Archive Two


Death changes nothing, but reveals everything about us
Swedenborg  
 
There is no single best kind of death. 
A good death is one that is "appropriate" for that person. 
It is a death in which the hand of the way of dying slips easily into the glove of the act itself.
 It is in character, ego-syntonic.
 It, the death, fits the person.
 It is a death that one might choose if it were realistically possible for one to choose one's own death.... 
Edwin Shneidman, A Commonsense Book of Death 
 
He who dies 
Before he dies 
Does not die 
When he dies...... 
Abraham a Sancta Clara      
 
 
   To die the Great Death is to transcend life and death and achieve utter freedom. 
 It makes the prospect of physical death secondary and unimportant.  
Zen master Bunan put it this way: 
Die while alive 
And be thoroughly dead, 
Then do what you will, 
All is good. 
Philip Kapleau, The Zen of Living and Dying  
 
  
When a person dies (having chosen their own death, although not "consciously"), 
you must tell the person that they are free to leave,
 and that you joyfully give them their freedom. 
Let them know that they need not stay close,
 because you realize that you will be reunited
Seth 
 
     According to esoteric Buddhism,
 every being possesses buddha-nature or enlightenment in his or her true nature.  
So when all concepts and emotions dissolve into the primordial purity at death,
the luminosity of the innate wisdom shines forth for every being. 
 The mind of even the tiniest insect will experience, for at least a split second, 
its own innate awareness, the luminous nature,
 and its own spontaneous presence, the luminous visions... 
Tulku Thondup:  Peaceful Death, Joyful Rebirth 
 
 
The near death experience (NDE)  tends to vanquish one's fear of death, completely and forever. 
 While one retains the normal fears associated with the process of dying, 
the moment of death itself is regarded positively
 as a liberating transition into a sublime state
that NDErs know they have already encountered.
Kenneth Ring 
 
 
What is known as dying is Life's opening  toward its next  birth.  
   The person dying starts visualizing their next life. 
What you do at the moment of your death 
determines how your birth is going to be. 

 
  Mysticism is really the cornerstone of all major religions...
It is characterized by a sense of unity, transcendence,
 connecting to the broader universe 
and a sense of life and the promotion of personal spirituality. 
 It re-calibrates how we see our life
 and gives a sense of sacredness and reshapes how we view death.
Dr. Stephen Ross 
 
 
The intent is for man to die, 
as every man has to die, at the demand of his own soul.  
When man has reached a higher stage in evolution,
 with deliberation and definite choice of time, 
he will consciously withdraw from his physical body.
The Tibetan/Alice Bailey 
 
People are apt to forget that every night, in the hours of sleep, 
we die to the physical plane and are alive and functioning elsewhere...
....the process of daily sleep, and the process of occasional dying are identical, 
with the one difference that in sleep the magnetic thread or current of energy
 along which the life force streams, is preserved intact, 
and constitutes the path of return to the body
The Tibetan/Alice Bailey 
 
Love Death as a beacon guiding you to greater Life.  
  Love Life so much that you won't waste a moment 
suffering a prolonged farewell.
Thanatos 
 
Our death is our wedding with eternity
Rumi 
 
I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately,
 to front only the essential facts of life, 
and see if I could not learn what it had to teach,
 and not, when I came to die,
 discover that I had not lived 
Henry David Thoreau  
 
        ...He discovers that when he lets go of pain and suffering, 
he has the sensation of reversing his direction. 
He realizes that life's true direction is through death into unending life. 
 Discovering that life can be rectified, it grows clear to him, 
as the sides of all previous restrictions fall away, that he is being born. 
 He lets death go.  
He lets his pain be. 
 He lets fear go.
The fear of death disappears
what oppressed him and would not leave suddenly vanishes.  
Where is death? 
 What death?  
He feels no fear because there is no death, only light. 
 He draws in a breath, 
breaks off in the middle of it, stretches out, 
and greets death peacefully.... 
 
 
The Disappearance of Fear of Death 
Nearly all people who have experienced a Near Death Experience ( NDE) lose their fear of death.
 This is due to the realization that there is a continuation of consciousness, 
even when you have been declared dead by bystanders or even by doctors.
 You are separated from the lifeless body, retaining the ability of perception.
 Quotation:  
“It is outside my domain to discuss something that can only be proven by death. 
For me, however, the experience was decisive in convincing me that consciousness lives on beyond the grave. Death was not death, but another form of life.” 
Another quotation:  
“This experience is a blessing for me,
 for now I know for sure that body and mind are separated, 
and that there is life after death.” 
Dr. Pim van Lommel 
  
"I think death would bring me peace. 
 I would like to get out of this." 
What you are saying, is that you would like to find a way to escape 
and I will tell you now, there is no escape in death. 
 Death is merely a door which goes from one room to the next. 
 What you find in that room as you pass through the door 
is what you carry with you as you make the passage. 
 And if it is escape you seek through death, 
then you will shortly find an equal desire 
to escape from that room back to the room of life...... 
Tom Carpenter, Dialogue on Awakening 
 
If we really faced our fear of death,
 our lives would ultimately be lighter and more joyful.
 Death awareness needn't depress us. 
 It enhances our ability to live more fully. 
If we understood the reality of death, we would treat each other differently.  
Carlos Castaneda was once asked how we could make our lives more spiritual, and he said: 
  Just remember that everyone you encounter today, everyone you see, will someday have to die. 
 He's right. 
 That knowledge changes our whole relationship with people
Larry Rosenberg;  Living in The Light Of Death 
 
One who wants to meet death because they  can't face the problems of life 
is not a person of will. 
 However, 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. 
 This is a totally difference experience.
Osho 
 
For Plato, to philosophize is nothing other than precisely to practice dying while living. 
 It is to live through dying, to practice dying while living.  
Herein is the way of the philosopher for Plato---
the way in which death is overcome
Masao Abe 
 
 
They are the true votaries of knowledge who practice nothing else but how to die or to meet death
Plato 
 
 
There is nothing I desire more to be informed of, than of the death of men:
 that is to say, what words, what countenance, and what face they show at their death....
Were I a composer of books, I would keep a register, commented of the diverse deaths, 
which in teaching men to die, should after teach them to live.
Montaigne 
 
 
 
D: It  seemed to me that if someone were in a place where they could not die, 
that they would naturally want to remain there forever.
  I was thinking of the way people on Earth are always searching for immortality. 
S:  No, you would be bored very quickly. 
 If your lesson of the third grade is over, why would you want to stay in the third grade for the rest of your life?  It would be comfortable, but there would be no learning. 
D:  There would be no challenges. 
S:  That's true.  Death is necessary in order to progress.  
Stagnation would occur if there were no death in order to move one to the spirit side. 
 This is an ongoing process which is best suited for the learning of much information....
It is simply climbing ladders, if you will, where each level of experience is growing in awareness 
from the one below it.  So the surroundings which will be the catalyst for these experience 
will be discarded as the new experiences are needed...
New surroundings are very important to progression.....  
Dolores Cannon:  Between Death & Life:  Conversations With A Spirit 
 
 
In the old way, when it was time to die,
 old ones would go off by themselves, 
feeling that the moment of death was as intimate between them and the Earth Mother 
as the moment of birth is between human mother and child. 
 They would find a quiet place and there make prayers to the Great Spirit, 
thanking him for the life they had enjoyed. 
 They would sing their song, and they would die
Sun Bear 
 
 
Death, as humans know it, 
is the clearing away of the most formal illusions
 within which they have obscured themselves from their true identity as Life Itself.  
After death, subtle illusions can linger,
and lure one back to experience rebirth and redeath in form--- 
which is, ultimately, the essential path Home
Thanatos 
 
I am emerging from regrets of earth memories, 
from disillusions, from idealizations which become illusions, 
ephemeral and of no true worth. 
 I am viewing each piece of skin which peels off from me
in its right connection with the true Self which it served to obscure. 
 And more and more I become thankful for the Reality 
which was there beneath the skin, all the time. 
 This is the Self which is now becoming more and more outstanding, 
more revealed, more substantial.  
That Self is substantial Light...... 
Frances Banks communicating to Helen Greaves, after Death. (Testimony of Light) 
 
What is perhaps the most incredible common element in the accounts of near-death experiences
 is the encounter with a very bright light.  
The love and warmth that emanate from this Being to the dying person
 are utterly beyond words, 
and he feels completely at ease and accepted in the presence of this Being....
He is ineluctably drawn to it. 
Dr. Raymond Moody 
 
 
Q:  What happens to an individual after death? 
RM:  Engage yourself in the living present. The future will take care of itself. 
 The "I" of the wise man includes the body 
but he does not identify himself with the body. 
 For there cannot be anything apart from "I" for him.  
If the body falls, there is no loss for the "I".  
"I" remains the same.
  If the body feels dead, let it raise the question. 
 Being inert, it cannot. 
"I" never dies and does not ask. 

Who then dies?  Who asks?... 
dialogue with Ramana Maharshi 
 

Whether one passes on or remains is all the same.  
That you can take no one with you is the only difference.  
Ah, how pleasant!
Two awakenings and one sleep.  
This dream of a fleeing world! 
The roseate hues of early dawn! 
Tokugawa Ieyasu 
 
 
You have to learn to do everything, even to die.
 Gertrude Stein 
 
 
One should be ever booted and spurred and ready to depart.
Michel de Montaigne 
 
Death - the last voyage, the longest, the best.
 Thomas Wolfe 
 
People who cannot let go of their egos 
Who can't look Death in the eye,
 can't live either. 
Thich Nhat Hanh 
 
If a man sets out to have a direct, positive experience of death, 
if he is on his way to know what death is with a positive attitude, 
if he has no conflict with life, 
if he is not against life, 
then even in death this man is searching for life. 
Osho 
 
 
"..all of a sudden I was chasing that light at the end of the tunnel and this wind was whizzing by me. 
And the moment I hit that light that was so bright, I was up against a light wall....
And he was talking, and it was really beautiful and loving. 
 He said, 'Now you are your true self at this moment.  
This moment is who you really are,
 and you have left your body behind.' "
a Near Death Experiencer 
 
 
Because we know that life is eternal,
 and we know that there is no ending to that which you are about,
 if one of you is killed in an earthquake or crashes your plane, 
or any number of other very creative ways you have found to make your exit into the Non-Physical,
 because we know the whole picture, we grieve not a moment for any of you. 
But from your more shortsighted point of view in physical, 
a lot of you grieve tremendously.  
Abraham  
 
 
Be in the world but don't be of the world.
 Don't accumulate inside, be poor in spirit. 
Never possess anything -- 
and then you are ready to die.. 
Osho 
 
 
"Hey, Sung Hu! 
Where'd you go? 
Hey, Sung Hu! 
Where'd you go? 
You have gone  
Where you really were 
And we are here-- 
Damn it!  We are here!"    
Chuang Tzu 
 
It is generally accepted that one must die, or leave this world,
 in order that they may enter another world where Truth is more fully known. 
 In a sense this is true, but not in the way inferred. 
 We are to give up the belief that we are mortal, matter, mind and personality; 
 and awake to the Truth that we are Spirit, right here and now; 
 and that no other world exists 
Lillian DeWaters 
 
Enjoy Life  with the  body, not as the  body. 
 One is not born with the body's birth. 
 One does not die with the body's death.
.Thanatos 
' 
 
It is a question of acknowledging that we are born alone 
and that we die alone,
 but that it is still OK.  
There is nothing particularly terrible or special about it.
Chogyan Trungpa 
 
 
To transcend Death, transcend Birth.... 
Thanatos 
 
In this world, one who wants to know life must himself go through the experience of death. 
Except for this there is no other way. 
To know life one has to learn the art of dying. 
And the one who is afraid of death will remain unacquainted with life also, 
because death is the innermost and the most mysterious center of life. 
Only those who enter into death consciously, 
with awareness and a welcoming heart,
 can know this life."
Osho 
 
After your death you will be what you were before your birth
Schopenhauer 
 
If we lose our body, our mind and soul live on. 
 With the attachment to the physical body gone, the mind can see things more clearly than ever before
 and can experience that Reality which normally eludes one
 who is attached to many worldly activities through clinging to one’s body. 
The afterlife experience for an average person is bound to be much better than the experience here on earth. 
At that time there is no physical suffering. 
The departed soul can travel anywhere at will
 and can even help the bereaved near and dear ones in a spiritual way. 
Therefore, death is not something that has to be dreaded. 
Death is only a transition from one state of existence to another. 
Through death one gets a kind of freedom
 that is impossible for one to enjoy while one is in the body.
Vedanta  
 
When you do not expect your death, you will never know it.
Ramtha 
 
“I personally want to ‘do’ death in the active 
and not the passive, 
and to be there to look it in the eye
 and be doing something when it comes for me.” 
Christopher Hitchens 
   
      I have witnessed too many humans die after they wanted to die. 
 They leave with a deeply troubled sense of not having experienced what they most wanted....
a vibrant, Creative Death.   
  I understand why humans would desire rebirth
 so that they can experience  a Creative Redeath.
Thanatos 
 
 
"As a result of that experience, I have very little apprehension about dying my natural death...
because if death is anything at all like what I experienced, 
it's gotta be the most wonderful thing to look forward to,
 absolutely the most wonderful thing".
Tom Sawyer, a NearDeather,  quoted from Lessons From The LIght 
 
 
Death is the end of nothing other than the nightmare of false identity. 
 Choosing Creative Death,  servitude to false identity ends, 
and embodiment is revealed as the effortless  expression of unlimited Life.
Thanatos 
 
"It is not death or pain that is to be dreaded, but the fear of pain or death."
Emerson 
 
A fearless relationship with Death relieves the bewilderment  of dying.
Thanatos  
 
Life is wasted in the necessary preparation of finding what is the true way, 
and we die just as we enter it.
Emerson 
 
In the small death, you die unconsciously.  
In the Great Death, you die consciously. 
 Behind the Great Death is revealed the Great Life. 
 Unless you open the door of the Great Death, 
you won't enter the space of the Great Life.
Osho 
 
Only spirit is immortal.  
To believe we can exist in any other state -- meaning the physical --
 is to follow the ego's attempts to make the dream of separation a reality,
 in which our individual identity is secure, 
by having us believe in the illusion it calls life.
ACIM 
 
Make fun of death. 
We are as dead as it gets, and we are fully aware of this joyous experience. 
We are with you every time you allow it. 
We are in every singing bird and in every joyful child. 
We are part of every delicious pulsing in your environment. 
We are not dead, and neither will you ever be! 
You will just get up, one day, and get out of the movie. 
Abraham  
 
"I have absolutely no fear of death. 
From my near-death research and my personal experiences, 
death is, in my judgment, simply a transition into another kind of reality." 
Dr. Raymond Moody 
 
  "God conceals from men the happiness of death that they may endure life." 
Anonymous 
 
"It is not the end of the physical body that should worry us.
 Rather, our concern must be to live while we're alive - 
to release our inner selves from the spiritual death 
that comes with living behind a facade designed t
o conform to external definitions of who and what we are."  
Elisabeth Kubler-Ross 
 
Find where from thoughts emerge.
 Then you will abide in the ever-present inmost Self
 and be free from the idea of birth or the fear of death. 
Ramana Maharshi 
 
. . . death is nothing to us.
For all good and evil consists in sensation, but death is deprivation of sensation. 
And therefore a right understanding that death is nothing
 to us makes the mortality of life enjoyable, 
not because it adds to it an infinite span of time, 
but because it takes away the craving for immortality.
 For there is nothing terrible in life for the man who has truly comprehended 
that there is nothing terrible in not living. 
[Death] does not then concern either the living or the dead,
 since for the former it is not, and the latter are no more. 
Epicurus 
 
Death, so called, is but a passing of the Spirit 
into a larger sphere--a birth.
The Rosicrucian View 
 
...with the fear of death removed, 
which is a great step forward and a wonderful comfort to mankind,
 what is being done to prepare the Spirit for the change called death? 
Are such careful preparations made for this journey 
as for the entrance of the Spirit into the physical body (birth)?
 Is this passing from physical life made pleasant by love and good wishes of friends? 
Alas! No. This greatest of all journeys into the home of the Spirit is still attended by grief,
 the way is paved with fears, and washed with tears.
 The traveler is not attended by the love and joy which awaited his entrance into Earth life. 
The Spirit often enters into this new life unprepared, unhappy on account of the grief of relatives.... 
Max Heindel, founder of 
The Rosicrucian Fellowship 
 
You would know the secret of death. 
But how shall you find it unless you seek it in the heart of life? 
The owl whose night-bound eyes are blind unto the day cannot unveil the mystery of light. 
If you would indeed behold the spirit of death, open your heart wide unto the body of life. 
For life and death are one, even as the river and the sea are one. 
Kahlil Gibran 
 
“Men fear death as children fear to go in the dark; 
and as that natural fear in children is increased by tales, so is the other.” 
Francis Bacon 
 
At the turn of the 20th century, most people died quickly and at any age.
 The average age at death was just forty-six years old, 
and most people died of infections and accidents. 
Now, however, most of us will live into old age. 
Three-quarters of Americans die after age sixty-five, 
and the average age at death for adults is nearly eighty. 
Americans commonly claim that we are a death-denying society. 
Mostly, though, we are simply unfamiliar with death--
at least with the kind of dying that most of us actually face.... 
Marilyn Webb:  The Good Death 
 
"We are living too long. 
It's not viable.
 I can't think of any reason to stay alive once the mind goes.  
It is an existential nightmare that you can't get out of life. 
Medical science got us into this and medical science will have to get us out." 
Martin Amis 
 
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 dying process has potential beyond all description for learning about who we are...
but we squander that opportunity shamelessly, stupidly. 
 We say the dying are "confused" and "hallucinating" and we feel sorry that their lives "ended". 
 By so doing we completely miss the point and the opportunity to learn something truly profound. 
 Dying people come to see the world as logical, purposeful and continuous.  
Dying process comes to be seen as a series of events preparing a person for continued life,
 not as an augur of life's "end."
  It is quite impossible to understand death 
until one learns to view it through the eyes of the dying. 
Michael Holmes 
 
It's very beautiful over there....
last words of Thomas Edison 
 
I wish that I had had  more conversations about death.
  Everyone assumed that I wanted to spend my last days talking about what had been. 
 I wanted to talk about what was to come
from the death letter of JL 
 
For the average good citizen, death is a continuance
 of the living process in his consciousness 
and a carrying forward of the awareness and tendencies of the life. 
 His consciousness and his sense of awareness are the same and unaltered. 
 He is oft unaware that he has passed through the episode of death.
The Tibetan 
 
By entering Nirvana while yet alive, he negated any power that death might have held over him..... 
 

"Who knows if to live is to be dead,
 and to be dead, to live? 
And we really, it may be, are dead; 
in fact I once heard sages say that we are now dead,
 and the body is our tomb ...
 if we really are dead, 
then our world must be the kingdom of death. 
To inhabit such a kingdom means to die continuously, 
to be subject to transience, to agony, and loss. 
To lead the existence of a shadow that will soon vanish. 
To repeatedly watch the defeat of goodness, 
the destruction of love and joy, of beauty and innocence. 
To go hungry or thirsty. 
To be sick or old. 
To know exhaustion, fear, anguish, violence or desolation.
 To destroy and be destroyed: to be the client of death in every respect.
 Confused and wounded, the shadows wander about their nocturnal kingdom, 
and from the openings of their tombs take darkness for light and death for life. 
They forget they are shadows, since they have drunk from the spring of oblivion
But sometimes a spark of memory makes them search
 for the light of such a dawn as might reveal,
 beyond the fields of death, another landscape: 
a kingdom of life where love has made decay unknown, and no one ever dies.  


Socrates. Plato, Gorgias  


The way death feels to you is related to how you feel  while dying,
 but everyone who makes their transition, 
without exception,
 experiences  the relief of  the release of resistance. 
  And as you re-emerge into that pure positive energy 
knowing fully who you are, 
you never look back with a moment’s regret.

Abraham 
 
The only thing that burns in hell 
is the part of you that won't let go of your life: 
your memories, your attachments. 
They burn them all away, 
but they're not punishing you, 
they're freeing your soul. 
If you're frightened of dying and you're holding on, 
you'll see devils tearing your life away. 
If you've made your peace, 
then the devils are really angels freeing you from the earth. 
 
Meister Eckhart 
 
You see, death is not the grave as many people think. 
It is another phenomenalized form of life. 

Edgar Cayce 
 
"So this is death!" 
I recall saying to one of the Sisters who was beside me--"
 "Life separated by density---that is all!" 

Helen Greaves, after dying. 
 
I love the Afterlife.
  Here,  All is immediate...
All is  Now. 
Here  Life is  unobstructed, 
beyond measurement, 
beyond Man... 
a Disincarnate 
 
Human life is inverted. 
 Humans believe that while embodied they are alive,
 and when they shed their body, they are dead. 
They believe that limitation is Life 
and limitlessness is Death.  
Isn't that a strange deceit?   


Thanatos
 
 
 Steve Jobs apparently floated in and out of consciousness until around 2pm that afternoon. 
Then, says Simpson (his sister), “His breathing changed. It became severe, deliberate, purposeful.”
 He made it through the night, 
but Simpson recalls, “Steve’s final words, hours earlier, were monosyllables, repeated three times… 
OH WOW. OH WOW. OH WOW.” 
 
 
Death is not extinguishing the light;  
it is putting out the lamp because the dawn has come. 
  Tagore 
 
It is one of the noblest functions of reason 
to know whether it is time to walk out of the world or not 
Marcus Aurelius 
 
Our death can be our life's most creative expression.
  We ignore the hopeless  pain of others 
if we resign ourselves to a hopeless painful death.  
We can die inspired, 
transcending pain through sharing an enthusiastic interest in what is to come,
  transforming the death experience
 for those who witness our transition.  
 
Thanatos 
 
 
Have your being outside this body of birth and death and all your problems will be solved. 
 
Nisargadatta Maharaj 
 
The secret of Zen is to dwell in nirvana before one dies, 
so that there will be no death left to die.... 

Kenneth Kramer 
 
Only the dead can die, not the living. 
 That which is alive in you is immortal

Nisargadatta Maharaj 
 
No one knows whether death, 
which people fear to be the greatest evil,
 may not be the greatest good 
Plato 
 
Many of us are familiar with the truisms of the Near Death Experiences:
that death is not fearsome, 
that life continues beyond, 
that love is more important than material possessions, 
that everything happens for a reason. 
 But what would we be like, 
what would the world be like, 
if we all really lived according to these precepts, 
if they were not mere bromides for us but living truths?

Bruce Greyson, MD 
 
If I cannot control my Death, 
I want to at least create the one experience
 after which I won't mind dying--
after which I can die without regret
AC 
 
The knowledge of life is the knowledge of death
Edgar Cayce 
 
You aren't fully alive 
until you know that you never die.

Thanatos 
 
We must eliminate the abyss separating us from the dead... 

Rudolph Steiner 
 
I have set out to design my own death, or de-animation, as I prefer to call it.  It's a hip, chic thing to do.  It's the most elegant thing you can do.  Even if you've lived your life like a complete slob, you can die with terrific style.  I call it "Designer Dying," and it involves two basic principles by which I've lived my life:  think for yourself and question authority.  
Timothy Leary  
 
There are some odd things about human dying, anyway, that don't fit at all with the notion of agony at the end.  People who almost die but don't, and then recover to describe the experience, never mention anguish or pain, or even despair;  to the contrary they recall a strange, unfamiliar feeling of tranquility and peace.  The act of dying seems to be associated with some other event, perhaps pharmacologic, that transforms it into something quite different from what most of us are brought up to anticipate.  We might be learning more about this.....Something is probably going on that we don't yet know about. 
Lewis Thomas, M.D. 
 
I cried at birth.  I will smile at death. 
TW 
 
The attitude of men to the death of their fellows is of unique significance for an understanding of our human condition...The knowledge that we must die gives us our perspective for living, our sense of finitude, our conviction of the value of every moment, our determination to live in such a fashion that we transcend our tragic limitation 
-John McManners 
 
For the past 33 years, I have looked in the mirror every morning and asked myself: "If today were the last day of my life, would I want to do what I am about to do today?" And whenever the answer has been "No" for too many days in a row, I know I need to change something. Remembering that I'll be dead soon is the most important tool I've  ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life. Because almost everything – all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure - these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important. Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart... 
Steve Jobs, 2005 
 
The only Death is dying to the human dream...Thanatos 
 
What you picture as the world of death and what you now conceive of as the world of physical life is no different...  
Tom Carpenter: Dialogue On Awakening 
 
The end of our days is an influence on who and where we suppose ourselves to be now....RK 
 
Soul, mind, ego are mere words.  There are no true entities of the kind.  Consciousness is the only truth.  Forgetfulness of your real nature is the real death;  remembrance of it is the true birth.  It puts an end to successive births.  Yours is the eternal life.... 
Ramesh Maharshi 
 
 Death saves Life by ending the illusion of decline, the nightmare of lost identity, the torture of pain.  What has been known as dying is Life communicating that it is time to prepare for our next birth...   
In the West it has been a long time since people longed for the next life more than they did this one... 
Deepak  Chopra 
 
I'm planning to die feeling full of life.  I'm not following  the script that society has written.....TC 
 
Let us beware of saying that death is the opposite of life.  The living being is only a species of the dead, and a very rare species.... 
Nietzsche 
 
Death is the only God that loves not bribes ... Aristophanes 
 
Who knows if to live is to be dead, and to be dead, to live? And we really, it may be, are dead; in fact I once heard sages say that we are now dead, and the body is our tomb ...Socrates. 
 
 
"This can't go on forever, can it?"  he asked the doctor.  "I'm ready to have some peace." 
 
 
"We have lost, being born, as much as we shall lose, dying":   EM Cioran 
 
When forms around you die or death approaches, your sense of Beingness, of I Am, is freed from its entanglement with form: Spirit is released from its imprisonment in matter. You realize your essential identity as formless, as an all-Pervasive presence, of Being prior to all forms, all identifications. You realize your true identity as consciousness itself, rather than what consciousness had identified with. That's the peace of God. The ultimate truth of who you are is not I am this or that, but I Am."... 
Tolle 
 
All say, 'How hard it is that we have to die'--a strange complaint to come from the mouths of people who have had to live.....Mark Twain 
 
I am a fairly healthy woman in my 80s and at this time I have no 
thoughts of ending my life and no reason to. However, I believe I have 
the inherent right to decide, at some future time, that I have lived 
long enough and that continued life would be only a source of pain and 
misery to myself and others   
---Audrey Maslin 
 
Death is a great illusion, for what has been created can never be destroyed.  Death is of the body only. The essence that inhabits and operates the body will soon come back and integrate with another embodiment, if it wishes to, for the life force that lives within the walls of flesh is ongoing.  Remember that..... 
.Ramtha 
 
Regarding Death....we leave the body consciously, with our eyes open.  When we leave the body, it is not through age or disease or suffering, but simply the timing to go on, to go elsewhere, to expand in other ways.. 
...Bashar


  
As a hawk or an eagle having soared high in the air, wings its way back to its resting-place, being so far fatigued, so does the soul, having experienced the phenomenal, return into Itself where it can sleep beyond all desires, beyond all dreams. 
--Brhadaranyakopanishad 
 
 William W. Atkinson the Spirit of the Upanishads  
 
 
 
  I suddenly felt a great urge to rise up. I had no physical feeling whatever, very much in the same way that physical feeling is absent during a dream, but I was mentally alert, however much my body seemed to contradict such a condition.  I then beheld what had taken place. I saw my physical body lying lifeless upon its bed, but here was I, the real I, alive and well. 
For a minute or two I remained gazing, and the thought of what to  
do next entered my head, but help was close at hand.     
  I knew at once of the alteration that had taken place in my condition; I knew, in other words, that I had 'died'. I knew, too, that I was alive, that I had shaken off my last illness sufficiently to be able to stand upright and look about me. At no time was I in any mental distress, but I was full of wonder at what was to happen next, for here I was, in full possession of all my faculties, and, indeed, feeling 'physically' as I had never felt before.     
 And here let me say that all idea of a 'judgment seat' or a 'day of judgment'  
was entirely swept from my mind in the actual procedure of transition. 
It was all too normal and natural to suggest the frightful ordeal  
that orthodox religion teaches that we must go through after 'death'. 
Anthony Borgia: LIFE IN THE WORLD UNSEEN  
 
 
 
 
 
 
Death is actually the transformation from our human form back to our eternal spiritual essence.  Transition is the journey we take in consciousness as we leave our human form and life behind.  We have the sleep of forgetfulness when we transition into the physical world and the clarity of awakened consciousness when we transition back home.  Death frees us from the limitations of the body and the physical world, and opens us to the Clear Light, which is our True Nature. 
Diane Goble:  Beginner's Guide To Conscious Dying  
 
 
If you want to participate in the evolution of your own consciousness during this lifetime, which in turn contributes to raising the consciousness of others whose lives you touch and spreads to your community, your country, humanity, the world, 
 learn to practice the Art of Conscious Dying while you are living.  
 Learn to live consciously in each moment and 
 your transition process will be peaceful whenever it comes.   
Diane Goble:  Beginner's Guide To Conscious Dying 
 
 
 
 
 
I asked the japonica flowers: “Are you the same as the flowers that died in the frost or are you different flowers?” The flowers replied to me: “We are not the same and we are not different. When conditions are sufficient we manifest and when conditions are not sufficient we go into hiding.  
It’s as simple as that.” 
Thich Nhat Hanh  No Death, No Fear   
 
 
 
The in-between duration spanning the crib and the crematorium is not the one-way, flowing time we take it to be but a non-durational expression of eternity.  Assante reveals the futility of striving for immortality; she shows that we are already immortal, even if we are too blinkered to notice. Immortality is our birthright, she says. It comes factory installed, part of our original equipment. We do not need to acquire or develop it. We don’t live into eternity; we’re up to our neck in it now. The natural result of this realization is the diminution or eradication of the fear of death, which throughout human history has caused more suffering than all the physical diseases combined. 
Larry Dossey, MD, introduction to:  
 Julia Assante PhD. :  The Last Frontier: Exploring the Afterlife and Transforming Our Fear of Death  
 
 
 
 
 
Our greatest fear is that when we die we will become nothing. Many of us believe that our entire existence is only a life span beginning the moment we are born or conceived and ending the moment we die. We believe that we are born from nothing and that when we die we become nothing.  
And so we are filled with fear of annihilation. 
Birth and death are notions. They are not real.  
The fact that we think they are true makes a powerful illusion that causes our suffering. There is no birth, there is no death; there is no coming, there is no going; there is no same, there is no different; there is no permanent self, there is no annihilation. We only think there is.  
When we understand that we cannot be destroyed, we are liberated from fear.  
It is a great relief. We can enjoy life and appreciate it in a new way. 
 Thich Nhat  Hanh . No Death, No Fear   
 
 
 
Humancentric death is but a change of dreams within The Dream.   
Thanatos  
 
 
 
Everything that happened yesterday exists now only as a memory. Our conversations, actions, thoughts and feelings, even the sights and sounds of yesterday, are no more real than the images that appeared to us in last night’s dreams. From today’s point of view, there is not much difference between the two. Both are now memories, although our memory of yesterday’s daytime experiences may be stronger than that of last night’s dream. We see, too, that our immediate experiences of today, which seem tangible and real right now, will appear dreamlike to us when we look back at them tomorrow. 
 Dzogchen Ponlop   Mind Beyond Death   
 
 
If you want to know what death is like, then become aware of your own consciousness as it is divorced from physical activities.  You will find that it is highly active.  With practice you will discover that your normal waking consciousness is highly limited, and that what you thought of once as death conditions seem much more like life conditions. 
Seth:  Seth Speaks  
 
 
 
 
“I looked at Mr. Parker and could hear his voice in thoughts that I understood were coming from him,” said Gordon. “He insisted to me that he was not that body and I wasn't to be concerned about him.  
All this came in thoughts, not words, but I understood them clearly. 
There is no misunderstanding when you are in this situation. 
“I had a feeling of other people in a semicircle closing around Mr. Parker,” said Gordon. “There seemed to be a kind of energy rolling back and forth between Mr. Parker's form and these unseen presences that were gathering around.” Gordon stared at Mr. Parker until—”in a flash”—his patient disappeared in 
a field of “bright golden light. 
 “I could see several layers in this transparent golden light and for a moment there was a shower of bright golden specks,”said Gordon. “These specks reminded me of the sea spray that is tossed up by a wave crashing at the beach. These shining specks were a cloud around me but it was only an instant.” 
 When I spoke to Gordon, he said that he had been a “changed man” ever since that experience. From that day forward, said Gordon, 
he’d had no trepidations about death—his or anyone else’s. 
Paul Perry;  Raymond Moody:  Glimpses of Eternity: Sharing a Loved One's Passage from this Life to the Next   
 
 
Death is the opener, the one giving vision.  
 Death is the greatest and loveliest change  
that the heart of nature has in store for us. 
G. de Purucker:  Golden Precepts of Esotericsim  
 
 
The great lesson we have to learn, if we would keep in spiritual touch not only with the dead, but with all those who are absent from us in the flesh, is the fleeting nature of the personality.  We must learn to understand our personal selves for the transitory things they are.  Then, discovering and living in the spiritual reality behind them and within them, we shall find our inner immortal selves and begin to live in and for that permanent root of our being.  When we can do that, we shall see;  we shall know ourselves as being immortal today--now--this moment! And we shall then also recognize the true selves of those we love, and experience in every moment of our lives the fact that we are together always, always in real touch with one another even when the bodily eyes do not see the beloved face and the bodily ears hear not the voice of the absent. 
Leoline L. Wright:  After Death--What? 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
You are experiencing more and more of the Core of Your Being, more and more of the Essence of who you are, as life continues. You are eternally merging with that Essence— and, as part of the process of life, emerging from it again, as a replenished expression of it.  
This process that we might call “energy merging” is the formula for all of life. 
It can be written as: e + merging.  This is what death and dying is all about. 
That is why this event is sometimes called a spiritual “emergenc-y.”  
“Death is an emergency” because it is not about “dying” at all.  
It is about merging and emerging. 
 Neale Donald Walsch   Home with God  
 
 
You do not welcome death, as you welcome any new adventure, instead you dread it, dread it, dread it. That is why so many of you bring yourself into states of such enormous decline before you will allow the death experience, then you are choosing what you consider the  to be the lesser of two evils.  
Until you begin to no longer dread and push against death, you cannot really live.  
You have to understand that well being abounds. 
The re-emergence back to the non-physical is a delicious experience. 
Your non-physical self knows this.  
Abraham 
 
 
 
 
You are non-physical beings expressing yourselves in physical bodies. You are eternal beings. Some of you come forward intending very fast, brief, explosive, delicious physical experience. You cannot evaluate or judge a quality of a life by its length. The benefit is to the physical humans who remain, who now have born within them a stronger than ever desire to understand the relationship between the physical and the non-physical. The one who makes the transition knew it, and knows it instantly. Those who are remaining physical, in their desire to maintain relationship with their dearly departed  are led to an understanding that there is no separation between what is physical and non-physical. That is what that intention is about-- this  intention of having an emphatic experience and an early re-emergence into non-physical;  it is almost always because there is a former agreement to put this death thing in proper perspective.  
Abraham 
 
 
 
If we are fortunate enough to die consciously, then we should take 
full advantage of opportunities to create peace for all parties.  
Our last words and intentions matter so much to those left behind. 
We should be careful how we leave. 
 Monica Williams-Murphy, MD: A rare case when needs of the dying should be secondary  
 
 
Death is not at all what human beings insist it is. 
Death is not the experience of shedding the body.  
Death is the shedding of human identity.  
  Death occurs when a human relaxes their obsession with living 
and allows themselves to be lived.   
Thanatos 
 
 
 
 
"Death is a part of life as much as birth, and is as inevitable as eating, eliminating, sleeping and breathing. The human body is going to breathe and just as surely as it breathes, it's going to stop breathing. It is not something to be overcome or fought against. "If you fight against death you totally misunderstand the miraculous nature of life. 
Death is a miracle and if life is beautiful, then death is equally beautiful." 
 
E. J. Gold. THE GREAT ADVENTURE: Talks on Living, Dying, and the Bardos 
 
 
 
 
  "You say I know you. I feel bad that I have forgotten you. You seem to 
know me so well, but I can’t quite remember you even though  
you seem so terribly familiar in a way."      
" Don’t feel bad. We discussed this before you went down. We both knew that it would be this way, that the veil would be drawn and that you would forget for a time. That was part of the deal. Nobody there remembers. But you will. 
All of you will remember in time. 
And all of you will return." 
 
Todd Michael The Evolution Angel: An Emergency Physician's Lessons with Death and the Divine   
 
 
 
 
When our desire for the Absolute overcomes our fear of death, we offer the pretense of our personal existence to the sacrificial fire of infinite consciousness.   
Henceforth, nothing stands in the way of awakening any longer and it progressively unfolds its splendor on all the planes of phenomenal existence, which, little by little, reveal their underlying non-temporal reality, like the gaze of Shams of Tabriz that, 
"was never cast upon some fleeting object without rendering it eternal". 
   Francis Lucille:  Eternity Now  
  
 
 
People should not be afraid of dying.  Death is no more to be feared than breathing.  Dying is as natural and as painless as blinking your eyes.  And that's almost the way it is.  At one moment you're in one plane of existence and you blink your eyes, so to speak, and you're in another plane of existence.  That's about the physical sensation you have, and it's as painless as that.  Any pain you feel in the process is from physical damage, but spiritually there is no pain.  Your memories are intact and you feel the same, as if your life is continuing.  Sometimes it takes you a little bit to notice that you're no longer connected to your physical  body, but usually it is noticed right away because your perceptions are broadened to where you can perceive the spiritual plane without the veil in the way.  
 Human life is the clouded mirror, as some have likened it to.   
What happens is that at first there is a period of  orientation.  You are still very conscious of the physical  plane but you are exploring and absorbing the sensations of being aware of the spiritual plane, until you get used to the fact that you're really on the spiritual plane and you are comfortable with it.  
     A spirit speaking with Dolores Cannon:  Between Death & Life 
 
 
The grandest of all truths--the truth of our eventual death--must be kept in mind always.  A small part of the mind must always remain soaked in the thought of death. What shall we gain from this ceaseless contemplation on death?  Awakening of the spirit, disappearance of all meanness, practicality in work, new vigor in body and mind, and power to uplift others. 
But all these will come to us only if we face the thought of death courageously.  This is important.                       
        Swami Tyagananda:  The Grandest Truth  
 
 
"You say I know you. [Pause.] I feel bad that I have forgotten you. You seem to know me so well, but I can’t quite remember you even though you seem so terribly familiar in a way." 
"Don’t feel bad. We discussed this before you went down. We both knew that it would be this way, that the veil would be drawn and that you would forget for a time. That was part of the deal. Nobody there remembers. But you will. 
All of you will remember in time.  
And all of you will return." 
 
Todd Michael: The Evolution Angel: An Emergency Physician's Lessons with Death and the Divine  
 
 
Attending the death of another human being is awe-inspiring, and I regard it as a sacred privilege of the highest order. I am fortunate indeed to have been granted such generous access to an event so incredible. When I witness a soul leaving its body I am deeply humbled and filled with wonder. The power of death is stunning in its intensity. Death changes everything, for both the one who dies and for those who are left behind. 
Todd Michael:  The Evolution Angel: An Emergency Physician's Lessons with Death and the Divine   
 
 
When you die, it is impossible to not be Complete, but it IS possible to not be consciously aware of this. “Peace” is being consciously aware that you are Complete. That there is nothing more for you to do. That you are done. Finished. 
And you can go Home. 
 Donald Neale  Walsch:  Home with God   
 
 
 
Death is not the opposite of Life, but actually is one of the modes of living--a modification of consciousness, a change from one phase of living to others.  It is impossible for any entity to live for an instant if he were not dying at the same time:  as Paul phrases it, "I die daily."  Every man 'dies' when he sleeps;  likewise, because our bodies are in a state of constant change, their atoms are in a continuous process of renewal which is nothing but a kind of dying, and which so far as the atoms are concerned is not a relative but a complete death for them.  Even while embodied we are living in the midst of innumerable tiny deaths. 
Gottfried De Purucker:  Death and the Circulation of the Cosmos  
 
 
 
 
The principal theme of all the great Mystery schools of antiquity, and of the ceremonials which reflected in dramatic form these inner teachings, was the 'adventure' which the human entity enters upon when the physical body is cast aside.  The strongest emphasis was upon the fact that death and sleep are fundamentally the same, not different except in degree;  that sleep is an imperfect death and death is a perfect sleep.  This is the main key to all the teachings on death;  because if we understand what happens during sleep,  
we will have the Ariadne's thread to a relative comprehension of  
what takes place at, during, and after dying.       
Gottfried De Purucker:  Death and the Circulation of the Cosmos  
     
 
 
 
 When we watch the mind in meditation, we can see clearly how each thought arises and ceases, how cause and effect operate, how states of mind succeed each other just like one life after another, and how our imagined permanence is really a process of continual change.  If we learn to observe all these things taking place in this life, it is not so hard to accept the idea of them all continuing after death.   Our own mind is the only thing we can really know.  We can learn to see,  
beyond any doubt, how we continually create our own world by the power of mind.                                      
  Francesca Fremantle:  Luminous Emptiness:  Understanding the Tibetan Book of the Dead  
 
 
Most people don't want to come back.  In fact, they get angry at the people who have resuscitated them...Sometimes they come back to fulfill a mission related to the realization they've had in this near-death state.  People who have survived clinical death or near death have greater zest for life;  their concern for material life is much diminished;  they have greater self-confidence;  and they feel a real sense of a purpose in life.  They become spiritually enthusiastic, more interested in nature, and develop a tolerance and compassion toward others.  Also, they have a reduced fear of death because they have become convinced that death is a great ride!  They have a sense of relative invulnerability, so they feel very optimistic.  They also feel as if they have a special destiny, perhaps a little pride that they died and were reborn.               
Joan Halifax, speaking with the Dalai Lama:  Sleeping, Dreaming and Dying 
 
 
 
 
 When I began to experience Fourth Dimensional Life, I assumed that this was an expansion of my humancentricity.  I assumed that my human identity would expand further and further forever.  But I soon recognized that human identity dissolves as Consciousness expands and that death is the dissolution of humancentricity. 
Thanatos 
 
 
 
“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.” 
Elisabeth Kubler Ross quoted in:  
Paul Perry; Raymond Moody Glimpses of Eternity: Sharing a Loved One's Passage from this Life to the Next (Mind Body Spirit)    
 
     I teach dying people meditation and encourage them not to shy away from the altered states that come in the course of the experience of dying, 
but to establish a strong mental foundation so that they can investigate  
these states with some degree of equanimity.                  
       Joan Halifax, speaking with the Dalai Lama: Sleeping, Dreaming, and Dying 
 
 
My intent is to place the death moment back in its rightful place, as our birthright, and to encourage its fullest expression whenever possible.  I believe that it is possible to establish in our society an attitude of respect toward a vacating body and the dying person's right to depart in peace, thus establishing an after-life consciousness.  By rejoining death with the rest of life, all of us will experience a joy and a release of the energy that is currently locked up in our fear and evasions.  We can also prepare for the tomorrows of the soul 
Anya Foos-Graber:  Deathing  
 
 
One time, the famous monk Xuan Jue visited the Sixth Patriarch of Chinese Buddhism, Hui Neng. After entering the great hall at Nan Hwa Ssu, he circled the Patriarch three times, hit the floor with his staff, and just stood there without bowing.  
The Patriarch admonished him for violating the rules of etiquette and asked him why he was so arrogant. 
 Xuan Jue replied, “The great question of life and death is a momentous one. Death may come at any moment, I have no time to waste on ceremony.”  
The Patriarch said, “Why don’t you attain the substance of ‘no birth’, then the problem of death and its coming will not concern you anymore.” 
Xuan Jue replied, “Since substance has no birth, the basic problem of death and when it comes is solved.”  
 
 
 
"There isn’t a way to explain it, as there is no feeling like it here on earth. It was crystal clear. It was like going home at last, at last. A feeling of belonging, of meaning, of completeness. It just seemed so much more real than anything I had ever experienced in my entire life." 
Paul Perry, Jeffrey Long:  Evidence of the Afterlife: The Science of Near-Death Experiences   
 
 
 
A lot of upset with the death of somebody very close to us is linked to fear about our own living and dying, isn't it?   
In silent listening, inwardly, there can be a wondrous illumination of the conditioned, reactive bodymind.  It gets more and more transparent with sustained awareness.  And yet one easily gets entangled in what reveals itself--the desires, the fears, all the emotional-physiological states connected with memory and anticipation.  All of it has such an amazingly powerful attraction, seriously masquerading for the real thing.       
 Right at this moment, can we see our life story permeated with awareness?  Beholding it quietly in the midst of breathing and throbbing?  It's not necessary to continue with the involvement in story and emotion, no matter how strongly and convincingly the body vibrates with memories.   
   Can there be a simple shift from story-entanglement to open listening, this moment?  
 Coming and going is happening in vast emptiness without limitation, without time.  In this there is no fear of passing away. 
     Toni Packer: The Silent Question 
 
 
Well, then, let's follow  
the peal of bells to the 
yonder shore.     
 Hakurin, 1897:  Japanese Death Poems  
 
 
 
Deathing is conscious dying:  it is dying that is not left to chance or contingency.  
As a concept, deathing is, of course, analogous to birthing.  Deathing is like giving birth—only to yourself.  It demands conscious participation and full awareness if it is to  be done correctly and beautifully….. 
Kenneth Ring, Introduction to Anya Foos-Graber’s Deathing: An Intelligent Alternative for the Final Moments of Life  
 
 
Death is our crown.  
After death, the soul enters into the Astral Light. 
When the hour of death comes, the Angel of Death approaches the deathbed. There is a choir of Angels of Death. Each Angel of Death carries a book. In this book are the names of all the souls who must depart from the flesh. 
No one dies a day before his appointed time.  
The Angel of Death simply removes the soul from the body. The soul is linked to the body by a fine, heavenly cord of a silvery color. The Angel of Death breaks the cord so that the soul cannot re-enter the body.  
After death, souls see the sun just as they used to, the clouds, the stars as always, everything just as before. For a while, the souls of the dead do not believe that they have died. These souls see all the things of the world just as they did before; therefore they do not believe that they have died. The souls of the dead live in the Astral Light. The Astral Light is the light of all enchantments and magic spells. The Astral Light is related to the air; we eat it, we breathe it,  
but we can see it only with the eyes of the soul. 
 
Samael Aun Weor:  Beyond Death: The Gnostic Book of the Dead 
 
 
The fear of death is the fear of letting go....Why would it be supposed that one's creative ability ceases at the moment consciousness leaves the physical?   
The instant the Self releases from the body, there is light, there is peace, 
 there is freedom, there is home.  
 Emmanuel's Book 
 
 
If we want to be successful in terms of experiencing our death and journey after death, then we have to master the experience of nowness. Whatever we are going through, that is who we are in that moment. When we speak about nowness, we are not talking about anything external, so we should not look for it outside. We should look directly at the space of our immediate experience, which is always right in front of us—the space that is neither yours nor mine, neither theirs nor ours. That “in-between” space is the bardo. 
Even if we do not realize the nature of mind and the reality of all phenomena in this lifetime, it will be possible to recognize it at the time of death, because at death mind manifests in such an intense and powerful way. Even if we fail to realize the nature of mind at the moment of death, it is said that we will have further opportunities in the two bardos that arise after death. Further, even if we are unsuccessful during that time, we will at least be able to maintain a calm and peaceful state of mind and accomplish a favorable rebirth as a result of our habituation to mindfulness and awareness practices.  
 Dzogchen Ponlop :  Mind Beyond Death  
 
 
Death is not a frightening incident.  
 In Sanskrit there is a very beautiful statement.  It is said that when you see a friend, think as though you are meeting them for the first time. 
  And when you are enjoying something, think that you are  
enjoying it for the last time in your life.  
                   Do you see what this means?                      
Swami Suddhananda  
 
 
One does not have to assail death, or bury it under a load of declarations of what Life is or is not.  Merely stop assuming you had a beginning, a birth in time, or are subject to fate or destiny's schedule.  Lack, poverty, want, woe, mishap, sorrow, frustration, limitation and death are inescapable, regardless of what you think or do not think, so long as you insist on identifying yourself with, or as, a self that does not exist--a mortal, a man, a material person launched in time at such and such minute, at such and such geographical location.                          
--from Alfred Aiken  
 
 
 
 
The Vedântins, acknowledging two kinds of conscious existence, the terrestrial and the spiritual, point only to the latter as an undoubted actuality. As to the terrestrial life, owing to its changeability and shortness, it is nothing but an illusion of our senses. Our life in the spiritual spheres must be thought an actuality because it is there that lives our endless, never-changing immortal I.  In every new incarnation it clothes itself in a perfectly different personality, a temporary and short-lived one, in which everything except its spiritual prototype is doomed to traceless destruction." 
from a conversation with an Indian Teacher, recorded by Madame Blavatsky 
   
There inevitably comes a point, for instance in the case of malignant disease, where the physician knows that it simply is a question of time, and the spiritual healer can learn to recognize the same signs.  Then, instead of the present silence on the part of both healer and doctor, where the patient is concerned, this remaining time will be employed, (if the patient's faculties permit), with due preparation for the "beneficent and happy withdrawal" of the soul;  the patient's family and friends will share in the preparation.  
 An entirely new concept of death, with the emphasis upon conscious withdrawal, will be taught, and funeral services, or rather the crematory services, will be joyous events because their emphasis will be upon release and return.  
 Alice. A. Bailey;  Esoteric Healing  
 
 
Death is sleep.  
After death, there begins before our spiritual eyes a representation of a program that was learned by heart by us in our lifetime, and was sometimes invented by us, the practical realization of our true beliefs, or of illusions created by ourselves.  
In order to live a conscious life in the world on the other side of the grave, the man must have acquired belief in that world, in this terrestrial life.  
from a conversation with an Indian Teacher, recorded by Madame Blavatsky 
 
 
There's never ever anything more delicious than the death experience.  
 Nothing ever ever goes wrong with what you call the death experience.  
           Death is the ultimate blending, the ultimate path of least resistance.                  Abraham  
 
My love came to me 
Under the November tree 
Shelterless and dim. 
He put his hand upon my shoulder, 
He did not think me strange or older, 
Nor I, him. 
Frances Cornford, "All Souls' Night"  
 
 
 
Just as we live our own life, we each die our own death.  In the proverbial end, what scientists and religious leaders think about death is, for me, irrelevant. 
  The only thing that will matter to me when I die is what I think.  
 The experience is genuinely personal. 
Michael Holmes:  Two On Dying  
 
 
Death is a third dimensional experience.  
 Those whose identity is not limited to the humancentric cannot experience death.  Their lives transcend the perspective that, by its nature, must die. 
Thanatos 
 
"God is not mysterious. Sometimes God is frightening and horrible, distorted and bizarre.. but in the end, God is God, and the Angel of Death is very much God, 
come to take you home. 
"The uninitiated see the Angel of Death as a horrible, grotesque, distorted, terrifying figure, but to those who are initiated, who have died before they died, the angel of death comes as a lover... beautiful, seductive and compelling... awe-inspiring, breath-taking. 
"Breathtaking beauty-to take the breath-and the breath speaks, `Let me return into thee."' 
E.J. Gold: The Great Adventure:  Talks on Living, Dying, and the Bardos  
 
 
 
‘He alone lives whose life is in the whole universe, and the more we concentrate our lives on limited things, the faster we go towards death. Those moments alone we live when our lives are in the universe, in others; and living this little life is death, simply death, and that is why the fear of death comes. The fear of death can only be conquered when man realises that so long as there is one life in this universe, he is living. When he can say, "I am in everything, in everybody, I am in all lives, I am the universe," then along comes the state of fearlessness. To talk of immortality in constantly changing things is absurd.  
Says an old Sanskrit philosopher: 
It is only the Spirit that is the individual, because it is infinite.’ 
Swami Vivekananda  The Complete Works of Swami Vivekananda 
 
 
What we call “life” and “death” are simply concepts—relative designations  
that are attributed to a continuous state of being, an indestructible 
awareness that is birthless and deathless. 
Although we may cling to this life and fear its end, beyond death there is mind; 
and where there is mind, there is uninterrupted display: spacious, 
radiant, and continually manifesting. 
 Dzogchen Ponlop   Mind Beyond Death 
 
We must crown ourselves with flowers and listen to music playing as we enter into the sleep from which there is no awakening.  
 Mirabeau 
 
All souls find peace after their death. Not all souls find peace before it. 
 Neale Donald Walsch:  Home with God   
 
If I think more about death than some other people, it is probably because I love life more than they do.  
Angelina Jolie  
 
 
I want to say a word to those who are about to die. I want to beg them to forget their bodies as soon as possible after the change which they call death. Oh, the terrible curiosity to go back and look upon that thing which we once believed to be ourselves! 
If we could only remember in life that the form which we call our self is not our real immortal self at all, we would not give it such an exaggerated importance, though we would nevertheless take needful care of it.  Many souls who have not been here long are so melancholy.  
They return again and again to the place which they should not visit. 
One day while walking down an avenue of trees—for we have trees here—I met a tall woman in a long black garment. She was weeping—for we have tears here also. I asked her why she wept, and she turned to me eyes of unutterable sadness. 
“I have been back to it,” she said.  
My heart ached for her, because I knew how she felt. The shock of the first visit is repeated each time, as the thing one sees is less and less what we like to think of ourselves as being. 
Elsa Barker:   LETTERS FROM THE AFTERLIFE   
 
 
 
 
 
The fear and horror of death is founded upon the love of form--our own form, the forms 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 for that soul to live spiritually, constructively and  
divinely within the material vehicles.   
Djwhal Khul: Death:  The Great Adventure 
 
 
"Ordinarily, one's attention is grabbed by events and various demands which seem necessary at the time, but over the long haul, the sheer amount of involvement with these petty details is staggering. One never realizes how involved one has become until one is lying on the deathbed, then one sees how trivial it all was. 
"If you know that death awaits you at the end of your life, your attitude will change; you're not going to try to grasp at anything and you won't get involved in a lot of situations, because you simply can't afford to-time becomes too precious. 
"The lure of organic life tends to be somewhat dissipated by the sobering experience of death."  
E. J. Gold. THE GREAT ADVENTURE: Talks on Living, Dying, and the Bardos  
 
 
 
Old people grow younger here until they reach their prime again, and that then they may hold that for a long time. 
Elsa Barker:  LETTERS FROM THE AFTERLIFE   
 
 
To the man of the "invisible" there comes a sudden memory of earth.  "Oh," he says.  The world is going on without me.  What am I missing?  
 
He looks about him and sees only the tranquil fields of the fourth dimension.  Oh, for the iron grip of matter once more.  To hold something in taut hands! 
He closes his eyes, reversing himself in the invisible. He is drawn to human life, to human beings in the intense vibration of union.  There is sympathy here—perhaps the sympathy of past experience with the souls of those whom he now contacts, perhaps only sympathy of mood or imagination. Be that as it may, he lets go his hold upon freedom and triumphantly loses himself in the lives of human beings.  
 
After a time he awakes, to look with bewildered eyes upon green fields and the round, solid faces of men and women. Sometimes he weeps, and wishes himself back. If he is strong and stubborn, he remains and grows into a man. He may even persuade himself that the former life in tenuous substance was only a dream, for in dream he returns to it, and the dream haunts him and spoils his enjoyment of matter. 
After years enough he grows weary of the material struggle; his energy is exhausted. He sinks back into the arms of the unseen, and men say again with bated breath that he is dead. But he is not dead.  
He has only returned whence he came. 
Elsa Barker:  LETTERS FROM THE AFTERLIFE  
 
 
 
 
 
You can only die when you have chosen to die, after you have done whatever it is you have decided to do in the choosing of this life---just as you chose to be born when you chose to be born.  You were not born early;  you were not born late.  Therefore you will not die early.  You will not die late.  You will die exactly when you have chosen to and you will be able to do whatever it is you chose to do in this life before you die.  
Even if you are not consciously aware of the timing of your choice of death, it will not really matter.  Because you will still recognize that even after you have died, you are still alive.  Know that you are an Eternal Being, all of you.  You are Eternal Beings.  You have existed forever. If you exist now, you have always existed and you always will exist.  But you will simply exist in different forms.                               Bashar:  Quest For Truth 
 
 
 
Everything seems easy now. I could do twice as much work as I do—I feel so strong. As yet I have not settled down anywhere, but am moving about as the fancy takes me; that is what I always dreamed of doing while in the body,  
and never could make possible.  
Do not fear death; but stay on earth as long as you can. Notwithstanding the companionship I have here, I sometimes regret my failure in holding on to the world. But regrets have less weight on this side—like our bodies.  
Everything is well with me. 
Elsa Barker.LETTERS FROM THE AFTERLIFE  
 
 
 
"I  know I am deathless. 
I know that this orbit of mine cannot be swept by a carpenter's compass; 
 And whether I come to my own today, or in ten thousand or ..ten million years, 
I can cheerfully take it now or with equal cheerfulness can wait." 
 
Yogi Ramacharaka:  A Series of Lessons in  Gnani Yoga  
 
 
 
 
Einstein, were he alive today, would be 133 years old. 
That’s assuming that he would want to live that long. As he lay dying of an abdominal aortic aneurysm in 1955, he refused surgery, saying:  
“It is tasteless to prolong life artificially. I have done my share, it is time to go.  
I will do it elegantly.” 
David Ewing Duncan:  When I'm 164 
 
 
 
Could he but speak to himself with full consciousness, at the hour of his death, 
the Initiate would say:  
‘The perishing world was my master. I am now dying as a result of the entire past with which I am enmeshed. Yet the soil of mortal life has matured the seeds of immortal life. I carry them with me into another world. If it had merely depended on the past, I could never have been born. The life of the past came to an end with birth. Life in the sense-world is wrested from universal death by the newly-formed life-germ. The time between birth and death is merely an expression for the amount wrested from the dying past by the new life; and illness is nothing but the continued effect of the dying portions of the past.’ 
Rudolph Steiner:  Knowledge of Higher Worlds  
 
 
What you call “death” is wonderful. So do not grieve when a person dies, nor approach your own death with sadness or foreboding. Welcome death as you have welcomed life, for death IS life in another form. Welcome the death of another with soft celebration and deep happiness, for theirs is a wondrous joy. Here is the way to a peaceful experience of death— your own or that of another: know that the person dying is always at cause in the matter.  
You are the cause of your own death. This is always true, no matter where, or how, you die. 
  Neale Donald Walsch  Home with God  
 
 
 
 
And then a Word sounds forth.   
The descended, radiating point of light ascends, responsive to the dimly heard recalling note, attracted to its emanating source.   
This man calls death and this the soul calls life. 
Djwal Khul :Esoteric Healing 



As a hawk or an eagle having soared high in the air, wings its way back to its resting-place, being so far fatigued, so does the soul, having experienced the phenomenal, return into Itself where it can sleep beyond all desires, beyond all dreams. 
--Brhadaranyakopanishad 
 
 William W. Atkinson the Spirit of the Upanishads  
 
 
 
  I suddenly felt a great urge to rise up. I had no physical feeling whatever, very much in the same way that physical feeling is absent during a dream, but I was mentally alert, however much my body seemed to contradict such a condition.  I then beheld what had taken place. I saw my physical body lying lifeless upon its bed, but here was I, the real I, alive and well. 
For a minute or two I remained gazing, and the thought of what to  
do next entered my head, but help was close at hand.     
  I knew at once of the alteration that had taken place in my condition; I knew, in other words, that I had 'died'. I knew, too, that I was alive, that I had shaken off my last illness sufficiently to be able to stand upright and look about me. At no time was I in any mental distress, but I was full of wonder at what was to happen next, for here I was, in full possession of all my faculties, and, indeed, feeling 'physically' as I had never felt before.     
 And here let me say that all idea of a 'judgment seat' or a 'day of judgment'  
was entirely swept from my mind in the actual procedure of transition. 
It was all too normal and natural to suggest the frightful ordeal  
that orthodox religion teaches that we must go through after 'death'. 
Anthony Borgia: LIFE IN THE WORLD UNSEEN  
 
 
 
 
 
 
Death is actually the transformation from our human form back to our eternal spiritual essence.  Transition is the journey we take in consciousness as we leave our human form and life behind.  We have the sleep of forgetfulness when we transition into the physical world and the clarity of awakened consciousness when we transition back home.  Death frees us from the limitations of the body and the physical world, and opens us to the Clear Light, which is our True Nature. 
Diane Goble:  Beginner's Guide To Conscious Dying  
 
 
If you want to participate in the evolution of your own consciousness during this lifetime, which in turn contributes to raising the consciousness of others whose lives you touch and spreads to your community, your country, humanity, the world, 
 learn to practice the Art of Conscious Dying while you are living.  
 Learn to live consciously in each moment and 
 your transition process will be peaceful whenever it comes.   
Diane Goble:  Beginner's Guide To Conscious Dying 
 
 
 
 
 
I asked the japonica flowers: “Are you the same as the flowers that died in the frost or are you different flowers?” The flowers replied to me: “We are not the same and we are not different. When conditions are sufficient we manifest and when conditions are not sufficient we go into hiding.  
It's as simple as that.” 
Thich Nhat Hanh  No Death, No Fear   
 
 
 
The in-between duration spanning the crib and the crematorium is not the one-way, flowing time we take it to be but a non-durational expression of eternity.  Assante reveals the futility of striving for immortality; she shows that we are already immortal, even if we are too blinkered to notice. Immortality is our birthright, she says. It comes factory installed, part of our original equipment. We do not need to acquire or develop it. We don't live into eternity; we're up to our neck in it now. The natural result of this realization is the diminution or eradication of the fear of death, which throughout human history has caused more suffering than all the physical diseases combined. 
Larry Dossey, MD, introduction to:  
 Julia Assante PhD. :  The Last Frontier: Exploring the Afterlife and Transforming Our Fear of Death  
 
 
 
 
 
Our greatest fear is that when we die we will become nothing. Many of us believe that our entire existence is only a life span beginning the moment we are born or conceived and ending the moment we die. We believe that we are born from nothing and that when we die we become nothing.  
And so we are filled with fear of annihilation. 
Birth and death are notions. They are not real.  
The fact that we think they are true makes a powerful illusion that causes our suffering. There is no birth, there is no death; there is no coming, there is no going; there is no same, there is no different; there is no permanent self, there is no annihilation. We only think there is.  
When we understand that we cannot be destroyed, we are liberated from fear.  
It is a great relief. We can enjoy life and appreciate it in a new way. 
 Thich Nhat  Hanh . No Death, No Fear   
 
 
 
Humancentric death is but a change of dreams within The Dream.   
Thanatos  
 
 
 
Everything that happened yesterday exists now only as a memory. Our conversations, actions, thoughts and feelings, even the sights and sounds of yesterday, are no more real than the images that appeared to us in last night's dreams. From today's point of view, there is not much difference between the two. Both are now memories, although our memory of yesterday's daytime experiences may be stronger than that of last night's dream. We see, too, that our immediate experiences of today, which seem tangible and real right now, will appear dreamlike to us when we look back at them tomorrow. 
 Dzogchen Ponlop   Mind Beyond Death   
 
 
If you want to know what death is like, then become aware of your own consciousness as it is divorced from physical activities.  You will find that it is highly active.  With practice you will discover that your normal waking consciousness is highly limited, and that what you thought of once as death conditions seem much more like life conditions. 
Seth:  Seth Speaks  
 
 
 
 
“I looked at Mr. Parker and could hear his voice in thoughts that I understood were coming from him,” said Gordon. “He insisted to me that he was not that body and I wasn't to be concerned about him.  
All this came in thoughts, not words, but I understood them clearly. 
There is no misunderstanding when you are in this situation. 
“I had a feeling of other people in a semicircle closing around Mr. Parker,” said Gordon. “There seemed to be a kind of energy rolling back and forth between Mr. Parker's form and these unseen presences that were gathering around.” Gordon stared at Mr. Parker until--”in a flash”--his patient disappeared in 
a field of “bright golden light. 
 “I could see several layers in this transparent golden light and for a moment there was a shower of bright golden specks,”said Gordon. “These specks reminded me of the sea spray that is tossed up by a wave crashing at the beach. These shining specks were a cloud around me but it was only an instant.” 
 When I spoke to Gordon, he said that he had been a “changed man” ever since that experience. From that day forward, said Gordon, 
he'd had no trepidations about death--his or anyone else's. 
Paul Perry;  Raymond Moody:  Glimpses of Eternity: Sharing a Loved One's Passage from this Life to the Next   
 
 
Death is the opener, the one giving vision.  
 Death is the greatest and loveliest change  
that the heart of nature has in store for us. 
G. de Purucker:  Golden Precepts of Esotericsim  
 
 
The great lesson we have to learn, if we would keep in spiritual touch not only with the dead, but with all those who are absent from us in the flesh, is the fleeting nature of the personality.  We must learn to understand our personal selves for the transitory things they are.  Then, discovering and living in the spiritual reality behind them and within them, we shall find our inner immortal selves and begin to live in and for that permanent root of our being.  When we can do that, we shall see;  we shall know ourselves as being immortal today--now--this moment! And we shall then also recognize the true selves of those we love, and experience in every moment of our lives the fact that we are together always, always in real touch with one another even when the bodily eyes do not see the beloved face and the bodily ears hear not the voice of the absent. 
Leoline L. Wright:  After Death--What? 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
You are experiencing more and more of the Core of Your Being, more and more of the Essence of who you are, as life continues. You are eternally merging with that Essence-- and, as part of the process of life, emerging from it again, as a replenished expression of it.  
This process that we might call “energy merging” is the formula for all of life. 
It can be written as: e + merging.  This is what death and dying is all about. 
That is why this event is sometimes called a spiritual “emergenc-y.”  
“Death is an emergency” because it is not about “dying” at all.  
It is about merging and emerging. 
 Neale Donald Walsch   Home with God  
 
 
You do not welcome death, as you welcome any new adventure, instead you dread it, dread it, dread it. That is why so many of you bring yourself into states of such enormous decline before you will allow the death experience, then you are choosing what you consider the  to be the lesser of two evils.  
Until you begin to no longer dread and push against death, you cannot really live.  
You have to understand that well being abounds. 
The re-emergence back to the non-physical is a delicious experience. 
Your non-physical self knows this.  
Abraham 
 
 
 
 
You are non-physical beings expressing yourselves in physical bodies. You are eternal beings. Some of you come forward intending very fast, brief, explosive, delicious physical experience. You cannot evaluate or judge a quality of a life by its length. The benefit is to the physical humans who remain, who now have born within them a stronger than ever desire to understand the relationship between the physical and the non-physical. The one who makes the transition knew it, and knows it instantly. Those who are remaining physical, in their desire to maintain relationship with their dearly departed  are led to an understanding that there is no separation between what is physical and non-physical. That is what that intention is about-- this  intention of having an emphatic experience and an early re-emergence into non-physical;  it is almost always because there is a former agreement to put this death thing in proper perspective.  
Abraham 
 
 
 
If we are fortunate enough to die consciously, then we should take 
full advantage of opportunities to create peace for all parties.  
Our last words and intentions matter so much to those left behind. 
We should be careful how we leave. 
 Monica Williams-Murphy, MD: A rare case when needs of the dying should be secondary  
 
 
Death is not at all what human beings insist it is. 
Death is not the experience of shedding the body.  
Death is the shedding of human identity.  
  Death occurs when a human relaxes their obsession with living 
and allows themselves to be lived.   
Thanatos 
 
 
 
 
"Death is a part of life as much as birth, and is as inevitable as eating, eliminating, sleeping and breathing. The human body is going to breathe and just as surely as it breathes, it's going to stop breathing. It is not something to be overcome or fought against. "If you fight against death you totally misunderstand the miraculous nature of life. 
Death is a miracle and if life is beautiful, then death is equally beautiful." 
 
E. J. Gold. THE GREAT ADVENTURE: Talks on Living, Dying, and the Bardos 
 
 
 
 
  "You say I know you. I feel bad that I have forgotten you. You seem to 
know me so well, but I can't quite remember you even though  
you seem so terribly familiar in a way."      
" Don't feel bad. We discussed this before you went down. We both knew that it would be this way, that the veil would be drawn and that you would forget for a time. That was part of the deal. Nobody there remembers. But you will. 
All of you will remember in time. 
And all of you will return." 
 
Todd Michael The Evolution Angel: An Emergency Physician's Lessons with Death and the Divine   
 
 
 
 
When our desire for the Absolute overcomes our fear of death, we offer the pretense of our personal existence to the sacrificial fire of infinite consciousness.   
Henceforth, nothing stands in the way of awakening any longer and it progressively unfolds its splendor on all the planes of phenomenal existence, which, little by little, reveal their underlying non-temporal reality, like the gaze of Shams of Tabriz that, 
"was never cast upon some fleeting object without rendering it eternal". 
   Francis Lucille:  Eternity Now  
  
 
 
People should not be afraid of dying.  Death is no more to be feared than breathing.  Dying is as natural and as painless as blinking your eyes.  And that's almost the way it is.  At one moment you're in one plane of existence and you blink your eyes, so to speak, and you're in another plane of existence.  That's about the physical sensation you have, and it's as painless as that.  Any pain you feel in the process is from physical damage, but spiritually there is no pain.  Your memories are intact and you feel the same, as if your life is continuing.  Sometimes it takes you a little bit to notice that you're no longer connected to your physical  body, but usually it is noticed right away because your perceptions are broadened to where you can perceive the spiritual plane without the veil in the way.  
 Human life is the clouded mirror, as some have likened it to.   
What happens is that at first there is a period of  orientation.  You are still very conscious of the physical  plane but you are exploring and absorbing the sensations of being aware of the spiritual plane, until you get used to the fact that you're really on the spiritual plane and you are comfortable with it.  
     A spirit speaking with Dolores Cannon:  Between Death & Life 
 
 
The grandest of all truths--the truth of our eventual death--must be kept in mind always.  A small part of the mind must always remain soaked in the thought of death. What shall we gain from this ceaseless contemplation on death?  Awakening of the spirit, disappearance of all meanness, practicality in work, new vigor in body and mind, and power to uplift others. 
But all these will come to us only if we face the thought of death courageously.  This is important.                       
        Swami Tyagananda:  The Grandest Truth  
 
 
"You say I know you. [Pause.] I feel bad that I have forgotten you. You seem to know me so well, but I can't quite remember you even though you seem so terribly familiar in a way." 
"Don't feel bad. We discussed this before you went down. We both knew that it would be this way, that the veil would be drawn and that you would forget for a time. That was part of the deal. Nobody there remembers. But you will. 
All of you will remember in time.  
And all of you will return." 
 
Todd Michael: The Evolution Angel: An Emergency Physician's Lessons with Death and the Divine  
 
 
Attending the death of another human being is awe-inspiring, and I regard it as a sacred privilege of the highest order. I am fortunate indeed to have been granted such generous access to an event so incredible. When I witness a soul leaving its body I am deeply humbled and filled with wonder. The power of death is stunning in its intensity. Death changes everything, for both the one who dies and for those who are left behind. 
Todd Michael:  The Evolution Angel: An Emergency Physician's Lessons with Death and the Divine   
 
 
When you die, it is impossible to not be Complete, but it IS possible to not be consciously aware of this. “Peace” is being consciously aware that you are Complete. That there is nothing more for you to do. That you are done. Finished. 
And you can go Home. 
 Donald Neale  Walsch:  Home with God   
 
 
 
Death is not the opposite of Life, but actually is one of the modes of living--a modification of consciousness, a change from one phase of living to others.  It is impossible for any entity to live for an instant if he were not dying at the same time:  as Paul phrases it, "I die daily."  Every man 'dies' when he sleeps;  likewise, because our bodies are in a state of constant change, their atoms are in a continuous process of renewal which is nothing but a kind of dying, and which so far as the atoms are concerned is not a relative but a complete death for them.  Even while embodied we are living in the midst of innumerable tiny deaths. 
Gottfried De Purucker:  Death and the Circulation of the Cosmos  
 
 
 
 
The principal theme of all the great Mystery schools of antiquity, and of the ceremonials which reflected in dramatic form these inner teachings, was the 'adventure' which the human entity enters upon when the physical body is cast aside.  The strongest emphasis was upon the fact that death and sleep are fundamentally the same, not different except in degree;  that sleep is an imperfect death and death is a perfect sleep.  This is the main key to all the teachings on death;  because if we understand what happens during sleep,  
we will have the Ariadne's thread to a relative comprehension of  
what takes place at, during, and after dying.       
Gottfried De Purucker:  Death and the Circulation of the Cosmos  
     
 
 
 
 When we watch the mind in meditation, we can see clearly how each thought arises and ceases, how cause and effect operate, how states of mind succeed each other just like one life after another, and how our imagined permanence is really a process of continual change.  If we learn to observe all these things taking place in this life, it is not so hard to accept the idea of them all continuing after death.   Our own mind is the only thing we can really know.  We can learn to see,  
beyond any doubt, how we continually create our own world by the power of mind.                                      
  Francesca Fremantle:  Luminous Emptiness:  Understanding the Tibetan Book of the Dead  
 
 
Most people don't want to come back.  In fact, they get angry at the people who have resuscitated them...Sometimes they come back to fulfill a mission related to the realization they've had in this near-death state.  People who have survived clinical death or near death have greater zest for life;  their concern for material life is much diminished;  they have greater self-confidence;  and they feel a real sense of a purpose in life.  They become spiritually enthusiastic, more interested in nature, and develop a tolerance and compassion toward others.  Also, they have a reduced fear of death because they have become convinced that death is a great ride!  They have a sense of relative invulnerability, so they feel very optimistic.  They also feel as if they have a special destiny, perhaps a little pride that they died and were reborn.               
Joan Halifax, speaking with the Dalai Lama:  Sleeping, Dreaming and Dying 
 
 
 
 
 When I began to experience Fourth Dimensional Life, I assumed that this was an expansion of my humancentricity.  I assumed that my human identity would expand further and further forever.  But I soon recognized that human identity dissolves as Consciousness expands and that death is the dissolution of humancentricity. 
Thanatos 
 
 
 
“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.” 
Elisabeth Kubler Ross quoted in:  
Paul Perry; Raymond Moody Glimpses of Eternity: Sharing a Loved One's Passage from this Life to the Next (Mind Body Spirit)    
 
     I teach dying people meditation and encourage them not to shy away from the altered states that come in the course of the experience of dying, 
but to establish a strong mental foundation so that they can investigate  
these states with some degree of equanimity.                  
       Joan Halifax, speaking with the Dalai Lama: Sleeping, Dreaming, and Dying 
 
 
My intent is to place the death moment back in its rightful place, as our birthright, and to encourage its fullest expression whenever possible.  I believe that it is possible to establish in our society an attitude of respect toward a vacating body and the dying person's right to depart in peace, thus establishing an after-life consciousness.  By rejoining death with the rest of life, all of us will experience a joy and a release of the energy that is currently locked up in our fear and evasions.  We can also prepare for the tomorrows of the soul 
Anya Foos-Graber:  Deathing  
 
 
One time, the famous monk Xuan Jue visited the Sixth Patriarch of Chinese Buddhism, Hui Neng. After entering the great hall at Nan Hwa Ssu, he circled the Patriarch three times, hit the floor with his staff, and just stood there without bowing.  
The Patriarch admonished him for violating the rules of etiquette and asked him why he was so arrogant. 
 Xuan Jue replied, “The great question of life and death is a momentous one. Death may come at any moment, I have no time to waste on ceremony.”  
The Patriarch said, “Why don't you attain the substance of 'no birth', then the problem of death and its coming will not concern you anymore.” 
Xuan Jue replied, “Since substance has no birth, the basic problem of death and when it comes is solved.”  
 
 
 
"There isn't a way to explain it, as there is no feeling like it here on earth. It was crystal clear. It was like going home at last, at last. A feeling of belonging, of meaning, of completeness. It just seemed so much more real than anything I had ever experienced in my entire life." 
Paul Perry, Jeffrey Long:  Evidence of the Afterlife: The Science of Near-Death Experiences   
 
 
 
A lot of upset with the death of somebody very close to us is linked to fear about our own living and dying, isn't it?   
In silent listening, inwardly, there can be a wondrous illumination of the conditioned, reactive bodymind.  It gets more and more transparent with sustained awareness.  And yet one easily gets entangled in what reveals itself--the desires, the fears, all the emotional-physiological states connected with memory and anticipation.  All of it has such an amazingly powerful attraction, seriously masquerading for the real thing.       
 Right at this moment, can we see our life story permeated with awareness?  Beholding it quietly in the midst of breathing and throbbing?  It's not necessary to continue with the involvement in story and emotion, no matter how strongly and convincingly the body vibrates with memories.   
   Can there be a simple shift from story-entanglement to open listening, this moment?  
 Coming and going is happening in vast emptiness without limitation, without time.  In this there is no fear of passing away. 
     Toni Packer: The Silent Question 
 
 
Well, then, let's follow  
the peal of bells to the 
yonder shore.     
 Hakurin, 1897:  Japanese Death Poems  
 
 
 
Deathing is conscious dying:  it is dying that is not left to chance or contingency.  
As a concept, deathing is, of course, analogous to birthing.  Deathing is like giving birth--only to yourself.  It demands conscious participation and full awareness if it is to  be done correctly and beautifully….. 
Kenneth Ring, Introduction to Anya Foos-Graber's Deathing: An Intelligent Alternative for the Final Moments of Life  
 
 
Death is our crown.  
After death, the soul enters into the Astral Light. 
When the hour of death comes, the Angel of Death approaches the deathbed. There is a choir of Angels of Death. Each Angel of Death carries a book. In this book are the names of all the souls who must depart from the flesh. 
No one dies a day before his appointed time.  
The Angel of Death simply removes the soul from the body. The soul is linked to the body by a fine, heavenly cord of a silvery color. The Angel of Death breaks the cord so that the soul cannot re-enter the body.  
After death, souls see the sun just as they used to, the clouds, the stars as always, everything just as before. For a while, the souls of the dead do not believe that they have died. These souls see all the things of the world just as they did before; therefore they do not believe that they have died. The souls of the dead live in the Astral Light. The Astral Light is the light of all enchantments and magic spells. The Astral Light is related to the air; we eat it, we breathe it,  
but we can see it only with the eyes of the soul. 
 
Samael Aun Weor:  Beyond Death: The Gnostic Book of the Dead 
 
 
The fear of death is the fear of letting go....Why would it be supposed that one's creative ability ceases at the moment consciousness leaves the physical?   
The instant the Self releases from the body, there is light, there is peace, 
 there is freedom, there is home.  
 Emmanuel's Book 
 
 
If we want to be successful in terms of experiencing our death and journey after death, then we have to master the experience of nowness. Whatever we are going through, that is who we are in that moment. When we speak about nowness, we are not talking about anything external, so we should not look for it outside. We should look directly at the space of our immediate experience, which is always right in front of us--the space that is neither yours nor mine, neither theirs nor ours. That “in-between” space is the bardo. 
Even if we do not realize the nature of mind and the reality of all phenomena in this lifetime, it will be possible to recognize it at the time of death, because at death mind manifests in such an intense and powerful way. Even if we fail to realize the nature of mind at the moment of death, it is said that we will have further opportunities in the two bardos that arise after death. Further, even if we are unsuccessful during that time, we will at least be able to maintain a calm and peaceful state of mind and accomplish a favorable rebirth as a result of our habituation to mindfulness and awareness practices.  
 Dzogchen Ponlop :  Mind Beyond Death  
 
 
Death is not a frightening incident.  
 In Sanskrit there is a very beautiful statement.  It is said that when you see a friend, think as though you are meeting them for the first time. 
  And when you are enjoying something, think that you are  
enjoying it for the last time in your life.  
                   Do you see what this means?                      
Swami Suddhananda  
 
 
One does not have to assail death, or bury it under a load of declarations of what Life is or is not.  Merely stop assuming you had a beginning, a birth in time, or are subject to fate or destiny's schedule.  Lack, poverty, want, woe, mishap, sorrow, frustration, limitation and death are inescapable, regardless of what you think or do not think, so long as you insist on identifying yourself with, or as, a self that does not exist--a mortal, a man, a material person launched in time at such and such minute, at such and such geographical location.                          
--from Alfred Aiken  
 
 
 
 
The Vedântins, acknowledging two kinds of conscious existence, the terrestrial and the spiritual, point only to the latter as an undoubted actuality. As to the terrestrial life, owing to its changeability and shortness, it is nothing but an illusion of our senses. Our life in the spiritual spheres must be thought an actuality because it is there that lives our endless, never-changing immortal I.  In every new incarnation it clothes itself in a perfectly different personality, a temporary and short-lived one, in which everything except its spiritual prototype is doomed to traceless destruction." 
from a conversation with an Indian Teacher, recorded by Madame Blavatsky 
   
There inevitably comes a point, for instance in the case of malignant disease, where the physician knows that it simply is a question of time, and the spiritual healer can learn to recognize the same signs.  Then, instead of the present silence on the part of both healer and doctor, where the patient is concerned, this remaining time will be employed, (if the patient's faculties permit), with due preparation for the "beneficent and happy withdrawal" of the soul;  the patient's family and friends will share in the preparation.  
 An entirely new concept of death, with the emphasis upon conscious withdrawal, will be taught, and funeral services, or rather the crematory services, will be joyous events because their emphasis will be upon release and return.  
 Alice. A. Bailey;  Esoteric Healing  
 
 
Death is sleep.  
After death, there begins before our spiritual eyes a representation of a program that was learned by heart by us in our lifetime, and was sometimes invented by us, the practical realization of our true beliefs, or of illusions created by ourselves.  
In order to live a conscious life in the world on the other side of the grave, the man must have acquired belief in that world, in this terrestrial life.  
from a conversation with an Indian Teacher, recorded by Madame Blavatsky 
 
 
There's never ever anything more delicious than the death experience.  
 Nothing ever ever goes wrong with what you call the death experience.  
           Death is the ultimate blending, the ultimate path of least resistance.                  Abraham  
 
My love came to me 
Under the November tree 
Shelterless and dim. 
He put his hand upon my shoulder, 
He did not think me strange or older, 
Nor I, him. 
Frances Cornford, "All Souls' Night"  
 
 
 
Just as we live our own life, we each die our own death.  In the proverbial end, what scientists and religious leaders think about death is, for me, irrelevant. 
  The only thing that will matter to me when I die is what I think.  
 The experience is genuinely personal. 
Michael Holmes:  Two On Dying  
 
 
Death is a third dimensional experience.  
 Those whose identity is not limited to the humancentric cannot experience death.  Their lives transcend the perspective that, by its nature, must die. 
Thanatos 
 
"God is not mysterious. Sometimes God is frightening and horrible, distorted and bizarre.. but in the end, God is God, and the Angel of Death is very much God, 
come to take you home. 
"The uninitiated see the Angel of Death as a horrible, grotesque, distorted, terrifying figure, but to those who are initiated, who have died before they died, the angel of death comes as a lover... beautiful, seductive and compelling... awe-inspiring, breath-taking. 
"Breathtaking beauty-to take the breath-and the breath speaks, `Let me return into thee."' 
E.J. Gold: The Great Adventure:  Talks on Living, Dying, and the Bardos  
 
 
 
'He alone lives whose life is in the whole universe, and the more we concentrate our lives on limited things, the faster we go towards death. Those moments alone we live when our lives are in the universe, in others; and living this little life is death, simply death, and that is why the fear of death comes. The fear of death can only be conquered when man realises that so long as there is one life in this universe, he is living. When he can say, "I am in everything, in everybody, I am in all lives, I am the universe," then along comes the state of fearlessness. To talk of immortality in constantly changing things is absurd.  
Says an old Sanskrit philosopher: 
It is only the Spirit that is the individual, because it is infinite.' 
Swami Vivekananda  The Complete Works of Swami Vivekananda 
 
 
What we call “life” and “death” are simply concepts--relative designations  
that are attributed to a continuous state of being, an indestructible 
awareness that is birthless and deathless. 
Although we may cling to this life and fear its end, beyond death there is mind; 
and where there is mind, there is uninterrupted display: spacious, 
radiant, and continually manifesting. 
 Dzogchen Ponlop   Mind Beyond Death 
 
We must crown ourselves with flowers and listen to music playing as we enter into the sleep from which there is no awakening.  
 Mirabeau 
 
All souls find peace after their death. Not all souls find peace before it. 
 Neale Donald Walsch:  Home with God   
 
If I think more about death than some other people, it is probably because I love life more than they do.  
Angelina Jolie  
 
 
I want to say a word to those who are about to die. I want to beg them to forget their bodies as soon as possible after the change which they call death. Oh, the terrible curiosity to go back and look upon that thing which we once believed to be ourselves! 
If we could only remember in life that the form which we call our self is not our real immortal self at all, we would not give it such an exaggerated importance, though we would nevertheless take needful care of it.  Many souls who have not been here long are so melancholy.  
They return again and again to the place which they should not visit. 
One day while walking down an avenue of trees--for we have trees here--I met a tall woman in a long black garment. She was weeping--for we have tears here also. I asked her why she wept, and she turned to me eyes of unutterable sadness. 
“I have been back to it,” she said.  
My heart ached for her, because I knew how she felt. The shock of the first visit is repeated each time, as the thing one sees is less and less what we like to think of ourselves as being. 
Elsa Barker:   LETTERS FROM THE AFTERLIFE   
 
 
 
 
 
The fear and horror of death is founded upon the love of form--our own form, the forms 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 for that soul to live spiritually, constructively and  
divinely within the material vehicles.   
Djwhal Khul: Death:  The Great Adventure 
 
 
"Ordinarily, one's attention is grabbed by events and various demands which seem necessary at the time, but over the long haul, the sheer amount of involvement with these petty details is staggering. One never realizes how involved one has become until one is lying on the deathbed, then one sees how trivial it all was. 
"If you know that death awaits you at the end of your life, your attitude will change; you're not going to try to grasp at anything and you won't get involved in a lot of situations, because you simply can't afford to-time becomes too precious. 
"The lure of organic life tends to be somewhat dissipated by the sobering experience of death."  
E. J. Gold. THE GREAT ADVENTURE: Talks on Living, Dying, and the Bardos  
 
 
 
Old people grow younger here until they reach their prime again, and that then they may hold that for a long time. 
Elsa Barker:  LETTERS FROM THE AFTERLIFE   
 
 
To the man of the "invisible" there comes a sudden memory of earth.  "Oh," he says.  The world is going on without me.  What am I missing?  
 
He looks about him and sees only the tranquil fields of the fourth dimension.  Oh, for the iron grip of matter once more.  To hold something in taut hands! 
He closes his eyes, reversing himself in the invisible. He is drawn to human life, to human beings in the intense vibration of union.  There is sympathy here--perhaps the sympathy of past experience with the souls of those whom he now contacts, perhaps only sympathy of mood or imagination. Be that as it may, he lets go his hold upon freedom and triumphantly loses himself in the lives of human beings.  
 
After a time he awakes, to look with bewildered eyes upon green fields and the round, solid faces of men and women. Sometimes he weeps, and wishes himself back. If he is strong and stubborn, he remains and grows into a man. He may even persuade himself that the former life in tenuous substance was only a dream, for in dream he returns to it, and the dream haunts him and spoils his enjoyment of matter. 
After years enough he grows weary of the material struggle; his energy is exhausted. He sinks back into the arms of the unseen, and men say again with bated breath that he is dead. But he is not dead.  
He has only returned whence he came. 
Elsa Barker:  LETTERS FROM THE AFTERLIFE  
 
 
 
 
 
You can only die when you have chosen to die, after you have done whatever it is you have decided to do in the choosing of this life---just as you chose to be born when you chose to be born.  You were not born early;  you were not born late.  Therefore you will not die early.  You will not die late.  You will die exactly when you have chosen to and you will be able to do whatever it is you chose to do in this life before you die.  
Even if you are not consciously aware of the timing of your choice of death, it will not really matter.  Because you will still recognize that even after you have died, you are still alive.  Know that you are an Eternal Being, all of you.  You are Eternal Beings.  You have existed forever. If you exist now, you have always existed and you always will exist.  But you will simply exist in different forms.                               Bashar:  Quest For Truth 
 
 
 
Everything seems easy now. I could do twice as much work as I do--I feel so strong. As yet I have not settled down anywhere, but am moving about as the fancy takes me; that is what I always dreamed of doing while in the body,  
and never could make possible.  
Do not fear death; but stay on earth as long as you can. Notwithstanding the companionship I have here, I sometimes regret my failure in holding on to the world. But regrets have less weight on this side--like our bodies.  
Everything is well with me. 
Elsa Barker.LETTERS FROM THE AFTERLIFE  
 
 
 
"I  know I am deathless. 
I know that this orbit of mine cannot be swept by a carpenter's compass; 
 And whether I come to my own today, or in ten thousand or ..ten million years, 
I can cheerfully take it now or with equal cheerfulness can wait." 
 
Yogi Ramacharaka:  A Series of Lessons in  Gnani Yoga  
 
 
 
 
Einstein, were he alive today, would be 133 years old. 
That's assuming that he would want to live that long. As he lay dying of an abdominal aortic aneurysm in 1955, he refused surgery, saying:  
“It is tasteless to prolong life artificially. I have done my share, it is time to go.  
I will do it elegantly.” 
David Ewing Duncan:  When I'm 164 
 
 
 
Could he but speak to himself with full consciousness, at the hour of his death, 
the Initiate would say:  
'The perishing world was my master. I am now dying as a result of the entire past with which I am enmeshed. Yet the soil of mortal life has matured the seeds of immortal life. I carry them with me into another world. If it had merely depended on the past, I could never have been born. The life of the past came to an end with birth. Life in the sense-world is wrested from universal death by the newly-formed life-germ. The time between birth and death is merely an expression for the amount wrested from the dying past by the new life; and illness is nothing but the continued effect of the dying portions of the past.' 
Rudolph Steiner:  Knowledge of Higher Worlds  
 
 
What you call “death” is wonderful. So do not grieve when a person dies, nor approach your own death with sadness or foreboding. Welcome death as you have welcomed life, for death IS life in another form. Welcome the death of another with soft celebration and deep happiness, for theirs is a wondrous joy. Here is the way to a peaceful experience of death-- your own or that of another: know that the person dying is always at cause in the matter.  
You are the cause of your own death. This is always true, no matter where, or how, you die. 
  Neale Donald Walsch  Home with God  
 
 
 
 
And then a Word sounds forth.   
The descended, radiating point of light ascends, responsive to the dimly heard recalling note, attracted to its emanating source.   
This man calls death and this the soul calls life. 
Djwal Khul :Esoteric Healing 



 
 
“Dying is part of living. You cannot love without dying, dying to 
everything which is not love, dying to all ideals which are the 
projection of your own demands, dying to all the past, to the 
experience, so that you know what love means and therefore what 
living means. So living, loving and dying are the same thing, which 
consists in living wholly, completely, now. Then there is action which is 
not contradictory, bringing with it pain and sorrow; there is living, 
loving and dying in which there is action. That action is order.” 
J. Krishnamurti, Flight of the Eagle 
 
 
 
 
Death is actually the transformation from our human form back to our eternal spiritual essence.  Transition is the journey we take in consciousness as we leave our human form and life behind.  We have the sleep of forgetfulness when we transition into the physical world and the clarity of awakening consciousness when we transition back home.   
Death frees us from the limitations of the body and the physical world, and opens us to the Clear Light, which is our True Nature...... 
Beginner's Guide To Conscious Dying..page 13 
 
     So let each day of our earth-life be a day of preparation.  Prepare! Prepare!  This is the one word that our dear ones on the other side wish to say to us.  For they find us chasing things that, to them, are no better than shadow-shapes.   
     When we drop the physical body, we shall feel as though we have awakened out of a dream.  Then this entire life, which now appears to be so long--in some cases interminable--appears to be but a moment in eternity.  
 Let us make the most of this life and each day prepare for our life in eternity 
.--J.P.Vaswani  
 
     Although it's been twenty years since my heavenly voyage, I have never forgotten it.  Nor have I, in the face of ridicule and disbelief, ever doubted its reality.  Nothing that intense and life-changing could possibly have been a dream or hallucination.  To the contrary, I consider the rest of my life to be a passing fantasy, a brief dream, that will end when I again awaken to the permanent presence of that giver of life and bliss.     
 For those who grieve or fear, I assure you of this:  There is no death, nor does love ever end.  And remember also that we are aspects of the one perfect whole, and as such are part of God, and of each other.      
  Someday you who are reading this and I will be together in light, love, and unending time.      
..Beverly Brodsky sharing her NDE.  Lessons from the Light. Kenneth Ring  
 
 
     "..The last few days before I passed, I was coming and going, coming and going. I was definitely aware.  I was conscious of my mother, of my brother, and of my father around me.  I was conscious of going to other countries and other places, but I really didn't want to go.  I wanted to stop where I was.  That was the physical body holding me.  
   "Then I thought that I really must stop this business of seesawing.  Suddenly it became borne in on me that I had to make a decision.  We all have to make the decision, really, whether we are going to struggle or whether we're going to let go.  This is why people are afraid of death.  The people who lack positiveness fear death even more because they dither, 'Shall I or shan't I?    
  "Then I had this magnificent, wonderful vision.  There were the gates.  I had always envisioned that the entrance to my paradise would be through these magnificent gates.  They're gates of life--of light.  They're living gates.  There was this beautiful gate opening, and there were all of my family to greet me.   
   "I said, 'Do you always have to go through gates like that?'  And they said, 'No, this is because this is what you have always thought, and you will have what you imagined.  You built this.  This is yours---the gateway--your entrance of light.'   
  "And I cried and I said to myself, 'Lord, thank you...I'm ready to go.'" 
A.D. Mattson, from the afterlife, through Margaret Tweddell:  Witness From Beyond 
 
 
 
Live your life that the fear of death can never enter your heart.  Love your life, perfect your life, beautify all things in your life. Seek to make your life long and its purpose in the service of your people. Prepare a noble death song for the day when you go over the great divide.  When it comes your time to die, be not like those whose hearts are filled with the fear of death, so that when their time comes they weep and pray for a little more time to live their lives over again in a different way. 
 Sing your death song and die like a hero going home.  
Chief Tecumseh (Crouching Tiger) Shawnee Nation 1768-1813     
 
 
The physical world is a reflection of non-physical reality.  Humancentric souls perceive the physical as reality itself and their lives are dominated by this illusion.   Once one lives as reality, aware of themselves as reflection's source, one lives as Life.  Living as Life, one enjoys reflecting without  identifying with reflections.  One does not fear what happens when  focus changes and reflections dissolve... the dissolution humancentric souls experience as death. 
Thanatos   
 
 
 
 
How do I know that loving life is not a delusion? How do I know that in hating death I am not like a man who, having left home in his youth, has forgotten the way back? 
Chuang Tzu 
 
 
You have said that the moment of awakening in the morning is very important.  Could you tell us why? 
 
Jean Klein:  In deep sleep there is no knower.  That is a state without knower.  In this sense it is closer to our true nature, closer by the state that is no state than the waking state and the dream state that assume a knower.  Before you go to sleep at night you give up all your qualifications, let everything which is psychology, every residue of thinking, ideas, problems, tension, etc. dissolve.  Then only one quality remains, the being without qualities.  In other words, come to know what is permanent in you, and what is permanent shines. Letting go of everything which is not permanent, everything that you are not, is just like the moment of surrender when you die.  When you die, you gave to give up all your qualifications one way or another.  Why should you wait until that moment?  Why don't you die every evening so that you can see that death does not exist?  If you die totally in the night, you will yourself be present in the morning before the body wakes up.  That is a very important moment.  Because you will then be convinced that the background of consciousness never becomes influenced by appearances 
..Jean Klein 
 
 
 
And death is the most ordinary thing in the world. It is as common as births; it is of more frequent occurrence than marriages and the attainment of majorities.   Situated as we are, knowing that it is inevitable, we cannot keep our thoughts from resting on it curiously, at times. Nothing interests us so much.   And this matter of death and dying, like most things else in the world, may be exaggerated by our own fears and hopes. Death,  terrible to look forward to, may be pleasant even to look back at. Could we be admitted to the happy fields, 
and hear the conversations which blessed spirits hold, one might discover that to conquer death a man has but to die; that by that act terror is softened into familiarity, and that the remembrance of death becomes but as the remembrance of yesterday. To these fortunate ones death may be but a date, and dying a subject fruitful in comparisons, a matter on which experiences may be serenely compared.  
Alexander Smith (1830-1867) 
 
 
 
George Rodonaia underwent one of the most extended cases of a near-death experience ever recorded. Pronounced dead immediately after he was hit by a car in 1976, he was left for three days in the morgue. He did not "return to life" until a doctor began to make an incision in his abdomen as part of an autopsy procedure.   
   "I saw the universal form of life and nature laid out before my eyes. It was at this point that any concern I had for my body just slipped away, because it was clear to me that I didn't need it anymore, that it was actually a limitation."    
  While "dead" George was surprised to discover the range and power of his thoughts and what he could do with them.  He found he could project himself anywhere on Earth he wanted to go and experience what was there, and that he could do the same thing regarding events in history.   
     "I came to see that reality is everywhere. That it is not simply the earthly life but the infinite life. Everything is not only connected together, everything is also one.    
  Many people have asked me what I believe in, how my NDE changed my life. All I can say is that I now believe in the God of the universe. Unlike many other people, however, I have never called God the light, because God is beyond our comprehension. God, I believe, is even more than the light, because God is also darkness. God is everything that exists, everything - and that is beyond our ability to comprehend at all. So I don't believe in the God of the Jews, or the Christians, or the Hindus, or in any one religion's idea of what God is or is not. It is all the same God, and that God showed me that the universe in which we live is a beautiful and marvelous mystery that is connected together forever and for always."  
 
(Of all the cases I have investigated in my 26 years of work in the NDE field, George Rodanaia's is the most dramatic, the longest, the most evidential, and the most soul-stirring..p.m.h.Atwater) 
 
--The Story of George Rodanaia, related by p.m.h. Atwater and Phillip Berman 
 
 
 
Death is superconsciousness, death is coming back into the wholeness  of who you really are. 
  Death is better than an orgasm. 
--Abraham 
 
 
We can always choose to die the old way; most of us will. 
Robert Orfali.. Death With Dignity 
 
“When you make people less afraid to die, then they’re less likely to cling to life at a huge cost to society. After having such a transcendent experience, individuals with terminal illness often show a markedly reduced fear of dying and no longer feel the need to aggressively pursue every last medical intervention available. Instead they become more interested in the quality of their remaining life as well as the quality of their death.” 
...Roland Griffiths, quoted in New York Times 
 
When Rabbi Burnham lay dying, his wife burst into tears.  He said  "What are you crying for?  My whole life was only that I might learn how to die." 
--Osho, The Art of Dying 
 
Death will ultimately open for us an instant when, for an infinitesimal fraction of time, pure truth, naked, certain, and eternal enters the soul.  I may say that I have never desired any other good for myself. 
Simone Weil  
 
To die is only to be as we were before we were born; yet no one feels any remorse, or regret, or repugnance, in contemplating this last idea. It is rather a relief and disburdening of the mind: it seems to have been holiday-time with us then: we were not called to appear upon the stage of life, to wear robes or tatters, to laugh or cry, be hooted or applauded; we had lain perdus all this while, snug, out of harm’s way; and had slept out our thousands of centuries without wanting to be waked up; at peace and free from care, in a long nonage, in a sleep deeper and calmer than that of infancy, wrapped in the softest and finest dust. And the worst that we dread is, after a short, fretful, feverish being, after vain hopes and idle fears, to sink to final repose again, and forget the troubled dream of life!. 
..William Hazlitt  
 
 
Being aware of your mortal nature is extremely important. If you remind yourself every day, twice a day, that you will die, then you will naturally move toward knowing higher dimensions of perception.   Once there is a deep acceptance of death, life will happen to you in enormous proportions. But because you have tried to keep death away, life has also stayed away from you. The greatest calamity of the human mind is that it is against death, because the moment you reject death, you also reject life. In your mind, you are trying to keep death out but with it, every other possibility stays out. It is only when you become aware of death that you want to know what life is about. Only when you start really wondering what life is about does your spiritual process begin. Once you come to terms with death and you are conscious that you will die, you will want to make every moment of your life as beautiful as possible…. 
Sadguru   
 
 
Death is the opener, the one giving vision;  death is the greatest and loveliest change that the heart of nature has in store for us--- 
G. de Purucker, Golden Precepts of Esotericism 
 
 
It is my personal opinion that our heavy emphasis on "drugging" patients prior to their deaths is a great disservice to them and to their families.  Patients who were not heavily medicated in their final hours were able to experience thee blissful states prior to their transition, resulting in a knowledge (rather than a belief) of a waiting, loving presence of another being, of an existence (rather than a place) of peace and equanimity, of a state of well-being and wholeness--transcending all fear of death. 
...Elisabeth Kubler-Ross  
 
 
 
What is experienced after what we now call “death”? 
 
What occurs after the illusion of death continues to be an experience of your belief.  Please remember there is no world outside your mind; no independent script is written for you.  The only thing there is to make a world is your belief.   The form of your belief—the kind of world you experience—is determined solely by the goals that you have set to bring you to the place of your awakening.  
--conversation with Brother...  Tom and Linda Carpenter 
 
...whereas ordinary people need death ceremonies, masters do not need or may not wish to have them.  That is why many masters even aspire to "die like a dog", as they say.  Just as a stray dog may expire by the side of the road without anyone taking the least notice, so these masters hope that no one will pay any attention to their death so that they will be free to move on from this life in a manner that they would enjoy.... 
Tulku Thondup, Peaceful Death Joyful Rebirth   
 
What you picture as the world of death and what you now conceive of as the world of physical life is no different.  What you perceive as the world of life versus the world of death bears no relevance on your waking up.  The waking up process takes place in your mind, and the mind is with you in either event.  Strange as it may seem to you at this moment, the options and choices that you have available to you in this realm make it far easier for you to choose to be Awake. 
Dialogue On Awakening 
 
 
Recall the state of sleep. Were you aware of anything happening? If the sun or the world be real, should they not be present with you in sleep? 
You cannot deny your existence in sleep. Nor can you deny you were happy then. You are now the same person speaking and raising doubts. You are not happy according to you. But you were happy in sleep. What has transpired in the meantime that happiness of sleep has broken down? It is the rise of the ego. That is the new arrival in the jagrat (waking) state. There was no ego in sleep. 
that we practice dying with each sleep experience......Ramana Maharshi 
 
“The shock of the fear of death drove my mind inwards and I said to myself mentally, without actually framing the words: ‘Now that death has come; what does it mean? What is it that is dying? This body dies . . . But with the death of the body am I dead? Is the body I? . . . The body dies but the Spirit that transcends it cannot be touched by death. That means I am the deathless Spirit.’ All this was not dull thought; it flashed through me vividly as living truth which I perceived directly. . . From that moment onwards the ‘I’ or Self focused attention on itself by a powerful fascination. Fear of death had vanished once and for all. Absorption in the Self continued unbroken from that time on.” 
Ramana Maharshi describing his death experience at age 17 
 
 
 
The birth of the ego is called the birth of the person. There is no other kind of birth. Whatever is born, is bound to die. Kill the ego: there is no fear of recurring death for what is once dead. The Self remains even after the death of the ego. That is Bliss – that is immortality.  
Ramana Maharshi 
 
 Robert , (William Blake's brother) fell ill during the winter of 1787 and succumbed, probably to consumption. As Robert died, Blake saw his brother's spirit rise up through the ceiling, "clapping its hands for joy." He believed that Robert's spirit continued to visit him and later claimed that in a dream Robert taught him the printing method that he used in Songs of Innocence and other "illuminated" works.   
 
In Plato's Phaedo, Socrates said, "True philosophers make death and dying their profession."  I think our Greek meant that we should practice dying with every breath, and study dying in our every moment.  I also think that the terrible squeezing of the heart we feel when first facing the unknown is the moment when our horizon begins to expand past the bounds of suffering.  Just one person seeing both the sorrow and at the same time the great heart of who we really are can open shuttered eyes and let the light shine out even before the moment of death.  
  Joan Halifax.  Being With Dying...  
 
There is one real birth and one real death. You are born once and you really die only once. 
What is the real birth? 
It is the birth of a “drop” in the Ocean of Reality. What is meant by the birth of a “drop” in the Ocean of Reality? It is the advent of individuality, born of indivisibility through a glimmer of the first most-finite consciousness, which transfixed cognizance of limitation into the Unlimited. 
What is meant by the real death? 
It is consciousness getting free of all limitations. Freedom from all limitations is real death: it is really the death of all limitations: it is liberation. In between the real birth and the real death, there is no such reality as the so-called births and deaths. 
What really happens in the intermediate stage known as births and deaths is that the limitations of consciousness gradually wear off till it (consciousness) is free of all limitations. Ultimately, consciousness, totally free of all limitations, experiences the unlimited Reality eternally.   Real dying is equal to real living. 
Meher Baba 
 
 
Death is a great gift, because it throws open all the doors and windows. Dying forces us outside the wall. Instead of seeing the familiar things we’ve assiduously collected and labeled as reality, we must start over. However, the rishis assert that we don’t enter the Akashic field empty-handed. Whatever our dream is right now, that dream continues. Consciousness is tied by thousands of threads to old memories, habits, preferences, and relationships. Whenever someone really presses the issue of what happens after we die, my response comes in the form of a question: “Who are you?” You have to know where you are right now, in order to know where you will be tomorrow, and the afterlife is just a special kind of tomorrow. 
 
Deepak Chopra: Life After Death: The Burden of Proof  
 
 
You are quite consciously holding yourself in physical reality, if that is where you find yourself to be. A very small shift is all that is required to go into non-physical existence. The difference between physical reality and non-physical reality, what you call physical life and physical death, is not as large as you think. It is a very, very short step between your physical vibration, that which makes you physical, and that which allows you to be non-physical.  A very short step, very short... 
Bashar.  
 
 
“Death must be so beautiful. To lie in the soft brown earth, with the grasses waving above one's head, and listen to silence. To have no yesterday, and no tomorrow. To forget time, to forgive life, to be at peace.” 
Oscar Wilde 
 
 
You cannot live without dying. You cannot live if you do not die psychologically every minute. This is not an intellectual paradox. To live completely, wholly, every day as if it were a new loveliness, there must be dying to everything of yesterday, otherwise you live mechanically, and a mechanical mind can never know what love is or what freedom is.  
Jiddu Krishnamurti 
 
Most of us are frightened of dying because we don't know what it means to live. We don't know how to live, therefore we don't know how to die. As long as we are frightened of life we shall be frightened of death. The man who is not frightened of life is not frightened of being completely insecure for he understands that inwardly, psychologically, there is no security. When there is no security there is an endless movement and then life and death are the same. The man who lives without conflict, who lives with beauty and love, is not frightened of death because to love is to die. 
Jiddu Krishnamurti, Freedom from the Known 
 
 
 
Fundamentally, the only difference between death and the sleep-state is that death is the permanent evacuation of the awareness-principle from the physical body, whereas in sleep it is merely a temporary condition. In death the sutratma, or silver cord, snaps, and the personal-consciousness leaves the physical body to disintegrate and return to the ground from whence it came. In the sleep state, this cord which connects the physical body to the subtle bodies is maintained. Essentially, death is an illusion. Death is actually an interval between two states or planes of consciousness. It eventuates in the return of every component of the microcosm to its proper place. 
--L.L. 
 
If you understand life then you understand death. 
Life is a forgetfulness of the original source, and death is again a remembrance. 
Life is going away from the original source, death is coming back home. Death is not ugly, death is 
beautiful. But death is beautiful only for those who have lived their life unhindered, uninhibited. 
unsuppressed. Death is beautiful only for those who have lived their life beautifully, who have not been 
afraid to live, who have been courageous enough to live -- who loved, who danced, who celebrated. 
Death becomes the ultimate celebration if your life is a celebration. 
--Osho, The Art of Dying 
 
 
 
In reality, there is no death. 
In reality there is no death because there is no individual 'self' or 'I' who could die.  In reality, there is only that Primordial Consciousness or God which, though appearing in myriad forms, is itself empty of all forms and therefore without birth or death.  This Consciousness is who I Am. This Consciousness is also who you are.  Thus, whether you Realize it or not, your sense of being a separate self is a delusion, and ultimately, so is the death of that 'self'....Joel Morwood:  Through Death's Gate  
 
 
 
Almost all of my patients are children now.  I take them home to die. The biggest fear of children is to be alone, to be lonely, to not be with someone.  At the moment of this transition, you are never, ever alone.  You are never alone now, but you don't know it.  But at the time of transition, our guides, your guardian angels, people whom you have loved and who have passed on before you, will be there to help you.  We have verified this beyond a shadow of a doubt, and I say this as a scientist.  There will always be someone to help you with this transition....Elizabeth Kubler-Ross.  on LIFE after DEATH  
 
   A man who has been in the active phase of dying for several days is growing progressively weaker and more somnolent.  He is no longer eating or drinking and his urine output is virtually zero.  Suddenly he perks up and gathers just enough energy to whisper, “I am not going to die.”  Shortly thereafter, he dies.   
An inexperienced hospice nurse would have been perplexed and felt rather unsettled about this patient’s remark.  The rational inference would have been that the poor man had a remarkable talent for practicing the fine art of denial.  She would have concluded he was deluded and obviously not getting enough oxygen to his brain.   
But an experienced hospice nurse would likely have reached a very different conclusion; namely, the patient had seen where he was going (after death) and was greatly relieved to learn that death does not end life after all.  Rather than doubting his sanity, an experienced nurse might have smiled broadly and replied, “You are correct, you will not die.”  Neither would she have been at all surprised when he "died" shortly thereafter.  The nurse realized her client had seen where he was going, was greatly relieved if not captivated by the prospect, and then moved on....Michael Holmes, retired nurse and hospice worker 
 
 
"You have squeezed yourself into the span of a lifetime and the volume of a body, and thus created the innumerable conflicts of life and death.   
Have your being outside this body of birth and death and all your problems will be solved. 
    They exist because you believe yourself born to die.   
 Undeceive yourself and be free.  You are not a person. 
....Nisargadatta Maharaj 
 
The morbid attitude of the majority of men to the subject of death, and their refusal to consider it when in good health, is something which must be altered and deliberately changed. The fear and the morbidness which the subject of death usually evokes, and the unwillingness to face it with understanding, are due to the emphasis which people lay upon the fact of the physical body, and the facility with which they identify themselves with it.  It is based also upon an innate fear of loneliness, and the loss of the familiar. Yet the loneliness which eventuates after death, when the man finds himself without a physical vehicle, is as nothing compared to the loneliness of birth. At birth, the soul finds itself in new surroundings, and immersed in a body which is at first totally incompetent to take care of itself, or to establish intelligent contact with surrounding conditions for a long period of time. The man comes into incarnation with no recollection as to the identity or the significance to him of the group of souls in bodies with which he finds himself in relationship.  After death this is not so, for the man finds on the other side of the veil those whom he knows, and who have been connected with him in physical plane life, and he is never alone as human beings understand loneliness; he is also conscious of those still in physical bodies; he can see them, he can tune in on their emotions, and also upon their thinking, for the physical brain, being non-existent, no longer acts as a deterrent....Djwhal Khul  
 
Awareness of death is the very bedrock of the path.  Until you have developed this awareness, all other practices are obstructed. 
..The Dalai Lama  
 
Death, if we could but realize it, is one of our most practiced 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, we shall no longer know death...  
The Tibetan 
 
 
 
And it is time to go, to bid farewell 
to one's own self, and find an exit 
from the fallen self.  
We are dying, we are dying, so all we can do 
is now to be willing to die, and to build the ship 
of death to carry the soul on the longest journey. 
Have you built your ship of death, O have you? 
O build your ship of death, for you will need it. 
...D.H. Lawrence  
 
The birth of the "I-thought" is human birth;  its death is human death.  After the "I-thought" has arisen, the wrong identity with the body arises.   See the real Self and this confusion with the body will vanish.  You are eternal, and others will be found to be eternal.  Until this truth is realized there will always be this grief due to wrong identity.  Birth, death, and rebirth should only make you investigate the question and find out that there are no births or rebirths--they relate to the body and not to the Self.. 
..Ramana Maharshi 
 
Knowledge is strength.  When you know a thing you mastered it, but as long as you do not know it  you are afraid of it.  And fear of death proceeds from that ignorance because you do not know what is meant by death and what will happen after death.  The moment we know it, we become free from that fear.  Therefore, one who knows that Master, that Ruler of the past and future, Ruler of the body and mind, who is dwelling in the center of the heart, small in size, has become free from death.  And that Ruler of the body, mind, intellect, and senses is immortal......Swami Abhedananda  
 
 
 
This world is the nurse of all we know, 
This world is the mother of all we feel, 
And the coming of death is a fearful blow 
To a brain unencompass'd by nerves of steel: 
When all that we know, or feel, or see, 
Shall pass like an unreal mystery. 
 
The secret things of the grave are there, 
Where all but this frame must surely be, 
Though the fine-wrought eye and the wondrous ear 
No longer will live, to hear or to see 
All that is great and all that is strange 
In the boundless realm of unending change. 
 
Who telleth a tale of unspeaking death? 
Who lifteth the veil of what is to come? 
Who painteth the shadows that are beneath 
The wide-winding caves of the peopled tomb? 
Or uniteth the hopes of what shall be 
With the fears and the love for that which we see? 
...Percy Shelley:  On Death 
 
 
Think of yourself as a physical creature now.  Know that later you will still operate through another form, but that the body and the material world are your present modes of expression.  You will exist when your body is dead, but practically speaking, you will always be working through an image of yourself....Seth 
 
"To die is an art. 
Everything on this planet,  
every act is done  
so that dying may be graceful. 
 All knowledge of spirituality is to mend one thing only - 
that when we die, we die in grace, without fear, 
without vengeance, without desire.  
We should just love to die,  
that moment...at that moment,  
everything is decided."  
Yogi Bhajan 
 
 
Most individuals when they arrive on the other side will simply find that it's like waking up from a dream.   Just as you have a dream and the dream feels very solid and very real, but when you wake up in your bed you find it was simply a dream and your surroundings feel like reality. When you die you will find it's like opening your eyes and saying, "THIS is really me and that was just a dream."  You remember it fully, you learn lessons from it, you review it in what is called a life review to see what the consequences of your choices and actions were and you expand your consciousness by  absorbing all the lessons and the consequences of choices that you made in that life.   You will mostly experience immediately what you believed you would experience, or if you believe nothing, then it will a relatively neutral experience until such time that you go through your life review and until such time you are also greeted by those who have passed on, which is a very common part of the experience, because they will help you cross over, they will help you acclimate, they will help you remember who you actually are on that level.......Bashar  
 
The soul, we are told, must return to the one who gave it.  To date that has been an enforced and dreaded restitution, one which engenders healing of the physical body, overemphasizing its importance, and making them regard the prolongation of earthly existence as the most important factor in their lives......During the next cycle, these wrong attitudes must come to an end;  death will become a normal and understood process---as normal as the process of birth, though evoking less pain and fear.  This comment of mine is in the nature of a prophecy, and should be noted as such....The Tibetan through Alice Bailey 
 
 
 The Tibetan tradition emphasizes the vital importance of a lifetime spent in learning and training to distinguish the clear light of truth from the illusory states of unenlightened existence, so that in the confusion immediately following death, this discrimination can still e made.  For the Tibetan and many other traditions, the 'way' is to live one's life in the constant awareness of death, and the goal, to die consciously.  Such an understanding of the relation of life and death can only throw into sharp relief the negative attitude towards the adventure of death that has recently held the West so firmly in its grip.....Stanslav Grof     
 
  Eschatological mythologies not only give detailed descriptions of the afterlife states of mind or abodes of the deceased, such as heaven, paradise or hell, but offer precise cartographies to guide the dying through the sequential changes of consciousness that occur during the critical period of transition.     Such belief systems certainly have the power to alleviate the fear of death, and in their extreme forms may even reverse the values assigned to living and dying.  For the Hindu, unenlightened life appears to be a state of separation, imprisonment and delusion, whereas death is reunion, spiritual liberation and awakening.  Death represents an opportunity for the individual self to break away from worldly illusion and experience its divine nature... 
Stanislav Grof 
 
 
 
Death is the only event which we can predict with absolute certainty, and yet it is the event about which the majority of human beings refuse to think at all until faced with the imminent and personal issue. People face death in many different ways; some bring to the adventure a feeling of self-pity, and are so occupied with what they have to leave behind, what is about to end for them, and the relinquishing of all they have gathered in life, that the true significance of the inevitable future fails to arrest their attention. Others face it with courage, making the best of what may not be evaded, and look up into the face of death with a gallant gesture because there is nothing else they can do . . . Still others refuse altogether to consider the possibility; they hypnotize themselves into a condition wherein the thought of death is refused all lodgment in their consciousness, and they will not consider its possibility, so that when it comes, it catches them unawares; they are left helpless and unable to do more than simply die.....Alice A. Bailey, From Bethlehem to Calvary 
 
The person does not die, but is simply separated from the physical component which was serviceable in the world.  The actual person is still alive.     We say that the actual person lives because the person is not a person because of the body, but because of the spirit.  For the spirit does the thinking in a person, and thought together with affection constitutes the person.     We can see from this that when someone dies, it is simply crossing from one world into another.  This is why "death", in its inner meaning, refers to resurrection and to continuity of life....Swedenborg   
    
 
 
 Swedenborg was not merely told but shown  through direct experience what the dying person encounters, both at the moment of physical death and afterward, and he was enabled to have such experiences frequently over the last third of his lifetime, a period of nearly three decades.  Thus Swedenborg is hardly just a precursor to today's Near Death Experiencers, he is a true seer and, as such, he had already mapped the realm that NDE research has, with its own methods, tried to adumbrate.. 
...Kenneth Ring


It is interesting to note that death is governed by the Principle of Liberation, and not by that of Limitation.  Death is only recognized as a factor to be dealt with by self-conscious lives and is only misunderstood by human beings, 
 who are the most glamoured and deluded of all incarnated lives.   
Alice A. Bailey:  A Treatise On White Magic 
 
 
Death has often been depicted in fearsome forms and colours but, in reality, none of that is true.  Death is a liberation.  For the Initiate, above all, it is a liberation, for when an Initiate dies he is not simply changing his place of residence, he is going to a royal welcome, he is going to his coronation.         
       Omraam Mikhael Aivanhov:  Freedom, The Spirit Triumphant 
 
 
 
Life continues during sleep, and the forces that are active and creative during the waking state receive their strength and renewal from what is given to them by sleep. Thus it is with what can be observed in the manifest world. The domain of the world is greater than the field of this observation, and what is known about the visible universe must be supplemented and fructified by what can be known about the invisible. A human being who does not continually draw strength for his weakened forces from sleep must of necessity destroy his life. Likewise, a world concept that is not fructified by a knowledge of  
the hidden world must lead to desolation. It is similar with death.  
Living beings succumb to death in order that new life may arise.        
  Rudolph Steiner: An Outline of Occult Science  
 
 
We are all entangled in the same reality. Isolation has been outmoded on every front, from ecology to the Internet. We need to remember our common source. The human spirit is degraded when we confine ourselves to the span of a lifetime and the enclosure of a physical body.  
We are mind and spirit first, and that places our home beyond the stars.  
Knowing that I will return to the field one day to find my source provides me with immeasurable confidence in the purpose of life. As fervently as any devout believer, I have faith in this vision.  
My faith is renewed every time I have a moment of witnessing, in which  
I can touch the silence of my own being. Then I lose all fear of death-- 
indeed, I touch death right now, and gladly. 
Deepak Chopra:  Life After Death  
 
 
There now exists extensive clinical evidence to support the claims of religion and mythology that biological death is the beginning of an adventure in consciousness.  
 This perennial wisdom concerning death has another immediate and verifiable dimension--its relevance for life. Confrontation with death in a ritual context, or precipitated by emotional or spiritual crises, can both eliminate the fear of death and lead to transformation--that is, to a more enlightened and personally satisfying way of living.     
  For the Tibetan and many other traditions, the 'way' is to live one's life in the constant    
                                          awareness of death, and the goal, to die consciously.                                      Stanislav and Christina Grof:  Beyond Death    
 
 
 
 
 The luminosity experienced in meditation is called the path luminosity or child luminosity.  The true luminosity of our awakened nature is called the basic luminosity or mother luminosity.  It dawns at the moment of death, and if it is        
            recognized, the mother and child meet and become one in liberation.                      Francesca Fremantle:  Luminous Emptiness-Understanding The Tibetan Book of the Dead  
 
     
Death is better than a flower.  
 A flower cannot give you tremendous peace and bliss.  It can give you something, but not that.  Death, however, can give you both tremendous peace and tremendous bliss.  Death is better than your boyfriend, girlfriend, husband or wife because they give you very little bliss.  They cannot truly solve your problems.  They can alleviate emotional anxiety momentarily, perhaps, but not for long.  At the moment of death, however, all anxiety and other emotional problems are totally cut off...    
 Lama Yeshe:  Life, Death and After Death    
 
 
 
 
Personality and identity are not dependent upon physical form.  You adopt a body as a space traveler wears a space suit, and for much the same reason.  What you call death is rather your choice to focus in other dimensions and realities.   
Seth  
 
     What you call your "physical body" is not something your consciousness is "in" nor is it something that your consciousness "leaves" upon death.  
                           Your physical body is inside your consciousness.                        
           Bashar  
 
 
 
  When the tenth-century Chinese Zen Master named Dasui Fazhen was asked, 
"How are you at the time when life-death arrives?" he answered promptly,  
           "When served tea, I take tea;  when served a meal, I take a meal."                     Sushila Blackman:  Graceful Exits    
 
 
 No death is death, because every death opens a new door--it is a beginning.  There is no end to life, there is always a new beginning, a resurrection.     If you change your sadness to celebration, then you will also be capable of changing your death into resurrection.  So learn the art while there is still time.  Don't let death come before you have learned the secret alchemy of changing baser metals into higher metals.  Because if you can change sadness, you can change death.  If you can be celebrating unconditionally, when death comes you will be able to laugh, you will be able to celebrate, you will go happy.  And when you can go celebrating, death cannot kill you.  Rather, on the contrary, you have killed death.  But start it, give it a try.  There is nothing to lose.                  
Osho  
 
 
 
 
 
Where are we? We are here, now. We have emerged from the past and we have not yet projected the future. When we can relate directly to the present moment in this way, it is a very subtle, profound and powerful experience. From this point of view, death is taking place in every moment.  Every moment ceases, and that is the death of that moment. Another moment arises, and that is the birth of the next moment... 
  Dzogchen Ponlop:  Mind Beyond Death  
 
 
 
So often people see themselves as doing something for someone else when they're really doing it for themselves.     Everybody is doing everything for themselves.  When you awaken to this awareness, you will have reached Breakthrough.  And when you understand that this is true even about dying, you will never fear dying again.  And when you no longer fear dying, you will no longer fear living.  You will live your life fully, right up until the very last moment. 
Neale Donald Walsch 
 
 
 
 
     Before taking you last breaths, you may become aware of the biological changes that are taking place as your Soul disconnects from its physical form.  You may also be so in awe of your newly awakened psychic senses that you take your attention away from the Light and fail to merge with it.  It is easy to become distracted by the wonder of it all, even if you thought you were prepared for it.  The habit of the waking conscious mind is to try to control any situation, but do not try to impose your will on this experience.  Neither run towards nor away from the Light, but relax into it.  Allow the Light to flow through you and merge with it 
Through The Tunnel:  Diane Goble.  
 
 
 
If you can transform a death into a moment of celebration, you have helped your friend, your mother, your father, your brother, your wife, your husband.  You have given them the greatest gift that is possible in existence.  
 And close to death, it is very easy.    
OSHO  
 
 
Numerous experiences in the spiritual world have made it clear to me that when people cross over from the natural into the spiritual world, which happens when they die, they carry with them everything that is theirs, or everything belonging to their personhood, except their earthly body.  For when people enter the spiritual world, or the life after death, they are in a similar body to their body in this world.  There seems to be no difference, since they do not feel or see any difference.  But their body is spiritual, and so is separated and purified from earthly elements.  Further, when something spiritual touches and sees something spiritual, it is just the same as when something natural touches and sees something natural.     As a result, when people become spirits, they cannot tell that they are not in the body they had in the world, and consequently do not know that they have died.                      
  Emanuel Swedenborg  
 
 
The thought of death leaves me in perfect peace, for I have the firm conviction that our spirit is a being of indestructible nature;  it works on from eternity to eternity;  it is like the sun, which though it seems to set to our mortal eyes, does not really set, but shines on perpetually.  
  Goethe  
 
 
"In a way, death does not exist; it is contained within life; it is simply a change of level, a change of clothing, to take us forward in our understanding of life. 
With every new role, actors change costume as well as partners, and this new part teaches them something more about themselves and about others. Well, with us it is the same: we cannot keep playing the same part forever, and after a time we must leave the world’s stage. We call this stage exit ‘death’, but actually there is only uninterrupted life. The actor is still alive after the show… We have to become accustomed to seeing existence as a continuum. Humans have a bad habit of drawing boundaries everywhere: between the spiritual and the material, between waking and sleeping, between life and death… No, existence is all one." 
Omraam Mikhaël Aïvanhov    
 
 
"To die proudly when it is no longer possible to live proudly. Death of one's own free choice, death at the proper time, with a clear head and with joyfulness, consummated in the midst of children and witnesses: so that an actual leave-taking is possible while he who is leaving is still there. " 
- Friedrich Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols 
 
 
 
Jump into the experience while you are alive! 
If you don't break your ropes while you are alive 
Do you think ghosts will do it after?    
Kabir 
 
 
The path of the soul after death is the same as the path of the soul in dreams.   
   Lakota Saying    
 
‘When I lay down with limbs outstretched and mentally enacted the death scene and realised that the body would be taken and cremated and yet I would live, some force, call it atmic power or anything else, rose within me and took possession of me. With that, I was reborn and I became a new man. I became indifferent to everything afterwards, having neither likes nor dislikes.’   
Ramana Maharshi 
 
...a person's mood at the time of death has even more impact on the spirit's  
subsequent experiences than the circumstances of that death. 
     Handbook To The Afterlife  
 
 
We are all (immortal) gods acting like goddamned (mortal) fools.. 
Lester Levenson  
   
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, 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 on any plane at will, or in any direction within the form of God, we shall no longer know death. 
 
 Alice A. Bailey: A Treatise on White Magic 
 
 
 
 
 
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 the expansion of your consciousness beyond the boundary of the definition of yourself simply as a physical being.  And in so doing, shall we say, 
you dissolve, you disperse.  You no longer express yourself simply as physical life, you express yourself more as an expanded consciousness nonphysical life.  
 You enter different strata, different "reality levels" in which you no longer experience what you call the boundaries of space-time in the same way as before.   
Time does not exist in the same way. 
  Many things can seem to happen, as you would say,"in the twinkling of an eye."                                                                    
       Bashar  
 
 
 
Knowledge is strength.  When you know a thing you mastered it, but as long as you do not know it  you are afraid of it.  And fear of death proceeds from that ignorance because you do not know what is meant by death and what will happen after death.  The moment we know it, we become free from that fear.  Therefore, one who knows that Master, that Ruler of the past and future, Ruler of the body and mind, who is dwelling in the center of the heart, small in size, has become free from death.  And that Ruler of the body, mind, intellect, and senses is immortal. 
Swami Abhedananda 
 
 
Whoever has lived long enough to find out what life is, knows how deep a debt of gratitude we owe to Adam, the first great benefactor of our race. 
He brought death into the world. 
Mark Twain  
 
Seeing Him alone, one transcends death; there is no other way.  
Svetasvatara Upanishad  
 
  It is important to understand the necessity of preparing yourselves for sleep every evening as for a sacred journey, so as to be ready, one day, for the far more decisive journey of death. 
--Omraam Mikhael Aivanhov 
 
The idea is to die young as late as possible. 
Ashley Montagu  
 
 
Most men and women think that the notion of another world peopled with innumerable invisible beings that are just as real, and often a great deal more highly evolved than those they rub shoulders with every day, is too far-fetched, too ridiculous to be taken seriously. To their way of thinking, anything that cannot be perceived by human beings or by one of the highly sophisticated instruments used by scientists simply does not exist. This is very faulty reasoning. Can they see the one thing that is essential to them, their own life? Suppose you see a man’s body stretched out on the ground. He is visible; he is tangible, but he is dead; something invisible has left him, that something that once enabled him to walk about, to love and speak and think. You can put all the food and all the treasures of the world by his side, telling him, ‘There you are, my friend: all that is for you. Enjoy it!’ but it will not change anything; you will get no reaction. In the face of this, how can anyone doubt the existence of the invisible world? The visible world would be nothing if it were not animated and sustained by the invisible world.  
We must always seek the invisible behind what is visible.  
 
--Omraam Mikhael Aivanhov  
 
 
When a human being dies, he leaves a very dense region and enters a subtler one, like the diver who comes up for air.  Birth is therefore a form of death:  when a baby is born, it dies in the subtle realms. 
  And when someone dies on earth, he is born on high. 
--Omraam Mikhael Aivanhov  
 
 
Facing death without fear may truly be the final frontier 
..Joellyn St. Pierre:  The Art of Death Midwifery  
 
And because I love this life, I know I shall love death as well. 
Tagore 
 
A man of understanding knows there is no death. Death does not happen; it has never happened. It happens only because you are identified with the body and you don’t know yourself. Yes, from the body you will be separated. If you are too identified, that separation looks like death. But if you are not identified with the body and you know yourself as the witnessing soul, as the consciousness, as the awareness, then there is no death. 
Osho 
 
 
The continuity of life after death is just a continuation of the same state of consciousness that existed prior to  death, whereas immortality is the expansion  
of consciousness to the point of infinity. 
Joel S. Goldsmith:  A Parenthesis In Eternity 
 
 
One day we'll all wake up to the dream, see it was a dream, 
and laugh at the whole thing..  
   Then when you're ready to leave the dream, you gather in all your forces, and with a big smile on your face,  you consciously exit the body into your immortality.. 
Lester Levenson  
   
You have seen the downward passing; 
Now look at the rising up... 
To you it seems a setting; 
In truth it is a rising. 
The tomb seems like a prison, 
It is the freeing of the soul.   
    -Rumi  
 
On older, more evolved worlds, the departure of a loved one is not generally met with great sorrow or grief. Death is seen as a passage or a graduation, anticipated with happy expectations of the worlds ahead. 
..The Urantia Book   
 
 
If you have touched something of the transcendental in yourself, if you have entered your own nothingness at the center--the center of your being, where you are no more a body and no more a mind, where you are simply just pure awareness, consciousness---then death is going to be a great celebration,  
a great understanding, a great revelation...      
         --Osho The Art of Dying  
 
 
Gurdjieff made a point of it that not everybody has a soul, the soul has to be earned. 
This was a very new idea, that you have to deserve it. Ordinarily you are just an empty bottle; inside there is nothing. You have to earn, you have to be worthy, you have to gather your consciousness in such a crystallized way that it can pass through death without dying . 
     So according to Gurdjieff, only a few people live eternally, most people are just experimental. They are born, they do all kinds of stupid things, and the final stupidity -- they die.               
--Osho:  The Language of Existence 
 
 
 
 There hasn't been a culture or civilization in history, whether it be that of aborigine tribes in Australia or the Greek culture at its zenith, that has not bestowed its highest accolades on those men and women who faced death unflinchingly, with courage and dignity.  When they knew they had to die, these heroes didn't rage against it.  They conquered death by their supreme indifference to it or--and this amounts to the same thing--their total concurrence in it, robbing its power to sting and thus gaining true immortality.                            
  --Philip Kapleau:  The Zen of Living and Dying 
 
 
You have the idea that you have been born. You are only really born when you discover what is permanent, eternal, in you. That moment is your real birthday. Find out what is eternal in you, what belongs to the real birth.  
...Jean Klein  
 
 
Death really represents a blind spot in your present ability to perceive energy transformation, and even value fulfillment Certainly the birth of a child is really basically just as incomprehensible, but this transformation is projected into, 
rather than out of, your sphere of understanding....                 
      Seth  
 
 
 
Friend, hope for the Guest while you are alive. 
Jump into experience while you are alive! 
Think....and think....while you are alive. 
What you call "salvation" belongs to the time before death. 
If you don't break your ropes while you're alive, 
do you think your ghost will do it after? 
What is found now is found then. 
If you find nothing now, you will simply end up 
                             with an apartment in the City of Death.                                       
  Kabir      
 
 
 Sharing beautiful assurances of reunions with loved ones at the end of luminous tunnels helps temper the illusory experience humancentrics call death.  And why not?  Humancentrics spend their lives adjusting their beliefs to protect identities that are threatened by embodiment's end, identities that die.     
 Instead of seeking assurances that their identities survive death, humancentrics should awaken to the identity that cannot die,  their identity as Life Itself.      Humancentrics who recognize that they are all that Life is no longer identify with what was destined to die. 
                            Life without death is unspeakably glorious.                               
--Thanatos  
 
 
 
 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.                                      
        --C.J. Jung    
 
 
 After we are met by those we have loved, and by our guides and guardian angels, we pass through a symbolic transition often described in the form of a tunnel, a river, a gate.  Each one will choose what is most symbolically appropriate for him.  In my own personal experience it was naturally a mountain pass with wild flowers simply because my concept of Heaven includes mountains and wildflowers, the source of much happiness in my childhood in Switzerland.  This is culturally determined.     
 After we pass through this visually very beautiful and individually appropriate form of transition, called the tunnel, we approach a source of light that many of our patients describe and that I have myself experienced in the form of an incredibly beautiful and unforgettable life-changing experience called "Cosmic Consciousness."     In the presence of this light we are surrounded by total and absolute unconditional love, understanding and compassion.  We are in the presence of this light, which is a source of pure spiritual energy and no longer physical or psychic energy.  
 Spiritual energy can neither be manipulated nor used by human beings.  It is an energy in the realm of existence where negativity is impossible.  And that means that no matter how bad we have been in our life or how guilty we feel, we are unable to experience any negative emotions.  It is also totally impossible to be condemned in this presence, since it is a being of total and absolute unconditional Love.                               
---Elisabeth Kubler-Ross.  The Tunnel and the Light 
 
 
 
 
 
There's a knowingness there that doesn't require naming.  We communicated telepathically and every question I ever had was answered before I had a chance to ask...     I experienced the dawning of universal knowledge where everything suddenly made complete sense and laughed at myself for not remembering while I was still in my body...we don't die, only the human form we created dissolves.  We are spiritual beings having human being experiences to learn about existence in the physical dimension...and then our eternal lives go on in ways human beings can barely comprehend.... 
Diane Goble: (describing her NearDeathExperience)  Beginner's Guide To Conscious Dying  
      
 
 
 
...our current concepts of death and dying are based on some very old assumptions.  Many of us still look upon death as the end of life.  Our vocabulary is filled with statements indicating the finality of death: "the last breath," "the final moments."  Out-of-body experiences provide substantial evidence that when someone dies, that person has in fact only changed their vibratory rate and the density of their body.  The person is still very much alive and well." 
...William Buhlman: The Secret of the Soul  
 
 
It is during the dream state that we have an opportunity to rehearse or become familiar with the processes of dying, because there is a kind of an analogous process of dissolution experienced during the dream state.  In a way, meditators rehearse by utilizing the dream state so that they become familiar with the dissolution processes and train themselves to be able to recognize the various signs that are associated with various levels of dissolution. 
     But the principal purpose of dream meditation is to train oneself in such a way that, even during the dream state, the individual can  experience what is known as the Clear Light.                                            
 --The Dalai Lama, The Power of Compassion    
 
We are living here now as aliens and only for a time. When the day of our homecoming puts an end to our exile, frees us from the bonds of the world, and restores us to paradise and to the kingdom, we should welcome it. 
---St. Cyprian 
 
"After death we see with the inner sight that is always within all earthly people.  It is the same sight that is used when you sleep at night and dream."   
--A.D. Mattson:  Witness From Beyond 
 
“Often I reawaken from my body to my self:  I come to be outside other things, and inside myself.” 
                   Plotinus, The Enneads IV. 8. 1 
    
 
  "Birth is much more of a shock than death.  Sometimes when you die you do not realize it, but birth almost always implies a sharp and sudden recognition.  
 So there is no need to fear death. And I who have died more times than I care to tell,  
speak these words to tell you so." 
--Seth     
 
One thing that I have learned is that all fears are an illusion. Each of us is an immortal being possessing unlimited potential.  Our true inner self cannot be harmed, nor can it die 
.--William Buhlman:  Adventures Beyond The Body  
 
"If you want to know what death is like then become aware of your own consciousness as it is divorced from physical activities. You will find that it is highly active. With practice you will discover that your normal waking consciousness is highly limited, and that what you thought of once as death conditions seem more like life conditions." 
--Seth 
  
We think it's a really interesting thing how you all fall apart at the idea of death, when all of you are going to die. We do not think you are practicing death in a very powerful way. 
Think about what you've been doing with the subject of your personal death. Every time someone dies, or nearly so, so many of you look at that as something really, really not wanted. Death, after all, is a synonym for punishment. And we think that when someone dies it would be very good right now to begin practicing what you now know about death:  
it's this inevitable new step into a new perspective. It is the continuation of who you are from a more powerful vantage point. It is awareness of All-That-Is from broader view. It is energy that now still has clear view of all that is you.    
 The beginnings and endings that you call birth and death are more about helping you to focus than anything else. But they really are illusions. You are eternal beings. And when you re-emerge into nonphysical, you do not become less-than. You don't become some nebulous, unfocused energy that just swirls around in nothingness.      You assume that perspective of all-knowingness. 
You remember all that you are, not just the personality that you were. 
--Abraham 
 
 
....it is ignorance based on the fear of disappearing.  But there is nothing to disappear.  In the feeling of fear you will discover a fear of dying.  But when you discover life, you will see there is no death. So, first face life.  Life is a continuum, there is no beginning and no end.  Go very deeply in you and discover that which has never changed.  You know the many changes in you, but the knower of these changes has never changed.   
There is nothing to disappear. There is no one who dies..... 
Jean Klein.Beyond Knowledge 



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