This site shares Life-affirming meditations
that heal misconceptions about Death.
Living beautifully and dying beautifully,
Embrace Death as Birth
into limitless Life Awareness.
Why are you afraid of death?
Is it perhaps because you do not know how to live?
If you knew how to live fully, would you be afraid of death?
Life for you is sorrow, and so you are much more interested in death.
You feel that perhaps there will be happiness after death.
But that is a tremendous problem,
and I do not know if you want to go into it.
After all, fear is at the bottom of all this—
fear of dying, fear of living, fear of suffering.
If you cannot understand what it is that causes fear and be free of it,
then it does not matter very much whether you are living or dead.
Jiddu Krishnamurti
The Book of Life: Daily Meditations with Krishnamurti
I’ve often said to people that the way to really live is to die. The passport to living is to imagine yourself in your grave. Imagine that you’re lying in your coffin.
Awareness
Anthony De Mello
There is sorrow in death;
there is sorrow when you are looking forward to something, and it does not happen; there is sorrow when a nation runs down, goes to seed;
and there is the sorrow of corruption,
not only in the collective, but also in the individual.
… Sorrow has an ending,
but it does not come about through any system or method.
There is no sorrow when there is perception of what is.
Jiddu Krishnamurti
The Book of Life: Daily Meditations with Krishnamurti
Have you ever tried dying to a pleasure voluntarily, not forcibly?
Ordinarily when you die you don’t want to;
death comes and takes you away;
it is not a voluntary act, except in suicide.
But have you ever tried dying voluntarily, easily,
felt that sense of the abandonment of pleasure?
If you experiment with dying to little things—t
hat is good enough. Just to die to little pleasures—
with ease, with comfort, with a smile—is enough,
for then you will see that your mind is capable of dying to many things,
dying to all memories.
Jiddu Krishnamurti
The Book of Life: Daily Meditations with Krishnamurti
Death does not exist.
When that moment comes for you
to leave behind your physical body
and emerge from the density that you now understand,
there is nothing that could prepare you
for the exquisiteness that will be yours
at that very moment in time.
It will be a surprising delight.
Karen Peebles
Beyond the Other Side of Suicide
I remembered don Juan telling me once
that death might be behind anything imaginable,
even behind a dot on my writing pad.
He gave me then the definitive metaphor of my death.
I had told him that once while walking on Hollywood Boulevard in Los Angeles
I had heard the sound of a trumpet playing an old, idiotic popular tune.
The music was coming from a record shop across the street.
Never had I heard a more beautiful sound.
I became enraptured by it.
I had to sit down on the curb.
The limpid brass sound of that trumpet was going directly to my brain.
I felt it just above my right temple.
It soothed me until I was drunk with it.
When it concluded, I knew that there would be no way
of ever repeating that experience,
and I had enough detachment not to rush into the store
and buy the record and a stereo set to play it on.
Don Juan said that it had been a sign
given to me by the powers that rule the destiny of men.
When the time comes for me to leave the world,
in whatever form,
I will hear the same sound of that trumpet,
the same idiotic tune,
the same peerless trumpeter.
Carlos Castaneda
Eagle's Gift
You came into the world with a cry—
with the very first breath you drew you gave a cry—
and many people spend their whole lives crying and protesting,
right down to the grave.
When, however, you understand that this present life
is only one day in your long life,
and that at the change called death
you simply disappear onto the next plane,
to come back again later on,
then the events of this particular life
appear in their true proportion,
and then you begin to have dominion.
The events of this life will not appear less important
because of your new knowledge,
but they will no longer intimidate you,
because you will know that you can control them.
No seeming misfortune will any longer have power
to break your heart or weaken your courage.
You will understand life
as the wondrous opportunity and the glorious gift that it is.
Emmet Fox
The Emmet Fox Reader
The so-called dead are very sensitive to our thoughts
for a considerable time after they have passed over to the other side,
and for this reason excessive grief is to be deprecated.
It saddens them and prevents their focusing their attention
as they should upon the new life which they are starting.
Of course, it seems very hard to tell people not to grieve
when one whom they have dearly loved passes out of sight;
but the fact remains that excessive grief is bad for both parties.
Emmet Fox
The Emmet Fox Reader
Some of us are born restless,
like misfits who are never satisfied
by the offers of religion, science, and philosophy.
Some of us don’t want
the comfort of conformity and tradition,
so we accept the quest for truth
as an individual journey
that mirrors the process of our own death.
Nevit O. Ergin, Will Johnson
The Forbidden Rumi
You are no longer concerned with where you fall,
your manner of death, the pain.
You no longer care, don’t feel the need to.
This is only the end of a night,
the last of your nights,
the culmination of your entire life.
Ending in this perfect fall.
All of it, everything, has been a flash.
You don’t understand it, but it’s beautiful...
Nukila Amal
The Original Dream
Today people think:
when a human being has passed through the gate of death,
his activity ceases as far as the physical world is concerned.
But indeed it is not so!
There is a living and perpetual intercourse
between the so-called dead and the so-called living.
These who have passed through the gate of death
have not ceased to be present;
it is only that our eyes have ceased to see them.
They are there in very truth.
Rudolf Steiner
The Dead Are With Us
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
Time was never meant to be our enemy.
We have turned it into one,
by saying things like “I’m running out of time” or “Time’s up,”
which implies that human beings are trapped in the prison of time
with no chance of escape,
at least not until death reveals if the hope of an afterlife is true.
Eternity is timeless,
and when any religious faith promises eternal life, two things are involved.
One is the absence of time’s afflictions,
such as growing old and dying.
The second promise is much more abstract.
After death we become timeless.
Literally without time
in the “zone of eternity” where souls abide.
But why wait for an afterlife?
If time is an illusion,
we should be able to step out of it whenever we want,
simply by living in the present moment—
then the value of going to Heaven will be achieved.
Deepak Chopra, Menas C. Kafatos
You Are the Universe
According to Western neuroscience,
consciousness is an epiphenomenon of matter,
a product of the physiological processes in the brain,
and thus critically dependent on the body.
The death of the body, more specifically the brain,
is seen as the absolute end of any form of conscious activity.
Belief in life after death, posthumous journey of the soul,
abodes of the Beyond, and reincarnation
have been relegated to the realm of fairy tales and handbooks of psychiatry
and are seen as products of wishful thinking of primitive or simple-minded people
who are unable to accept the obvious biological imperative of death.
This approach has pathologized much of the spiritual and ritual history of humanity. Very few people, including most scientists,
realize that we have absolutely no proof
that consciousness is actually produced by the brain.
Moreover, we do not have even a remote notion how this could possibly happen;
no scientist has ever attempted to specifically address
how the formidable gap between matter and consciousness could be bridged.
Stanislav Grof
The Ultimate Journey
Modern psychology has discovered
how powerful the birth trauma is to the individual’s life.
What about the “death trauma”?
If one believes in the continuity of life,
should one not give it equal consideration?
Laura Huxley
This Timeless Moment
So live your life that the fear of death can never enter your heart.
Love your life, perfect your life, beautify all things in your life.
Seek to make your life long
and its purpose in the service of your people.
Prepare a noble death song
for the day when you go over the great divide.
When it comes your time to die,
be not like those whose hearts are filled with the fear of death,
so that when their time comes they weep and pray
for a little more time to live their lives over again in a different way.
Sing your death song and die like a hero going home.
~ Chief Tecumseh
(Crouching Tiger) Shawnee Nation 1768-1813
When someone dies,
feel free to continue the conversation,
but know that you are not speaking
to the limited person that you knew.
You are speaking to the essence.
Pat Rodegast, Judith Stanton
Emmanuel's Book III: What Is an Angel Doing Here?
You cannot imagine how many times
the swinging door of death has opened to receive you
and opened again to allow you to take birth.
The moment you are born,
you are anticipating the exit sign.
Tell a dying loved one
that the celebration is already arranged.
All the beings ever loved will be there at the greeting.
That is not some simplistic description,
but a limited way of saying “All is well.”
Fear is left at the deathbed.
If one is willing, it can be left now
by breathing a soft “yes”
into the fact of death itself.
Pat Rodegast, Judith Stanton
Emmanuel's Book III: What Is an Angel Doing Here?
British neurologist and Nobel-Laureate John Eccles
considered Impersonal Consciousness to be intracerebral,
and specified an area in the brain
where fusion of consciousness with brain takes place.
This region is called Supplementary Motor Area, SMA–
located at the top of the physical brain.
He also held that by a complex code,
the extra-celebral mind plays 50 million neurons in the SMA region.
Eccles believes that the non-physical mind
survives after the death of the physical body and brain.
This concept fits in perfectly with the spiritual concept
that is the Source–the Impersonal Consciousness–
which identifies itself with each body/ mind organism
and creates the separate entity with the sense of personal doership.
When the body dies,
the Consciousness identified with a particular body/ mind organism,
gets freed from the bondage of the organism
and becomes intermingled with the Impersonal Consciousness.
Ramesh S. Balsekar
The Relationship Between 'I' And 'Me'
The body’s transience inspires the way I work.
Biodegradability is a primary facet of my designs.
Wrapping the body in natural fiber is harmonious with death and decomposition.
When you consider life as a composition of notes,
everyone’s essence is a song.
Decomposition is our notes’ return to the bio-system
to be reworked into new compositions.
I use fabrication that won't hinder that process
and is palatable to the soil.
I think of the body as a gift that you give back to the earth.
You present the gift of your body in a beautiful wrapping
that life delicately opens and receives.
Pia Interlandi
Quote from Art of Dying Magazine, Volume III
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
Now, 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
The water of life is slipping through your fingers,
any moment and death may strike –
and you are trying to solve metaphysical puzzles?
“Who created the world?
Whether anybody created it or not?
Who is God?
What is his form?”
People go on constantly discussing, debating.
It seems they are avoiding something through these discussions.
They are avoiding existence.
They are trying to remain occupied in something
so that the reality of life and death is not encountered.
Osho
Nirvana: The Last Nightmare: Learning to Trust in Life
"God is not mysterious.
Sometimes God is frightening and horrible, distorted and bizarre.. .
but in the end, God is God,
and the Angel of Death is very much God,
come to take you home.
"The uninitiated see the Angel of Death
as a horrible, grotesque, distorted, terrifying figure,
but to those who are initiated,
who have died before they died,
the angel of death comes as a lover...
beautiful, seductive and compelling...
awe-inspiring, breath-taking.
"Breathtaking beauty-to take the breath-and the breath speaks,
`Let me return into thee."'
E. J. Gold
THE GREAT ADVENTURE: Talks on Living, Dying, and the Bardos
Death is not traumatic to the dying.
One moment you are alive and then you are not,
and there is little difference except you are free.
Do not anguish over what seems to be
the circumstances of sudden and chaotic death.
In truth, there is no such thing as “chaotic” anything,
and death itself is always most pleasant
to those who have died.
Pat Rodegast, Judith Stanton
Emmanuel's Book III: What Is an Angel Doing Here?
The World is afraid of dying,
I find bliss in dying.
Kabir
Ram Dass has said that it is hard for us to be with a dying person
until we learn how to see what is eternal,
so we can be there together as souls.
It’s simple, but it’s not easy.
A dying person needs you to be fully there, just being,
listening for what is needed with love and kindness
but not trying to impose ideas of how to die.
Just being what he calls “a loving rock,”
appreciating that you’re here,
that you’re two human beings on the edge of the mystery,
and that you can share your truth together.
You are not your roles.
You are two souls.
This is it.
Ram Dass, Mirabai Bush
Walking Each Other Home: Conversations on Loving and Dying
Dolphins, I learned from J. William Worden
of the Harvard Child Bereavement Study at Massachusetts General Hospital,
had been observed refusing to eat after the death of a mate.
Geese had been observed reacting to such a death
by flying and calling,
searching until they themselves
became disoriented and lost.
Joan Didion
The Year of Magical Thinking
Never the spirit was born;
the spirit shall cease to be never.
Never was time it was not;
End and Beginning are dreams.
Bhagavad Gita
Then I looked down and watched the progressive disappearance of my body.
Oh no! I must be dying. I need my body!
Panic mounted.
But then an intimate voice asked very quietly,
‘But who’s minding the store?’
I realized that although everything I knew myself to be was gone,
I was still fully aware.
This awareness was watching the whole drama.
The awareness was wise;
it spoke the truth.
I was one with it.
When I realized this,
I felt a profound calm I had never experienced before.
That which I am is beyond life and death.
All I could say was,
‘I’m home, I’m home, I’m home.’
Ram Dass, Mirabai Bush
Walking Each Other Home: Conversations on Loving and Dying
The body, like a mother,
is pregnant with the spiritual child;
death is the pain and stress of birth.
All the souls that have passed over to the next life
already are anxiously waiting to see
in what state that proud spirit will be born.
Yahiya Emerick
The Complete Idiot's Guide to Rumi Meditations
We do not come from dust,
nor do we return to dust.
We come from life,
and we are the conduit into other life.
We come from and return
to incomparably amazing plants and animals.
Even while we are alive,
our wastes are recycled
directly into beetles, grass, and trees,
which are recycled further into bees and butterflies
and on to flycatchers, finches, and hawks,
and back into grass
and on into deer, cows, goats, and us.
Bernd Heinrich
Life Everlasting: The Animal Way of Death
William Blake said to his friend Crabbe Robinson:
There is nothing like death.
Death is the best thing that can happen in life;
but most people die so late
and take such an unmerciful time in dying.
God knows ,
their neighbors never see them rise from the dead.
Neville Goddard
Awakened Imagination
We should let dead people look like dead people.
After sitting with a dead person for a day or so,
you can see the changes.
You are genuinely convinced that that soul, that personality,
is not there anymore.
It makes it a lot easier to tuck that person into the earth
and say goodbye.
In think it’s harder to bury somebody
embalmed to look like they're alive.
Ellen Macdonald
Quote from Art of Dying Magazine, Volume III
Dying in peace really means
living our waning days as well and peacefully as we are able
with the assistance of compassionately offered and sensibly applied medical treatments—no less and no more.
Dying in peace pertains to the months, weeks, and days of our demise,
during which we likely will seek and need to manage medical treatments
so as to obtain their benefits
yet keep from getting dragged into dying situations
we know we wish to avoid.
Bart Windrum
The Promised Landing: A Gateway to Peaceful Dying
Living (existence) is a spatial illusion,
while dying (non-existence) is a temporal illusion.
When the light of consciousness gets shut off,
we no longer exist
because we are no longer elaborated in space
and extended in duration.
But as what we ARE
we have never lived
and we cannot die.
Ramesh S. Balsekar
A Net of Jewels
The death-warning had nothing dismal about it for her;
no, it was remission of exile,
it was leave to come home.
Mark Twain
Joan of Arc
Don Juan commanded me to relax
and abandon myself to my death.
He said that I had to remain in there until I died
and that I had a chance either to die peacefully,
if I would make a supreme effort and let my terror possess me,
or I could die in agony,
if I chose to fight it.
He said that the energy I needed
to accept my terror was in my middle point,
and that the only way to succeed
was to acquiesce,
to surrender without surrendering.
Carlos Castaneda
Eagle's Gift
During our lifetimes,
we generally pay a lot of attention to our bodies,
but rarely think about what goes with us when we die.
We cannot, of course,
take any physical or material aspect of our lives with us when we die.
It is only the consciousness that goes with us.
It is also only the consciousness that experiences suffering
or, more accurately, is able to perceive the experience of suffering.
Most importantly, it is the consciousness itself
that can be transformed into wisdom during the dying process.
The majority of the time we are focused
on maintaining our physical body and material environment.
Anyen
Dying With Confidence
When one leaves his body in awareness consciously,
he can easily set the future course for the life within.
One who can witness this moment of transition
gets to glimpse and perceive life in ways
that might not otherwise be available to him.
As this transition is like a twilight zone,
you get to view it being away from both life and death.
The various yogic practices are designed and structured
to bring about this profound glimpse.
It is for this purpose that in many cultures of the world
the last moment of life or the moment of death
is considered very important.
Cheryl Simone, Sadhguru
Midnights With the Mystic
Lessons Learned About Sudden Death
A sudden death requires a different grieving process
than one that has been anticipated.
The grieving process may take longer to go through
when the death was sudden and unexpected.
The trauma associated with grieving a sudden death
is akin to PTSD and should be treated as such.
It is useful for a family to get therapy together
and for the surviving spouse or parent to also get individual help.
A grieving person needs emotional support,
not just financial donations,
especially if their loved one died suddenly.
Pat Miles, Suzanne Watson
Before All Is Said and Done:
Practical Advice on Living and Dying Well
Tantra believes in burning your inner light.
And Tantra says that with that light,
the past simply becomes irrelevant.
It never belonged to you.
Of course, it happened,
but happened as if in a dream
and you were fast asleep.
It happened, you did many things,
good and bad,
but they all happened in unconsciousness
, you were not responsible.
And suddenly everything of the past is burnt down,
a fresh and virgin being comes up –
this is sudden enlightenment.
Osho
Tantra
The conditions of life after death
are almost infinite in their variety,
but they can be calculated without difficulty
by any one who will take the trouble to understand the astral world
and to consider the character of the person concerned.
That character is not in the slightest degree changed by death;
the man's thoughts, emotions and desires
are exactly the same as before.
He is in every way the same man,
minus his physical body;
and his happiness or misery depends upon the extent
to which this loss of the physical body affects him.
Charles Webster Leadbeater
Works of Charles Webster Leadbeater
Remember that if there is a link of love
you will certainly meet again,
and that nothing that is good, or beautiful, or true,
can ever be lost.
On this plane we often see our friends or our dearly loved ones
go away to live in a distant country
knowing that we shall not see them again for several years—
and death is really nothing more than this.
Emmet Fox
The Emmet Fox Reader
Where there is a strong sense of bereavement;
or where the survivors are left in tragic circumstances,
the dead person will of course suffer acutely.
As a matter of fact, the so-called dead
are very sensitive to our thoughts for a considerable time
after they have passed over to the other side,
and for this reason excessive grief is to be deprecated.
It saddens them and prevents their focusing their attention
as they should upon the new life which they are starting.
Of course, it seems very hard to tell people not to grieve
when one whom they have dearly loved passes out of sight;
but the fact remains
that excessive grief is bad for both parties.
Emmet Fox
The Emmet Fox Reader
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 great earth burdens me with a body,
forces upon me the toil of life,
eases me in old age,
and calms me in death.
If life is good,
death is good also.
Zhuangzi
Simon Critchley:
The Book of Dead Philosophers
Birth is the entry to phenomenality.
Death is the exit from phenomenality.
All that requires insight is:
Who is born and who dies?
Or better stated:
What is born and what dies?
Wu Hsin
An Interlude in Eternity
Find out what it means to die -
not physically, that's inevitable -
but to die to everything that is known,
to die to your family, to your attachments,
to all the things that you have accumulated,
the known, the known pleasures, the known fears.
Die to that every minute
and you will see what it means to die
so that the mind is made fresh, young, and therefore innocent,
so that there is incarnation
not in a next life,
but the next day.
J Krishnamurti
Life and death should not be considered as opposites.
It is closer to the truth to speak of dying
as an entrance rather than an exit.
What the doorway of death offers
is a resurgence of tremendous vitality,
for you are entering from what could be described
as a watered down version of life
into the thing itself,
the vitality of the primary reality.
Pat Rodegast, Judith Stanton
Emmanuel's Book
It’s hard to be put in the position to play god
and make the decision to end a kitty’s life,
but our cats know we’ve always done the best we can for them,
and they harbor no ill will toward us when we make this difficult choice.
We do what we have to do,
and then life just continues on.
We have to remember the good times
and not get too pulled down into the sad.
Because neither the good nor the sad can be changed anyway.
They trust us and know we are doing what is best for them.
I imagine it's a relief to be a cat
and not comprehend death
nor think about not being on earth anymore.
It’s just another nap in the sunshine,
falling asleep
while the person they love pets them.
Take care, Nova.
Sam Rosenthal
shared upon the passing of his beloved cat, Nova
https://blacktapeforabluegirl.bandcamp.com/album/stellarpurr
Dying is the most important thing you do in your life.
It’s the great frontier for every one of us.
And loving is the art of living as a preparation for dying.
Allowing ourselves to dissolve into the ocean of love
is not just about leaving this body;
it is also the route to Oneness and unity with our own inner being,
the soul, while we are still here.
If you know how to live and to love,
you know how to die.
Ram Dass.
Walking Each Other Home:
Conversations on Loving and Dying
D
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