This site shares Life-affirming meditations
that heal misconceptions about Death.
Living beautifully and dying beautifully,
Embrace Death as Birth
into limitless Life Awareness.
Even if we can make some sense of the larger questions of control, death, and meaning, we will be left with difficult problems in the way we live our lives.
How and when should I want to die?
How much pain and suffering should I be willing to bear, and for what reason?
What do I owe others in my dying,
especially those who would still have me with them if they could?
When I am in doubt about my living or dying,
where should I locate the benefit of doubt,
toward life or death?
What kind of person should I be to ask questions of that kind?
Daniel Callahan.
The Troubled Dream of Life: In Search of a Peaceful Death
'
All individuals die.
Only those
Who are no longer individuals
Live forever.
Wu Hsin
In the Shadow of the Formless
Death to oneself is the improbable source
of a way of life so new and so alive
that it feels like having been born again.
In this metaphorical sense,
the ego dies on finding out its own incapacity,
its inability to make any difference to itself that is really important .
Alan W. Watts
Become What You Are
When human beings pass through the portal of death, they first have certain experiences.
DEVACHAN
The human being now enters devachan
where he or she prepares in the spiritual world for a new life in the future.
Here human beings live with spiritual events and beings
until they are again called into the physical world,
be it because the karma of a person demands it
or because an individual is needed on the physical earth.
Rudolf Steiner
The Principle of Spiritual Economy
When human beings pass through the portal of death, they first have certain experiences.
KAMALOKA
There follows the condition of what is called kamaloca,
the time of weaning the soul from the effects of physical, sensuous existence,
which lasts about a third of the time of a person’s physical life.
After the etheric body has been cast off,
the astral body still contains all the passions, desires, and so on
that it had at the end of life;
they must be lost and purified, and that is kamaloka.
Then the astral body is cast off and here, too,
the fruit, the astral essence, is taken along; but the rest — the astral corpse —
dissolves into the astral world.
Rudolf Steiner
The Principle of Spiritual Economy
When human beings pass through the portal of death, they first have certain experiences.
ETHERIC CORPSE
Then the etheric body leaves the astral body, where the ego lives.
All three had been connected from the time they left the physical corpse,
but now the etheric body separates itself from the other two
and becomes an etheric corpse.
However, today’s human beings do not lose their etheric body completely
but take an extract or excerpt along with them for all the times to follow.
So in this sense the etheric corpse is cast off,
but the fruit of the last life is carried along by the astral body and by the ego.
If we want to be quite precise, we will have to say
that something is taken along from the physical body as well:
a kind of spiritual abstract of this body —
the tincture medieval mystics spoke about.
However, this abstract of the physical being is the same in all lives;
it merely represents the fact that the ego had been embodied.
On the other hand, the essence of the etheric body is different in all lives,
depending on what one has experienced in a life
and on the degree of one’s progress in it.
Rudolf Steiner
The Principle of Spiritual Economy
When human beings pass through the portal of death, they first have certain experiences.
MEMORY TABLEAU
The second experience after death
consists of a human being’s attaining a “memory tableau” of the life just completed,
so that all events in it recur in comprehensive memory.
This process lasts a definite amount of time.
For reasons that cannot be stated here today,
the duration of this memory is shorter or longer,
depending on the individual.
In general, the duration of this state can be determined
from the length of time each human being
was able to stay awake during the past life,
continuously and without once succumbing to the forces of sleep.
Supposing that the outer limit for a person’s staying awake
continuously had been forty-eight hours,
then the memory tableau after death will also be forty-eight hours.
And thus, this stage is like an overview of the past life.
Rudolf Steiner
The Principle of Spiritual Economy
When human beings pass through the portal of death, they first have certain experiences--
EXPANSION
Their first experience is the feeling that they are growing larger
or that they are growing out of their skin.
This has the effect of the human being attaining another perception of things
than was the case earlier in physical life.
Everything in the physical world has its definite place —
either here or there — outside the observer,
but that is not so in this new world.
There, it is as if the human being were inside the objects,
extended with or within them,
whereas earlier he or she was only a separate object in its own place.
Rudolf Steiner
The Principle of Spiritual Economy
Our usual understanding of impermanence is that the world is full of things,
like tables and chairs and you and me,
and that these things are all impermanent.
But in Buddhism they say that the true understanding of impermanence
reveals that there is actually no impermanence
because nothing ever forms in the first place
as a persisting, separate, independent “thing” to be impermanent.
There is only thorough-going flux, seamless unicity—
this ever-present, ever-changing Here/ Now.
This is what Buddhists mean by emptiness
and what Advaita calls the one, immutable Self.
When this is seen clearly, there is no fear of death,
for there is no one separate to die.
And there is no “me” to be unworthy or to fail.
Joan Tollifson
Nothing to Grasp
There is nowhere to go and nothing to become.
There is simply this present happening,
the boundless unicity that includes absolutely everything
and that holds on to nothing.
Sometimes it seems that we can recognize or allow this simplicity of being,
and sometimes it seems that we can’t.
In times of stress, old habits tend to return and take over.
We jump back onto our imaginary treadmill of suffering.
The dream of separation and lack seems believable.
We chase the carrot.
It happens.
But all of this is the movement of life,
vanishing instant by instant into thin air.
It’s not personal.
And in the end,
in waking up or in deep sleep
or at the moment of death,
we see
that nothing has ever really happened.
Joan Tollifson
Nothing to Grasp
I guess I could be pretty pissed off about what happened to me,
but it’s hard to stay mad, when there’s so much beauty in the world.
Sometimes I feel like I’m seeing it all at once,
and it’s too much, my heart fills up like a balloon that’s about to burst.
And then I remember to relax,
and stop trying to hold on to it,
and then it flows through me like rain
and I can’t feel anything but gratitude
for every single moment of my stupid little life.
—Lester (voiceover), after being shot in the head in the movie American Beauty,
screenplay by Alan Ball
quoted in:
Joan Tollifson
Nothing to Grasp
Even if death were to fall upon you today like lightning,
you must be ready to die without sadness and regret,
without any residue of clinging for what is left behind.
Remaining in the recognition of the absolute view,
you should leave this life
like an eagle
soaring up into the blue sky.
Dilgo Khyentse Rinpoche
Dying is the event for the remaining family and friends.
For the dying person, their evolutionary path is the event —
crossing the bridge into another dimension.
I’ve found that as the physical body declines,
the spiritual activity increases.
Consciousness is still in the body,
but they're starting to have out-of-body experiences .
They talk with deceased loved ones.
I let them know they’re in a safe space.
They’ll smile and say, "I just saw was my husband."
I'll ask, "How did that make you feel?
Are you looking forward to seeing him again?"
I don’t challenge their experience.
Susan Buhlman
Quote from Art of Dying Magazine, Volume III
You are not the victim of the world you see
because you invented it.
You can give it up as easily as you made it up.
You will see it or not see it, as you wish.
While you want it you will see it;
when you no longer want it,
it will not be there for you to see.
A Course In Miracles
The Stoics, thought the prospect of death, rather than depressing us,
could make our days far more enjoyable than would otherwise be the case.
By imagining how our days could go worse—
and in particular, by contemplating our own death—
we could increase our chance of experiencing joy.
In our youth, it takes effort to contemplate our own death;
in our later years, it takes effort to avoid contemplating it.
Old age therefore has a way of making us do something
that we should have been doing all along.
William B. Irvine
A Guide to the Good Life
(the ancient art of stoic joy)
By contemplating the impermanence of everything in the world,
we are forced to recognize that every time we do something
could be the last time we do it,
and this recognition can invest the things we do
with a significance and intensity that would otherwise be absent.
We will no longer sleepwalk through our life.
Some people, I realize, will find it depressing
or even morbid to contemplate impermanence.
I am nevertheless convinced that the only way we can be truly alive
is if we make it our business
to periodically entertain such thoughts.
William B. Irvine
A Guide to the Good Life
(the ancient art of stoic joy)
As a Zen master lay dying he cried out in pain.
Upset by his cries, one of his students said,
“Master! Why are you calling out like that?”
The master responded,
“My crying in pain is no different from my laughing in joy.”
Philip Kapleau
The Zen of Living and Dying
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
If we are to be able to face our own inevitable death with honest acceptance,
before we have reached that time,
then we need to shift our priorities well before it’s too late.
This gives us the opportunity to put our energies
into directions of true value.
Once we acknowledge that limited time is remaining,
although we don’t know if that is years, weeks or hours,
we are less driven by ego or by what other people think.
Instead, we are more driven by what our hearts truly want.
Acknowledging our inevitable, approaching death
offers us the opportunity to find greater purpose and satisfaction
in the time we have remaining.
Bronnie Ware
Top Five Regrets of the Dying:
A Life Transformed by the Dearly Departing
So living is dying.
You understand?
Living means that every day you are abandoning
everything that you are attached to.
Can you do this?
A very simple fact but it has got tremendous implications.
So that each day is a new day.
Each day you are dying and incarnating.
There is tremendous vitality, energy there
because there is nothing you are afraid of.
There is nothing that can hurt.
Being hurt doesn't exist.
Krishnamurti
The Future is Now
We are friends with the one who kills us,
who gives us to the ocean waves.
We love this death.
Only ignorance would say,
Put it off a while,
day after tomorrow.
Do not avoid the knife.
This friend only seems fierce,
bringing your soul more range,
perching your falcon on a cliff of the wind.
Jesus on his cross, Hallaj on his—
those absurd killings hold a secret.
Submit to love without thinking,
as the sun this morning rose recklessly
extinguishing our star-candle minds.
Rumi
The Big Red Book
What is Buddhahood?
Becoming aware of the inner sky that was in the rock, in the animals,
in the trees, in man and in woman.
Once you become aware of that inner sky,
you are released from all forms.
That is freedom.
Not that you become free,
because in that freedom you don't exist,
you can't exist.
“You become free” simply means you become free from yourself.
Osho
Every man is related to the dead,
as shown by clairvoyant consciousness.
When the young—children or juveniles—
pass through the gate of death,
it is seen that the connection between the living and the dead
is different from that of older people,
those dying in the twilight of their life.
There is a decisive difference.
When we lose children,
when the young are apparently taken from us,
they do not really leave us at all,
but remain with us.
This is seen by clairvoyant consciousness
by the fact that the messages we receive on awakening
are forceful and vivid
when the dead concerned died as children or young people.
The connection between those remaining behind and the dead
is then such that we can only say
that a child or young person is not lost at all;
he really remains present.
Rudolf Steiner
Earthly Death and Cosmic Life
The Stoics think we should spend time contemplating the loss of friends, to death, perhaps, or to a falling-out. Thus, Epictetus counsels that when we say good-bye to a friend, we should silently remind ourselves that this might be our final parting.9 If we do this, we will be less likely to take our friends for granted, and as a result, we will probably derive far more pleasure from friendships than we otherwise would.
William B. Irvine
A Guide to the Good Life
(the ancient art of stoic joy)
To Echard...On The Path...
In India, preserving the dead body is the last thing we want to do. The rule is if someone dies, within four to six hours after death, you must cremate the body. Traditionally, they said, once death has occurred—by the next dusk or dawn, whichever occurs first—the body must be cremated. Destroying the body immediately is very good for both the dead and the living. Preserving the body is only a torture for the person who has departed.
Sadhguru
Death; An Inside Story - A Book for All Those Who Shall Die
No matter how long one lives,
one always perceives their life’s length
against their expectations of its length,
not any objective measurement.
And thus, one’s length of life is not even a viable, objective measurement
of one’s experience of it.
A greater length does not imply greater depth.
If a person had the option to live fifteen years of immense vigor and luster
or one hundred years of suffering tedium,
wouldn’t the fairly obvious choice be the fifteen good years
over the one hundred bad?
In truth, someone dying earlier than expected
could be just as sad as someone dying as expected
but living an arduous, horrible life.
And so, what does this suggest about my diagnosis and young death?
It’s sad, sure, but perhaps no more or less
than any other way this whole thing could have gone.
Am I ready to die?
I don’t know.
Does it matter?
No.
Robert Pantano
Notes from the End of Everything
Your life and your identity and your consciousness
will still be here ten thousand years from now,
but in a different form.
You will not be gone: only your form will change.
That this is true is evidenced by the fact
that when you came into this world,
you weighed six, seven, eight, nine, or ten pounds,
but that form has been changing ever since.
The child-body is not that of the adult-body,
and the body of the aged
is not the same as the body of the adult;
but the individual is the same,
the life is the same,
the Soul is the same,
the consciousness is the same.
Only the outer form changes.
Joel S. Goldsmith
The Contemplative Life
Clock time slices up the timeless, giving it beginnings and endings.
As a result, there is birth, aging, and death.
All of virtual reality,
from the atom to the human body to the universe,
is a timeless process frozen in time.
If you say, “I was born in 1961” or “The meeting starts promptly at three”
or “The big bang occurred 13.8 billion years ago,”
you are doing the same thing—
freezing a constant fluid process into a beginning,
which automatically brings a middle and an end.
Beginning, middle, and end are mental constructs.
What is the middle of blue?
What was the last thing that happened before time began?
When you wake up, being here is continuous—
actually, it has always been continuous,
until beginning, middle, and end were invented.
It will come as a great relief to ditch those concepts.
Not only will you find that you are living in the now,
but birth, aging, and death will become irrelevant.
Deepak Chopra
Metahuman: Unleashing Your Infinite Potential
I believe wholeheartedly in assisted death.
Not assisted suicide for depression.
Depression is a treatable, reversible condition.
Suicide is inappropriate,
except in untreatable, unbearable suffering.
Death is not treatable or preventable.
Death can be easy
or it can be utterly, devastatingly miserable.
It can be totally destructive of all dignity, privacy, and autonomy,
much less comfort. We have all seen it.
I fully respect the right of individuals to their own beliefs and end-of-life wishes.
I do not condone the imposition of personal religious beliefs
on someone who does not share the same convictions.
I believe it to be morally, ethically, humanely, and mercifully unconscionable
that a dying person must accept prolonged suffering
if that individual does not wish it.
Yet this is the law in 47 of the United States [at the time of this writing]—
and the official position of the American Medical Association.
This sometimes is justified by the myth
that physical and emotional suffering at the end of life can be controlled.
We all know that this is often not possible.
Sometimes we resort finally to medicating the individual
into a semiconscious state.
And just what is the point of that?
John Rowe III, MD, Medford,
Oregon, Journal of the American Medical Association
quoted in
John Abraham's
How to Get the Death You Want: A Practical and Moral Guide
Consciousness is not involved
in what happens to the phenomenal objects,
including human beings.
Consciousness the real “you”
merely witnesses all events as in a dream.
Ramesh Balsekar
The Essence of the Ashtavakra Gita
In my view, what happens after death is a flat-earth question.
Worrying about what happens to us when we die
is like worrying about what happens to us
if we fall off the edge of the earth.
People used to worry about that,
but their fear was based on a misunderstanding.
Just as there is no edge to the earth,
there is no actual boundary,
no edge where life begins or ends.
The things we are worrying about
are all conceptual abstractions,
artificially pulled out of the whole.
Like the lines on a map dividing up the whole earth,
birth and death are artificial dividing lines
on an indivisible reality.
Joan Tollifson
Death: The End of Self-Improvement
No one knows for sure what happens after death,
and I may be surprised;
but I assume that dying will be just like going to sleep
or going under anesthesia.
Conscious experiencing—my movie of waking life and the experience of being present—will vanish as it does every night in deep sleep or under anesthesia.
And, as in deep sleep,
I won’t be there to miss myself or my movie of waking life.
The fear of dying only exists during waking life,
and only as a fearful idea.
In deep sleep, the problem—
and the one who seems to have it—
no longer exist.
Joan Tollifson
Death: The End of Self-Improvement
Is death enlightenment?
No, death is the dissolution of the body-mind mechanism.
When there is nothing there, is that enlightenment?
No, enlightenment is the falling away of the sense of personal doership.
Is death nothingness?
Nothingness for whom? Who are we talking about?
Wayne Liquorman
Acceptance of What Is: A Book About Nothing
We can see, then, that when we die
we simply move from one world into another.
This is why in the inner meaning of the Word, “death”
means resurrection and a continuation of life.
Emanuel Swedenborg
Our Life After Death
Accepting negativity is the concept of,
“Hey, we’re in an infinite evolution.”
You’re not looking at a group of dead bodies.
You’re looking at a group of dead bodies
whose infinite being has departed and is still alive.
There is no death.
All the agony we experience emotionally and psychologically
is agony of the ego.
When you understand that,
a big door opens inside you.
Stuart Wilde
Infinite Self
First, even more than taxes,
I saw how death is inevitable.
But I also learned from those for whom death
is so much more present than for most of us
that this needn’t detract from the living of life to the full.
Not in a devil-may-care nose-thumbing way,
a last whisky before the ship goes down,
but in a calmness and realism
that I also now see in the oncology transfusion room.
Running away from death is not only a waste of energy;
it sets life in opposition to it.
Which it isn’t.
Death is a natural part of life,
and the more we understand that,
the more we can enjoy living.
Simon Boas
A Beginner's Guide to Dying
Please try not to fear death so much.
We hide and run from it;
we follow joyless diets, or subscribe to transactional belief systems,
or try to drown it out with pleasures and purchases.
We change the subject.
But without death we are not human.
I used to think that death was the frame of our brief lives,
but now I see it as the canvas on which each of us is painted.
Talk about it.
Let it help you put your quotidian worries and squabbles into perspective.
And accept it.
Meditation and (with a guide) psilocybin can help.
Simon Boas
A Beginner's Guide to Dying
I have called all of this ‘A Beginner’s Guide to Dying’
because the intention was to show some of the things that,
for me at least,
made the road a bit smoother,
and the destination a little less frightening.
It’s also only partly about ‘Dying’.
I hope you’ll find that it’s mostly about living and life.
Because, in an almost paradoxical way,
I’ve found that having a really positive view of existence
has helped me to be completely accepting of non-existence.
I don’t even really think of them as opposites now.
And of course, it may well be that ‘we’ don’t cease to exist when our bodies do –
I think that’s a very real possibility –
but none of us will ever know that for sure.
The ‘certainties’ provided by both science and religion
all ultimately rest on us believing something unknowable and unprovable.
And that’s how it should be.
Simon Boas
A Beginner's Guide to Dying
Nothing is known about the happening called death,
except that there is an organic death:
life will go out of the body and the body will be cremated or buried.
Is it not possible for the mind to look at the phenomenon called death
as something inevitable, and without any fear?
The answer is: only if it understands who the ego-centre “me” really is.
The “me” is without the slightest doubt, only Consciousness –
Impersonal Consciousness which has identified itself
with a particular body-mind organism as a separate entity as “identified consciousness”
so that life and living can happen through that entity according to “Cosmic Law.” Therefore, obviously,
all that happens at death is that identification gets dissolved
and Consciousness regains its impersonality.
Ramesh Balsekar
The Relationship Between "I" and "Me"
The whole fear about death has come simply because you have no idea what it is.
You have formed ideas about everything.
But it does not matter what ideas you have formed about life,
when you are confronted with the moment of death,
you really do not know anything.
That is one space of life which has remained uncorrupted by the human mind. Everything else we have corrupted.
Death is one thing that we are still clueless about--
though a lot of people would like to talk authoritatively about it.
They know they are going to heaven;
they are dead sure about it.
If they are so sure, I don't see what they are waiting for!
They are doing everything not to go to heaven.
Why?
Sadhguru
Life and Death in One Breath
Not all will admit they are dying, not even to themselves.
Unbelievable as it may seem,
some people go through the dying process with such denial
that they realize their condition is irreversible only after death.
Several dead I have worked with
took days to fully come to terms with their new situation.
Difficult adjustments are usually short-term,
lasting no more than a few days from our standpoint.
And someone is always on the other side ready to assist.
If the dying were to explore the afterlife as it is actually lived,
postmortem turmoil would all but cease.
Julia Assante
The Last Frontier: Exploring the Afterlife and Transforming Our Fear of Death
When we disregard the paranormal events that surround the deathbed,
we also miss a great deal of essential information
about the death process and the afterlife itself,
as well as messages about what the dying need, what they want for us,
and, sometimes, what day or hour they will draw their final breath.
Nearing-death awareness seems to arise when people make peace with death.
It is most noticeable in those whose bodies are gradually shutting down.
In situations where mortality is sudden,
victims of accidents, crimes, and war are still lovingly assisted.
Julia Assante
The Last Frontier: Exploring the Afterlife and Transforming Our Fear of Death
Dr. Leyva has become a preeminent palliative care physician
in the western suburbs of Chicago.
She is living her dream of helping children, and now adults,
achieve their goals and live their last days with pride and dignity.
She related some interesting observations of patients at the end of life.
“People who are near death often have experiences
that are beyond this world, and they are universally positive.”
She is convinced that when people are dying,
they are sometimes comforted by loved ones from the other side.
She remembers watching a terminal ninety-year-old woman
get all dressed up in imaginary clothes and jewelry
so that she would be pretty enough for her departed friends.
Scott Kolbaba
Physicians' Untold Stories:
Miraculous experiences doctors are hesitant to share with their patients, or ANYONE!
Why has the brain separated living and death?
Why has this division taken place?
Does this division exist when there is attachment?
Can one live in the modern world with death –
not suicide, we are not talking about that –
but end all attachment, which is death, while one lives?
I am attached to the house I am living in.
I have bought it, paid a great deal of money for it,
and I am attached to all the furniture, the pictures, the family,
the memories of it all.
And death comes and wipes all that out.
So can you live every day of your lives with death,
ending everything every day,
ending all your attachments?
For that’s what it means to die.
We have separated living from dying,
therefore we are perpetually frightened.
But when you bring life and death together –
the living and the dying –
then you will find that there is a state of the brain
in which all knowledge as memory ends.
J. Krishnamurti
Meeting Life
The vibrant aliveness Here-Now,
is the only place where we ever actually are.
Whether it is the personal death that awaits each of us,
or the inevitable planetary death in which the earth itself will be no more,
or even the end of the entire known universe,
death is the single reality that most clearly informs us
that the future is a fantasy
and that the person and the world
and everything that we have been so concerned about
are all fleeting bubbles in a stream.
We all know, intuitively,
that this bubble is not all we are,
nor are we some kind of lost soul trapped inside it.
The wholeness we long for is actually all there is
. The bubble has never been a solid, separate, independent thing.
Joan Tollifson
Death: The End of Self-Improvement
In my view, what happens after death is a flat earth question.
Worrying about what happens to us when we die
is like worrying about what happens to us if we fall off the edge of the earth.
People used to worry about that,
but their fear was based on a misunderstanding.
Just as there is no edge to the earth,
there is no actual boundary,
no edge where life begins or ends.
The things we are worrying about are all conceptual abstractions,
artificially pulled out of the whole.
Like the lines on a map dividing up the whole earth,
birth and death are artificial dividing lines on an indivisible reality.
Joan Tollifson
Death: The End of Self-Improvement
No one knows for sure what happens after death,
and I may be surprised;
but I assume that dying will be just like going to sleep or going under anesthesia. Conscious experiencing—
my movie of waking life and the experience of being present—
will vanish as it does every night in deep sleep or under anesthesia.
And, as in deep sleep,
I won’t be there to miss myself or my movie of waking life.
The fear of dying only exists during waking life,
and only as a fearful idea.
In deep sleep, the problem—
and the one who seems to have it—
no longer exist.
Joan Tollifson
Death: The End of Self-Improvement
What is death? A bogey mask.
Turn it around and you’ll see it for what it is.
Look! Now it can’t bite!
Now or later your body is bound to be separated from your spirit,
just as it was separated before.
If it’s now, what is there to complain about,
seeing that, if not now, it’ll be later?
Why is there such a thing as death?
For the cyclical perpetuation of the universe.
The universe needs not only the things that currently exist in it
but also those that are to come
and those that have already been and gone.
Epictetus
The Complete Works: Handbook, Discourses, & Fragments
It’s not death or pain that’s frightening,
but the fear of pain or death.
That’s why we approve of the line
‘It’s not dying that’s dreadful, but dying in disgrace.'
Death should therefore be the object of our confidence,
and the fear of death the object of our caution.
At the moment, we do the opposite:
we treat death as something to flee from,
while we’re careless, negligent, and unconcerned
in forming a judgment about it.
Socrates was right to call death and so on ‘bogeys.’
Epictetus
The Complete Works: Handbook, Discourses, & Fragments
What every man, whether he has patience or not,
has always expected is, of course, death.
But he knows this only when death comes …,
when it is too late to be able to enjoy it.
E.M.Cioran
The Trouble With Being Born
People are troubled not by things but by their judgments about things.
Death, for example, isn’t frightening,
or else Socrates would have thought it so.
No, what frightens people is their judgment about death,
that it’s something to fear.
So whenever we’re obstructed or troubled or distressed,
let’s blame no one but ourselves—that is, our judgments.
Epictetus
The Complete Works: Handbook, Discourses, & Fragments
It's dark because you are trying too hard.
Lightly child, lightly.
Learn to do everything lightly.
Yes, feel lightly even though you're feeling deeply.
Just lightly let things happen and lightly cope with them.
I was so preposterously serious in those days, such a humorless little prig.
Lightly, lightly –
it's the best advice ever given me...
So throw away your baggage and go forward.
There are quicksands all about you sucking at your feet,
trying to suck you down into fear and self-pity and despair.
That’s why you must walk so lightly."
Aldous Huxley
Island
The subjective (more accurately termed the non-objective,
since it can have no definite characteristic,
which would make it an object) cannot die, since there is no 'thing' to dissolve,
and it cannot therefore be reborn,
nor, for the same reason, can it ever have been born at all.
Being non-objective
it is altogether outside the range of both birth and death,
which are phenomenal events subject to Time.
Nor can anything that is not an object be subject to time,
nor anything objective be intemporal.
The non-objective, therefore, suffers neither birth nor re-birth,
neither death nor re-death
(each repetitive event as ludicrous as the other).
Wei Wu-wei
The Tenth Man: The Great Joke (Which Made Lazarus Laugh)
Now, when a man with whom we have been united through various ties
leaves the physical world and passes through the gates of death,
at first there remains to us the memory of this man,
that is, a number of feelings and thoughts have arisen
as a result of our relation to him, and which we ourselves have experienced.
But since he passed away from us through the gates of death
these thoughts and feelings which united us with him,
now live on in a very different manner.
While he lived with us here on the physical plane, we knew that at any time,
in addition to the relation our souls had formed to him,
the outer physical presentment itself might also appear;
we knew that we could bring our inner experience to bear upon this outer reality of his. And if at any time by some means the man changed,
we had to expect that the feelings we formerly had towards him
would also change in one way or another.
We do not often think of the radical difference it makes
when suddenly, or even not suddenly, the moment comes,
when henceforward we can only carry in our soul the memory of our friend,
when we know, ‘Never more will our eyes see him, or our hands grasp his.’
The picture we formed of him remains fundamentally as already fixed.
But a radical change appears in the relation of the two people.
As has been said, it may sound trivial,
but it cuts deeply into the inner life in each individual case,
when a human soul which formerly impressed us from without
by means of its physical embodiments,
becomes nothing but a memory.
Rudolf Steiner
The Forming of Destiny and Life after Death
There have been more troubles caused by birth than by death.
We do not always like to think that, but it is true.
So never think for a moment
that it makes any difference to your daily experience,
whether you are living in this country or that country,
this side of the veil or that side of the veil,
for when the veil is torn aside,
we will understand the scripture,
“The darkness and the light are both alike to thee.”
Never forget that.
Darkness and light are not two different things:
they are the same thing.
So, too, are life and death the same thing.
Joel S. Goldsmith
The Journey Back to the Father's House
Unrecognized thought is the daytime equivalent of falling asleep.
Each discursive thought is a mini-daydream.
Drifting off into mindless thinking
is how we end up sleepwalking through life—
and therefore death.
Saying “thinking” in our meditation
is therefore the same as saying “wake up!”
We wake up and come back to reality—
not to our dreamy visions (thoughts) about it.
If we can wake up during the day and be mindful,
we will be able to wake up in the bardo after we die.
This is what it means to become a buddha,
an “awakened one.”
Andrew Holecek
Preparing to Die
TO SAY GOODBYE
Music & Lyrics by Nan Schwartz
HOW TO SAY GOODBYE
HOW TO LET YOU GO
WOND’RING IF WE’LL MEET AGAIN
IF ONLY I COULD KNOW
DON’T WANT TO SAY GOODBYE
WE’VE BOTH HELD ON SO LONG
BUT NOW I KNOW YOUR TIME HAS COME
AND SO I’M TRYING TO BE STRONG FOR YOU
IF THIS IS GOODBYE
YOUR SPIRIT WILL HAVE WON
YOU’LL SOAR AMONG THE ANGELS
YOUR STRUGGLES WILL BE DONE
SO AS I LET YOU GO
I ASK WITH ONE LAST CRY
PLEASE PROMISE YOU WILL COME TO ME
IN DREAMS THAT I FOREVER SEE.
YOUR SMILING FACE WILL ALWAYS BE.
THEN I CAN SAY GOODBYE
LET THE PAST DIE AWAY
NOW AT LAST FLY AWAY
ONLY WHEN, ONLY THEN
YOU’LL BE FREE…...
SO AS I LET YOU GO
I ASK WITH ONE LAST CRY
PLEASE PROMISE YOU WILL COME TO ME
IN DREAMS THAT I FOREVER SEE.
YOUR SMILING FACE WILL ALWAYS BE.
THEN I’LL KNOW THAT I CAN SAY GOODBYE
GOODBYE
GOODBYE…
In Loving Remembrance
of
Amy Elizabeth Bruno-Linder
1961-2024
When you get ready to die,
do not worry about the usual things,
like following rituals or taking care of everyday business.
Be prepared so that you can die in the best way possible.
Use all the mighty influence of those powerful strong minutes of death,
when a person exists partially in the other world,
and his words and deeds
have special power over those who remain in this world.
Leo Tolstoy
A Calendar of Wisdom
Dying people answer research questionnaires
to determine their quality of life,
but neither they nor most people around them
are willing to ask for quality of death,
or advocate for one, or make one,
or imagine quality of death as the last privilege of a dying person.
Stephen Jenkinson
Die Wise
When you have overcome the fear of death
you will have overcome death itself.
Do not ever think that anyone overcomes death
until he has overcome the fear of death,
until he can agree within himself,
“Living or dead, I’m still alive.
Living or dead, I can never be separated from the love of God,
so it is not important to me whether I’m alive or dead
because dead or alive, I’m alive in God.”
In that kind of overcoming, death has no power;
there is then no sting in passing from human sight.
By that time you realize that everyone has to pass from human sight
at least to make room for someone else to come along.
But passing from human sight is no longer a tragedy;
passing from human sight is no longer a source of grieving.
Joel S.. Goldsmith
The Journey Back to the Father's House
Questioner:
Yesterday I couldn’t sleep. When I was lying on my bed
I kept hearing sounds and seeing lights.
I was scared, sweating.
I thought I was dying.
Maharaja:
Whatever is happening is happening as it should.
Even if whatever you felt was dying actually was dying,
you were not dead.
Keep that firmly in mind.
Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj
Seeds of Consciousness
The chief mourner does not always attend the funeral.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
I have always found that the people who have quite genuinely died to themselves
make no claims of any kind to their own part in the process .
They think of themselves as lazy and lucky .
If they did anything at all , it was so simple that anyone else could do the same —
for all that they have done is to recognize a universal fact of life ,
something as true of the weak and foolish as of the wise and strong .
They would even say that in this respect
there is some advantage in being weak and foolish ,
for the possession of a strong will and a clever head
makes some things very difficult to see .
Alan W. Watts
Become What You Are
Shamanism is closely related to death and dying.
The career of many shamans begins with a spontaneous visionary state.
This initiatory crisis, or “shamanic illness,” as Western anthropologists call it,
usually takes the form of a profound experience
of psychospiritual death and rebirth
and represents extraordinary experiential training for actual death.
After the experience of death, dismemberment, and total annihilation,
the shaman experiences rebirth.
He or she acquires new flesh, new blood, and new eyes
and ascends to the supernal realms.
Stanislav Grof
The Ultimate Journey
And now here I am living in this unimaginable world.
It feels really strange, and I can’t tell if I’m fortunate or not.
Maybe it doesn’t matter.
For me—and for everybody else, probably—
this is my first experience growing old,
and the emotions I’m having, too, are all first-time feelings.
If it were something I’d experienced before,
then I’d be able to understand it more clearly,
but this is the first time, so I can’t.
For now all I can do is put off making any detailed judgments
and accept things as they are.
Just like I accept the sky, the clouds, and the river.
And there’s also something kind of comical about it all,
something you don’t want to discard completely.
Haruki Murakama
What I Talk About When I Talk About Running
And that’s my very promising job,
to find a way to oblige people
to learn something they don’t want to learn
and to learn it well and to learn it soon.
I have to teach people
how to love someone who’s leaving,
not someone who’s staying.
Nobody wants to learn to love like that.
Stephen Jenkinson
Die Wise
That white light you hear of people seeing during near-death experiences?
It’s love. Seen by “tired” eyes.
You sense both that it emanates from intelligence
and that in some uncanny way it is that intelligence.
You get that it knows you far better than you know yourself;
it understands you; it adores you.
Like a doting parent, times infinity.
This recognition, being so understood, is “heaven.”
You are the face of God as It’s never before been seen.
Mike Dooley
The Top Ten Things Dead People Want to Tell YOU
From a Dearly Departed
I’ve never cried as much as I have here. Or laughed.
I thought I knew what to expect when I died—
you know, either “God, judgment, a few deceased relatives”
or “lights out, game over, absolute nothingness”—
but I had no idea.
Nothing could have prepared me for all I’ve found.
How the whole world had it so wrong is beyond me.
If I had had just an inkling of the truth about life
and what I now know while I was alive,
things would have been so different for me!
Imagine living amid the all-or-nothing romance of time and space
while learning how to change what you don’t like,
add more of what you do,
and never be afraid of anything!
Where everything is so precious, ephemeral, and fantastic!
Where there is so much love, love, love,
everywhere, always.
Why didn’t I see it then?
Mike Dooley
The Top Ten Things Dead People Want to Tell YOU
Two conditions must exist
in order to classify a death as a suicide.
1. You must be aware of what you are doing—
that is, you must be making a conscious choice to die.
2. You must be making the choice to die
for the purpose of escaping, rather than completing, your life.
Neale Donald Walsch
Home With God
WHAT HAPPENS WHEN YOU DIE
Well, first of all, you won’t.
Which is all you really have to know about death
and why it’s the first thing “dead” people want to tell you.
Many of them found this hard to believe themselves at first,
gazing upon their own funerals,
lingering around their old stomping grounds,
stunned and amazed as they gestured and shouted to the friends left behind.
There’s an abrupt disconnect, of course,
that comes from leaving behind all things time and space
and learning to maneuver in the unseen.
The nature of this transition depends entirely
on the beliefs of the dearly departed at the time of transition,
because their beliefs and thoughts carry over to their new environs.
Mike Dooley
The Top Ten Things Dead People Want to Tell YOU
IF I WOKE UP
IN THE MORNING
AND NOTHING HURT,
I WOULD THINK
I WAS DEAD
Tourist T-Shirt
Virginia Beach, Virginia
All our feelings have significance
only in relation to their relative opposites.
While the human individual abhors pain and discomfort,
he would never be able to understand, let alone appreciate,
pleasure and comfort by themselves.
And yet, in his abysmal ignorance, he forgets this basic fact of life
and strives with all his might for pleasure without pain
and life without death.
Ramesh S. Balsekar
Final Truth: A Guide to Ultimate Understanding
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