directives, do not resuscitate orders and the appointment of a proxy who can confirm the dying's instructions, we discover that our death experience, with the proper preparation, can extend our life legacy through engendering a proactive acceptance that negates resistant sorrow.
The New Art of Dying shares stories of those who befriended death prior to dying, those who artfully crafted documents that minimized uncertainty and established experiential space for celebration over suffering.
The New Art of Dying inspires us to meet death as artists through life affirming action
rather than passive resignation.
He flat died.
And he died without pretending
that he was “really going to get well any day now,”
without permitting himself to become a ghoulish and futile medical experiment,
without contributing to the stupefying mass denial
that causes almost 80 percent of America’s healthcare dollars
to be blown on the last six months of life.
He died unashamed and having, as usual, a great time.
John Perry Barlow describing Timothy Leary’s death
‘Oh Arjuna,
both you and I have passed through many births.
You know them not,
but I remember them all.’
Sri Krishna to Arjuna: The Bhagavad-Gita
One of our female patients was blinded in a laboratory explosions,
and the moment she came out of her physical body
she was again able to see and to describe the whole accident
and the people who dashed into the laboratory.
When she was brought back to life she was again totally blind.
Do you understand why many, many of these people
resent our attempts to artificially bring them back
when they are in a far more gorgeous, more beautiful
and perfect place?
Elisabeth Kubler-Ross: The Tunnel and the Light: Essential Insights on Living and Dying
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
Individuals who are dying in a more gradual manner
feel as though their will to live sustains them
and are afraid that if they yield, they will die.
At the point of surrender, fear subsides,
and the person developed a feeling of serenity and tranquility.
When death becomes certain, its advent is faced with inner calmness.
Usually the stage of life review immediately follows the shift from active mastery to passive surrender.
At this point, the self splits from its bodily representation,
an event that can precipitate “our-of-the-body experiences”.
Individuals can actually see their bodies approaching death,
but there is no more fight against impending death.
Death as a reality is negated,
and the self becomes a witness watching this scene with detached interest.
Stanislav Grof: The Ultimate Journey: Consciousness and the Mystery of Death
“In birth there is nothing but birth
and in death there is nothing but death.
Accordingly, when birth comes, become and manifest birth,
and when death comes, become and manifest death.
Do not avoid them or desire them.”
Eihei Dogen
I've had terminal cancer for more than a month now
and it's been one of the best times of my life,
the best moments of my life.
You know, as a meditator, you wonder what it will be like to die.
You say to yourself, "I'm not afraid of death."
However, truthfully, if someone asks you, you can't really know until you face it.
But when they told me I had cancer,
it was like telling me, "Oh, do you want some ice cream?"
There was no negative reaction at all--nothing,
not one bit of anxiety, not one bit of fear, not one bit of depression.
Actually, a smile came on my face.
Once they tell you you're terminal,
now you're getting somewhere.
Rodney Bernier
Quote from The Art of Dying by S.N.Goenka and others
If you are not attached to anything,
death can come this very moment
and you will be in a very welcoming mood.
You will be absolutely ready to go.
In front of such a person, death is defeated.
Death is defeated only by those who are ready to die any moment, without any reluctance. They become the immortals. They become the buddhas.
Osho: Commentaries on the Teachings of Bodhidharma
As long as the dream lasts,
The dreamer lasts.
When the dream ends,
Both end.
This waking world and the self trance
Are no different.
Wu Hsin
“Are you sure? The surgeon said you could live to be ninety.”
“I don’t want to live to be ninety,” she said.
“I’m going to miss you,” I said, weeping.
“You are not only my mother. You are my friend.”
Katy Butler: Knocking on Heaven's Door: The Path to a Better Way of Death
“Light and free you let go, darling;
forward and up.
You are going forward and up;
you are going toward the light.
Willingly and consciously you are going,
willingly and consciously,
and you are doing this beautifully--
you are going toward the light--
you are going toward a greater love--
you are going forward and up.
You are going toward a greater love than you have ever known.
You are going toward the best, the greatest love,
and it is easy,
it is so easy,
and you are doing it so beautifully.”
Laura Huxley, speaking to Aldous Huxley as he died.
Laura Huxley: This Timeless Moment: A Personal View of Aldous Huxley
To reach the unlimited,
One must release one's hold on the limited.
Anyone believing that they are a body
Cannot arrive there.
Wu Hsin: Being Conscious Presence
If you can change sadness into celebration,
then you will also be capable of changing your death into resurrection.
So learn the art while there is till time.
If you can change sadness, you can change death.
If you can be celebrating unconditionally,
when death comes you will be able to laugh,
you will be able to celebrate, you will go happy.
And when you can go celebrating,
death cannot kill you.
Rather, on the contrary,
you have killed death.
Osho: Yoga: The Alpha and the Omega
There is a stage in our lives on earth which we know as the prime of life.
It is towards this that we all move.
Those of us who are old or elderly when we pass into spirit
will return to our prime-of-life period.
Others who are young will advance towards that period.
And we all preserve our natural characteristics;
they never leave us.
Anthony Borgia: The World Unseen (Life on Other Worlds)
If you should have the desire to study Zen under a teacher and see into your own nature,
you should first investigate the word shi [death].
If you want to know how to investigate this word,
then at all times while walking, standing, sitting, or reclining,
without despising activity, without being caught up in quietude
, merely investigate the koan:
“After you are dead and cremated, where has the main character [chief actor] gone?”
Then in a night or two or at most a few days,
you will obtain the decisive and ultimate joy.
Japanese Zen Master HAKUIN
How you die reflects your whole life and how you lived.
If I can see just your death, I can write your whole biography--
because in that one moment your whole life becomes condensed.
In that one moment you show everything.
OSHO: The Art of Living and Dying
Death is the end of
The illusion that one is mortal because
Death reveals what cannot die.
Self realization is the other means to
End the same illusion.
Wu Hsin
Every life is a preparation for the next death.
If one is wise,
one will use this life to the best advantage
and prepare for a good death.
S.N. Goenka
All students who know the teachings about the timeless mind,
dying, death and rebirth, and in particular the practice of Conscious Dying (Phowa),
have one thing in common:
They look fearlessly into the future, think of others, and are sources of strength for their surroundings.
They are the quiet center of the storm that befalls the family when death is imminent.
Lama Ole Nydah: Fearless Death - Buddhist Wisdom on the Art of Dying
That I might know that man lives after death,
it has been granted me to speak and converse with several persons
with whom I had been acquainted during their life in the body,
and this not merely for a day or a week, but for months,
and in some instances for nearly a year, as I had been used to do here on earth.
They were greatly surprised that they themselves,
during their life in the body, had lived,
and that many others still live, in such a state of unbelief concerning a future life,
when nevertheless there intervenes but the space of a few days between the decease of the body and their entrance into another world—-
for death is a continuation of life.
Swedenborg: Arcana Coelestia
The soul that rises with us, our life's Star,
Hath had elsewhere its setting
And cometh from afar.
Wordsworth
The hour of departure has arrived,
and we go our ways---
I to die, and you to live.
Which is better,
only the god knows.
Socrates
The leading cause of death is birth.
Lewis Lapham
Living is 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
What does it mean to die?
So how can I find out, actually, not theoretically, what it means to die?
I actually want to find out, as you want to find out.
I am speaking for you, so don't go to sleep
. What does it mean to die?
Put that question to yourself.
While we are young, or when we are very old, this question is always there.
It means to be totally free,
to be totally unattached to everything that man has put together,
or what you have put together-- totally free.
No attachments, no gods, no future, no past.
You don't see the beauty of it,
the greatness of it,
the extraordinary strength of it while living to be dying.
You understand what that means?
While you are living,
every moment you are dying,
so that throughout life you are not attached to anything.
That is what death means
Krishnamurti: The Future is Now
I am going to find out what death means because it is as important as living.
Krishnamurti, The Future is Now
That which we call birth, incarnation , death, reincarnation,
is simply the movement into and out of a particular octave of vibrations.
Human beings contain response-mechanisms for all the different planes within themselves.
When they develop these response-mechanisms
they will become aware of abundant life upon each of the planes.
Not only will they see that each planet or star has its counterpart upon each plane ,
but they will observe myriads of stars
which are at various stages of passing to or from ‘physical’ incarnation stage,
and exist around this earth in invisible forms of varied texture and development.
The few stars which we can see,
which happen to be in physical bodies at this time,
compare in numbers with the invisible stars to the degree that the living humans on the earth today
compare with the numbers of those who have lived and died upon its surface.
Vera Stanley Alder: Initiation of the World
The first thing I would like to tell you about death
is that there is no bigger lie than death.
And yet, death appears to be true.
It not only appears to be true,
but even seems like the cardinal truth of life.
We have even structured our lives out of our fear of death.
The fear of death has created society, the nation, family and friends.
The fear of death has caused us to chase money
and has made us ambitious of higher positions.
And the biggest surprise is that our gods and our temples
have been raised out of the fear of death.
And nothing is more false than death.
That is why whatever system of life we have created,
believing death to be true,
has become false.
Osho
There is no man so fortunate
that there shall not be by him when he is dying
some who are pleased with what is going to happen.
Marcus Aurelius
Weren't you a small baby, some years ago?
Where is the baby now?
It is gone forever and it is impossible to bring it back.
It, in a sense, died while you continued on to become a child, unaffected by its passing.
The child too is gone and you continued to become a teenager,
then a young adult and now a full adult.
Each died to give way to the next.
Soon the adult will give way to the aged.
All these deaths keep succeeding one another.
It is the natural course of the form's journey through the world.
Therefore, why fear this impending death?
It is no different from the previous deaths.
You have known them but you are not them.
Only the name and form die.
That which knows the name and form continues.
Fight with all your strength against the idea that you are describable
and death cannot touch you.
Wu Hsin: Behind the Mind
When you cease living for the images of society
and live instead for your own ideal, your own truth --
however that is within your being and love your eternal being --
then you become one with the flora and the fishes and indeed with all life.
Then you can say, “I have finished this experience.
I have loved all life that is here and, because I have,
I am ready for a new adventure.
I am ready for a far-off kingdom and a new understanding
and a whole different way of being.”
When you have done those things, master,
you will leave this plane in a blaze of glory.
That is how I left.
Ramtha: The White Book
Darkling I listen; and, for many a time
I have been half in love with easeful Death,
Call’d him soft names in many a mused rhyme,
To take into the air my quiet breath;
Now more than ever seems it rich to die,
To cease upon the midnight with no pain….
John Keats
“I can’t see how anybody could live freely
unless you’re not frightened of death any more,” the-now 69-year-old says.
“If you’re frightened of death, that sort of cuts your living down too.”
Nell de Gier
Quoted from article:
http://www.smh.com.au/lifestyle/life/how-to-embrace-death-for-a-fuller-life-20140522-zridc.html#ixzz32piqP4Cp
Consciousness though formless,
gives form to that which it is conscious of being,
but the moment you withdraw your formless reality
or consciousness from your conception of yourself (the form you wear)
this conception passes away.
A conception remains a formed reality
only as long as the invisible reality wears it.
Neville
Epicurus will oblige me with these words:
"Think on death,"
or rather, if you prefer the phrase,
on "migration to heaven."
The meaning is clear,
--that it is a wonderful thing to learn thoroughly how to die.
You may deem it superfluous to learn a text that can be used only once;
but that is just the reason why we ought to think on a thing.
When we can never prove whether we really know a thing,
we must always be learning it.
Seneca: Letters from a Stoic
Ignorance is the cause of all suffering.
It is the cause of all misfortune and sorrow.
When a person loses anything,
if he remembers that the true self cannot lose anything,
then sorrow is gone, and there is no grief.
If we know that the soul is immortal,
then when a friend dies, we have no reason to mourn over him,
or to grieve for him.
Of course, some people may think that it would not be human.
When they say that, they mean that they wish to remain on the plane of sorrow and grief
and imperfection and ignorance;
but a wise man is one who has risen above all human imperfections.
Swami Abhedananda Mystery of Death
Death can be seen as morally acceptable
when timing and circumstance allow us to avoid unnecessary pain and suffering,
to be conscious and alert,
and to remain within the circle of human companionship.
I call such a death a “moral good”
because it allows us to achieve important personal as well as social ends.
We are more at one with ourselves
and those around us.
By contrast, the wild death of technological attenuation,
or the personality-destructive death accompanying advanced dementia,
alienates us both from ourselves
and from those around us.
Daniel Callahan: The Troubled Dream of Life: In Search of a Peaceful Death
What is death?
A scary mask.
Take it off--see, it doesn't bite.
Epictetus
The skull told him (Zhuangzi):
"The dead have no lord over them, no servants below them.
There is none of the work associated with the four seasons,
so we live as if our springs and autumns were like heaven and earth, unending.
Make no mistake, a king facing south could not be happier."
Zhuangzi could not believe this and said,
" If I got the Harmonizer of Destinies to bring you back to life, sir,
with a body, flesh and blood, and companions, wouldn't you like that?"
The skull frowned, look aggrieved, and said,
"Why should I want to cast away happiness grater than that of kings
and become a burdened human being again?"
It's crucial to remember that the nature of dying is experiential and not medical.
Diane Burnside Murdoch: The New Art Of Dying
Again, is there not the fact that the wisest man ever dies with the greatest cheerfulness,
the most unwise with the least?
Don’t you think that the soul which has the clearer and longer sight
sees that it is starting for better things,
while the soul whose vision is dimmer does not see it?
Cicero: On Old Age
"If one leaves aside the last three hundred years of historical experience
as it unfolded in Europe and America, and examines the phenomenon of death
and the doctrine of the soul in all its ramifications -
Neoplatonic, Christian, dynastic-Egyptian, and so on,
one finds repeatedly the idea that there is a light body, an entelechy
that is somehow mixed up with the body during life
and at death is involved in a crisis in which these two portions separate.
One part loses its raison d'etre and falls into dissolution; metabolism stops.
The other part goes we know not where.
Perhaps nowhere if one believes it does not exist;
but then one has the problem of trying to explain life.
And, though science makes great claims and has done well at explaining simple atomic systems,
the idea that science can make any statement about what life is
or where it comes from is currently preposterous."
Terence McKenna
If a person has not found 'spirituality' to be useful to them before they became ill,
why introduce it when a person is facing death?
I feel it's a way of avoiding the living person in front of you –
and avoiding yourself.
Providing a 'solution' to this 'problem' of death, with a story.
It's big business, this spirituality.
It preys on the vulnerable and it's a crutch
that's going to break when you lean on it.
You have your life,
your living moments, and yourself –
right up to the very end.
You are enough – you don’t need to be spiritual."
Rebecca Green, Death Doula
a definition of "death"
Our true ‘I’ is an open, empty ‘field’
which allows experience to manifest freely.
When we no longer believe there is a self that must transcend itself and its circumstances,
we have achieved the only real freedom there is –
freedom from our illusory sense of bondage
and confinement to the adventures of a self.
Jennifer Matthews: Radically Condensed Instructions for Being Just as You Are
