Archive Three
If you have no idea how you got here,
and that doesn’t seem to bother you,
then why be afraid of death?
Rebecca Green, Death Doula
I can see no way to guarantee or control our reaction
to the prospect of suffering and dying
when it actually comes to us.
If we know in advance, however,
that our response is not necessarily fixed by nature or biology,
then we can begin to shape the self and the person
whom we will bring to that experience.
Daniel Callahan: The Troubled Dream of Life
Dry your tears, my friends,
and raise your heads
as the flowers raise their crowns to greet the dawn.
Look at the bride of Death
standing like a column of light Between my bed and the infinite;
Hold your breath and listen with me
to the beckoning rustle of
Her white wings.
Kahlil Gibran
With the last breath
all worries and cares of the mundane world are cast aside.
The feeling is like that of walking into a lover’s embrace,
or like the joyful anticipation of a child
waiting to open presents on Christmas morning.
Philip Kapleau: The Zen of Living and Dying
There may be a feeling of floating or flying,
similar to sensations people often have in dreams.
There is an awareness of great calmness and tranquility,
a sensation of relief and utter ease.
One might even wonder,
“What was all the worry about?”
Philip Kapleau: The Zen of Living and Dying
Let me capitulate in some detail the masters’ accounts
of the stages of the journey from death to rebirth.
During the first stage the most striking element
is the thought of how easy it is to die.
Unlike the sometimes prolonged act of dying,
death itself is as simple, easy,
and as natural as a leaf’s fluttering off a tree.
Philip Kapleau: The Zen of Living and Dying
The soul residing in the body
is already preparing itself for the life between death and rebirth.
Life between birth and death
receives sense and significance
when we observe existence between death and the next birth.
Rudolph Steiner: Life Between Death and Rebirth
Before the light in my mind faded
and the shadows lengthened too much for me to see anymore,
I chose at least,
at last,
to be master of my farewell.
Eugene O’Kelly, Chasing Daylight
quoted in: Diane Burnside Murdock: The New Art Of Dying
What passes beyond death
and enters into a life between death and rebirth,
and into ever-renewed earthly lives,
is already within us during the life between birth and death.
When we recognize it in ourselves,
then we also, simultaneously, recognize our immortality.
Rudolph Steiner: Life Between Death and Rebirth
The disembodied soul does not part with Nature
when it leaves the earth-life but, rather,
it rises to a plane of Nature
which is fuller, richer and sweeter in every way
than the best of which the earth dwelling soul dreams.
The dross of materiality burned away by the astral vibrations,
the soul blossoms and bears spiritual fruit in the new life.
Yogi Ramacharaka: The Life Beyond Death
Death is our eternal companion.
It is always to our left, at arm’s length.
The thing to do when you’re impatient is to turn to your left
and ask advice from your death.
An immense amount of pettiness is dropped
if your death makes a gesture to you,
or if you catch a glimpse of it,
or if you just have the feeling that your companion is there watching you.”
Carlos Castaneda: Journey to Ixtlan
. . . 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
I was united with you,
Remain united in me.
We shall speak together In the language of eternal being.
We will be active Where actions become events,
We will weave in the Spirit
Where human thoughts are woven
In the Word of eternal Thoughts.
Rudolph Steiner
—Address for Georga Wiese, January 11, 1924
As we go to sleep, we turn with a question,
in pure love and deep feeling,
to the one who passed away.
The question is carried in the heart into sleep.
Awaking the next morning,
we pay close attention to the first thing in our consciousness.
This answer will be in our own voice,
not that of the other.
Rudolph Steiner
Once upon a time we knew how to die.
We knew how to sit at a deathbed.
We knew how to die and how to sit
because we saw people we loved die all through infancy, childhood,
youth, middle age, and old age:
deaths we could not make painless,
deaths no machine could postpone.
The deaths of our ancestors were not pretty.
Some died roaring in pain.
But through the centuries we tutored ourselves in the art of dying
by handing down stories about how those we loved met their deaths.
Katy Butler Knocking on Heaven's Door: The Path to a Better Way of Death
Those who have died sometimes appear to us as images--
often not in their own likeness,
but in the image of another person or thing.
This image is, as it were, the gaze of the loved one upon us.
We can also feel the individual’s presence
and gaze as thoughts that come as if by grace.
We must try to become sensitive to the presence of this “other” in our thought life--
for the dead wish to help in the work of earthly evolution.
Rudolf Steiner
Men who have seen life and death...an unbroken continuum,
the swinging pendulum,
have been able to move as freely into death as they walked through life.
Socrates went to the grave almost perplexed by his companions' tears.
Voltaire
What is important is that we learn to feel that whoever has passed through the gates of death
has only assumed another form of life;
we should feel towards him as towards someone who has been obliged to emigrate to a far-away country,
to which we are going to follow him at a later date.
Therefore we have nothing worse to bear than a time of separation.
Rudolph Steiner: Life Beyond Death
It is necessary to meditate early,
and often,
on the art of dying
to succeed later in doing it properly just once.
Umberto Eco: The Island of the Day Before
There is never an ending to the Consciousness of You,
so really there is no “death”.
But there will come an end to the time
that your Consciousness will flow through this particular body
that you identify as you.
It is up to you when you withdraw your focus from this body.
Abraham
A good death
does honor to a whole life
Petrarch
For me, all dying people are teachers, giving to all those who help them a chance to transform themselves through developing their compassion.
Sogyal Rinpoche: Glimpse after Glimpse
I have never met a terminally ill patient who actually wanted to die,
but I have met many who want to stop living
the way they are forced to as a result of their disease.
Marilyn Webb: The Good Death: The New American Search to Reshape the End of Life
As a Zen master lay dying he cried out in pain.
Upset by his cries, one of his students said,
“Master! Why are you calling out like that?”
The master responded,
“My crying in pain is no different from my laughing in joy.”
Philip Kapleau: The Zen of Living and Dying
Keeping death out of mind cuts people off
from an important fact of their physical, mental and spiritual existence.
If knowing that we will die is part of what makes us human,
then forgetting that we will die threatens our humanity.
In the same way, the denial of death in American society
also cuts people off from our common humanity,
keeping them at such a distance from the deaths of others
that they cannot grieve or mourn
except in the culturally prescribed “way”.
James Farrell: Inventing The American Way of Death
The beginning of life is joyful
and the ending of life is joyful
because there is no true Death.
Therefore at every stage of your growth
from Baby through to Old Age, as you see it,
rejoice in your being.
For you will move forward and be reincarnated and reincarnated.
Enjoy this happening.
There is an understanding on the Earth Plane
that it is a wonderful thing to come off the wheel of life and rebirth.
However, once you merge into the oneness
there is a longing to go back onto the wheel of life and death,
for it is a wonderful thing.
R. Mackenzie: Metatron-This Is The Clarion Call: All You Need To Know
The whole human being can be infinitely strengthened
when he is conscious not only of his firm stand here in the physical world
but is filled with the inner realization of being able to say
of the dead whom he has loved:
they are with us,
they are in our midst.
Rudolph Steiner: The Dead Are With Us
Today people think:
when a human being has passed through the gate of death,
his activity ceases as far as the physical world is concerned.
But indeed it is not so!
There is a living and perpetual intercourse
between the so-called dead and the so-called living.
Those who have passed through the gate of death have not ceased to be present;
it is only that our eyes have ceased to see them.
They are there in very truth.
Rudolph Steiner: The Dead Are With Us
Transcendence of individuality means
transcendence not only of the fear of the unknown that death represents.
Transcendence of individuality—misidentification with an entity as a separate individual--
means at once the realization that the process of life-death is but a dream
and that the awakening from this living-dream renders all that happens therein truly illusory.
Ramesh Balsekar: Explorations Into the Eternal: O, Death Where Is Thy Sting?
The individual, when there has been apperception,
apparently continues to live like an ordinary person
but his living is truly “being lived”
and his dying is merely the disappearance of an appearance
because of his awareness that his real nature continues to be the same
as it was before the appearance of the body in the course of its duration,
and even after the disappearance of the body.
Ramesh Balsekar: Explorations Into the Eternal: O, Death Where Is Thy Sting?
He who sees multiplicity or diversity,
alone goes from death to death.
He who sees oneness,
rises above death.
Swami Abhedananda: Mystery of Death
For the light seeker,
death is like sinking or rising into a blissful starlight.
It is the outward ebbing of a tide.
It is a glorious purple,
crimson and gold dimming into an autumn sunset.
Even to those trained to think in the reality of the afterlife,
death comes as one unfolding surprise after another.
Measureless,
the light enfolds you,
encompasses you,
encircles you with life-giving arms.
Earlyne Chaney: The Mystery of Death& Dying: Initiation at the Moment of Death
Every day the human being encounters the other side of existence,
between falling asleep and waking up again.
What is experienced during this time is not accessible to earthly consciousness,
is hidden in the darkness of the unconscious,
and may seem to many to be of little importance to earthly existence;
but these experiences become fully conscious once the human soul has passed through the gates of death,
and then appear as the most significant of all earthly life.
Rudolph Steiner: Life Beyond Death
There is no such thing as death,
but when you have the experience that you call death
you release your habits of thought
that are the only thing that hinders you
from being what Life has caused you to become.
Abraham
The work of the Sufi is to take away the fear of death.
This path is trodden in order to know,
while in life,
what will be with us after death.
It is said in the Koran: “Die before death.”
To take off this mortal garb,
to teach that it is not this mortal but that immortal Being,
so that we may escape the great disappointment that death brings,
this is what is accomplished in life by a Sufi.
Hazrat Inayat Khan
Your pet would also like to help you to get over this “death” thing,
for it understands that there is no death,
but only Eternal Life.
Your pet joyously romps into physical body after physical body,
dreading death never,
enjoying its own joyful ride on its own joyful river.
Your dog is among the best teachers on the planet.
Abraham-Hicks: The Astonishing Power of Emotions
75 percent of parents who lost a child
had an encounter within a year of the child’s death.
But a sad 75 percent of all those who had encounters
reported not mentioning them to anyone for fear of ridicule.
Julia Assante The Last Frontier: Exploring the Afterlife and Transforming Our Fear of Death
When I allow time I am afraid of death.
I wonder if you understand all this?
Time means accumulation - right?
Time means remembrance,
time means accumulating knowledge about oneself,
all that involves time.
But when there is no time at all,
psychologically,
there is nothing - you follow?
Krishnamurti
Death holds many fears.
It is that which is most unspoken about,
but yet most often thought about.
There is no need to fear death,
for with its release there is again life
which far exceeds that which is here on this planet.
Dolores Cannon: Between Death & Life: Conversations with a Spirit
Verily death is the bridge that unites friend to friend.
Muhammad
In that moment when Life and Death suddenly integrate,
that Inconceivable Light passes before our eyes like a shooting star.
Shinmon Aoki: Coffinman: The Journal of a Buddhist Mortician
Life lives and death dies.
This body is only covering a life--
this living being does not die.
Ignorance of this makes us fear death
Hazrat Inayat Khan
Instead of feeling helplessly attracted to death,
those who have met it directly in near-death experiences,
even if they were negative experiences,
as well as those who have been visited by the dead
feel a renewed love of life and a profound sense of purpose.
Julia Assante The Last Frontier: Exploring the Afterlife and Transforming Our Fear of Death
Teach me to live that I may dread
The grave as little as my bed
Bishop Ken
We may look upon death as a powerful deliverer,
that unlooseth all our fetters,
breaks our chains to pieces,
raiseth our souls to the highest glory and happiness.
If we consider death thus,
there is nothing more lovely than death,
and nothing more to be desired.
Charles Drelincourt :The Christian's Defence Against the Fears of Death:
With Seasonable Directions How to Prepare Ourselves to Die Well
(1818)
If humans would accept that they, every human,
are all that Life is,
they could not fear death.
They would know that fearing death is fearing Life,
fearing themselves.
Death would not exist
as it appears to exist in their dream of being human,
of being less than Life Itself.
Thanatos
If we realize as we should the inevitableness of death,
is it not well to “learn to die” and to die well?
When death comes our way, how shall we greet it,
as a friend—or a foe?
Is death to be a beginning of life or its end?
It one’s heart is fully prepared for the future,
then Death will come as a friend to rid us of a heavy burden.
We meet it, as we do a welcome friend, with a smile,
not with a mocking fist as some noble Frenchmen met the guillotine.
Herbert Lockyer: Last Words of Saints and Sinners
'The end of my life is near at hand;
seven days hence,
like a man who rids himself of a heavy load,
I shall be free from the burden of my body.
Death of the Buddha
There is this remarkable fact in Buddhism,
that nowhere is any fear expressed of death itself,
nowhere any apprehension of what may happen to the dead.
It is the sorrow of separation,
the terror of death to the survivors,
that is always dwelt upon with compassion,
and the agony of which it is sought to soothe.
H. Fielding: The Soul of a People
The Devachanic Plane, the mental plane or the heaven world,
is a realm of nature which is of exceeding importance to us--
a vast and splendid world of vivid life in which we are living now
as well as in the periods intervening between physical incarnations.
It is only our lack of development,
only the limitation imposed upon us by this robe of flesh,
that prevents us from fully realizing
that all of the glory of the highest heaven is about us here and now,
and that influences flowing from that world are ever playing upon us
if we will only understand and receive them.
C.W. Leadbetter: The Devachanic Plane
So this whole process of death was created
so that the physical body would die
and would HAVE to release the spirit.
It was done so that you wouldn't get lost in this world of matter,
so that you had an easy way to come back to our side of the veil--
which, by the way, is a much more natural state for you.
Much more natural.
Saint-Germain: Death and Dying
Lese Dunton: What would you most like people to realize as a result of this research?
(into Near Death Experiences)
Bruce Greyson: I think the most important thing for people to realize,
for the average person to realize, is that having a near-death experience is a very common,
very normal experience. They happen to everybody.
They happen to presidents, they happen to psychotics, religious people or atheists.
They are a normal part of living. They have nothing to do with mental illness.
They’re nothing to be afraid of or worried about if you have them.
Nothing to be ashamed of, either.
Dunton: And it results in a tendency to not fear death anymore.
Greyson: Right. And people tend to think that if they weren’t afraid of dying,
or they thought dying was beautiful, they’d become suicidal.
That does not seem to be the case.
What happens is that when they lose their fear of death,
they also lose their fear of living life to the fullest
because they’re not afraid of taking chances anymore.
They’re not afraid of dying.
So they actually get more interested in life
and enjoy it much more than they did before.
Fred M. Frohock: BEYOND: On Life After Death
Fear of death is more fearsome than death itself.
Train the body without attachment,
to accomplish its purpose,
but never forget that it is only a transient’s nest.
Strive for the realization of the true Self,
that is, the unborn and undying life-force, atman.
When one lives in full awareness of this true Self,
there is no more meaning to the word “death”.
The bird flies freely away from one night’s perch:
its freedom of wings is a joy
and the infinite sky is not a source of fear.
Swami Veda Bharati: Meditation and the Art of Dying
In the fourth, and last Journey,
the Perfect Man guides others in their transition
from what is generally considered to be physical death,
to a further stage of development which is invisible to the ordinary person.
For the dervish, therefore,
the apparent break which takes place at conventional physical death does not exist.
A continuous communication and interchange exists
between him and the next form of life.
Idries Shah: The Sufis
I dive down into the depth of the ocean of forms,
hoping to gain the perfect pearl of the formless.
No more sailing from harbor to harbor
with this my weather-beaten boat.
The days are long passed when my sport was to be tossed on waves.
And now I am eager to die into the deathless.
Tagore: Gitanjali
I sit by life's well,
In the land beyond my dreams.
Heart to heart meeting,
Spirit and soul's greeting,
In the land beyond my dreams.
The ark is waiting and I am dreaming,
Of the land beyond my dreams.
In the ark of silence, silently we go,
To the land beyond my dreams.
Yogananda
I feel weightless as I float away from my body.
It’s a wonderful sensation of freedom;
no pain, no struggle for breath.
Voices speak to me and I strain to comprehend the words.
Several people feel close to me and even though their words are muffled;
I clearly hear my name called.
It must be the middle of night
yet my room is illuminated by ethereal, silvery light.
William Buhlman: Adventures in the Afterlife
The fact of death does not turn a coward into a hero
or the fool into a wise man, true;
yet those judgments are highly limiting to begin with,
and death does bring man into his own estate.
That is, he sees his own characteristics and abilities in a clearer light
and after the first shock of surprise,
he usually views himself with a more generous, lively compassion than he did before.
Jane Roberts: The Afterdeath Journal of An American Philosopher: The World View of William James
May you know in your soul that there is no need to be afraid.
When your time comes,
may you be given every blessing and shelter that you need.
May there be a beautiful welcome for you
in the home where you are going.
You are not going somewhere strange.
You are going back to the home you never left.
(excerpt from Celtic prayer)
The American Book of Living and Dying: Lessons in Healing Spiritual Pain
Death will have to be lived,
it will have to be known,
it will have to be seen.
You will have to fall in love with it;
you will have to look into its eyes.
And as soon as a man looks into death’s eyes,
begins to watch it, penetrate into it,
he feels astounded.
To his great amazement, he realizes,
“what a great mystery lies hidden in death!
What I knew as death and kept running away from,
actually conceals within itself the source of supreme life.”
Hence I say to you:
Enter into death willingly so that you may reach life.
Osho: And Now, And Here
When both the fear of life and the fear of death
shall have departed from us,
and we are no longer afraid of the universe in which we live,
we shall discover by some Divine interior awareness
that the soul is immortal, forever expanding, forever outgoing,
and forever upward spiraling.
It is only because we have been taught to be afraid of the universe
that we have questioned that “good shall come at last alike to all.”
We should think of passing from this world as a great adventure.
We should live as though the day in which we live were eternity itself.
Ernest Holmes: You Will Live Forever
Euphoria sets in.
The body takes care of the dying mind.
The mind takes care of the dying body.
“You know that great feeling,
when you first meet somebody you’re really attracted to,
when you fall in love?
We’ve all had that feeling,” Norma said.
"It’s caused by serotonin, dopamine, and norepinephrine.
Those chemicals will continue to increase,
and they are at peak in the moment when you die.”
Erika Hayasaki. The Death Class: A True Story About Life
Humans believe that the inspiration to reincarnate
is to live an enlightened life.
Few are aware that, for many, if not most,
the inspiration is to die an enlightened death.
Thanatos
Birth turns into death.
God knows from what kind of foolishness
and during what unfortunate times
the idea became fixed in the human mind
that birth and death are dichotomous,
that life and death are two separate things.
We want to live;
we don’t want to die--
but we don’t know that death is already a part of life.
Once we decide that we don’t want to die
it becomes a certainty,
that very moment,
that our lives will be filled with problems and difficulties.
Osho
I had always secretly wished that consciousness would survive after bodily death.
I wanted it to be true,
but maybe my faith was not strong enough to make this true for me.
Through my Near Death Experiences, I now have empirical corroboration of this--
but I don’t go so far as to call it proof.
The question is, will this be strong enough to withstand panic if,
say, tomorrow, I learn that I am terminally ill?
Will this console me if I lose a person I love?
I don’t know.
But I am convinced that we should think about these issues
before something sad happens to us,
before we confront death or mourning,
in order to be prepared as much as possible.
Beatrice (after a Near Death Experience)
Kenneth Ring: Lessons From The Light
There is no separate, indivisible, specific point of death.
Life is a state of becoming, and death is a part of this process of becoming.
You are alive now, a consciousness knowing itself,
sparkling with cognition amid a debris of dead and dying cells;
alive while the atoms and molecules of your body die and are reborn.
You are alive, therefore, in the midst of small deaths;
portions of your own image crumble away moment by moment
and are replaced, and you scarcely give the matter a thought.
So you are to some extent now alive in the midst of the death of yourself --
alive despite, and yet because of, the multitudinous deaths and rebirths
that occur within your body in physical terms.
Seth Speaks: The Eternal Validity of the Soul
What happens after death is so unspeakably glorious
that our imaginations and our feelings do not suffice
to form even an approximate conception of it…
Sooner or later, the dead all become what we also are.
But in this reality, we know little or nothing about that mode of being.
And what shall we still know of this earth after death?
The dissolution of our timebound form in eternity
brings no loss of meaning.
Rather, does the little finger know itself a member of the hand.
C.G. Jung
I have come to accept myself exactly as I am.
This is the greatest gift of all.
And so my healing has occurred.
Soon my body will be dropping away from me,
like a cocoon, and my spirit will fly like a butterfly--
beautiful and perfect.
I don’t claim to know where exactly it is I am going,
but my heart tells me it is filled with light and love.
An open heart is an infinitely greater blessing than death is a tragedy.
Let us all take comfort in this knowledge.
A letter from an AIDS patient, Bill
David Kessler: The Needs of the Dying
Dr. Katherine Morris, a surgical oncologist,
has seen good deaths, and she's seen bad deaths.
The good ones, she says, are peaceful, even transcendental.
The patient's family is gathered around,
and they're hurting,
but they're supporting each other.
"They're crying and they're joking.
They're together.
And they're with the person when they go."
Bad deaths, she says, happen when the family has to watch
traumatic and futile life-prolonging procedures.
"It was my patients that really taught me how important it was
for some patients that are really facing the end of life
to have that control and to be able to say,
'I accept that I am actively in the dying process,
and this is how I want to do it.
I want to die at home.’ "
Marisa Demarco
“And how did you come out?”
“I died of too much joy.”
“That was a pleasant death and an unusual one,” I said, smiling.
“How did it happen?”
“The doctor said that I died of heart failure.
For years I had wanted a certain thing, and when it came to me suddenly,
the realization was too much for me.”
“And then?”
“Why, I suddenly realized that I had let slip the body
through which I might have enjoyed this thing I had attained.”
“And then?”
“I remembered that I was not my body,
that I was my consciousness;
and as long as that was intact, I was intact.
So I went right on enjoying the attainment.”
“Without a regret?”
“Yes.”
Elsa Barker: Letters from the Afterlife
For many months, my idea of healing was that of caring for my body.
I gave it my best try and I am proud of this fact.
I often expressed my certainty that I would heal my body with my own healing powers.
I still believe these healing powers exist,
but as my physical health reached a point where optimism about my health
would have had to become self-denial,
I realized the need to accept my own impending death and physical mortality.
I also realized that self-compassion meant feeling in my heart
that even death was not a sign of weakness or failure.
This seems to be the ultimate act of self-acceptance.
I thank God for it.
A letter from an AIDS patient, Bill
David Kessler: The Needs of the Dying
There is no single best kind of death.
A good death synchronizes with your own particular needs
and is tailor-made so that it is meaningful for you.
A good death for you in one in which the “hand” of your way of dying
slips easily into the “glove” of your death.
A good death meets your own needs,
within the context of the wishes and needs of your loved ones and your own social milieu.
It is “ego-syntonic”—it fits you.
The important point is that even if you cannot choose the manner of your dying,
you can choose to think about he way in which you will die
and perhaps change it a little bit
so that it is more acceptable to you and to your loved ones.
Edwin Shneidman: Voices of Death
The body is in the mind.
Everything is in the mind,
whether you’re incarnate or discarnate;
it doesn’t make any difference because the process is always the same--
you become right-minded instead of wrong-minded.
You’re never in the body.
Questions about what happens when I die,
what happens when I’m in between lifetimes
are really meaningless because you’re never in a body.
It’s always at the level of the mind.
Ken Wapnick
Click below to listen:
Alan Watts: Being Alive
It is not that death is something which will only happen in the future,
so why think about it now?
This too is a misapprehension.
Death will not happen in the future--
death is already happening every moment.
Although it will come to its completion in the future,
it is actually taking place every moment.
We are dying this very moment.
If we sit here for an hour,
we will have died one hour.
It may take seventy years for us to die completely,
nevertheless this one hour will be part of it.
During this one hour we will be dying too.
It is not that after seventy years one dies all of a sudden;
death never occurs instantaneously.
Death is not a sudden event;
it is a growth that begins with birth.
Birth is the first part of death,
and death is the last.
What we call the birth day is actually the first day of death.
Osho
“According to what you have been taught,
you are composed of physical matter and cannot escape it,
and this is not so.
The physical matter will disintegrate,
but you will not.
Though you cannot find me, know that I am here.
Your own parents seem to disappear before your eyes
and vanish into nothingness forever.
I can assure you that they will continue to live.
I can assure you that death is another beginning,
and that when you are dead,
you are not silenced.
For is this voice that you hear now, silence?
Seth: The Seth Material
"When consciousness is finally understood,
it will mean that the absence of consciousness will be understood.
The study of consciousness leads, inevitably, to the study of death.
Death is both a historical and an individual phenomenon
about which we, as monkeys, have great anxiety.
But what the psychedelic experience seems to be pointing out
is that actually the reductionist view of death has missed the point
and that there is something more.
Death isn't simple extinction.
The universe does not build up such complex forms as ourselves
without conserving them in some astonishing and surprising way
that relates to the intuitions that we have from the psychedelic experience.”
Terrence McKenna
Many older people were brought up to believe God tells us
when we are going to die.
They believe that it is all in God’s hands,
it is God’s will.
But we are far beyond that belief
with all the things we can do in today’s world to keep people alive.
One older lady told me her husband died of pneumonia. She said pneumonia is the old man’s friend. Well, now we have antibiotics, respirators, and many medical possibilities that shoo that old man’s friend right out the door. So I don’t think we are playing God with a law that provides for assisted dying.
Reverend Dr. Patricia Ross
(from Compassion in Dying: Stories of Dignity and Choice.
Edited by Barbara Coombs Lee)
Click below to listen:
Alan Watts: Nothingness
It is a line of tradition in Judaism that says we have the right to challenge God.
So when a person exercises that right to end life
under clearly defined circumstances,
they are fulfilling the duty of challenging God.
It does not mean we are not grateful for our lives.
I am grateful to God,
but the time has come when that gift is no longer meaningful.
Rabbi Joshua Stampfer (from Compassion in Dying: Stories of Dignity and Choice. Edited by Barbara Coombs Lee)
When we insist on the soul's undying existence,
what is meant is the survival after death of a definite unchanging personality
which was and will always remain the same throughout eternity.
It is the very imperfect superficial "I' of the moment,
evidently regarded by Nature as a temporary form and not worth preservation,
for which we demand this stupendous right to survival and immortality.
But the demand is extravagant and cannot be conceded;
the "I" of the moment can only merit survival if it consents to change,
to be no longer itself but something else, greater, better,
more luminous in knowledge, more moulded in the image of the eternal inner beauty,
more and more progressive towards the divinity of the secret Spirit.
It is that secret Spirit or divinity of Self in us which is imperishable,
because it is unborn and eternal.
Sri Aurobindo & The Mother: Psychic Being (Soul: Its Nature, Mission, Evolution)
Death is the expansion of your consciousness
beyond the boundary of the definition of yourself simply as a physical body.
Do remember this:
what you call your "physical body"
is not something that your consciousness is "in",
nor is it something that your consciousness "leaves" upon death.
Your physical body is inside your consciousness.
Bashar: Quest For Truth
You are never out of touch (with those who have passed).
What you call physical death truly, truly, is only
like stepping from one room to another room in the same house.
Really no more difference than that.
Just operating in a different modality.
Bashar: Quest for Truth
“Come, oh beautiful Death; my soul is longing for you.
Come close to me and unfasten the irons of life,
for I am weary of dragging them.
Come, oh sweet Death, and deliver me from my neighbours
who looked upon me as a stranger
because I interpret to them the language of the angels.
Come, oh gentle Death,
and enfold me under your white wings,
for my fellowmen are not in want of me.
Come and take me, my beloved Death.”
Kahlil Gibran: A Poet's Death Is His Life
There is something real, something of human evolution,
something additional to the Mystery Monitor, which survives death.
This newly appearing entity is the soul,
and it survives the death of both your physical body and your material mind.
This entity is the conjoint child of the combined life and efforts
of the human you in liaison with the divine you, the Adjuster.
This child of human and divine parentage
constitutes the surviving element of terrestrial origin;
it is the morontia self, the immortal soul.
The Urantia Book: Revealing the Mysteries of God, the Universe, World History, Jesus, and Ourselves
The desire for immortality that lives inside us is not fanciful;
it is truly justified.
But as people do not know what it is in them that is immortal,
the poor things cling with all their might to physical life.
They will feel immortal when they have learned
to work on their thoughts, feelings and behaviour,
for that is where eternal life is to be found.
Those who live that life, who have truly understood what it is,
have no fear of death.
They are aware that the riches they have accumulated
in their heart and soul
will never leave them.
On the contrary, they know they will find them
magnified in the invisible world,
since that is where we have our origin.
Omraam Mikhael Aivanhov
Death is a change of state that allows us to pass
through regions to which we cannot have access with our physical body.
Living on earth and living in the next world
are necessary periods in our evolution.
This is why we come, then we leave,
and then we come back again…
Omraam Mikhael Aivanhov
“‘ Whatsoever a man soweth,’” he said, “‘ that shall he reap.’
Those few words describe exactly the great eternal process
by which all that you see, actually here before you, is brought about.
All the trees, the flowers, the woods, the houses
that are also the happy homes of happy people--
everything is the visible result of ‘whatsoever a man soweth.’
This land, wherein you and I are now living,
is the land of the great harvest,
the seeds of which were planted upon the earth-plane.
All who live here have won for themselves
the precise abode they have passed to by their deeds upon the earth.”
Anthony Borgia The World Unseen (Life on Other Worlds)
Consequences of a Near Death Experience
"My body, my life, and the whole world suddenly felt like a prison."
"It had such a profound effect on the rest of my life:
the timelessness that I experienced;
the knowledge that my consciousness will survive outside my body.
It was enough to destabilize my life."
The reported changes are probably triggered by the conscious experience
of a dimension where time and distance play no role,
where past and future can be glimpsed,
where people feel complete and whole,
and where infinite wisdom and unconditional love can be experienced.
After an NDE, the insight no longer rests on faith but on certainty.
The NDE teaches people that life goes on after physical death.
The experience changed everything for me:
there’s something after death,
and it’s good.
Death is merely a release from the body.
Pim van Lommel . Consciousness Beyond Life: The Science of the Near-Death Experience
“Those people who think death is a one way street --
they are just wrong.
Doctors who believe NDE's are nothing but chemical changes in a dying brain are mistaken.
That is so far from the truth, it is just absurd!”
Leonard Rogers. Near Death Experiencer
May of the souls in the hearafter will refer to the glory of their new world
as “the vacation they never enjoy on earth.”
It is, perhaps, a gigantic understatement,
but the only way they can give us
the feeling of their new life in the hereafter.
Their vacation is the absence of cares and worries,
where nothing is expected
unless the souls want to accomplish something,
and where the pace is dictated by the soul’s willingness to rest or proceed.
We are in complete control of our destiny in the hereafter.
George Anderson: Walking In the Garden of Souls
The change called “death,” - the word is a misnomer -
universally regarded with gloomy fear,
occurs so naturally and simply that the greater number,
after passing out of the physical are not aware
that the transition has been made,
and having no knowledge of a spiritual life
they are totally unconscious of having passed into another state of being.
Carl August Wickland: Thirty Years Among the Dead
Once you know on your own what life is,
you never bother about death.
You can go beyond…
It is within your power
and it is your right.
Osho
There is no such thing as an afterlife,
it 's just life in different dimensions.
It's all life.
There is no afterlife because you never end.
Bashar
Please help me to understand what you mean by ‘death is life’. Help me to grasp that.”
“There is no death Karen.
I could tell you in no plainer words than those.
Death does not exist.
When that moment comes for you to leave behind your physical body
and emerge from the density that you now understand,
there is nothing that could prepare you for the exquisiteness that will be yours at that very moment in time.
It will be a surprising delight.
You have now lived in density for 42 years, but in all of that time,
no one has told you, prepared you for what awaits you.
You have been taught, told, that death is the unknown
and that the unknown is to be feared.
Yet I will visit new truths upon you Karen.
What awaits you is nothing short of the spectacular,
and truly, what awaits you is life in forms that you have up until now misunderstood.
Life awaits you.
More of life. Fresher versions. More beautiful varieties.
Far more delicate instruments of life.
Even more passionate, bolder means of life.
Brilliant methods. Intricate pathways.
Oh, how I desire to strip from you your present thoughts of that moment
and as a gift to you present you with a fuller understanding!
How I challenge you to let go!
Let go of what you believe lies ahead of you and peer into that window I have prepared.
Just take a glimpse of what I am suggesting.
“Listen.
You will not die.
You could not die if you tried, if you wanted to.
Death will not come to claim you.
It does not exist.”
Karen Peebles: The Bridge Between Worlds
One becomes more and more alive
or more and more dead..
Henry Miller
Most people die clinging.
They don’t want to die,
and one can understand why they don’t want to die.
Only at the moment of death
do they recognize the fact
that they have not lived.
Osho: Courage: The Joy of Living Dangerously
On earth, very often are are not afforded the choices of our life plan,
but we certainly choose what is to be our life’s work in the hereafter.
It is one of the most satisfying things in my life to know
that choice is one of the most beautiful gifts we will receive
when we enter the Garden of Souls.
George Anderson: Walking In the Garden of Souls
“Every thought you have held about death has been in error.
Every construction you have built in the name of death has been built on false foundation.
It is only, let me repeat, only, when you replace the word death with life
on every account that you speak and think of it, that its secret will begin to unfold to you,
its magnificence, its hidden beauty.
Karen Peebles: The Bridge Between Worlds (conversations with her disincarnate Uncle)
When I say 'how to prepare for death',
I don't mean preparing for the death that will come in the end --
that is very far away.
If you prepare for it you will be preparing for the future
and again the mind will come in.
No, when I say prepare for death,
I don't mean the death that will come finally,
I mean the death that visits you every moment with each exhalation.
Accept this death each moment
and you will be ready for the final death when it comes.
OSHO
Death, if we could but realise it, is one of our most practised activities.
We have died many times,
and shall die again and again.
Death is essentially a matter of consciousness.
We are conscious one moment on the physical plane,
and a moment later we have withdrawn onto another plane
and are actively conscious there.
Just as long as our consciousness is identified with the form aspect,
death will hold for us its ancient terror.
Just as soon as we know ourselves to be souls,
and find that we are capable of focusing our consciousness
or sense of awareness in any form or any plane at will,
or in any direction within the form of God,
we shall no longer know death.
Alice Bailey: A Treatise On White Magic
You can always decide, you can ALWAYS decide to not incarnate again.
You could allow the life you are living right now to be,
in a sense, linearly speaking, the last life you will have.
You do not necessarily have to be what you might call "the most spiritually awakened being on Earth"
in order to allow yourself to realize
that you may wish to explore and grow and learn in other dimensions,
and in non-physicality as well.
But you do not ever "have to" incarnate.
Never.
Bashar
If the purpose of being born into a physical body
is to learn how not to be born again,
not being born again is achieved
by learning how not to become unconscious
before, during, and after the moment of dying.
Dr. Bruce Goldberg: Peaceful Transiton: The Art of Conscious Dying & the Liberation of the Soul
…And now he has preceded me briefly
in bidding farewell to this strange world.
This signifies nothing.
For us believing physicists,
the distinction between past, present, and future
is only an illusion,
even if a stubborn one.
Albert Einstein in a letter to his deceased friend’s children
This is my attitude about death.
Laugh!
Let laughter be your attitude about death.
It is a cosmic lie created by man himself,
created by the ego, by self consciousness.
That's why in nature no other animal, bird, tree is afraid of death.
Only man, and he makes so much fuss out of it... his whole life trembling.
Death is coming closer,
and because of death he cannot allow himself to live totally.
How can you live if you are so afraid?
Life is possible only without fear.
Life is possible only with love, not with fear.
And death creates fear.
OSHO
Death is simply the shedding of the physical body,
like the butterfly coming out of a cocoon.
It is a transition into a higher state of consciousness,
where you continue to perceive, to understand,
to laugh, to be able to grow,
and the only thing you lose
is something that you don’t need anymore,
and that is your physical body.
Elizabeth Kubler-Ross: On Death and Dying
If you really love, and love here-now,
death cannot take anything from you.
I say to you:
death may even become an opportunity, an opening, a new door.
You loved the friend when he was visible,
and you loved him so deeply that you started feeling,
through your love,
the invisibleness of him.
Then death takes the body.
Now in that gross element, body is no more there to hinder.
Now love can flow totally.
You may even feel thankful to death.
You were already discovering the spiritual dimension of your beloved, lover, friend,
and now death has taken the last obstacle.
Now you can see through and through.
Death has given you an opportunity to see whether you really loved or not,
because if love's eyes cannot penetrate that much so that you can see that which is not body,
that which is beyond matter,
that which is invisible,
then it is not love.
Osho
I can tell you, with absolute certainty, that you will die.
I have watched a lot of people die,
and from first-hand observation I can also tell you
that those who spend time investigating what the dying process entails
handle it better than those who adopt an attitude of,
“Just surprise me.”
Michael Holmes: Dying To Know
Just as our attitude as we fall asleep is important for the following day,
the attitude at the moment of death is of vital importance for the next incarnation.
The attitude of a dying man has repercussions in the next world
which continue until his next incarnation,
for no single phenomenon, no thought, feeling or action,
can exist in isolation;
every single thing has both a cause and consequences,
whether immediate or remote.
Omraam Mikhaë Aïvanhov: Looking Into the Invisible: Intuition, Clairvoyance, Dreams
Death is not at all frightening.
But loss of life quality is dreadful.
So the goal is to fight not to preserve a breast or even to avoid death.
Rather, the fight is to preserve/create a qualitatively desirable life.
To "die" awake!
Jo Roman: Exit House
Dealing with Near Death Experiences
has changed the way I feel about life after death.
In fact, I never use that phrase anymore.
Instead, I think there is only life.
When the physical body no longer functions,
the spirit leaves and goes on living.
Kenneth Ring
We die,
and we do not die.
Shunryu Suzuki
The "beingness" of Absolute Reality
is confused with the "becoming" in the relative duality.
Man is not prepared to give up the relative "me"
so as to be the absolute "I".
He wants the "me", a phenomenal object, to become the absolute object.
As Nisargadatta Maharaj said, "it is like the case of a drowning man
who is not prepared to let go of his heavy hoard of gold".
Man is not prepared to accept death as the final disintegration of the object "me"
so that he could be the eternal and only subject "I"--
Ramesh S. Balsekar: Explorations into the Eternal
How wonderful!
The waves of individual selves according to their nature rise up,
playing for a time,
and disappear.
I remain the shoreless ocean.
from the Ashtavakra Samhita
Those of us who have returned to earth to tell about our new life
are faced with the difficulty of trying to describe in terms of the earth
what is essentially of a spirit nature.
Our descriptions must fall short of the reality.
It is difficult to conjure up in the mind a state of beauty
greater than we have ever experienced upon earth.
Magnify by one hundred times the beauties that I have told you about,
and you would still be far short of a true appraisement.
Anthony Borgia: Life In The World Unseen
Julie told her friends, "I'm dying."
And thirty minutes later she was gone...
Julie's journey to the destination called "death" excluded nothing.
She feared and she transformed fear,
and in the end she gave no fear to others.
She loved and in her dying drew others into love of one another.
She planned and carried out her plan with dignity and bravery.
She held nothing back, and finally nothing held her back.
She was not sentimental; her mind and heart were fresh
as she rested with not-knowing, her constant companion.
Julie's brave acceptance of her death is not the same as resignation.
Instead, she had the clear realization that death is part of life.
Joan Halifax: Being with Dying
Embodied birth and death create the parenthesis of humancentric illusion.
Beyond this parenthesis,
true identity is experienced
as Life without punctuation
as Life eternal.
Live beyond this parenthesis while embodied.
Do not wait to die.
Thanatos
We are spirits who manifest form in the physical world,
not bodies that have a soul.
The spark of life inside us is who we are;
the human body is what we project into the physical world to experience it.
Understanding this is in itself a leap of consciousness.
Once you get this, you can embrace a holistic worldview
that is not longer confined or limited to the physical world.
This is the evolution of consciousness.
Diane Goble: Beginner’s Guide To Conscious Dying
You never postpone anything,
death cannot destroy anything.
If you postpone, then death destroys.
There is mourning because death destroys tomorrow,
and you were depending on tomorrow.
Osho
Rather would we dwell upon the beauties of the spirit world,
and try to show something of the glories
that await every soul when his earthly life is ended.
It remains with every single soul individually
whether this beautiful land shall be his lot sooner,
or whether it shall be later.
Anthony Borgia LIFE IN THE WORLD UNSEEN
Passionate grief does not link us with the dead, but cuts us off from them.
This becomes clearer and clearer.
It is just at those moments when I feel least sorrow--
getting into my morning bath is one of them--
that H. rushes upon my mind in her full reality, her otherness.
Not, as in my worst moments, all fore-shortened and patheticized and solemnized by miseries,
but as she is in her own right.
This is good and tonic.
C.S. Lewis: A Grief Observed
The questions that we refuse to ask when we are alive, well, passionate and youthful
present themselves at the time of death.
The more we avoid the questions during a happy and healthy life,
the more difficult it becomes to overcome the sense of puzzlement and confusion at the hour of death.
Start asking yourself those questions now, while there is still youth,
while the body is healthy, while the eyes sparkle.
While the skin is not wrinkled and the back is not bent;
begin to inquire into death,
for death is what you fear and are most averse to.
Start asking now…..
Swami Veda Bharati: Meditation and the Art of Dying
Things like the corpse, the spirit, and the afterlife may pique the interest of people living in this world,
but for one departed, all that awaits is a sphere of refreshing breeze,
bearing them away to a transparent world.
Since there's no death in this world, we say they've gone off to be born.
There's no room left for Death.
The only thing there is, is Nirvana.
Shinmon Aoki: Coffinman: The Journal of a Buddhist Mortician
One can learn the art of dying in meditation.
The steps in meditation and death are the same.
Meditation disengages us from the body and takes us to the center of our consciousness,
and death too takes us away from the body to the center of consciousness.
But in death you are unconscious because it is against your will,
while in meditation you are conscious because it is your own choice.
Osho: The Way Beyond Any Way
But what is it to die but to stand naked in the wind and to melt into the sun...
Kahlil Gibran
No one can die fearlessly and in complete security
until they have truly realized the nature of mind,
for only this realization,
deepened over years of sustained practice,
can keep the mind stable during the molten chaos of the process of dying.
Sogyal Rinpoche
Rebirth is a fact.
The ripples on the ocean of creative energy are called birth and death.
At the deeper layer in the womb of the ocean there are neither ripples nor waves.
A consciousness settled in the dimension of meditation is set free of the movement of birth and death.
That is how I have seen the truth of birth and death
as well as the mystery of deathless life.
Vimala Thakar
It is in the field of ignorance that the tree of death grows.
Mistaking the impermanent, painful and non-self for permanent, pleasant and the self;
the body mistaken for the spirit and the spirit mistaken for the body
causes the attachment leading to the fear of death.
Swami Veda Bharati: Meditation and the Art of Dying
And if company may solace you, doth not the whole world walk the same path?
Do not all things move as you do, or keep your course?
Is there anything grows not old together with yourself?
A thousand men, a thousand beasts, and a thousand other creatures
die in the very instant that you die.
Montaigne
It is man alone who qualifies himself for the state of his existence after he passes into spirit.
Anthony Borgia: Life In the World Unseen
Try to realize that you are a divine traveler.
You are here for only a little while,
then depart for a dissimilar and fascinating world.
Do not limit your thought to one brief life and one small earth.
Remember the vastness of the spirit that dwells within you.
Paramahansa Yogananda
Is it not significant that one of the joys of life
is that of becoming physically unconscious at regular intervals?
One greets sleep amiably because of the anticipated renewal of strength and vitality.
Sleep refreshes one, returning one to a state of well-being,
to continue with one's day-to-day physical activities with renewed interest and vigor.
It would be only reasonable to view death and rebirth
as a larger cycle of refreshment and renewal.
Anil Sharma; Life Beyond Death
There is something we can do to reflect on death in the midst of life
in a way that is both skilful and beneficial to our well-being.
The practice of meditation and what I call "the art of dying" can also be seen
as the same process viewed from different perspectives.
During meditation practice we are learning to die to each moment.
We witness the birth of a thought, feeling, sensation or emotion;
we acknowledge its existence, and finally we let it go, we let it die.
As our practice deepens, this simple insight helps us to see clearly
that our lives are made up of a multitude of little births and deaths
that occur constantly from moment to moment.
Dennis Sibley: Meditation and The Art of Dying (lecture)
In the higher spheres the beauty of mind rejuvenates the features,
sweeps away the signs of earthly cares and troubles and sorrows,
and presents to the eye that state of physical development
which is that period of our earthly lives which we call 'the prime of life'.
Anthony Borgia: LIFE IN THE WORLD UNSEEN
There is a native belief among many persons which would imply
that the disembodied individual life force is magically, and instantaneously transformed
from ignorance into absolute knowledge upon passing over to the other side.
This is a childlike belief, and has no basis in fact.
There is really but very little difference in the general intelligence or spiritual attainment
of the individual life force, before or after death.
Soul progress is gradual, in or out of the body.
Anil Sharma Life Beyond Death
Death stands above me, whispering low
I know not what into my ear;
Of his strange language all I know,
There is not a word of fear.
Walter Savage Landor
The life one leads on earth represents only the peak of an iceberg which thrusts itself above the surface.
One must study the iceberg as a whole i.e., the life that persists beyond death
if one is to adequately understand life's meaning....
Death is a change of life from one state to another.
Nothing really dies.
It is true the physical body separates but it is equally true that this separation takes place
because the life force or life energy or life itself departs
and moves on to another aspect, another mode, another state of existence.
Anil Sharma: Life Beyond Death
The majority of persons are not really tired of life.
They are not world weary--they are merely mentally and emotionally tired.
And thus it is with the tired soul.
Change its place of abode in the Astral, and give it the Elixir of Life--
and it is ready for another part to play in the Drama of Life…a new birth.
Yogi Ramacharaka: The Life Beyond Death
"Are you born now?
Why do you think of other births?
The fact is that there is neither birth nor death.
Let him who is born think of death and palliatives for it. "
Ramana Maharshi
The division between the living and dying is not miles apart, it is together.
I wonder if you understand this please.
And if you understand the great beauty of it that each day, or each second there is no accumulation,
no psychological accumulation, you have to accumulate clothes with money and so on,
but psychologically there is no accumulation as knowledge, as attachment, saying, `It's mine'.
Will you do it?
Will you actually do this thing so that this conflict between death and living
with all its pain and fear and anxiety comes totally to an end....
J. Krishnamurti
Richard did not want to die a solitary or violent death;
nor did he want to spend his last days in the fog that painkillers can induce.
Until the end, he wanted to be able to talk to his children and grandchildren.
For Richard, the thought of living his last days of his life not knowing whom he was talking to
or even if it were day or night was "a bad legacy to leave."
Like many who consider aid in dying, Richard was determined to have some control
over how he spent his last days.
A retired salesman with a strong independent streak, he reasoned,
"I've lived life pretty much as I've wanted to
and I feel I should be able to end it if I need to.
I want the option. I want the choice--that's all I want.
When the quality of my life is not worth living, then I want to stop living....It should be my decision.
I should die the way I want to.
My God wouldn't tell me that I can't do this.
My God would tell me it's okay to do something that's going to relieve suffering and pain..."
Barbara Coombs Lee, editor: Compassion In Dying: Stories of Dignity and Choice
You are traveling but in dreams while safe at home
A Course in Miracles
Can one live a life in this world, living and death together?
That means living and dying every day.
So it means never, never becoming something,
becoming something psychologically, which is so-called psychological evolution.
And living with death means that which has been accumulated, gathered psychologically,
ending everything everyday, not at the end of the day but at the beginning and in the middle and all the time.
You understand what that means?
Never having roots in any place, never having a sense of ownership, possession, attachment
so the brain becomes extraordinarily alive, free, and therefore without fear.
J. Krishnamurti
When you die, you will see yourself in your total spiritual reality.
It comes as one hell of a shock to some when they see
that the spiritual reality of what they are is very different from what they think they are.
Preferably, you don’t want to wait until death and the next world to discover these things;
you want to become aware of them now and fix them while you can.
Stuart Wilde: Infinite Self
The individual soul could never grow without death.
The evolutionary process is a long one.
It requires various types of experiences of poverty and riches,
of purity and pollution, of ignorance and education of every country,
clime, culture, race and religion.
It requires experiences of both the sexes as well.
In a single body all this is not possible to assimilate.
Therefore by virtue of necessity we die and are born again
under different circumstances for a different set of experiences.
Sivananda: What Becomes of the Soul After Death
Death is not the end of life.
It is merely cessation of an important individuality.
Life flows on to achieve its conquest of the universal;
life flows on till it merges in the Eternal.
Sivananda: What Becomes of the Soul After Death
“I have waited for this hour, dearest friend.
Now that it has come, let me go.
For a long time I have waited, for a long time I have been the ferryman Vasudeva.
Now it is enough.
Farewell, hut; farewell, river; farewell, Siddhartha!”
Siddhartha bowed deeply before the one taking his leave.
“I knew this,” he said softly. “You will go into the forest?”
“I am going into the forest; I am going into Oneness,” said Vasudeva, radiant.
Hermann Hesse: Siddhartha
“I always say that death can be one of the greatest experiences ever.
We realize now that we don't have to cure to heal.
We need only provide pain relief, kindness and friendship.
Dying is as natural as birth.”
Paul Perry; Raymond Moody Glimpses of Eternity: Sharing a Loved One's Passage from this Life to the Next (Mind Body Spirit)
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: The Lost Writings of Wu Hsin: Pointers to Non-Duality in Five Volumes
'Great day phenomenon' is a common occurrence.
For some reason, many terminally ill people have a short-term revitalization for a day just before death.
They perk up, they move with ease unknown to them for months.
They are alert, even chipper.
They give optimism to their friends and family,
and one more chance to visit with the person everyone used to know.
They take advantage of whatever the source of energy it is to give everyone one last memory.
They give one last glimpse of all the great days that had come before.
Craig Ballantyne
Trust that what brought you here
Will take you there.
Wu Hsin: The Lost Writings of Wu Hsin: Pointers to Non-Duality in Five Volumes
Why don’t we die the way we say we want to die?
In part because we say we want good deaths but act as if we won’t die at all.
In part because advanced lifesaving technologies have erased the once-bright line
between saving a life and prolonging a dying.
In part because saying “Just shoot me” is not a plan.
Above all, we’ve forgotten what our ancestors knew:
that preparing for a “good death” is not a quickie process to save
for the panicked ambulance ride to the emergency room.
The decisions we make and refuse to make long before we die
help determine our pathway to the final reckoning.
This is not the world of our ancestors.
From the plagues of the Black Death through the 19th century’s epidemics of typhoid,
childbed fever and tuberculosis, they helplessly watched people die, from youth to old age.
By necessity, they learned how to sit at a deathbed and how to die.
Katy Butler: The Ultimate End of Life Plan//Wall Street Journal
My mother died shortly before her 85th birthday, in a quiet hospital room.
She did not die a perfect death. But she died a “good-enough” death,
thanks to choices she made earlier that seemed brutal at the time.
She slept in her own bed until the night before she died.
She was lucid and conscious to the end.
She avoided what most fear and many ultimately suffer:
dying mute, unconscious and “plugged into machines” in intensive care;
or feeling the electric jolt of a cardiac defibrillator during a futile cardiopulmonary resuscitation;
or dying demented in a nursing home.
She died well because she was willing to die too soon rather than too late.
Katy Butler: The Ultimate End of Life Plan//Wall Street Journal
'the day that I die will be by far the most beautiful day I ever lived'
a Freja Beha Erichsen tattoo
As what we are we have never 'lived', and we cannot 'die'.
Where could 'we' live? When could 'we' die?
How could there be such things as 'we'?
'Living' is a spatial illusion, 'dying' is a temporal illusion,
'we' are a spatio-temporal illusion
based on the serial interpretation of dimensional 'stills' or 'quanta' cognised as movement.
Only the concepts of infinity and intemporality can suggest intellectually
a notion of what we are as
the source and origin of appearance or manifestation.
Wei Wu Wei
The Nonsense of 'Life' and 'Death'
What difference could there be between 'living' and 'dying'?
'Living' is only the elaboration in sequential duration of what otherwise is known as 'death'.
When What-we-are functions, extending in three apparent spatial dimensions
and another interpreting them as duration,
together known as 'space-time',
there is what we know as 'living'.
When that process ceases we are no longer extended in sequential duration,
we are no longer elaborated in 'space',
'space-time' is no more and the apparent universe dis-appears.
Then we say we are 'dead'.
Wei Wu Wei
"If we never shift our perspective from the standpoint of life,
no matter how much we want to think on death,
it will only be an extension of our thinking on life."
Shinmon Aoki: Coffinman: The Journal of a Buddhist Mortician
Every man is an immortal soul on the pathway of an eternal evolution,
destined to be ever more and never less himself, on and on and on.
There are “many mansions,” many planes of self-expression.
We pass from one to the other; as we die to one, we become resurrected to the other.
For every death there is a resurrection, and for every resurrection there must be a death.
Not a death of the soul, but a death of the particular form or body we now use.
But we are all human beings and we do long
for “the touch of a vanished hand, and the sound of a voice that is still".
Ernest Holmes: You Will Live Forever
Instead of having to acquire a phobia of death (or thanatophobia)
on top of all the stress and suffering already present,
it would be imperative to understand
that death is nothing more than a release
from all the ills and suffering
into a much finer world of pure love and freedom of spirit.
Russell Symonds: Overcome the Fear of Death
“And this tree does not know how to die; only you know how to do that.
This tree shall be alive when your generations to generations to generations, yet unborn, will be here.”
“Ah, but, Lord, we can cut this tree down in a moment.”
“Not a moment. It will take you longer than a moment to cut the heart out of this tree.
And that is true, you can do that, but that is the difference between you and the tree.
You know how to die; it doesn't.”
Ramtha Crossing the River
Those who have the strength and the love to sit with a dying patient
in the silence that goes beyond words
will know that this moment is neither frightening nor painful,
but a peaceful cessation of the functioning of the body.
Watching a peaceful death of a human being reminds us of a falling star;
one of a million lights in a vast sky that flares up for a brief moment
only to disappear into the endless night forever.
Elisabeth Kubler-Ross: On Death and Dying
I have been walking in a dream, dreaming as if there were a dream,
resisting as if there were something to resist,
but now I resist no longer as there is no other:
no karma, no self, no void, no wombs, no male, no female,
no birth, no death, no labyrinth, no reality, no unreality.
Only my own endless endlessness remaining with no beginning and no end.
Now it is finished, and I am done with my desire,
aggression, resistance, attractions, thoughts, experience.
I am ready now to be what I am.
I am that I am.
There is no other.
John C. Lilly, E. J. Gold; Claudio Naranjo : American Book of the Dead
When a rose flower is disappearing in the evening, its petals are falling,
sit there and meditate.
Feel yourself as a flower with your petals falling.
Early in the morning when the sun rises and the stars disappear,
feel yourself disappearing with the stars.
And when the sun has risen and the dewdrops on the grass leaves start disappearing,
feel yourself disappearing like the dewdrops.
Feel death in as many ways as possible.
Become a great experience of death.
Osho: The Art of Living and Dying
All that we have imagined ourselves to be is lost in dying.
Our persona, our personal sense of history, our goals,
our ideas about reality melt away as we lie dying.
We become, consequently, a bit more translucent.
A bit more of the light of radiant Spirit shines in and through us, our life-in-form.
Kathleen Dowling Singh: The Grace in Dying
No matter what I think is happening or what I think I see,
I am only the Clear Shining Light.
Whatever I have experienced on any realm
is only the projection of my own consciousness.
The only genuine experience I have ever had
is that of being the Clear Luminous Void of the Void.
No matter what it seems to be, that is the only reality.
Only I, the Clear and Shining Void, am real.
John C. Lilly, E. J. Gold; Claudio Naranjo : American Book of the Dead
Never the spirit was born; the spirit shall cease to be never;
Never was time when it was not; End and Beginning are dreams!
Birthless and deathless and changeless remaineth the spirit for ever;
Death hath not touched it at all, dead though the house of it seems.
The Bhagavad-Gita
Death is the greatest truth--because the way we are living will come to an end;
we will die the way we are, and the framework we have created will also be destroyed.
Those we see as constituting our whole world--wife, husband, son, father, friend--
they will all die.
And yet death is a falsehood, because there is something that dwells inside the son
that is not the son which will never die.
There is something that dwells inside the father that is not the father which will never die.
The father, of course, will die, but within him, there is something more than the father,
beyond the relationship, which does not die.
Osho: And Now, and Here
As men learn to live consciously as souls,
as they also learn to focus themselves on soul levels
and begin to regard the form or forms as simply modes of expression,
all the old sorrowful ideas anent death will gradually disappear,
and a new and more joyful approach to that great experience will take their place.
Alice Bailey, Djwhal Khul: Esoteric Healing
If death is disturbing to you, it is because your understanding of life is not broad enough
to encompass life that transcends birth and death.
You are disturbed because you are out of the consciousness of the flow.
Lift up your eyes and embrace a larger sphere.
Eric Butterworth: In the Flow of Life
If you can enjoy yourself now, then there will be no mourning, ever.
I am not saying that you will not become sad when a friend departs,
but there will be no mourning.
And that sadness will have a beauty of its own,
a depth, a silence that always comes when you encounter death.
That sadness will be very meditative.
It will reveal something within you that life could not reveal.
Life remains superficial; just like laughter, it remains superficial.
Death is very deep, like sadness.
But sadness is not mourning, sadness has its own delight;
sadness is not sorrow, sadness is simply depth.
OSHO: On Death and Dying
In the beginning, there was the end.
In the quantum world, things don't move.
There is no time in a quantum state.
That is why it is called a state, and it is a perpetual state in the quantum field.
All that you have been living, you have already in your state had.
It is called a state because it has no time, because your birth is known and so is your death.
Ramtha Parallel Lifetimes: Fluctuations In The Quantum Field
The actual truth is that there is no death.
When a person seems to die, all that happens is that he leaves his body here
and goes over onto the next plane, otherwise unchanged.
He falls asleep here to wake up on the other side minus his physical body
but enriched with the knowledge that he has not really died.
This is the story of what we call "death,"
and in most cases it is easier than being born.
Emmet Fox: Life after Death
We have tied around our necks so many concepts; death, this "I Am", etc.
Similarly, concepts of good and evil are unnecessary.
We have developed these concepts and are caught in them.
All knowledge is like the son of a barren woman.
Presently there are only beingness and functioning.
The individuality and personality are thrown overboard.
There is no personality, so there is no question of birth, life, or death.
The body is of as much use now as it was prior to the birth and after the death.
How do you know me?
You know me only on the acquisition of body form, name and form.
Do you really see me as I am?
I doubt it.
Nisargadatta Maharaj: Consciousness and the Absolute
The fear and horror of death is founded upon the love of form--our own form,
the form of those we love and the form of our familiar surroundings and environment.
The hope of the future, and the hope of our release from this ill-founded fear,
lie in the shifting of our emphasis to the fact of the eternal soul
and to the necessity of that soul to live spiritually, constructively and divinely
within the material vehicles. Sorrow, loneliness, unhappiness, decay, loss
--all these are ideas which much disappear as
the common reaction to the fact of death also vanishes.
Alice Bailey, Djwhal Khul: Death: The Great Adventure
“Every thought you have held about death has been in error.
Every construction you have built in the name of death has been built on false foundation.
It is only, let me repeat, only, when you replace the word death with life on every account
that you speak and think of it, that its secret will begin to unfold to you,
its magnificence, its hidden beauty."
Karen Peebles The Bridge Between Worlds (Conversations with her deceased uncle)
It is only after a great awakening that we know all this is a great dream.
Fools, by their own accord, consider themselves to be awake,
and go about in a knowingly fussy way,
defining one man as a gentleman, and another as a rustic.
How hardheaded is this!
Confucius and you are both dreaming.
And I, who tell you that you are dreaming, am dreaming, too.
Even these words themselves may be called a great deception.
Chuang Tzu
William Scott Wilson The One Taste of Truth: Zen and the Art of Drinking Tea
The wish to leave life is profoundly different from the wish to destroy it.
Jo Roman: Exit House
after death, as described by a disembodied spirit.....
“The first thing you will discover is that you still exist.
You still think, you feel emotion.
Instantly you will discover too that you are not what you were while you occupied that human body.
You will realize that your senses have undergone an expansion-
your sight is not limited to that which your human eyes could see,
your hearing is not limited to that which your human ears heard.
Now you are aware of new senses.
The sense of knowing. A new consciousness.
Great joy comes with these discoveries, on a personal level."
Karen Peebles. Beyond The Other Side of Suicide
after death.....
We sink into the measureless being that is without limitation or determination.
It is pure being in which one thing is not opposed to another.
There is no being to which the subject opposes himself.
He identifies himself with all things and events as they happen.
Reality fills the self as it is no longer barred by preferences or aversions, likes or dislikes.
These can no more act as a distorting medium.
S. RADHAKRISHNAN
The underlying current running through these pages is a repeating tone,
resounding again and again, that death is life, death is life;
it beats, deep and mysterious as if a kettle drum keeping time with some universal melody,
and if it would veer from those notes- that secular sound- for very long,
would always bring itself around again to that same sound,
for surely, death is life, death is life,
I have come far to learn that death is life.
Karen Peebles . Beyond The Other Side of Suicide
“To attain the Good, we must ascend to the highest state and fixing our gaze thereon,
lay aside the garments we donned when descending here below;
just as, in the Mysteries,
those who are admitted to penetrate into the inner recesses of the sanctuary,
after having purified themselves,
lay aside every garment and advance stark naked.”
Plotinus; The Enneads
Plato in his Phaidon insists that "they are the true votaries of knowledge
who practice nothing else but how to die or to meet death.
Edward Conze: Thirty Years of Buddhist Studies
Everyone has had innumerable previous lifetimes--
"as many as the sands in the river Ganges," as the ancient texts say.
All life is life after death.
Philip Kapleau The Zen of Livng and Dying
I want you even to dance in your death,
to dance and celebrate even in the death of your loved ones.
Life and death both should be part of a single festival without any discontinuity.
OSHO
Sleep and dreaming are very important parts of the dying process.
Patients sometimes complain about how much time they spend sleeping
and comment that they fell like they are wasting what little time they have left.
This could not be further from the truth.
Much of the necessary work of the dying process takes place during the sleep/dream state.
This is not wasted time at all, it is vitally important.
Interestingly, the normal sleeping pattern during the dying process is virtually identical
to the normal sleeping pattern of newborns; off and on around the clock.
There is no night or day for newborns or dying people..
Michael Holmes: Crossing The Creek
Should it be possible for us to understand that life and death are,
of themselves, nothing more than Nirvana,
there is obviously no need to either try to escape from life and death
or to search for Nirvana and, for the first time, freedom from life and death becomes possible.
Do not make the mistake of believing that a change takes place between life and death,
for life is simply one position in time, already possessing both before and after:
because of this Buddhism says that life, as we know it, is not life.
Likewise, death is simply one position in time,
with a before and an after,
therefore death itself is not death.
Roshi P.T.N.H. Jiyu-Kennett: Zen Is Eternal Life
That's how a great master is.
In his being, death and life have become one.
There is no separation between death and life.
OSHO: The Great Death
There is death, there is the great death, and there is the greatest death.
In death you die unconsciously.
In the great death you die consciously, but you are born again.
In the greatest death you only die; you are not reborn,
you simply disappear into the immensity of existence
- you disperse yourself in the wholeness of the cosmos.
Only in ultimate death do you relax totally into existence, not to come back.
This coming back is not something great; it is coming back to the prison.
OSHO: The Great Death
Only in Western countries are tunnels and life reviews reported,
suggesting that these particular features may be culture-specific.
Japanese near-death experiencers frequently report going into a cave,
which is the entrance for them to a new reality.
Sometimes experiencers in other areas of the world speak of coming to a dark river,
where there is a boatman waiting for them...
P.M.H. Atwater: The Big Book of Near-Death Experiences
Spirit helpers are said to be around a person even before they die.
These guides are sometimes "specialists" in helping with certain types of death--
especially if there might be a particular reason why the crossover could be problematic.
These spirits also help the deceased to detach from their no longer functioning bodies.
However, their main purpose appears to be to orient the newly dead to their new state,
and move them to another, more pleasant, location.
In no instance has a spirit helper led the soul to an existence worse than the one
the recently deceased started in,
although there have been cases when the dead refused to accompany their guides
and wound up in a worse place on their own
Pamela Rae Heath and Jon Klimo: Handbook to the AFTERLIFE
The Great Death
Die while alive,
and be completely dead to yourself
Then do as you will,
all is good.
Zen waka poem
As the bird trims her to the gale,
I trim myself to the storm of time,
I man the rudder, reef the sail,
Obey the voice at eve obeyed at prime:
"Lowly, faithful, banish fear,
Right onward drive unharmed;
The port, well worth the cruise, is near,
And every wave is charmed."
Ralph Waldo Emerson: from Terminus
Indeed, at some time, one will have to forget everything that has been learnt.
Sri Ramana Maharshi: Words of Grace
Only Mind Experiences Death
The mind of the ignorant , entering into the phenomenal world, suffers pain and anguish;
and then, turning for a short while towards Brahman, it experiences happiness.
Such is the mind of the ignorant.
This phenomenal world, however, is nothing but thought.
When the world recedes from one’s view — that is when one is free from thought --
the mind enjoys the Bliss of the Self.
Conversely, when the world appears — that is when thought occurs —
the mind experiences pain and anguish.
Sri Ramana Maharshi : Words of Grace
Of all moments, the moment of death is the most powerful,
the most infused with transformative potential.
Death offers the greatest "enabling energy" for psychospiritual transformation.
Kathleen Dowling Singh: The Grace in Dying
Dying typically finds us lost in our separate sense of self.
The process of dying is the process of moving back in from the farthest reaches of the drama,
the greatest degree of distance of attention from Reality.
In the process of dying, we ingather and return to the Ground of Being,
remerging with that from which we had once emerged.
It is a journey from the particular to the universal to the Absolute.
Kathleen Dowling Singh: The Grace in Dying
The next thing I knew...I was standing in a mist and knew immediately that I had died
and I was so happy that I had died but I was still alive.
And I cannot tell you how I felt. It was, "Oh, God, I'm dead, but I'm here! I'm me!"
And I started pouring our these enormous feelings of gratitude because I still existed
and yet I knew perfectly well that I had died.
I knew that everything, everywhere in the universe was OK, that the plan was perfect.
That whatever was happening--the wars, famine, whatever--was OK. Everything was perfect.
Somehow it was all a part of the perfection, that we didn't have to be concerned about it at all.
And the whole time I was in this state, it seemed infinite. It was timeless.
I was just an infinite being in perfection.
And love and safety and security and knowing that nothing could happen to you
and you're home forever.
That you're safe forever.
And that everybody else is.
Kenneth Ring: relating Jayne's story in Heading Toward Omega
In a nutshell, to practice conscious dying,
you must be able to spontaneously know what you believe in most.
The dying moment is not a time to take on a new teaching!
At that time, you can't really say, "Wait a minute--I have to think about it!"
What you know has to be spontaneous, and you either have it or you don't.
Through instruction and experience, death can become a liberating and joyful process, not a rude exit.
It is a technique, an art acquired through concentrated preparation and practice before the death moment..
Anya Foos-Graber: Deathing: An Intelligent Alternative for the Final Moments of Life
Of primary concern is Deathing.
It is a means of making an informed, safe, responsible, and joyous transition
from the physically focused "I" consciousness to the various subtle stages of life-after-death's expanded states, including humanity's birthright--full enlightenment, or liberation.
Deathing is poles apart from merely dying.
Death's change-of-state becomes part of your VOLUNTARY awareness,
activating the higher centers (or chakras), instead of being unconsciously stockpiled into lower, INVOLUNTARY instinctive centers as is most ordinary dying.
Such a conscious death as Deathing imparts allows you to utilize the death process
in such a way that it transforms what appears to be a mere biological misfunction, or accident,
into a spiritual art form--the tool for the transformation of consciousness that it should be.
Anya Foos-Graber: Deathing: An Intelligent Alternative for the Final Moments of Life
Death cannot be the enemy,
because it is part of existence.
Existence has given birth to you.
Existence is mothering you.
And when you die,
you simply go back to your original source,
to rest and to be born again.
There is no need to be afraid .
YOU will not die,
you will only disappear
like a snowflake
in the pure air.
Your form will disappear
into formlessness,
the river will disappear
into the ocean,
but it will not cease to exist.
It will even become wider,
vaster,
it becomes oceanic.
- Osho -
It is not right to say that death comes in the end,
it has always been with you from the very beginning.
It is part of you, it is your innermost center, it grows with you,
and one day it comes to a culmination, one day it comes to flowering.
The day of death is not the day of death's coming, it is the flowering.
Death was growing within you all this time, now it has reached a peak;
and once death reaches a peak you disappear back into the origin.
Osho: The Art of Living and Dying
And for a space of time I seemed to lose my identity. . . .
I recall endeavoring anxiously to pierce through this new state to recall memory.
“Who am I? What did I do?” It was a strange, almost eerie, experience,
for the name I had borne for over seventy years eluded me. . . .
At length I recall telling myself to “give it up and go to sleep,” and in a way, this is what I must have done.
At least consciousness went from me. I remembered nothing more.
How long this went on I have no possible way of knowing . . . perhaps in earth time, for a very short space.
But when next I came back to consciousness I seemed to be pulling myself up out of a thin sea of silver. . . . Those are the only words I can use to describe the experience.
Helen Greaves: Testimony of Light: An Extraordinary Message of Life After Death
As soon as I was able to bring myself to a conscious state of mind,
after my withdrawal from my worn-out body,
I knew that I was the same in essence.
True, I felt light, and there was a new sense of freedom that was bewildering.
I was the same . . . yet not the same!
Helen Greaves: Testimony of Light: An Extraordinary Message of Life After Death
Don't you know that you cannot slay me,
since I tell you, I am not mortal?
Hector of Troy to Achilles in Homer's Iliad
Careers will leave you; lovers too. Friends & family pass away.
Art, literature & music— like all entertainment— are like froth or foam upon the surface of a stream.
They only pass away & can offer no comfort to you in your final days.
All knowledge, too, is as grass; fading as a leaf.
The only thing we can ever have is that which we can never lose— that is, the eternity that we are.
Seek this & there is nothing else to know;
all the world can vanish before you & you will not be frightened,
for what you are is greater than what any world could ever hope for.
Joshua Norager: A Concise Manual of Nondual Awareness
Sentient beings, observing their body and mind in the darkness of their ignorance,
mistakenly apprehend an inherently existing I.
This mind grasping at an inherently existent I is the source of all fear.
To remove fear, we must remove this mind by realizing that there is no inherently existent I.
Therefore, the only way to remove the fears of samsara entirely is first
to realize the lack of inherent existence of the I, which is selflessess of persons,
and then to realize the lack of inherent existence of other phenomena such as the body and mind,
which is selflessness of phenomena.
Nothing is inherently existent, nothing is truly existent, and nothing exists from its own side.
Gehse Kelsang Gyatso Living Meaningfully, Dying Joyfully.
It is now,
fortunately,
my time to face death.
Elisabeth Kubler-Ross
If humancentric consciousness could accept its inherent emptiness,
debate about death and dying would cease.
Humans would revel in the magic clay of embodiment,
consciously crafting experiences as reflected awareness,
knowing themselves to be Life Itself.
Humans would joyfully create deaths that celebrated the illusory end of their play within the limited
and the illusory return to the birthlessness and deathlessness they never left.
Thanatos
There is no shame in contemplating your death, in thinking it over, in being in awe of the wonder of death. Your society will try to convince you that talk and thoughts of death are immoral.
I will tell you that even serious consideration of ending one’s own life is shameless.
It takes great courage of spirit to look at one’s own mortality.
It is something not many people are able to do.
It builds tremendous character to decide to die, and then decide after all to live.
That process can be life altering. Do not look down on any person you meet in life
who tells you they have thought about suicide. Or attempted it.
Look at them in wonder.
They have dared to look past the barrier that divides our realms of existence.
Karen Peebles: The Other Side of Suicide
(quoting her deceased Uncle George who dictated her book from Beyond The Veil)
When summer opens, I see how fast it matures, and fear it will be short;
but after the heats of July and August, I am reconciled,
like one who has had his swing, to the cool of autumn.
So will it be with the coming of death.
Ralph Waldo Emerson: Journals
Elisabeth Kubler-Ross, the pioneering physician of the hospice movement,
believed that people often have an internal trigger that alerts them to knowledge of their own death.
Doctors and nurses know this firsthand.
Frequently, we care for people who come in to the ER who suddenly have become very sick.
Sometimes in the midst of the chaos, they grow calm and look us in the eyes and say, “I’m going to die.”
If one of my nurses hears this from a patient, he or she will usually come to find me immediately,
because the patient is often right.
Monica Williams-Murphy M.D. and Kristian A. Murphy. It's OK to Die
Kate Granger, a terminally-ill doctor in Yorkshire, has announced that she plans to “live tweet” her death,
using the hashtag #grangerkate.
She has 10,378 followers, to date.
The mystery of life is that it never ends.
The mystery of death is that it does not occur.
Karen Peebles. The Other Side of Suicide
The term suicide is such a cold and impersonal word,
it can even be used to define a person who had ended their life early, as in “a suicide”.
It is not, however, a term used here in the realm where I exist.
We have no such term for the soul of a human being who leaves his body before it is time to.
We have only unconditional love for such a soul.
Karen Peebles. The Other Side of Suicide
Often I have woken up out of the body to myself and have entered into myself,
going out from all other things. I have seen a beauty wonderfully great and felt assurance
that then most of all I belonged to the better part. I have lived to the full the best life
and come to identity with the Divine. Set firm in It, I have come to That Supreme Actuality,
setting myself above all else in the realm of Nous. Then after that rest in the Divine,
when I have come down from Nous to discursive reasoning,
I am puzzled how I ever came down, and how my soul has come to be in the body
when it is what it has shown itself to be by itself, even when it is in the body.
A. H. Armstrong. Plotinus: A Volume of Selections in a New English Translation
In the Middle Ages death was so prevalent that people had a heightened appreciation
of the preciousnessand fragility of life. Knowing that it could slip away from them at any time,
they felt driven to live it with an intensity and passion that we no longer possess.
When you are constantly reminded that death can snatch you away in an instant,
when you grow up playing amongst human thigh bones and seeing skeletons dance on the walls, you are likely to realise that life exists to be lived to the full, that every moment must be cherished as a gift, that you should make the most of the few years granted to you. The very ubiquity of death propelled a whole age towards
a state of radical aliveness.
Roman Krznaric: The Wonderbox: Curious histories of how to live
The living individual, during sleep, goes into the astral world every night,
meeting experiences there which are remembered, if at all, only in the fragmentary
and dissatisfying ways of dreams, when one wakes up in the physical body every morning. Therefore one does not go into an unknown realm when one leaves the physical body at death. Were this fact more widely recognised, many anxieties would be relieved concerning death as a strange and totally foreign experience, an ultimate fearful fate.
If one is aware of this direct first hand knowledge, death at its proper time can be greeted
as a blessing serenely arriving and welcomed joyously.
Anil Sharma: Life Beyond Death
Working here all these years, I've often thought...that maybe death is like a gateway.
Dying doesn't mean the end.
You go through it and onto the next thing.
It's a gate. And as the gatekeeper...I've sent so many on their way.
Telling them, "Off you go. We'll meet again."
Crematory Worker in movie; Departures.
This identification with the body makes you think that you are born.
Until I had form I had no worries, I didn’t even know that I had a form.
Did I have suffering before identification with the body?
No, it all began after the identification that I am this form.
Don’t bother (about) what you should do or not do.
Think that you are limitless, unborn and not going to die.
Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj: I Am Unborn
“You see, there is a real reason why true masters gain the stewardship over the physical. Somewhere in their initiation they die to the physical. They are reborn into the life of an initiate,
a master, where there are no clear lines of life and death. And they can flip right into
such a scene like this and review it and relive it over and over and over
without ever having to die in the body.”
Ramtha
My father was at his bedside, deeply distressed, but my grandfather quietly said to my father, "Don't worry, Leslie, I am all right, I can see and hear the most beautiful things
and you must not worry."
And he quietly died, lucid to the end.
Elizabeth and Peter Fenwick: The Art of Dying: A Journey to Elsewhere
Maharaj: Individuality does not remain for the jnani who has the experience of nothingness. So whatever happens, he no longer has an instrument with which to undergo any experience.
You say that nothingness is there, and also your individuality--
the two are incompatible, mutually exclusive.
If you really are at a stage where you find the nothingness,
what then is left to do in this world?
Visitor: There is nothing left. But then what should I do? Commit suicide?
Maharaj: You are not there even to die!
Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj: The Experience of Nothingness.
Death is generally considered to be a traumatic experience, but understand what happens.
That which has been born, the knowledge 'I am' which is the same everywhere, but which has gotten itself limited by the body, again becomes unlimited.
A speck of consciousness is given up.
Why the fear? How has this fear of death crept in?
That which cannot die somehow became convinced that it was going to die.
It is based on the concept that one is an individual who is born...
all the fear arises from mere words told to you by someone. This is the bondage.
It is only when you search for your Self that you become aware that it is all a fraud.
Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj: Consciousness and the Absolute
Think about this.
Don’t get linear with me.
Think about this.
Right now you are dead and on the other side,
and you are viewing this life.
And it is happening right now, people — right now.
Is this the only reality you are living in or are you a multiple-reality being?
Remember, in God we are eternal.
We are the past, present, and future simultaneously.
When we are a human being,
we are only the past struggling for a future,
but in God it has already happened.
Ramtha
Life as such has no beginning and no end.
It is a beginningless and endless movement and you are only an expression of it.
You are conscious of yourself through thought, by which I mean not just conscious thought but that conditioning which transforms the life that passes through you into feelings, into pleasure and pain. And this thought is not yours. It is what you have learned from others.
It is second-hand. It belongs to everybody. You belong to everybody.
When you accept nature, everything falls into its own rhythm.
There is nothing to control and nothing to ask.
You don't have to do a thing.
You are finished.
U.G. Krishnamurti The Natural State.
The Great Death-Defying Mantra
I look within to the pure, tranquil light
of inner vision, sweet and nourishing
with the fragrance of life.
May I be freed painlessly
from the bonds of death,
like a ripe fruit falling from the vine.
May I never again forget my original nature.
The Rig Veda
Do you want to experience death now?
Then relax. Relax and let go of your human identity.
Let go of feeling bound to third dimensional perspective.
Relax and let go of believing that you exist where your body appears to be.
Let go of believing that you began with physical birth;
that you could possibly end with physical death.
Relax, let go, feel the expansion, the exhilaration, the relief.
Death is more than shedding your body.
Death is awakening to your limitless identity as Life Itself.
Now that you can experience death at will,
live a deathless Life.
Thanatos
The Dead are indeed happy,
having got rid of the incubus of the body;
the Dead do not grieve.
Do men fear sleep? No, they court it and prepare for it.
But sleep is temporary death, and death is but a longer sleep.
If the man dies while alive, if he dies the death which is not death,
by the extinction of the ego--he will not grieve for anyone's death.
K. Lakshmana Sarma: Maha Yoga
The young forget, and rightly forget,
the inevitability of that final symbolic detachment which we call Death.
But when life has played its part,
and age has taken its toll of interests and strength,
the tired and world-weary man has no fear of the detaching process,
and seeks not to hold on to that which earlier was desired.
He welcomes death, and relinquishes willingly
that which earlier engrossed his attention.
Djwhal Khul: Esoteric Psychology
What must a peaceful death encompass?
A self that has, in some sustaining way, come to accept death,
a self that understands that control over fate will pass from its hands,
that this is precisely what biological death means and must mean.
It should also be a death marked by consciousness,
by a self-awareness that one is dying, that the end has come--
but, even more pointedly,
a death marked by self-possession,
by a sense that one is ending one's days awake, alert, and physically independent,
not as a machine-sustained body
or a body that has long ago lost its mind and self awareness.
Equally, it should be a death in public,
a time when friends and families draw near,
when leave can be taken,
when the props and devices of medicine can be put aside
save for those meant to palliate and assuage.
Daniel Callahan: The Troubled Dream of Life, In Search of a Peaceful Death
Death is no darksome king of terrors,
no skeleton with a scythe to cut short the thread of life,
but rather an angel bearing a golden key,
with which he unlocks for us the door into a fuller and higher life than this.
C. W.Leadbeater,Annie Besant: Life After Death.
A controlled out-of-body (OBE) experience is the most efficient means we know
to gather Knowns to create a Different Overview.
First, and perhaps most important,
among these Knowns is survival of physical death.
If there is a better way than the OBE of knowing that this takes place--
not just hoping, having faith, or believing, but knowing--we are unaware of it.
All of those who become only mildly proficient in the OBE
soon reach this stage of knowing.
In addition, such survival takes place whether we like it or not,
and without any consideration as to what we do or are in physical life.
It makes no difference.
Survival of self beyond physical existence is a natural and automatic process.
We wonder how we could ever have become so limited in our thinking.
Robert Monroe: Ultimate Journey
The ancients knew much more about death in those days,
and because they knew more they mourned less.
C. W.Leadbeater. Annie Besant: Life After Death.
For all of us are more ancient than the hills, more ancient than the earth on which we have built our temporary habitation. If we meditate on death, we shall no longer be afraid of death. We shall then know that death is only an illusion; death is only an appearance.
In reality there is no death.
We cannot die.
J.P. Vaswani
In hospitals, in old people's homes, people are simply hanging on because
the society,the culture, the law, won't allow them to be.
If they ask that they should be allowed to die, it looks as if they are asking for suicide. They are not asking for suicide. In fact, they have become dead corpses; they are a living suicide and they are asking to be rid of it. The length is not the meaning. How long you live is not the point -- how deep you live, how intensely you live, how totally you live -- the quality -- is. Science is concerned about quantity; religion is concerned about quality. Religion is concerned with the art of how to live life and how to die life.
Osho
Meditation cuts the gross, busy mind
and allows the subtle consciousness to function.
In that way, meditation performs a similar function to that of death.
Lama Yeshe: Life, Death, and After Death
A human like myself could create from scratch.
I could bring together the tiniest of pre-matter, thought energy itself,
and direct it to form specific objects, whether animate or inanimate.
Thoughts really are things.
They are powerful.
All the old stories are true.
Thoughts are pre-matter itself
for they have substance and mass and thus can be shaped into form at will.
It can be done and I did it.
I really did it.
I went on a creation binge, bringing together, creating, forming, and giving life
to anything and everything I could imagine.
I made cities, people, dogs, cats...everything had life and everything moved of its own
and there was breath, noise, language, and all manner of activity aside and apart from me.
Everyone and everything had substance and mass and reality,
and all went about their own business according to their own pleasure and perception.
The result was so incredibly wonderful that I watched with intense fascination,
never thinking I was some kind of god,
but, rather, feeling satisfaction that I had engaged in an exercise
perfectly normal for me to do and perfectly natural.
P.M.H. Atwater :I Died Three Times in 1977 - The Complete Story
The inner division between the seer and the seen, and the outer division between the Eternal and the world, are concealed by the other power,
limitation; and this also is the cause of the cycle of birth and death.
I am different from the body. The body is born and it dies;
is destroyed by weapons,
fire, and suffers from diseases and the like.
I have entered it, like a bird its nest...."
Adi Sankara
What I am is what I conceive; Is that not enough for me to be?
When could I have been born, I who am the conceiver of time itself?
Where could I live, I who conceive the space wherein all things extend?
How could I die, I who conceive the birth, life, and death of all things,
I who, conceiving, cannot be conceived?
Wei Wu Wei
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.
Death dies its own death...
Shri Sadguru Siddharameshwar Maharaj Amrut Laya - The Stateless State
Normally our physical energy runs in the wrong direction,
causing our delusions and superstitions to explode,
but at the time of death this energy naturally integrates into our shushuma, or central channel,
and brings an experience of great peace and emptiness.
Lama Yeshe: Life-Death and After-Death
There is only Life.
There is nobody who lives a life.
Roy Melvyn
What happens to an individual during a Near Death Experience
has nothing inherently to do with death or with the transition into death.
What happens to an individual during a NDE is not unique to the moment of apparent imminent death.
It is just that coming close to death is one of the very reliable triggers
that sets off this kind of experience.
Dying is only one, albeit a common one, of the circumstances
that tends to be conducive to this kind of experience.
The NDE, then, should be regarded as one of a family of mystical experiences
that have always been with us,
rather than as a recent discovery of modern researchers
who have come to investigate the phenomenology of dying.
Kenneth Ring; Heading Toward Omega: In Search of the Meaning of the Near-Death Experience.
In the absence of the phenomenal “me”,
there is no room for anxiety or worry (about death and dying).
Ramesh S Balsekar: Essence Of The Ashtavakra Gita
Use death as a tool with which to create,
not with which to destroy,
with which to move forward,
not with which to go back.
In this choice will you have honored Life Itself,
and allowed Life to bring you your own grandest dream,
even while you are living with your physical body:
peace within your soul at last.
Neale Donald Walsch: Home with God
We begin with awareness.
And we shall end there, as well.
That is, your own awareness right where you are sitting now;
the same awareness that is looking at these words from your very eyes.
It is the awareness you were born in, have lived in,
will continue in
and will find your death inside.
Joshua Norager: A Concise Manual of Nonduality
As to the future resurrection of the physical form at some distant judgment or end-of-the-world time---why? When the soul continues to dwell in a spirit form similar,
but far superior, to that physical form,
what is the need or purpose for a resurrected physical form--
a form composed of atoms of dense limitations?
A principal purpose of death is to release the soul from such a prison.
Earlyne Chaney: The Mystery of Death & Dying: Initiation At The Moment of Death
It doesn’t matter how busy we are;
we can find some time each day.
Training to be mindful at the time of death is a step-by-step process.
If we make great effort now,
the signs of death will become signposts for practice
and they will awaken our mindfulness when death is upon us.
Anyen Rinpoche . Dying with Confidence: A Tibetan Buddhist Guide to Preparing for Death
During our lifetime we accumulate a great many hallucinated experiences
that cause us to experience much confusion at the time of death.
When we’re dying, everything internal and external deteriorates and disappears,
so we get very scared because we’re losing our normal security.
Why are you afraid?
Why are you afraid of losing something?
What you’re losing is your self-existent or concrete preconceptionof yourself;
that’s what’s shaken.
It’s your projection of yourself that shakes,
not your nonduality.
Your own true nature isn’t shaken.
Lama Yeshe: Life, Death and After-Death
It is often said that something may survive of a person after their death,
if that person was an artist and put something of themselves into their work.
It is perhaps in the same way that a sort of cutting
taken from one person and grafted on to the heart of another continues to carry on its existence
even when the person from whom it has been detached has perished.
Proust: Remembrance of Things Past
Once you shone among the living as the Morning Star;
Among the dead you shine now, as the Evening Star.
Plato
Total annihilation is impossible.
We are the prisoners of an infinity without outlet,
wherein nothing perishes, wherein everything is dispersed, but nothing lost.
To be able to do away with a thing, that is to say, to fling it into nothingness,
nothingness would have to exist;
and, if it exist, under whatever form, it is no longer nothingness.
The more that human thought rises and increases,
the less comprehensible does nothingness become.
In any case---and this is what matters here--
if nothingness were possible, since it could not be anything whatever,
it could not be dreadful.
Maurice Maeterlinck: Death
If I were asked to say, what is the major task of healing groups,
I would say it is to prepare human beings
for what we should regard as the restorative aspect of death,
and thus give to that hitherto dreaded enemy of mankind,
a new and happier significance.
Djwhal Khul: Esoteric Healing
As he drew near the membrane between this reality and the next,
it seemed he could begin to peer through to the other side.
He seemed comforted by what he saw,
comforted enough to bet his immortality on that spiritual vision..
John Perry Barlow speaking about Tim Leary. Design For Dying
Death is your best motivator.
Irinia Bjorno: Guidance To Happy Death
Your infinite (eternal) nature is a property,
like any property in physics,
not at all dependent on your ‘beliefs.’
William Bray : Quantum Physics, Near Death Experiences, Eternal Consciousness, Religion, and the Human Soul
Imagine a pool of water on the ground.
The sun is reflected in it
and you might be misled into thinking that the pool has its own source of light.
Similarly there could be many separate puddles of water on the ground after heavy rain.
Each appears to be separate and has its own reflection of the sun
but every one is reflecting the same, single, real sun.
But, eventually the pools dry up and the light disappears.
The brain ceasing to function at physical death is the equivalent of the pools drying up.
But the sun is completely unaffected throughout.
Dennis Waite
The fact that we are not the body must become an actual experience
that penetrates and liberates our muscles, our internal organs, and even the cells in our body.
An intellectual understanding that corresponds to a sudden, fleeting recognition of our true nature
brings us a flash of pure joy,
but when we have full knowledge that we are not the body, we are that joy.
Francis Lucille Eternity Now
During our lifetimes, we generally pay a lot of attention to our bodies,
but rarely think about what goes with us when we die.
We cannot, of course, take any physical or material aspect of our lives with us when we die.
It is only the consciousness that goes with us.
It is also only the consciousness that experiences suffering or,
more accurately, is able to perceive the experience of suffering.
Most importantly, it is the consciousness itself that can be transformed
into wisdom during the dying process.
The majority of the time we are focused on maintaining our physical body and material environment,
when we actually need to place our attention on practice! (meditation).
Realizing this can help us shift our focus and motivate us to practice every day.
Anyen Rinpoche: Dying with Confidence: A Tibetan Buddhist Guide to Preparing for Death
Where death waits for us is uncertain;
let us look for him everywhere.
The premeditation of death is the premeditation of liberty;
he who has learned to die,
has unlearned to serve.
There is nothing of evil in life,
for him who rightly comprehends that the privation of life is no evil:
to know how to die,
delivers us from all subjection and constraint.
Montaigne
It is not death that a man should fear,
but he should fear never beginning to live.
Marcus Aurelius
It is of the greatest comfort to know,
according to Vedic teachings,
that all souls are on a journey back to our common Source.
And every soul’s journey will end in the spiritual world.
We will indeed meet our loved ones again,
perhaps in another world within space and time,
and ultimately in the home of all souls beyond space and time.
Philip Jones: Light on Death: The Spiritual Art of Dying
Through our overemphasis on the value of form life,
and through the universal fear of death
--that great transition we must all face--
and through our uncertainty as to the fact of immortality,
and also through our deep attachment to form,
we arrest the natural processes and hold the life
which is struggling to be free,
confined to bodies unfitted to the purposes of the soul.
This preservation is, in the majority of cases,
enforced by the subject's group
and not by the subject himself...
Alice A. Bailey: Estoteric Healing
Death is just a method for refocusing energy,
prior to a forward moving activity,
leading steadily and always toward betterment.
Djwhal Khul: Death: The Great Adventure
If one sets out to have a direct, positive experience of death,
if they are on their way to know what death is with a positive attitude,
if they have no conflict with life,
if they are not against life,
then even in death they are searching for life.
Osho
Life force gravitates like slow-moving lightning toward the brain.
The life force first leaves feet and legs.
They turn cold, and all color departs.
Then the hands and arms are affected,
and the nails turn purple, reflecting the change in the blood.
These signs may be observed by those watching--signs indicating death is near.
But the watchers will be unable to observe
that the pineal gland is becoming extremely active,
that the brain is becoming porous
as the crown chakra opens and expands.
With the upward passage of the life force,
rather than sinking into oblivion,
you become increasingly psychic.
You become aware that you are not dying at all;
rather your consciousness is becoming increasingly "alive",
and awareness is expanding.
Earlyne Chaney: The Mystery of Death and Dying: Initiation at the Moment of Death
You realize full well that you lie upon your deathbed.
The soul, answering the magnetic attraction of the higher spheres,
begins a movement toward the brain.
The death process does not differ a great deal from the birth process.
During the hours of childbirth, the birth canal gradually opens,
allowing the downward passage of the infant form.
In a similar fashion, your physical form becomes the womb
from which the spirit-soul must escape at the time of death.
The crown chakra at the top of the head begins to expand
just as does the physical womb;
the better to allow release of the spirit at the time of the soul's return to the higher sphere--
for death is truly a second birth.
Earlyne Chaney: The Mystery of Death and Dying: Initiation at the Moment of Death
A man who has been going deeper into meditation
passes the door of death many times.
Whenever he goes, he passes it, whenever he comes back...
It is simple to understand that death has nothing to do with life.
Death is a door.
If you move inside the door,
you move into the universe.
If you move outside the door,
you move into mortal existence.
Osho
Death is not the enemy.
To a man who has really lived,
death is the friend.
It is like sleep.
Nobody wants to remain wakeful twenty-four hours a day.
Osho
Everyone has to die;
so die as your true nature.
Why die as a body?
Never forget your true nature.
It may not be acceptable to many, but it is a fact...
this body has nothing to do with you.
If you must have an ambition have the highest,
so that at least while dying, you will be the Absolute.
Decide that now firmly,
with certainty and conviction.
Giving up the body is a great festival.
Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj
When a person is afraid of death,
know well that that person has missed life.
If he had not missed life
there cannot be any fear of death.
If a person has lived life,
he will be ready to live death also.
He will be almost enchanted by the phenomenon of death.
Osho
Death is the mother of beauty.
Wallace Stevens
I remember myself as the voyager,
whose deepest nature is the Clear Light itself;
I am one; there is no other.
I am the voidness of the void,
the eternal unborn,
the uncreated, neither real nor unreal.
All that I have been conscious of is my own play of consciousness,
a dance of light, the swirling patterns of light in infinite extension,
endless endlessness,
the Absolute beyond change, existence, reality.
I, the voyager,
am inseparable from the Clear Light;
I cannot be born, die, exist or change.
I know now that this is my true nature.
(the experience of confronting the Clear Light after death)
E. J. Gold; John C. Lilly; Claudio Naranjo: American Book of the Dead
When I was satisfied that the body far below was truly dead and nothing more could be done for it,
I felt an incredible sense of relief.
I felt relief at being freed from the heavy, burdensome mass and weight of that body;
I felt a sense of having been released from prison.
My body was not me.
I was me.
My body was something I had once worn, like someone wears a jacket or an old coat.
It was gone and I was free, and in my freedom I shouted,
"I'm dead, thank God, I'm dead."
There was no sorrow, remorse, or even the slightest regret or concern
for anyone or anything, including my children's welfare.
There was no thought of needing to live again,
to finish unfinished business, or of anger or pain.
It was completely natural and comfortable not to breathe
and I could see everything distinctly, colors and all.
I could hear, feel, move around, smell, think, remember, reason, and experience emotion,
only the way of this was different because I no longer had a physical body to filter and amplify sensations.
I did not need that body any more.
Everything was bright and there was no fear.
I was my true self at last.
I was me, and nothing else mattered.
I was free!
I was free!
P.M.H. Atwater: I Died Three Times in 1977 - The Complete Story
