Welcome to Death Knells

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Remember that you are immortal,

 and that you who go out of life will come back again, 

strengthened by the rest in the invisible!

 For a change of place is a rest of consciousness.

 To those whose nerves are weary, 

wise doctors prescribe a change. 

A rest in the invisible worlds 

is more refreshing than a summer in the mountains. 

Do not fear death. 

I passed through death, 

and I am more rested now than a strong man in the morning.

 I would not go back to my old body.

 When I want a body again 

I shall build a new one. 

I know the process of building, 

having built so many before.

Elsa Barker

  Last Letters From The Living Dead Man 

To die means to return to the collective unconscious,

 to merge with it 

in order to be transformed into form, into pure form.… 

Every path, whether directed towards the sun or the light 

leads towards death 

and to a new birth whose pains the soul shuns. 

But every living being walks this path,

 every living being dies, 

and each and every one is born,

 because the eternal mother

 returns every life forever back to the world.

Hermann Hesse

The Seasons of the Soul 

That I might know that man lives after  death, 

it has been granted me to speak and converse with several persons

with whom I had been acquainted during their life in the body,

 and this not merely for a day or a week, but for months, 

and in some instances for nearly a year, 

as I had been used to do here on earth.  

They were greatly surprised that they themselves,

 during their life in the body,

 had lived, and that many others still live,

 in such a state of unbelief concerning a future life, 

when nevertheless there intervenes but the space of a few days 

between the decease of the body and their entrance into another world—-

for  death is a continuation of life.

Swedenborg

 Arcana Coelestia

The tree of life now becomes the tree of death.

 But it is always the same tree.

 And it is from this tree of death

 that life must spring forth again, 

that life must be reborn.

The tree of life now knows its death. 

The Dionysian art of ecstasies now reasserts its claims. 

Through madness and ecstasy the mystery of the god is enacted

 and the drunken revellers acquire the will to die—

to die creatively. 

It is the conversion of that same life instinct 

which urged the tree of man to fullest expression. 

It is to save man from the fear of death, 

so that he may be able to die! 

To go forward into death! 

Not backward into the womb. 

Out of the quicksands, out of the stagnant flux! 

This is the winter of life,

 and our drama is to secure a foothold

 so that life may go forward once again.

 But this foothold can only be gained

 on the dead bodies of those who are willing to die.

Henry Miller

The Wisdom of the Heart

All mother spirits who have not gone back to the world

 know by a peculiar thrill 

when a child to which they have given birth 

is about to be reborn into the spiritual world—

a sort of sympathetic after-pain,

 the final and sweetest reward of motherhood.

Elsa Barker

Letters From the Afterlife

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   

For me, the good death includes being prepared to die,

 with my affairs in order, 

the good and bad messages delivered that need delivering. 

The good death means dying 

while I still have my mind sharp and aware;

 it also means dying 

without having to endure large amounts of suffering and pain.

 The good death means accepting death as inevitable, 

and not fighting it when the time comes. 

This is my good death, 

but as legendary psychotherapist Carl Jung said,

 “It won’t help to hear what I think about death. 

Your relationship to mortality is your own.”

Caitlin Doughty

An attitude of utter self-surrender to a perfectly natural happening 

should have the incidental advantage regarding the actual process of death 

inasmuch as the inherent relaxation in such an attitude

 would make the death-process that much easier and more bearable physically,

 instead of the tension inherent in the attitude of resistance and recoil 

that would make the process that much more difficult and painful. 

 An attitude of relaxed cooperation with what is happening (and cannot be avoided)

 can only be the result of a deep understanding of one’s true nature. 

 It is only the conviction that we are the timeless, spaceless noumenon 

and not the temporal and finite appearance that this body is,

 that would make such an attitude possible.  

 The knowledge of our true nature would misidentify us from our bodies

 and would enable us to witness, 

with perhaps a certain amount of wondrous curiosity,

 the actual death-process—

the disappearance of what had appeared as a phenomenon in consciousness—

without any tension or involvement. 

Ramesh Balsekar

Explorations Into the Eternal

Foolish, therefore, is the person who says that he fears death,

 not because it will pain when it comes, 

but because it pains in the prospect. 

Whatever causes no annoyance when it is present,

 causes only a groundless pain in the expectation.

 Death, therefore, the most awful of evils,

 is nothing to us,

 seeing that, when we are, death is not come, 

and, when death is come, we are not. 

It is nothing, then,

 either to the living or to the dead, 

for with the living it is not 

and the dead exist no longer.

Epicurus

 Letter to Menoeceus

Why not welcome Transition?

  Learn to glory in experience, 

which is the gift of wise old age, 

and look forward to the Great Adventure which awaits you.

  You know well---in your highest moments--

that Transition means realization

 without any physical plane limitations.

Alice Bailey

Discipleship in the New Age-Volume Two

Look, denial is fine.

 It is normal to deny death. 

We are wired that way.

 But just, for a little bit, step outside of denial,

 get your paperwork in order, 

think about the options that face us, 

think about the fact that each of us will, in time, die. 

Talk with the people who are important to you. 

Get your hands around death and dying 

and then, if you wish, 

step right back into denial.

Susan Abel Lieberman

  Death, Dying and Dessert.  Reflections on Twenty Questions About Dying  

Death in the morning, at evening another birth –

 this is the way of things,

 no different from the bubbles on the stream. 

Where do they come from, these newborn? 

Where do the dead go?

 I do not know. 

Nor do I know why our hearts should fret over these brief dwellings, 

or our eyes find such delight in them.

 An owner and his home vie in their impermanence,

 as the vanishing dew upon the morning glory. 

The dew may disappear while the flower remains –

 yet it lives on only to fade with the morning sun.

 Or perhaps the flower wilts while the dew still lies –

 but though it stays, it too will be gone before the evening.

‘If you are certain of entering paradise at death, 

your rebirth there is certain. 

If you are in doubt, your rebirth will be likewise.’

Hōnen 

in

Chomei Kenko:

Essays in Idleness: and Hojoki 

Life does not feed life.

  Life is on the receiving end of life. 

 Always.

  No, it’s death that feeds life. 

 It’s the end of life that gives life a chance.

What has to die is your refusal to die,

 your refusal for things to end.

  If that dies, 

life can be fed by that. 

Stephen Jenkinson

 Die Wise: A Manifesto for Sanity and Soul  

“You’ve been working on surviving all your life."

 “You’re always trying to get a better house, better clothes,

 better food, a better car, go to a better movie. 

You’re always thinking about improving yourself and living better.

And then, all of a sudden, 

none of that means anything anymore.”

 Ken paused. 

“If it weren’t for modern medicine,

 none of these old fogies would be here,” he said, 

tipping his head toward the hallway that led to the other apartments.

 “They’re all hanging on to life 

like it’s something really worth hanging on to, 

and it isn’t really all that.”

“I’m trying to visualize a world without me,” 

he said during our final visit before his death, 

pensive and serious.

 I thought I heard a hint of melancholy in his voice.

And then it all happened very fast.

 As Ken began reciting his epitaph, 

his words slurred and trailed off: 

Walking on eggshells

Hanging by a thread 

Not really living

Not really dead 

I’m all used up

Nothing left to give

All my time is spent 

Just trying to live 

That’s why I’ve chosen

Not to be

And let the world turn Minus me

When Ken took his leave from this world, 

he gathered around him family and friends, 

and he curated his own departure.

 Though he felt wistful for the people he would leave behind,

 Ken knew that his days were numbered,

 and he turned toward death with a sense of relief.

Anita Hannig

The Day I Die: The Untold Story of Assisted Dying in America

All the time you are awake, 

your two bodies, remain together interpenetrating each other,

 but when you fall asleep

 the greater part of your etheric slips out of the physical;

 and in reality this slipping out of the etheric is what constitutes sleep.

it is this etheric body

 which is the repository of all your thoughts and feelings. 

It includes what are often called

 the conscious and the subconscious minds.

 It is the “psyche” of the psychologist,

 and it is in fact, your human personality. 

That is why personality survives death; 

because it resides in the etheric

 which passes over intact, 

and not in the physical

 which breaks up into decomposition

 when it is left alone

Emmet  Fox

 Life After Death Described and Explained

The physical body is in simple truth 

nothing but a vehicle or vesture of the real man.

 It is put off permanently at death, 

but it is also put off temporarily every night when we go to sleep - 

indeed the process of falling asleep 

consists in this very action of the real man in his astral vehicle

 slipping out of the physical body.

Charles Leadbetter

Invisible Helpers

Anyone who knows the life of the human soul between death and rebirth 

will see that in this world through which we wander in a sleeping condition, 

we are living together with the so-called dead. 

The dead are always present.

 They move and have their being in a supersensible world. 

We are not separated from them by our ‘real being,’

 only by our condition of consciousness.

 We ‘sleep’ in the so-called waking condition among the dead,

 just as we do not perceive the physical objects around us when we sleep.

 Thus we do not live separated from the world

 ruled by the forces of the dead,

 we are together with them in one common world. 

In our ordinary consciousness 

we are only separated from them

 by the state of that consciousness.

Rudolf Steiner

Earthly Death and Cosmic Life

Paradise is our primordial pure consciousness, 

which is free of all limitations

 but embodies the infinity of the divine.

 I remember seeing a bumper sticker that said, 

"I believe in life before death."

 To me this means 

that we don't have to imagine a future paradise. 

Paradise can happen right here, right now, 

while we're in this human incarnation. 

The choice is ours.

Anam Thubten.

No Self No Problem 

Body is Consciousness,

 life is Consciousness,

 death is Consciousness too. 

When death-Consciousness comes to meet body-Consciousness 

where is the cause for sorrow?

 Just as water can be calm or in movement as ripples, 

Consciousness can also be at rest or in movement. 

The man with wisdom makes no distinction 

between sentient matter and insentient matter.

 What is observed as body 

and what is regarded as notion, 

the perishable and the imperishable, 

thoughts and feelings -

 all are manifestations  in the infinite Consciousness.

Ramesh S. Balsekar.

Final Truth: A Guide to Ultimate Understanding

When I stand by the stream and watch it,

 I am relatively still, 

and the flowing water makes a path across my memory

 so that I realize its transience

 in comparison with my stability.

 This is, of course, an illusion 

in the sense that I, too, am in flow

 and likewise have no final destination—

for can anyone imagine finality as a form of life? 

My death will be the disappearance 

of a particular pattern in the water.

Alan W. Watts

 Cloud-hidden, Whereabouts Unknown

You can always decide,

 you can ALWAYS decide to not incarnate again. 

 You could allow the life you are living right now to be,

 in a sense, linearly speaking,

 the last life you will have. 

 You do not necessarily have to be 

what you might call “the most spiritually awakened being on Earth”

 in order to allow yourself to realize

 that you may wish to explore and grow and learn in other dimensions, 

and in non-physicality as well.  

But you do not ever “have to” incarnate. 

 Never.

Bashar

 Quest for Truth

In this hour of joy it is not proper to grieve. 

 The goal, so hard to win, 

which for many aeons I have wished for, 

now at last is no longer far away. 

 When that is won,

 no earth or water, fire, wind or ether is present;

  unchanging bliss beyond all objects of the senses, 

a peace which none can take away, 

the highest thing there is; 

 and when you hear of that

 and know that no becoming mars it 

and nothing ever there can pass away—

how then, is there room for grief in your minds?

Buddha

at death, speaking to his followers

Many people experience after death 

a natural desire to reconnect with their loved ones and friends , 

to let them know they’re really still alive and OK. 

Even after some time has passed, 

they may still wish to help those they have left on earth, 

if only to mitigate the grief they may feel . 

And if the newly dead person has wronged people on earth, 

he or she may seek ways of making amends.

It takes time for a person who is now disincarnate

 and learning to adjust to the vaster reality of the subtle worlds

 to begin to think beyond their individuality 

and into attunement with the larger wholes 

of which he or she is a part,

 thereby experiencing himself or herself 

as part of planetary life and beingness — 

unless, of course, this person 

has already been accustomed to thinking and attuning in this way 

while in a physical body. 

David Spangler

  Subtle Worlds: An Explorer’s Field Notes 

The sense of separation

 is merely one of the mistakes of the personal self 

which it continues to dwell in

 because it does not understand the nature of Consciousness.

 Where the Consciousness is, 

there the individual is functioning, 

for the individual is his Consciousness.

  “ ‘When one thinks of a loved one who has passed on,

 he is really with that loved one in his Higher Mental Body 

the moment his Consciousness is upon the other person.

 If the Western World could understand this Truth,

 it would lift the chains 

which cause such useless suffering.

 Such grief is all due to the fact that the personality

—especially in the feeling—

accepts the body as being the individual

 instead of knowing the body is only a garment 

which the individual wears.

Godfre Ray King 

The Magic Presence