Welcome to Death Knells

---

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 

When human beings are living in the spiritual world

 between death and a new birth,

 they direct their longing to our physical world 

somewhat as physical human beings 

direct their longing to the spiritual world. 

Human beings between death and a new birth

 expect people on earth to show and radiate up to them 

knowledge that can be acquired only on earth.  

The earth has been summoned to life 

so that what is possible nowhere else may come into being. 

Knowledge of the spiritual worlds— 

which means more than vision, more than merely looking on— 

can arise only on earth.  

 We ourselves are living books for the dead.

Rudolf Steiner

Staying Connected

The very ancient Khemitians (Egyptians), over 10,000 years ago, 

did not have a word in their language for death. 

They used the phrases “Westing,” or “going to the West,” 

for the release of the physical form,

 but did not see the body as the total existence. 

The end of the physical envelope 

was not the cessation of consciousness.

Stephen S. Mehler, MA

Death will be the gateway

 to being more “alive” than you now suspect is possible.

Mike Dooley

The Top Ten Things Dead People Want to Tell YOU 

The body is eternal,

 but not as you suspect. 

Any piece of the body, any increment of it,

 can be comprehended as the Divine. 

And, because the energy that is the Divine cannot be extinguished, 

it is always re-known, or re-articulated, 

spoken anew in another form. 

The attachment to an identity through form 

is the only challenge you are really facing.

Paul Selig

Beyond the Known: Realization 

Embodied birth and disembodied death

Present the parenthesis of the humancentric dream

Beyond this illusory beginning and end,

True identity is experienced

As Life without punctuation

As Life eternal.

Live beyond this parenthesis while embodied.

Do not wait to die.

FloatingWorlds

Learning to die as an individual 

means letting go of our predispositions and fear . 

Learning to die as a civilization 

means letting go of this particular way of life 

and its ideas of identity , freedom , success , and progress . 

These two ways of learning to die 

come together in the role of the humanist thinker : 

the one who is willing to stop and ask troublesome questions , 

the one who is willing to interrupt ,

the one who resonates on other channels 

and with slower , deeper rhythms .

Roy Scranton:

 Learning to Die in the Anthropocene: Reflections on the End of a Civilization 

A correct grasp of how to die necessarily produces 

an expanded philosophy of how to live more abundantly,

 however short or long your time of physical life. 

 A conscious death allows you to utilize the death process

 in a way that transforms 

what appears to be a mere biological disfunction, or accident,

 into a spiritual art form—

the tool for the transformation of consciousness that it should be. 

 Conscious dying has effects exponentially powerful,

 benign and beneficial to the individual, 

society and all life.

Anya Foos-Graber

 Deathing

Q: Describe some of the planes into which entities pass

 on experiencing the change called death.

A: Passing from the material consciousness

 to a spiritual or cosmic, or outer consciousness,

 oft does an entity or being not become conscious of that about it; 

much in the same manner as an entity born into the material plane 

only becomes conscious gradually 

of that designated as time and space 

for the material or third dimensional plane. 

In the passage the entity becomes conscious, 

or the recognition of being in a fourth or higher  dimensional plane takes place, 

much in the same way as the consciousness is gained in the material. 

For, as we have given,

 that we see manifested in the material plane

 is but a shadow of that in the spiritual plane.

Edgar Cayce

Beyond Death 

Late middle age, on the cusp of old age, is a strangely liminal time. 

I can feel both the desire to die, 

to relax back into the darkness from which I came, 

and the will to live both present within me. 

The movie of waking life is like the ocean’s play on the surface, 

while at its depth, the ocean is dark and silent. 

We love the adventure of being a wave,

 roiling and dancing, moving this way and that, especially in our youth, 

and then, more and more as we age, 

we love relaxing back into the deep, 

melting into shapelessness, 

dissolving back into the vastness 

that we have never actually left.

Joan Tollifson 

Death: The End of Self-Improvement 

Q:  I don’t understand why, if this is a dream, death is necessary.

A: In a word, it is not. Does that surprise you? 

It is only your acceptance of it which makes it apparently so.

 Should you at this moment absolutely discard 

the very firm belief that you hold that says,

 “I was born; I will die, there is a beginning; there is an end, there are transitions,”

 you would no longer experience death.

 The meaning of that which you believe 

is transferred into those things you experience within your physical life. 

If there is no longer meaning to beginning and end, to birth and death,

 how could you possibly experience it? 

You see infinite life as being a process 

of going between the physical and discarnate state. 

If you saw infinite life as being a continuous flow 

without the need for interruption,

 then that would be the way you would experience it.

 Too simple? 

If you truly had no problem with this,

 you would never die.

Tom Carpenter

  Dialogue on Awakening

I am not quite sure whether I am dreaming or remembering, 

whether I have lived my life or dreamed it. 

Just as dreams do, 

memory makes me profoundly aware of the unreality, 

the evanescence of the world,

 a fleeting image in the moving water.

 Eugene Ionesco

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 

The majority of humans have a concept of life 

which is leading them to death: 

physical death or spiritual death, and sometimes both.

Of course, we are all going to die one day, 

but that shouldn’t stop us

 from studying the one true science: the science of life. 

 To be alive means to be in a constant state of wonder,

 to always see people and things

 as if for the first time.

Omraam Mikhaël Aïvanhov

 Sons and Daughters of God

Like the moon,

 so life surely has a side that is constantly turned away from us,

 and which is not life’s opposite,

 but its completion to perfection, to plenitude, 

to the truly whole and full sphere and globe of Being. 

 I shall not say that one should love death, 

but one should love life with such magnanimity, 

and without calculating exceptions,

 that one involuntarily always includes death 

(as the averted half of life) 

and loves it along with life.  

It is thinkable that death stands infinitely nearer to us than life itself.

Ranier Maria Rilke

 Letters

Many people don’t realize 

until they are on their deathbed and everything external falls away 

that no thing ever had anything to do with who they are.

 In the proximity of death, 

the whole concept of ownership stands revealed as ultimately meaningless.

 In the last moments of their life,

 they then also realize 

that while they were looking throughout their lives 

for a more complete sense of self, 

what they were really looking for, their Being,

 had actually always already been there, 

but had been largely obscured 

by their identification with things,

 which ultimately means identification with their mind.

Eckhart Tolle

Oneness with All Life 

For Christians, one’s last thought 

should be the sober commending of one’s soul to God, 

not a blissful “Aaaaah …” 

Montaigne’s own experience apparently 

included no thoughts of God at all. 

Nor did it seem to occur to him 

that dying inebriated and surrounded by wenches

 might jeopardize a Christian afterlife. 

He was more interested in his purely secular realization 

that human psychology, and nature in general,

 were the dying man’s best friends. 

And it now seemed to him that the only people 

who regularly died as bravely as philosophers should

 were those who knew no philosophy at all:

the uneducated peasants in his local estates and villages.

 “I never saw one of my peasant neighbors 

cogitating over the countenance and assurance 

with which he would pass this last hour,” he wrote—

not that he would necessarily have known if they did.

 Nature took care of them. 

It taught them not to think about death 

except when they were dying,

 and very little even then.

 Philosophers find it hard to leave the world 

because they try to maintain control. 

So much for “To philosophize is to learn how to die.”

 Philosophy looked more like a way of teaching people 

to unlearn the natural skill

 that every peasant had by birthright.

Sarah Bakewell 

How to Live: Or A Life of Montaigne in One Question and Twenty Attempts at an Answer

Do I fear death? 

 Not at all. 

 I've seen far too many near-death experiences to fear death. 

 I've also seen too many end-of-life experiences to fear death.

    Now, do people fear death?  Yes. 

 Why? 

 Because they haven't done the process of dying. 

 Most people are afraid of the process of dying, 

rather than the switching off. 

 But if they looked at the data, 

their fear of death would go. 

 If you accept that the near-death experience,

 particularly in cardiac arrest, 

is a good model for dying, 

you have nothing to fear at all. 

 You're looked after the whole way.

  So when your time comes, enjoy.

Peter Fenwick

 quoted in Death Makes Life Possible by Marilyn Schlitz

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? 

The idea that the soul will rejoin with the ecstatic 

just because the body is rotten- that is all fantasy. 

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. 

If you make love with the divine now, in the next 

life you will have the face of satisfied desire. 

Kabir

The meaning of death

 is quite simply the deprivation of a man's property

 consequent upon his being pitched into another world 

which does not correspond to this. 

  If there was anything in the world

the presence of which had become familiar to him 

and in which he had found consolation and peace, 

they he will greatly lament for it after he dies, 

and feel the greatest sorrow over losing it.  

However, had he taken pleasure only in the remembrance of God, 

and consoled himself with Him alone, 

then his will be great bliss and perfect happiness. 

 For the barriers which lay between him and his Beloved 

will now be removed,

 and he will be free of the obstacles and care of the world,

 all of which had distracted him from the remembrance of God.  

Al-Ghazali

The Remembrance of Death and the Afterlife

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 alone 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

To most people, death remains a hidden secret,

 as eroticized as it is feared.

 We are irresistibly attracted 

by the very anxieties we find most terrifying;

we are drawn to them by a primitive excitement 

that arises from flirtation with danger.

 Moths and flames, 

mankind and death—

there is little difference.

Sherwin B. Nuland 

How We Die: Reflections on Life's Final Chapter

After the death of his lifelong friend the engineer Michele Besso,

 Einstein sent a letter of condolence to Besso’s family.

 He wrote that, ‘Now [Besso] has departed from this strange world a little ahead of me. That means nothing.

 For us believing physicists ,the distinction between past, present, and future

 only has the meaning of an illusion, though a persistent one.’ 

Einstein himself died one month later. 

Or at least, that is how it appears to those of us trapped

 within the persistent illusion of linear time. 

From Einstein’s perspective, 

he and Besso are still alive and joking around, 

and neither of them has been born yet,

 and they have been dead and gone for uncountable millennia. 

Blake displays a similar understanding 

about the illusion of passing time in Jerusalem, 

where he writes that, ‘I see the Past, Present & Future, existing all at once.’

John Higgs

William Blake vs. the World

Know that were there to lie before the hapless bondsman

 no terror, calamity or torment save that of the death agonies alone,

 these would suffice to render his life miserable and to cloud his happiness, 

and would banish his heedlessness and his distraction. 

 It is right that his thoughts should dwell at length

 upon this matter (death), 

and that he should take the greatest care in preparing himself for it,

 not least because he is, with every breath, in its vicinity.  

Al-Ghazali

The Remembrance of Death and the Afterlife

I enjoy life twice as much as others do.

Now that I see my life limited in time, 

I want to extend it in weight. 

I want to arrest the speed of its flight 

by the speed of my grasp 

and by the vigor of my use 

to compensate for the haste of its flow. 

 To the extent that the possession of life is short, 

I have to make it the more profound and full.

Montaigne

Death is but a transition from this life to another existence

 where there is no more pain or anguish . 

That knowledge helps me , 

in my own losses and grief , 

to know that those I care for are okay .

 That I will see them again . 

And those I love now ,

 I will look after when I am gone .

 I will laugh with them and smile at them.

 And if they didn’t believe in life after death ,

 I would make funny faces at them and say ,

 ‘ Ha ha , we are here and okay . ’ 

I know that the only thing that really lasts forever

 is love ,

 and I will miss so much about the life I had 

and the people I have lost. 

Elisabeth Kübler-Ross

 On Grief and Grieving:

 Finding the Meaning of Grief Through the Five Stages of Loss 

There is no death, 

but only the visible becoming invisible. 

It is the nature of consciousness 

that the invisible again becomes visible,

 which is called as rebirth.

 It is not an action of any individual. 

The consciousness doesn’t have the trouble of coming and going.

 You should know your deathless nature.

You should develop inner faith about your immortality.

 Let your consciousness know 

that it is neither visible nor invisible, 

but only due to it, things are seen.

 This doesn’t involve any activity,

 but it is only making consciousness aware of itself.

Shri Nisargadatta Maharaj

 Self-Love, The Original Dream

The aspect of life which most stirs my soul 

is the ability to share in an undertaking, 

in a reality, more enduring than myself; 

it is in this spirit and with this purpose in view

 that I try to perfect myself and to master things a little more.

 When death lays its hand upon me 

it will leave intact these things, these ideas, these realities

 which are more solid and more precious than I; 

moreover my faith in Providence makes me believe

 that death comes at its own fixed moment, 

a moment of mysterious and special fruitfulness 

not only for the supernatural destiny of the soul 

but also for the further progress of the earth.

Teilhard de Chardin

Hymn of The Universe

If you die in an accident, physically, it is painful 

just before you lose consciousness of the physical plane

 because your body has been injured. 

But after you lose consciousness 

it is very easy and natural.

 It’s as natural as anything else in life:

 making love, walking, running, swimming. 

It is just another part of life.

 There’s no such thing as dying. 

You just go on to a different stage of your life. 

Dying is pleasant. 

If people are worried about it,

 tell them to go to a place in the river that has a deep pool. 

Tell them to dive down to the bottom of the pool. 

And then, at the bottom push up vigorously with their feet 

and come plunging up to the surface. 

Tell them it is like that.

Dolores Cannon

 Between Death and Life:  Conversations With A Spirit

How does the experience of life change 

when we stop denying death? 

Death, when present, brings us face to face with our mortality. 

 Now is the most important moment.

 Our mortality seems to come to life. 

  There is more here, present, now, than we knew. 

 We were busy wanting tomorrow to come 

or waiting for today to be over.  

Death brings “today” in the door 

and makes you shake hands. 

Suddenly life is fuller, richer than before. 

 There is more imagination.  

With death comes depth. 

Gail Thomas

  Healing Pandora

The Real does not die, 

the unreal never lived.

Nisargadatta

They travel in dreamlands, 

each wrapped up in his own dream.

What is remembered, 

is but another dream –

Nisargadatta

The ego fights mightily 

against the silence that could deliver it into wholeness.

The silence of death 

leads to the silence of the Self. 

“Die before you die,” say the Sufis.

 The only way to this silence 

is through the constant practice 

of being the witness to all that the ego does.

Vicki Woodyard

Bigger Than The Sky

Dying is traumatizing 

when it is happening in a place and time

 that will not make room 

for dying in its way of living. 

It is not dying that is traumatic; 

it is dying in a death-phobic culture that is traumatic.

Stephen Jenkinson

Die Wise: A Manifesto for Sanity and Soul 

Did you know that the cross of Christian crucifixion

 originated with the dawn of civilization as an ancient pagan ritual

 designed to not offend ancient nature gods?

 The first humans tried to keep death at bay

 by elevating it on a cross to rise above their sacred earth. 

After hundreds of years crucifixion lost its spiritual significance 

and became an instrument of torture, punishment, and execution 

when rediscovered by Alexander the Great, 

who brought it back to Europe in 400 BC. 

Then it was reinvented again by Rome,

 again as torture, with suffocation occurring after several days.

 In ancient Egypt, to capture and mummify dangerous animals 

like hundreds of crocodiles

 who served as messengers from this world to the next 

demonstrated the ancients’ reverence for death. 

And did you know that a tribe in Africa 

hangs the skull of the deceased over their doorway

 and consults the dead regularly? 

From the study of death, 

my students and I learned a lot.

John Abraham

How to Get the Death You Want: A Practical and Moral Guide 

Death is not an event; it is a process.

 As the Book of Common Prayer tells us, 

"In the midst of life we are in death." 

These reminders of mortality are reporting the course of a battle 

that has been in progress on the cellular level 

since the moment we were conceived, 

when life and death began together.

 A gray hair comes to report 

that one small portion of the field has fallen. 

And time is on the other side. 

As we enter our thirties or forties, 

the pace of life seems to accelerate.

 The reminders become more frequent,

 more difficult to ignore. 

There is nothing tragic about this.

 Youth is passing, 

and with it the pleasures of youth;

 these messages come to remind us

 that it is time to move on to another stage of life.

 What is tragic is trying to stay behind.

Yama would say,

 "You have finished with all this.

Why go through it again and again? 

The experiments are over; 

it is time to reflect and learn."

Eknath Easwaran

Essence of the Upanishads: A Key to Indian Spirituality 

Life is a projection, life is a mirage;

Death is a projection, death is an illusion;

Birth is a projection, birth is a dream; 

This very existence is a projection, this existence is a dream. 

The taste of coffee is a projection, so even coffee is an illusion. 

However contrived or fake it feels, 

remind yourself of the illusory nature of samsara.

 Ideas often feel fake until you get used to them,

 but faking it is the best preparation

 for the moment of death.

Dzongsar Jamyang Khyentse 

Living Is Dying: How to Prepare for Death, Dying and Beyond

‘Grief for the death of a loved one is selfishness 

and but retards the greater good the loved one should be enjoying. 

Grief from a sense of loss 

is really rebellion against the Action of a Law 

that has seen fit to give another

 greater opportunity for rest and growth,

 because nothing in the Universe goes backward,

 and all—no matter what the temporary appearance—

is moving forward to greater and greater Joy and Perfection.

Godfre Ray King

  The Magic Presence 

To fear death, gentlemen,

 is no other than to think oneself wise when one is not,

 to think one knows what one does not know. 

No one knows whether death may not be 

the greatest of all blessings for a man, 

yet men fear it

 as if they knew that it is the greatest of evils.

And surely it is the most blameworthy ignorance 

to believe that one knows what one does not know.

Socrates

During that period you refer to as old age, 

once again emotionally and psychologically

 the individual is less bound by physical time.

 He no longer, that is the whole self no longer,

 makes available sufficient psychic energy 

 for the maintenance of the physical organism. 

The main focus of the whole self has already begun to stray,

 and the energies used in necessary pattern organization for the physical plane

 are already being returned,

 taken from their attention to physical matters, 

and becoming more attuned to the whole self 

from which they were originally delegated.

Jane Roberts 

The Early Sessions: Book 3 of The Seth Material 

Life is a struggle, 

but death is only a rest 

for those who have gone through the struggle of life.

 For those who did not live,

 death brings nothing but fear. 

For one who is alive, 

death simply does not exist. 

It is out of the struggles of life 

that a restful death is earned. 

It is earned through living. 

Therefore, the one who dies a death that is earned

 attains deathlessness.

 Like a Jesus, like a Socrates.

 Earn death – 

that is the only essential challenge of life.

Osho

Love Letters to Life

The veil 

is where the everyday illusion of separation

meets the divine truth of eternity and universal interconnection. 

 On Halloween, Samhain,  

the "veil between the worlds" is at its thinnest, 

and the dead can and do walk among the living. 

 Communion with the other side is not as difficult as you think.

 It is just getting past the blocks you have to doing it,

 and reawakening and remembering 

the natural ability you have to connect. 

Once you reawaken your natural ability —

the ability you had as a child—

you will be connected all the time.

The Hoodwitch

www.thehoodwitch.com

When you lose a loved one, you suffer.

 But if you know how to look deeply,

 you have a chance to realize that his or her nature

 is truly the nature of no birth, no death. 

There is manifestation

 and there is the cessation of manifestation 

in order to have another manifestation

The day my mother died, I wrote in my journal, 

“A serious misfortune of my life has arrived.” 

I suffered for more than one year after the passing away of my mother.

But one night, in the highlands of Vietnam,

 I was sleeping in the hut in my hermitage. 

I dreamed of my mother. 

I saw myself sitting with her,

 and we were having a wonderful talk.

 She looked young and beautiful, her hair flowing down. 

It was so pleasant to sit there and talk to her

 as if she had never died. 

When I woke up it was about two in the morning, 

and I felt very strongly that I had never lost my mother.

 The impression that my mother was still with me was very clear.

 I understood then that the idea of having lost my mother 

was just an idea.

 It was obvious in that moment 

that my mother is always alive in me.

If you can stop and look deeply,

 you will be able to recognize your beloved one 

manifesting again and again in many forms. 

You will again embrace the joy of life.

Thich Nhat Hanh 

No Death, No Fear: Comforting Wisdom for Life

Dedicated to Evert and Wendy

Godspeed, Evert

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. 

The Buddha taught that 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: Comforting Wisdom for Life

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, Lorraine Sinkler

The Journey Back to the Father's House

A serving girl in the house in which Swedenborg was staying, Elizabeth Reynolds, 

said that he had told her the exact date of his own death. 

She said that he seemed as happy about it

 as if he was ‘going on holiday or to some merrymaking’.

 On the morning of the predicted day, 

he was ill in bed, and visited by his friend Pastor Ferelius. 

Realising that time was short,

 Ferelius asked Swedenborg if he wanted to recant. 

 Was there anything, perhaps, that he wanted to confess to God?

 Swedenborg raised himself up on his bed,

 put his hand on his heart, and said,

 ‘As truly as you see me before your eyes,

 so true is everything that I have written; 

and I could have said more had it been permitted.

 When you enter eternity you will see everything, 

and then you and I shall have much to talk about.’ 

He died that afternoon, as predicted.

John Higgs 

William Blake vs. the World 

Of course I do not think about death and dying all the time. 

Nor does anyone. 

La Rochefoucauld commented: 

“One can no more look steadily at death than at the sun.” 

At the same time

 we must not neglect one of the essential realities of life,

 in ignoring death. 

People tend to build up fears about topics hidden from them,

 and these fears grow to be worse than the realities.

John Abraham

How to Get the Death You Want: A Practical and Moral Guide 

The death of the small self 

cannot be accomplished in a lasting or effective way

 if we deny or circumvent the fear of physical death;

 yet working with small deaths 

can loosen the intense anxieties that surround physical death. 

There is a natural path between impermanence and death, 

and if we remain unwilling to follow it through, 

then we short-circuit the remarkable benefits of continuous dying.

 To approach the finality of our bodies 

while paying no attention to the mini-deaths of daily life 

is like confusing diamonds with pebbles 

and throwing them away. 

Nothing endures but change, 

and accepting this has the potential 

to transform the dread of dying into joyful living.

Yongey Mingyur  Rinpoche,  Helen Tworkov 

In Love with the World: A Monk's Journey Through the Bardos of Living and Dying

Our dread of physical death 

makes us resist the very idea of dying every day. 

We confuse the renewable deaths of our mental states 

with the ultimate death of our bodies. 

When we do this,

 every form of death and dying looms on the horizon

 as an inevitable nightmare, 

something that we spend our lives wishing will not happen.

 Actually, with some investigation, 

we can learn that what we dread as a future event

 is happening all the time.

Yongey Mingyur  Rinpoche,  Helen Tworkov 

In Love with the World: A Monk's Journey Through the Bardos of Living and Dying

Jesus prays,

 uncertain of the will of the Father,

 and is afraid of death. 

But once he knows what it is, 

he goes to meet it and offer himself up. 

Let us be going. 

He went forth.

Blaise Pascal

Pensees