This site shares Life-affirming meditations
that heal misconceptions about Death.
Living beautifully and dying beautifully,
Embrace Death as Birth
into limitless Life Awareness.
Rudolf Steiner: A Life Becomes an Eye
The soul that has crossed the threshold of death
looks upon what we as earthly human beings
have experienced between birth and death—
but not as if what one experienced then were simply there
but much of the state of being of the dead person
also exerts an influence in a particular way.
The state of being of a dead person
is not like that of someone living between birth and death.
The state of being of someone living between birth and death
is such that he feels himself enclosed within his skin
and looks out at the world through his senses.
As soon as one enters the spiritual world as a dead person,
one flows out into the whole of the spiritual world.
One gradually feels oneself filling the whole spiritual world.
And what one has experienced during physical Earth-existence
one senses to be something that continues to belong to one—
not, of course, as a physical body
but as what constitutes the form, the forces of the physical body.
This one retains after death,
but in such a way as the human eye inhabits the physical body.
Just as one has the eye for seeing,
so does one have oneself,
the earthly life that one has lived through,
as a cosmic sense-organ in order to perceive the world.
What our eye is now for our body,
our earthly life is for our spiritual life after death.
Rudolf Steiner
The Mystery of Death
Rudolf Steiner: Who Wakes With Us
The moment of waking is especially favourable
for the dead to approach us.
At the moment of waking,
very much comes from the dead
to every human being.
A great deal of what we undertake in life
is really inspired in us by the dead
or by beings of the higher hierarchies,
although we attribute it to ourselves,
imagining that it comes from our own soul.
Rudolf Steiner
The Dead Are With Us
John Koenig: A Longing for Revelation
You can’t help but take this life for granted.
Your eyes gradually adjust to the color of the walls,
and your ears tune out the chatter.
And while your brain goes numb
trying to shake off your complacency,
your heart can’t sit still,
and your gut is hungry for chaos.
The apocalypse is one of the oldest fantasies we have.
But it’s not about skipping to the end of the story.
It’s a longing for revelation,
a revealing of what we already know but cannot see—
that none of this is guaranteed,
and there’s no such thing as “ordinary life.”
That our civilization is just an agreement,
one that could be revoked at any time.
That beneath our rules and quarrels,
we’re stuck together on a wide-open planet
where anything can happen,
which leaves us no choice but to survive,
to build a shelter,
and find each other in the storm.
Knowing that every passing day
is very nearly miraculous,
a cascading series of accidents
that just happens to fall our way.
John Koenig
The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows
Joan Halifax: I Already Have What Dying People Have
In the beginning it wasn’t easy.
It did not come naturally or instinctively.
Working so closely with death often scared me;
I was afraid I might get what the dying person had.
When I recognized, however,
that I already have what dying people have
—mortality—
I stopped being afraid of catching it.
Recognizing this very interconnectedness
is the ground of giving no fear,
and the beginning of compassion.
Patient and caregiver are one and the same,
connected by life and death
as by suffering and joy.
When we manage to step through fear
by reconnecting with each other,
real compassion arises.
Joan Halifax
Being with Dying:
Cultivating Compassion and Fearlessness in the Presence of Death
Joan Halifax: The Same Continuum
After four decades of sitting
with dying people and their caregivers,
I believe that studying the process of how to die well
benefits even those of us
who may have many years of life ahead.
Of course, people who are sick or suffering,
dying of old age or catastrophic illnesses,
may be more receptive to exploring the great matter of dying
than those who are young and healthy,
or who still believe in their own indestructibility.
Yet the sooner we can embrace death,
the more time we have to live completely,
and to live in reality.
Our acceptance of our death
influences not only the experience of dying
but also the experience of living;
life and death lie along the same continuum.
One cannot—as so many of us try to do—
lead life fully
and struggle to keep the inevitable at bay.
Joan Halifax
Being with Dying:
Cultivating Compassion and Fearlessness in the Presence of Death
A Closing Prayer
My Lord God,
I have no idea where I am going.
I do not see the road ahead of me.
I cannot know for certain where it will end.
Therefore I will trust you always
though I may seem to be lost
and in the shadow of death.
I will not fear
for you are ever with me,
and you will never leave me
to face my perils alone.
Thomas Merton
A Book of Hours
Nothing Dies, Everything Transforms
Before the cloud appeared in the sky, it existed in another form—
as mist, ocean, rain, or river.
If we look deeply into the nature of a cloud,
we see that a cloud can’t die;
it can’t pass from a state of being into a state of nonbeing.
A cloud can become rain or snow or ice,
but it can’t become nothing.
So if the sky is clear,
it doesn’t mean that your cloud has died.
It continues on in other forms.
How can our loved one die?
Everything arises in dependence on everything else.
There’s no beginning or ending;
there’s no creation and no destruction of anything at all.
This is true of the entire universe.
Billions and billions of conditions have come together
for us to manifest in this form.
When different conditions arise,
we will manifest in a different form.
Do not get caught in the form.
Do not get caught in signs.
Learn to look with “the eyes of signlessness”
and see your cloud in its new forms—
in the rain, in the river, in your tea.
If you have lost someone
and if you have cried so very much,
please look deeply and recognize
that the true nature of your beloved
is the nature of no birth and no death,
no coming and no going.
Thich Nhat Hanh
How to Live When a Loved One Dies: Healing Meditations for Grief and Loss
dedicated to Dave and Bonita
Sadhguru: If I Have to Die Today
There is no such thing as security in this life.
The moment you start seeking security,
naturally you become death-oriented.
Unknowingly, you will seek death.
Moments of danger are moments
when you experience both life and death together at the same time.
These are the moments you realize
that life and death are here at the same time.
They are not two separate things.
They are one inside the other.
Life is all packed like this.
The Creation and the Creator, life and death—
are all packed one inside the other.
It takes attention—a lot of attention—to see it.
Otherwise, one just lives on the surface, half alive.
If you don’t know life and death at the same time,
you will know only one half of life.
Being half alive is a torture always.
If you want to live a full life,
you should look at your mortal nature every day,
not only when you are beyond a certain age.
Every day of your life,
you need to be aware that you are mortal.
It is not that I want to die today,
but if I do, it is all right with me.
I will do everything to protect myself,
to nurture myself, to take care of myself,
but if I have to die today,
it is okay with me.
Only then can I step out and live.
Otherwise, I cannot live.
Sadhguru
Death: Only for Those Who Shall Die--
a Yogi's Guide to Living, Dying, and Beyond
Sadhguru: Death Is the Highest Relaxation
Life needs a certain amount of tension to keep it going,
but in death there is relaxation.
In fact, death is the highest relaxation.
However, if you also know the relaxation of death when you are alive,
then life becomes an utterly effortless process.
The greatest calamity of the human mind is that it is against death.
The moment you reject death, you also reject life.
You think life is right and death is wrong.
It is not so.
Life is what it is only because death is.
One who does not embrace death
will not know life at all.
If you sit here saying, “I don’t want to die,
I don’t want to die, I don’t want to die,”
all that will happen is you will not live.
You will anyway die,
but by denying death,
you will not live well until then either.
If you are afraid of death,
you will only avoid life;
you cannot avoid death.
Sadhguru
Death: Only for Those Who Shall Die--
a Yogi's Guide to Living, Dying, and Beyond
Sadhguru: Sit Quietly and Die
Everyone must make preparations for their death—
not just externally, internally too.
You must be able to sit quietly and die.
When death is imminent,
most wild animals will withdraw to a place
where they just sit.
They don’t eat anything and they die.
When even animals, creatures that crawl,
have that much dignity about their death,
why do human beings want drama around them?
In life, they want drama,
but at least death should be conducted in a dignified way.
I would like to teach the whole population
a way to live beautifully, blissfully,
every moment of their life.
Then, naturally,
one will leave in the best possible manner.
Sadhguru
Death: Only for Those Who Shall Die--
a Yogi's Guide to Living, Dying, and Beyond
Osho: Laugh
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 selfconsciousness.
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.
And who is the culprit?
God has not created death,
it is man's own invention.
Create the ego,
and you have created the other side of it --
death
Osho
Osho: A Ripple in the Ocean
Death is not there, it is a lie --
but it appears very real.
It only appears very real, it is not.
It appears so because
you believe too much in your separate existence.
It is in believing that you are separate from existence
that you give reality to death.
Drop this idea of being separate from existence,
and death disappears.
If I am one with existence,
how can I die?
Existence was there before me
and will be there after me.
I am just a ripple in the ocean,
and the ripple comes and goes,
the ocean remains, abides.
Osho
Andrew Holecek: Letting Go of Letting Go
Death is about letting go.
That includes letting go of any expectations.
The danger in learning too much about death
is that we end up prepackaging the experience,
forcing reality into the straitjacket of our concepts.
Andrew Holecek
Preparing to Die
There people live, listless, petal-white,
and die stunned by a vision of the brute world.
And none sees the gaping grimaces
that bloom from the smile of their tender race
during nights that have no name.
They take their way, voided by a life
of serving senseless things by pure rote,
and their clothes grow limp on them,
and their beautiful hands age too soon.
That’s where death is. Not the one whose greeting
brushed by them so wondrously in childhood,—
the little death, as they called it back then;
but their own, which hangs green and tasteless—
like a fruit inside them that will never ripen.
Rainer Maria Rilke
The Book of Hours
Thomas Merton: A Ladder Under the Moon
All things stir by night,
waking or sleeping,
conscious of the nearness of their ruin.
Only man makes himself illuminations he conceives to be solid and eternal.
Will it come like this, the moment of my death?
Will You open a door upon the great forest
and set my feet upon a ladder under the moon,
and take me out among the stars?
Thomas Merton
A Book of Hours
Mary-Frances O'Connor: Not One, Not Two
After a loved one dies,
they are clearly no longer with us in the physical world,
which each day proves to us.
On the other hand, they are not gone,
because they are with us in our brain and in our mind.
The physical makeup of our brain—the structure of our neurons—
has been changed by them.
In this sense, you could say that a piece of them physically lives on.
That piece is the neural connections protected within our skull,
and these neural connections survive in physical form
even after a loved one’s death.
So, they are not entirely “out there,”
and they are not entirely “in here,” either.
You are not one, not two.
That is because the love between two people,
that unmistakable but usually indescribable property,
occurs between two people.
Once we have known love,
we can bring it into our awareness,
we can feel it emerge and emanate from us.
This experience reaches beyond
the love for the flesh and bones of the person
we once knew on this earthly plane.
Now loving is an attribute of us,
regardless of who we share it with,
regardless of what is given to us in return.
This is a transcendent experience,
a felt sense of being loving without needing anything in return.
In the very best moments together,
we learned to love and to be loved.
Because of our bonded experience,
that loved one and that loving are a part of us now,
to call up and act on as we see fit
in the present and the future.
Mary-Frances O'Connor, PhD
The Grieving Brain
The Surprising Science of How We Learn from Love and Loss
William Walker Atkinson: Never More Alive
”The body is not an entity,
for it is merely an aggregation of cells,
and these cells are merely material vehicles
for a certain form of energy which animates and vitalizes them.
When the soul passes from the body,
the units composing the body
manifest repulsion for each other,
in place of the attraction
which formerly held them together.
The unifying force which has held them together
withdraws its power,
and the reverse activity is manifested.
As a writer has well said:
“The body is never more alive than when it is dead.”
William Walker Atkinson
The Life Beyond Death
The Journey Of Transformation From “Death” To The Astral Planes To Rebirth And Beyond
Joel Goldsmith: Life Has No Opposite
There is only one answer to any claim
that relates to the fear of death,
and that is that life has no opposite
for life is infinite.
Life, the life which is God, is universal;
it is the life of all being
whether the life of man, woman, child, animal, or plant.
Life is always God;
there is no other life.
Whatever you know about the life
which is God
is the truth about the individual life
which is appearing as you and as me.
Joel Goldsmith
The Master Speaks
Ramana Maharshi: Birth and Rebirth Pertain to the Body
Questioner: How long does it take a man to be reborn after death?
Is it immediately after death or some time after?
Ramana Maharshi: You do not know what you were before birth,
yet you want to know what you will be after death.
Do you know what you are now?
Birth and rebirth pertain to the body.
You are identifying the Self with the body.
It is a wrong identification.
You believe that the body has been born and will die,
and confound the phenomena relating to the body with the Self.
Know your real being
and these questions will not arise.
Birth and rebirth are mentioned
only to make you investigate the question
and find out that there are neither births nor rebirths.
They relate to the body and not to the Self.
Know the Self
and don't be perturbed by doubts.
Sri Ramana Maharshi
Be As You Are: The Teachings of Sri Ramana Maharshi
Sri Ramana Maharshi: Past Lives, Present Suffering
Q: Can a yogi know his past lives?
Maharshi: Do you know the present life
that you wish to know the past?
Find the present, then the rest will follow.
Even with our present limited knowledge,
you suffer so much.
Why should you burden yourself with more knowledge?
Is it to suffer more?
Sri Ramana Maharshi
Be As You Are: The Teachings of Sri Ramana Maharshi
C. S. Lewis: Is the Word So Difficult to Learn?
It is hard to have patience with people who say, ‘There is no death’
or ‘Death doesn’t matter.’
There is death.
And whatever is matters.
And whatever happens has consequences,
and it and they are irrevocable and irreversible.
You might as well say that birth doesn’t matter.
I look up at the night sky.
Is anything more certain than that in all those vast times and spaces,
if I were allowed to search them,
I should nowhere find her face,
her voice, her touch?
She died.
She is dead.
Is the word so difficult to learn?
C.S. Lewis
A Grief Observed
Ranjit Chaudhri: The Witness Within
Ignorance or delusion shrinks our sense of self.
It makes us forget our bigger self,
the self that is one with God,
and causes us to believe we are the little self, the body.
The body performs actions, and we believe we are the body,
this individual performing all these activities.
We become concerned with the achievements of the body.
We strive for a good education, to amass wealth,
to gain recognition and success in our worldly life;
and towards the end of our life,
we become fearful when death approaches.
All this while we forget about our bigger self, our soul.
Our soul is the witness within us
that observes the ups and downs in our life.
It is not interested in the success and failures of the body,
and nor is it concerned about the death of the body.
As Vasugupta beautifully explains in the Spanda Karikas (Verses 14-16):
Two are found to exist here, called the Creator and the created. Among them, created matter is subject to decay but the Creator is imperishable.
Looking at created matter dissolving into the whole, examine carefully what is being destroyed here. At the time of his death, an ignorant man thinks, “I will cease to exist”.
But the Being within us, who is the abode of the quality of omniscience, cannot be destroyed. Due to lack of knowledge of this other Self, a man believes sooner or later, he may cease to exist.
Ranjit Chaudhri
The Shiva Sutras
Deepak Chopra: A Living Possibility
I am not afraid of death.
I want to say this clearly,
not as a performance of spiritual courage
but as an honest description of where I find myself,
after eight decades of living and exploring
and attending to the dying.
I am not afraid because I have come to believe—
through reflection, through meditation,
through the witness accounts of people
who have had near-death experiences,
through the testimony of the great wisdom traditions
and, yes, through something in my own direct experience
that I cannot fully articulate—
that what I most essentially am
does not end when this body stops.
The body is a temporary form.
Consciousness is the field in which all forms arise and pass.
The wave is not the ocean,
but the wave is made of ocean.
When the wave dissolves, the ocean remains.
The pattern of awareness that I call ‘Deepak’
has a particular history,
a particular set of relationships,
a particular body that will, in time, return to its elements.
But the awareness in which all of that arises,
the witnessing presence,
the sakshi, that, I believe,
is not subject to the laws that govern bodies.
I hold this lightly.
I do not offer it as metaphysical certainty.
No one knows.
But I hold it as a living possibility,
which is more than adequate for living fearlessly.
Deepak Chopra
Awakening in the Final Chapter: Aging with Grace, Love, and Freedom
Jane Roberts
Reforming the Body at the Other End
Your idea of death
is based upon your dependence upon the outer senses.
You will learn that it is possible,
through no physical act
(and underline that, through no physical act),
to relinquish the physical body,
expand the self,
using atoms and molecules
as stepping stones to a given destination,
and reforming the physical body
at the other end.
Jane Roberts
The Early Sessions: Book 2 of The Seth Material
Ernest Holmes — A Becoming God
Death loses its sting and the grave its victory
when we realize that life is eternal.
We are not permitted to stay too long in any one place,
just long enough to gather the experience necessary
to the unfolding and advancement of the soul.
This is wise,
for should we stay here too long
we would become too set, too rigid, too inflexible.
In the process of evolution change is inevitable,
and when this change comes
we should welcome it with a smile on the lips
and a song in the heart.
While it is true that we weep for our friends,
we should know that their life goes on.
We are thinking, then, of eternity from this larger viewpoint,
as a continuity of time,
ever and ever expanding,
until “time” as we now know and experience it
shall be no more.
Realizing this,
we should see in everyone a budding genius,
a becoming God,
an unfolding soul,
an eternal destiny.
Ernest Holmes
You Will Live Forever
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