This site shares Life-affirming meditations
that heal misconceptions about Death.
Living beautifully and dying beautifully,
Embrace Death as Birth
into limitless Life Awareness.
In stillness, I,
light-bodied, set out for
the other world.
HAMON
Japanese Death Poems
Written by Zen Monks and Haiku Poets
on the Verge of Death
Everything’s alright, form is emptiness and
emptiness is form, and we’re here forever, in
one form or another, which is empty. Everything’s
alright, we’re not here, there, or anywhere.
Everything’s alright, cats sleep.
Jack Kerouac
The Scripture of the Golden Eternity
To this day all visitors to Saint Paul’s Monastery on Mt. Athos in Greece,
one of the most important sites of Orthodox spirituality,
will come face-to-face with a beautiful Greek saying
mounted on the wall of the reception area:
“If you die before you die,
you won’t die when you die.”
Brian C. Muraresku
The Immortality Key
Rabbi Lawrence Kushner has written extensively
about the process that he calls
a “rehearsal” for our moment of transition:
“Just as the death of each creature
is in turn a rehearsal for the death of a species
and a galaxy and a cosmos.
The great rhythm of going out and returning.
Now this kind of death is not an end
but only the beginning of a transformation
that will generate a rebirth.
You cannot be reborn
until you are willing to die.”
Brian C. Muraresku
The Immortality Key
I’ve observed a number of people die.
When they’ve made a relationship to death,
they’re usually able to let go
and make the transition more easily.
But if they’re afraid of death,
it can be painful to watch.
You see a terror in their eyes
as if they’re being pushed into a deep pit.
Having witnessed both of these kinds of death,
I know which way I want to go.
This has been a very important inspiration for me
to keep contemplating death.
Now, having worked with it for a long time,
I no longer see death as frightening.
And I’ve started to teach more about death
because I feel that being so afraid of it
is really unnecessary.
Pema Chodron
Welcoming the Unwelcome
For me, the good death includes being prepared to die,
with my affairs in order,
the good and bad messages delivered that need delivering.
The good death means
dying while I still have my mind sharp and aware;
it also means dying without having to endure
large amounts of suffering and pain.
The good death means accepting death as inevitable,
and not fighting it when the time comes.
This is my good death,
but as legendary psychotherapist Carl Jung said,
“It won’t help to hear what I think about death.
Your relationship to mortality is your own.”
Caitlin Doughty
I am going home,
to the home where I have never been in this body,
where I have never been in this washable suit.
Thomas Merton
The Other Side of the Mountain
The whole of my effort is to help you not to be afraid,
because only through the heart will you be reborn.
But before you are reborn,
you will have to die.
Nobody can be reborn before he dies.
So the whole message of Sufism, Zen, Hassidism –
these are all forms of Sufism –
is how to die.
The whole art of dying is the base.
I am teaching you here nothing except that:
how to die.
If you die,
you become available to infinite sources of life.
You die, really, in your present form.
It has become too narrow.
You only survive in it – you don’t live.
The tremendous possibility of life is completely closed,
and you feel confined, imprisoned.
You feel everywhere a limitation, a boundary.
A wall, a stone wall comes wherever you move – a wall.
My whole effort is how to break these stone walls.
And they are not made of stone –
they are made of thoughts.
And nothing is more like rock than a thought.
OSHO
Until You Die
Discourses on the Sufi way
Grief is for those who stay behind.
The Soul that is freed of the body
delights in the Sound and Light,
and in the fullness of being.
Harold Klemp
ECK Wisdom on Life After Death
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
Death is the epitome of the truth
that in each moment we are thrust into the unknown.
Here all clinging to security is compelled to cease,
and wherever the past is dropped away and safety abandoned,
life is renewed.
Death is the unknown
in which all of us lived before birth.
Alan Watts
The Wisdom of Insecurity
Grand theft identity began soon after you arrived on Earth.
Parents, teachers, siblings, clergy,
and authority figures told you that you are inept,
insignificant, ugly, stupid, unworthy, and sinful,
and that the world is a dangerous jungle
with threats at every turn.
Over time you began to believe these terrible lies,
until the day came when you forgot
your innate beauty, strength, innocence,
and safety.
Eventually you adopted an identity
contrary to your divine nature
and have since lived as someone you are not.
Alan Cohen
A Course in Miracles Made Easy
The gaudy beauty of this world has no
attraction for me--
My closest friends are mountains and rivers,
Clouds swallow up my shadow as I walk
along,
When I sit on cliffs, birds soar overhead,
Wearing snowy straw sandals, I visit cold
villages.
Go as deep as you can into life,
And you will be able to let go of even
blossoms.
Ryokan
Dewdrops On A Lotus Leaf
In this dream world
We doze
And talk of dreams--
Dream on, dream on,
As much as you wish.
Ryokan
Dewdrops On A Lotus Leaf
Decisions made at the end of life
are often ambiguous and complicated
by unexpectedly powerful emotions.
Families that have not learned to live with mystery and ambiguity
are sometimes torn apart
by the complex decisions that must be made
when a family member is irreversibly ill or dying.
Our willingness to live with wonder and mystery
as dimensions of both living and dying
is a spiritual practice that will make it easier
to embrace end-of-life decisions already made
when one’s life situation was less ambiguous.
Karen Speerstra, Herbert Anderson
The Divine Art of Dying: How to Live Well While Dying
It is just as necessary for a human being
to have knowledge, feeling and perceptiveness
of the life between death and the new birth
as of earthly life itself.
For when he enters earthly life at birth,
the confidence, strength and hopefulness
connected with that life
depend upon what forces he brings with him
from the life between the last death and the present birth.
But again, the forces we are able to acquire during that life
depend upon our conduct in the earlier incarnation,
upon our moral and religious disposition
or the quality of our attitude of soul.
We must realise that whether the future evolution of the human race
will be furthered or impeded
depends upon our active and creative co-operation
with the super-sensible world
in which we live between death and the new birth.
Rudolph Steiner
The turn toward death is a decision to choose life,
to live as fully as possible until the end,
and to be an actor in living while dying.
We like to call this moment a blessed recognition.
Others may call it consciously dying.
It’s choosing to live until we die —
with the emphasis on living.
Taking this turn, then, becomes an authentic journey
and a movable feast with unexpected detours
and surprising opportunities for giving and receiving love
and then giving it all away again.
Choosing to participate fully in living toward death
can become a grace-filled time
overflowing with new discoveries
and love from unexpected sources.
Karen Speerstra, Herbert Anderson
The Divine Art of Dying: How to Live Well While Dying
By coupling the words dying with divine and art,
we imply that dying is not technology driven,
but instead holds the possibility
of being as God-filled, loving, and as sacred as being born.
Dying, just as any other point during our lives,
can be an integrative event,
rather than a splintering one.
We don’t negate the fact that it will be lonely,
for we all finally do it alone.
But by framing death and dying as a divine art,
we paint a picture of integrative wholeness
that we all very humanly and naturally encounter at the end of our lives.
It holds the potential to be both sad and joyous.
It’s not something to be denied or feared
but to be embraced and loved,
as all of life can and ought to be.
Karen Speerstra, Herbert Anderson
The Divine Art of Dying: How to Live Well While Dying
Dying people have so many questions,
things that could have been asked much earlier in their life
had they considered that they would one day die,
as we all will.
If asked earlier,
these questions about deeper matters
would allow people to find their answers
and their own peace sooner.
They would then not have to live in denial
about their approaching death
out of pure fear and terror,
as is often the case.
Bronnie Ware
Top Five Regrets of the Dying
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
Disease is essentially an aspect of death.
It is the process by which
the material nature and the substantial form
prepares itself for separation from the soul.
Alice A. Bailey
Esoteric Healing
When a certain awareness arises within you,
somewhere you begin to feel
the meaninglessness of the life and death cycle.
It is all nice, we are enjoying it,
but just going on and on does not make sense.
When the awareness comes,
that is when you start talking about mukti.
Mukti means you want to become free
from the process of life and death.
Not because you are suffering;
suffering people cannot attain mukti.
You are fine, you are joyful,
but you have had enough of kindergarten,
you want to move on.
However beautiful your school life was,
don't you want to go to college?
That's all.
You have seen enough of it.
Now you want to move on.
Sadhguru
Life and Death in One Breath
Rather than continuing to avoid death, or to fear it,
what if we changed our perception?
Might we conceive of death, instead,
as the winding down of life’s frantic clock –
and dying as a means of coming to terms
with our identities,
our loved ones,
ourselves?
Brandy Shillace
Death's Summer Coat
There might be something else that happens
that gives dying people a chance to enjoy
what time they have left with loved ones before they die.
Healthcare professionals call this “rallying” or “the surge,”
as explained by licensed hospice nurse, Julie McFadden, who goes by the name
Hospice Nurse Julie on YouTube
“A patient will look like they are actively dying or getting very close to death …
And then suddenly, they perk up and they start acting like their old selves again.
They may be hungry, eat, talk, laugh, joke around, be a little sassy with their family …
They frequently do this and then pass away usually the next day.”
Again, this isn’t understood well by healthcare workers
but it does give loved ones a chance to say goodbye.
Jennifer Anandanayagam
https://www.msn.com/en-us/health/health-news/can-we-choose-when-we-die-what-we-know/ar-AA1iiAEP
Neither consciousness nor what you call your soul or spirit
is limited to the body.
These aspects of you exist eternally.
The body itself returns to the Earth,
where it dissolves and is re-created into something new.
There is no death.
There is no end;
it is simply a continuation of the expansion,
but in higher levels of consciousness.
Not better levels of consciousness,
just levels of consciousness
where you’re experiencing yourself more as Source energy.
Sara Landon
Mike Dooley
Dream, the Journey, Eternity, and God
So you have this sense, near the end of your life, of waking up to life’s real meaning.
What’s the most important thing for everyone else who’s still asleep to know?
I want everyone to appreciate the joy and wonder of every single moment of their lives. We should be astonished that we are here
when we look around at the exquisite wonder and beauty of everything.
I think everyone has a sense of that already.
It’s leaning into that more fully.
There is a reason every day to celebrate that we’re alive,
that we have another day
to explore whatever this gift is of being conscious,
of being aware,
of being aware that we are aware.
That’s the deep mystery that I keep talking about.
That’s to be celebrated!
Excerpt from inspiring New York Times interview:
Roland Griffiths
A Psychedelics Pioneer Takes the Ultimate Trip
and when the time of death
arrives
the last thing I wish to see
is
a ring of human faces
about me—
better my old friends
the walls,
if they be there.
Charles Bukowski
if you want justice, take the knife
For the outer senses
a being comes into existence through birth,
and passes away through death.
This, however, is only because these senses cannot perceive
the concealed spirit of the being.
For the spirit,
birth and death are merely a transformation,
just as the unfolding of the flower from the bud
is a transformation enacted before our physical eyes.
Rudolf Steiner
How to Know Higher Worlds
There is no need to be afraid of death.
Death is like deep sleep and means peace!
That’s what death really is –
it means peace.
But the ego doesn’t know that,
and that is why the ego is afraid.
The ego thinks it is enjoying the peace in deep sleep,
but the peace in deep sleep exists
because there is absence of the ego.
And death is simply a longer deep sleep.
The ego is absent in deep sleep,
so why be afraid of the permanent absence of the ego?
Ramesh S. Balsekar
Confusion No More: For the Spiritual Seeker
There is no death.
That is the key to what you have to learn
in the years to come on Earth.
You are all preparing to end your lives with bodily death.
You have made no preparation for going on with existence.
Most people, if they do have a belief in immortality,
have such a fantastic idea of what it will be like
that they are not making plans for anything
but an eternity of idleness and some singing,
for which they perhaps haven't the least talent.
Here, we are far more interested
in getting on with life than you are.
We see our wasted incarnations
and wish we might have been sure of life after death.
We could have fitted ourselves to meet it
had we known what we know now."
George W. Meek
After We Die, What Then?
People are told by masters
that they should fight the ego,
kill the ego,
but what I’m saying is to accept the ego.
Is that not unique?
Don’t fight the ego.
Accept the ego.
Why, because ‘you’ didn’t create the ego.
The Source has created the ego,
and the Source is in the process of destroying the ego in some cases.
That’s why your head is in the tiger’s mouth.
There’s no escape.
There is no escape if you fight the ego.
If you keep on fighting the ego,
the tiger will have its mouth open for ages and ages.
You accept the ego,
and the tiger will snap its jaws quickly.
Ramesh S. Balsekar
Confusion No More: For the Spiritual Seeker
We can turn away from and eliminate the belief
that illusory experiences are real.
It’s as if we have already fallen asleep
and are already dreaming.
There is nothing to do about that.
But within the dream,
we can confront our belief that the dream is real.
We are able to recognize
that it is just a dream,
that it’s not real.
And once we discover
that the dream is just a dream
while dreaming it,
then it is possible to wake up.
Tsoknyi Rinpoche
Andrew Holecek
Dreams of Light
For Paul Tillich, a Lutheran theologian,
faith is the experience of surrender to one’s ultimate concern.
Knowing what is “ultimate” in our lives
is a lifelong quest
and one certainly not to be abandoned at death.
Having faith in ourselves, in our medical teams,
in all those caregivers around us,
and ultimately, for many,
in a power beyond our weakened physical selves,
enables us to begin to view death as a divine art.
Karen Speerstra
Herbert Anderson
The Divine Art of Dying
We need home palliative care regardless of prognosis or goals.
It shouldn’t matter how long you’re going to live;
it should matter what your need is.
And so the next stage of development
is to ensure access to palliative care across all settings,
across all stages of illness,
no matter where you live,
no matter what color you are,
no matter hold old you are.
We must increase public awareness of palliative care
so people start demanding it.
Koshin Paley Ellison, Matt Weingast, and Karmapa
Awake At The Bedside
The birth of a man is the birth of his sorrow.
The longer he lives, the more stupid he becomes,
because his anxiety to avoid unavoidable death
becomes more and more acute.
What bitterness!
He lives for what is always out of reach!
His thirst for survival in the future
makes him incapable of living in the present.
Thomas Merton
The Way of Chuang Tzu
The first thing I would like to tell you about death
is that there is no bigger lie than death.
And yet, death appears to be true.
It not only appears to be true,
but even seems like the cardinal truth of life.
We have even structured our lives
out of our fear of death.
The fear of death has created society,
the nation, family and friends.
The fear of death
has caused us to chase money
and has made us ambitious of higher positions.
And the biggest surprise is that our gods and our temples
have been raised out of the fear of death.
And nothing is more false than death.
That is why whatever system of life we have created,
believing death to be true,
has become false.
Osho
"How can death unify anything?" I protested.
"For sorcerers, death is an act of unification that employs every bit of their energy.
You are thinking of death as a corpse in front of you,
a body on which decay has settled.
For sorcerers, when the act of unification takes place,
there is no corpse. There is no decay.
"Their bodies in their entirety have been turned into energy,
energy possessing awareness that is not fragmented.
The boundaries that are set up by the organism,
boundaries which are broken down by death,
are still functioning in the case of sorcerers,
although they are no longer visible to the naked eye.
Carlos Castaneda
The Active Side of Infinity
"What's the hidden option, don Juan?"
"Death's hidden option is exclusively for sorcerers.
They are the only ones who have, to my knowledge,
read the fine print.
For them, the option is pertinent and functional.
For average human beings,
death means the termination of their awareness,
the end of their organisms.
"For the inorganic beings, death means the same:
the end of their awareness.
In both cases, the impact of death
is the act of being sucked into the dark sea of awareness,
Their individual awareness, loaded with their life experiences,
breaks its boundaries,
and awareness as energy
spills out into the dark sea of awareness."
"But what is death's hidden option
that is picked up only by sorcerers, don Juan?" I asked.
"For a sorcerer, death is a unifying factor.
Instead of disintegrating the organism,
as is ordinarily the case,
death unifies it."
Carlos Castaneda
The Active Side of Infinity
"The universe at large is crammed to the brim with worlds of awareness,
organic and inorganic, " don Juan said.
"Do those inorganic beings have life like we have life?" I asked.
"If you think that life is to be aware, then they do have life," he said.
"I suppose it would be accurate to say
that if life can be measured by the intensity,
the sharpness, the duration of that awareness,
I can sincerely say that they are more alive than you and I."
"Do those inorganic beings die, don Juan?" I asked.
Don Juan chuckled for a moment before he answered.
"If you call death the termination of awareness,
yes, they die.
Their awareness ends.
Their death is rather like the death of a human being,
and at the same time, it isn't,
because the death of human beings has a hidden option.
It is something like a clause in a legal document,
a clause that is written in tiny letters
that you can barely see.
You have to use a magnifying glass to read it,
and yet it's the most important clause of the document."
Carlos Castaneda
The Active Side of Infinity
What really is death?
Is it really separation?
Is it really the end?
Is it really the final goodnight?
Is it really the final goodbye?
Death is none of those things.
Death isn’t sad or the end.
Death is something to be celebrated
because it is the new beginning.
We are always told that death and birth are opposites,
but they are the same thing.
They work together to keep us constantly alive.
The Prose Anthologies:
Volume I | #Death
When someone remembers death correctly
his attachment to life is broken.
Such a person will see death hidden in every moment of life.
The attachment to life, the infatuation for life,
of someone who has known death rightly
will be killed naturally, will naturally disappear.
Such a person will soon come to know the nectar hidden behind death,
will soon come to know that death is one side of the coin
and God is the other.
On one side there is death;
on the other, nectar.
Those who have known death
have also known nectar.
Osho
The Great Secret
Everybody is afraid of death
for the simple reason that we have not tasted of life yet.
The man who knows what life is,
is never afraid of death;
he welcomes death.
Whenever death comes he hugs death,
he embraces death,
he receives death as a guest.
To the man who has not known what life is,
death is an enemy;
and to the man who knows what life is,
death is the ultimate crescendo of life.
Osho
Walking In Zen, Sitting In Zen
Death in the morning,
at evening another birth –
this is the way of things,
no different from the bubbles on the stream.
Yoshida Kenko
Essays in Idleness
It is not death which we should regard as an evil fate;
our Theosophical knowledge has at least taught us that.
It is never the dead whom we should pity,
but the living who still suffer under all the cramping restrictions
of this strange physical plane.
For those whose consciousness knows no other world,
it seems terrible to have to quit this;
a man whose sight ranges over the higher worlds knows,
with a vivid certainty that nothing can shake,
that, if one is to consider happiness alone,
the happiest moment for every man
is that in which he escapes from this world
into the wider and more real life above.
C.W. Leadbeater
The Hidden Side of Things
If the soul was created to animate the body,
if it depended on the body for its coming into existence,
it can have no reason or basis for existence
after the disappearance of the body.
It is naturally to be supposed
that the breath or power given for the animation of the body
would return at its final dissolution to its Maker.
If, on the contrary, it still persists as an immortal embodied being,
there must be a subtle or psychic body
in which it continues,
and it is fairly certain that this psychic body and its inhabitant
must be pre-existent to the material vehicle:
it is irrational to suppose
that they were created originally to inhabit that brief and perishable form;
an immortal being cannot be the outcome
of so ephemeral an incident in creation.
Shri Aurobindo
The Essential Aurobindo
To the question
“Where does the soul go, when the body dies?”
Jacob Boehme answered:
“There is no necessity for it to go anywhere.”
Aldous Huxley
The Perennial Philosophy:
An Interpretation of the Great Mystics, East and West
I am incorporeal,
I am eternal.
I will never pass away.
Forms-yes;
but not I.
I will be here forever.
Joel Goldsmith
The Altitude of Prayer
Grace, calm, a patient acceptance of what’s to come:
These are all qualities that can be cultivated,
and when they are, death is a test we will not fail.
Our fault is not that we fear death
but that we don’t respect it as a miracle.
The most profound subjects—
iove, truth, compassion, birth and death—
are equal.
They belong to our destiny
but also to our present life.
Deepak Chopra
Life After Death
He will be present in the body in such wise
that the best part of himself will be absent from it,
and will join himself by an indissoluble sacrament to divine things,
in such a way that he will not feel
either love or hatred of things mortal.
Considering himself as master,
and that he ought not to be servant and slave to his body,
which he would regard only as the prison
which holds his liberty in confinement,
the glue which smears his wings,
chains which bind fast his hands,
stocks which fix his feet,
veil which hides his view.
Let him not be servant, captive, ensnared,
chained, idle, stolid, and blind,
for the body which he himself abandons
cannot tyrannise over him,
so that thus the spirit in a certain degree
comes before him as the corporeal world,
and matter is subject to the divinity and to nature.
Annie Besant
Death--And After?
Today people think:
when a human being has passed through the gate of death,
their 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.
Those 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 and D.S. Osmond
The Dead Are With Us
Lord, we are more wretched than the animals
who do their deaths once and for all,
for we are never finished with our not dying.
Dying is strange and hard
if it is not our death, but a death
that takes us by storm, when we’ve ripened none within us.
Rilke
Book of Hours:Love Poems to God
The mind is immortal.
It remains untouched despite the body’s dissolution.
One has no more reason to fear its death when the body is destroyed
than one has to fear its death when one retires to sleep at night.
Sleep affects the body
but leaves the mind as active as ever in dream
or as potentially active as ever in deep sleep.
Death works upon the human being
in a somewhat similar manner
and the experiences which come to the soul after the body has terminated
are nothing else than prolonged vivid dreams
or unconscious deep sleep.
If one can touch and see things and people
without the help of the body during dream,
one shall certainly be able to do the same
during so-called death.
Anil Sharma
Life Beyond Death
Now comes the greatest revelation that you have ever had,
and it is this:
all that appears as human experience is but an illusion.
You are destined to prove the greatest revelation,
that even death is an illusion.
This is the highest revelation ever given to the world,
the revelation that ultimately will be its salvation.
Death in its most cruel form is an illusion.
Joel Goldsmith
Collected Essays
Are we afraid of the fact of death
or of the idea of death?
The fact is one thing
and the idea about the fact is another.
Am I afraid of the word death
or of the fact itself?
Because I am afraid of the word, of the idea,
I never understand the fact,
I never look at the fact,
I am never in direct relation with the fact.
It is only when I am in complete communion with the fact
that there is no fear.
J. Krishnamurti
The Book of Life
My fear of death is gone.
Where did it go?
Though I did not realize it at the time,
my experience of grief,
over my mother’s and my husband’s deaths,
was extreme partly because
I was grieving my own death at the same time.
My fear of being left alone was, in part,
my fear of having no one around me as I aged and died.
As my grief over my terrible losses began to ebb,
so did my fear of death in general,
and specifically, my own death.
Phyllis Shacter
Choosing to Die
The final truth,
as Ramana Maharshi and Nisargadatta Maharaj
and all the sages before them have clearly stated,
is that there is neither creation nor destruction,
neither birth nor death,
neither destiny nor free will,
neither any path nor any achievement.
Ramesh S. Balsekar
Confusion No More
Every thought you have held about death has been in error.
Every construction you have built in the name of death
has been built on false foundation.
It is only, let me repeat,
only, when you replace the word death with life
on every account that you speak and think of it,
that its secret will begin to unfold to you,
its magnificence, its hidden beauty.
That which you call death,
that moment you have been taught to fear,
that which you can hardly speak of,
in truth, is as lovely as a newly opening rose,
with the promise of hope borne on its fragrance...
Karen Peebles
Beyond The Other Side of Suicide
Interviewer (Q). All is well?
Jack Kerouac (A). Yeah. We’re all in Heaven, now, really.
Q. You don’t sound happy.
A. Oh, I’m tremendously sad. I’m in great despair.
Q. Why?
A. It’s a great burden to be alive. A heavy burden,
a great big heavy burden. I wish I were safe in Heaven, dead.
Q. But you are in Heaven, Jack. You just said we all were.
A. Yeah. If I only knew it.
If I could only hold on to what I know.
Paul Maher, Jr.
Empty Phantoms: Interviews and Encounters with Jack Kerouac
And when I said to Emmanuel,
"I deal a lot with the fear of dying in this culture, and death.
What should I tell people?
And he said, "Ram Dass,
tell them that death is absolutely safe."
And then he added one more image.
He said, "It's like taking off a tight shoe."
Now, just imagine that you as spirit or awareness,
have contained yourself in an incarnation
, or contained it in a conceptual model
of who you are and on a storyline,
and at some point you break out of that,
you dissolve out of that,
and there is this incredible release quality.
Ram Dass
Becoming Nobody
Only the complete realization
by man of the inevitability of his own death
can destroy those factors,
implanted, thanks to our abnormal life,
of the expression of different aspects of our egoism--
the cause of all evil in our common life.
G.I. Gurdjieff
Life Is Real Only Then, When "I Am"
It would be desirable for all,
for God, for the deceased, for you,
for me and even for the whole of humanity,
if, at the death of any person,
instead of the process
of the expression of senseless words,
the process of the real grasping
of your own forthcoming death
would take place in you.
G.I. Gurdjieff
Life Is Real Only Then, When "I Am"
To express one’s sympathy to someone
in the case of the death of a person close to him
was considered in ancient times
an immoral, even criminal action.
Perhaps it was considered so
because it is easily possible that,
in the being of that person who is being thus addressed,
the process of the fresh impression of the loss of a close person
has not yet quieted down,
and by these empty words of sympathy
he is reminded of it again
and his suffering aroused anew.
G.I. Gurdjieff
Life Is Real Only Then, When "I Am"
The only reason the sun is ongoing,
while man dies,
is the sun never even contemplates death.
All it knows is to be.
Ramtha
The White Book
Q. You mean that the Beat people want to lose themselves?
A. Yeah. You know, Jesus said to see the Kingdom of Heaven you must lose yourself . . . something like that.
Q. Then the Beat Generation loves death?
A. Yeah. They’re not afraid of death.
Q. Aren’t you afraid?
A. Naw . . . What I believe is that nothing is happening.
Q. What do you mean?
A. Well, you’re not sitting here. That’s what you think. Actually, we are great empty space. I could walk right through you . . . You know what I mean, we’re made out of atoms, electrons. We’re actually empty. We’re an empty vision . . . in one mind.
Q. In what mind—the mind of God?
A. That's the name we give it. We can give it any name. We can call it tangerine . . . god . . . tangerine . . . But I do know we are empty phantoms, sitting here thinking we are human beings and worrying about civilization. We’re just empty phantoms. And yet, all is well.
Q. All is well?
A. Yeah. We’re all in Heaven, now, really.
Q. You don’t sound happy.
A. Oh, I’m tremendously sad. I’m in great despair.
Q. Why?
A. It’s a great burden to be alive. A heavy burden, a great big heavy burden.
I wish I were safe in Heaven, dead.
Paul Maher, Jr.
Empty Phantoms: Interviews and Encounters with Jack Kerouac
If this universe is your universe
then its existence both now and back to the first rumblings of the ‘Big Bang’
need you to be observing it.
If you die you cease to observe
and your universe also ceases.
But also all historical record of its existence
will similarly dissolve.
In a startling paradox
your death ensures that your universe never happened.
In order for your universe to continue
you must continue to observe,
therefore you cannot die.
You always avoid the accidents,
become immune to the illnesse
s and seem to live a charmed life.
I stress ‘in your own universe’
because in many others you do die,
or at least from the viewpoint
of the ‘observer’ responsible for that universe.
And that is how you experience the death of others.
They only die in your universe,
whereas in their own they go on.
Anthony Peake
Is There Life After Death?
You follow your own world line and remain alive.
In the world line of any bystanders you die.
Your perceived universe will always split in such a way
to ensure your personal survival.
You may die in my universe
but you will go on and on in your own.
Anthony Peake
Is There Life After Death?
The Indian master Atisha said,
“If you do not contemplate death in the morning
the morning is wasted.
If you do not contemplate death in the afternoon,
the afternoon is wasted.
If you do not contemplate death in the evening,
the evening is wasted.”
Andrew Holecek
Preparing to Die
You examine the fabric of the existence you have left,
and you learn to understand
how your experiences were the result of your own thoughts and emotions
and how these affected others.
Until this examination is through,
you are not yet aware of the larger portions of your own identity.
When you realize the significance and meaning
of the life you have just left,
then you are ready
for conscious knowledge of your other existences.
Jane Roberts
Seth Speaks
It’s as if I have been in a dark room for a long time
and someone has just switched on the lights.
William Buhlman
Adventures in the Afterlife
In the Lun yü or Analects,
Kongzi expresses some agnosticism
about the possibility of the afterlife.
Chi-lu asks Kongzi,
“May I ask about death?”
to which the latter replies,
“You do not understand even life.
How can you understand death?”
Simon Critchley
The Book of Dead Philosophers
There’s no doubt
that how we die
lives on in those who survive us.
We’re gone,
but those who live on
carry our last days with them forever..
The New Art of Dying
Diane Burnside Murdock
What is called death
is the laying aside of the vehicle
belonging to this lowest world,
but the soul or real man in a higher world
is no more changed or affected by this
than the physical man is changed or affected
when he removes his overcoat.
All this is a matter,
not of speculation,
but of observation and experiment.
A Textbook of Theosophy
C.W. Leadbeater
The new space was both totally bright and totally dark at the same time
yet without shape, form, sound, color, mass, or movement.
It was aglow but there was no light source.
It was dark but there was no darkness.
Yet, somehow within this strange environment
was the presence of all shapes, all forms, all sound,
all color, all mass, and all movement.
Everything that ever was, is, or will be was there,
yet there was nothing there at all.
It was everything and it was nothing...
P.M.H. Atwater
I Died Three TImes in 1977-The Complete Story
It’s been shown that death rates rise significantly after Christmas,
and the same spike occurs
after mortally ill people have a birthday.
The implication is that when someone is dying,
she can postpone her time of death
until after a day she wants to live to see.
Deepack Chopra
Reinventing the Body, Resurrecting the Soul
We prepare for long trips,
we prepare for meals,
so why not death?
You can’t control how it will go,
of course (car crash or cancer),
but you can practice
how you’ll feel about it inside
when you know it’s happening.
Laura Pritchett
Making Friends With Death
When, dear one, a person dies,
his voice is absorbed into his mind;
his mind into his breath;
his breath into heat;
and heat into formless Spirit.
That is the Real.
That is the essence of this whole world.
That thou art.
Joel Morwood
Through Death's Gate
You examine the fabric of the existence you have left,
and you learn to understand
how your experiences were the result of your own thoughts and emotions
and how these affected others.
Until this examination is through,
you are not yet aware of the larger portions of your own identity.
When you realize the significance and meaning of the life you have just left,
then you are ready for conscious knowledge of your other existences.
Jane Roberts
Seth Speaks
God, give us each our own death,
the dying that proceeds
from each of our lives:
the way we loved,
the meanings we made,
our need.
Rainer Maria Rilke
Book of Hours
Face your fears
and allow yourself to unmask their illusion.
Know that you are forever
and that there is nothing in the unknown
that can ever keep you from happiness and joy.
Do away with the fear
that inhibits you from knowing
something greater than what you are experiencing on this plane
Ramtha
The White Book
I knew at once of the alteration
that had taken place in my condition;
I knew, in other words, that I had 'died'.
I knew, too, that I was alive,
that I had shaken off my last illness
sufficiently to be able to stand upright and look about me.
At no time was I in any mental distress,
but I was full of wonder
at what was to happen next,
for here I was,
in full possession of all my faculties,
and, indeed,
feeling 'physically' as I had never felt before.
Anthony Borgia
Life in the World Unseen
Impermanence hurts…
but the reason we contemplate death and destruction
is not that we love to feel down.
We do it because it gives us the courage and strength
to look at the world with love and compassion.
Love and compassion heal the mind.
When we look at the world with loving eyes,
all harmful thoughts and emotions
vanish naturally.
Chokyi Nyima Rinpoche
Sadness, Love, Openness
Awareness is aliveness.
How aware you are is how alive you are.
The difference between life and death is just that.
Sadhguru
Don't Polish Your Ignorance...It May Shine
Life Has No Answer
Life has no answer.
Life has only one thing, one problem—
which is, living.
The man who lives totally, completely,
every minute without choice,
neither accepting nor rejecting the thing as it is,
such a man is not seeking an answer,
he is not asking what the purpose of life is,
nor is he seeking a way out of life.
But that requires great insight into oneself.
Without self-knowledge,
merely to seek an answer has no meaning at all
because the answer will be
what is most satisfactory, what is gratifying.
That is what most of us want;
we want to be gratified,
we want to find a safe place,
a heaven where there will be no disturbance.
But as long as we seek,
life will be disturbed.
J. Krishnamurti
What Are You Looking For?
You are in a dimension of consciousness,
because of the rate of vibration you’re in,
where you experience time and space;
you experience the illusion of birth and death.
We just are.
There’s living,
which is what you perceive yourself to be doing,
and then what you might call a state of being,
which is our experience.
We are the Isness of All That Is,
and that is what you are as well.
Sara Landon, Mike Dooley
The Dream, the Journey, Eternity, and God
You’ve created a belief
that you began living when you were born
and that you will stop living when you die;
you call that your life.
And what you create each day
is what you call living.
We’re beyond this experience.
There are no beginnings or endings;
all is eternal.
Sara Landon, Mike Dooley
The Dream, the Journey, Eternity, and God
We are afraid of dying,
which is letting go all the things we have known,
all the things that we have experienced, gathered –
the lovely furniture which we have
and the beautiful collection of pictures.
Death comes and says,
‘You can’t have any of those anymore.’
And we cling to the known,
afraid of the unknown.
We can invent reincarnation.
But we haven’t inquired
what it is that is born in the next life.
J. Krishnamurti
Meeting Life
A mind that is alone is completely living,
and in that living there is a dying every minute;
and, therefore, for that mind
there is no death.
It is really extraordinary.
If you have gone into that thing
you discover for yourself
that there is no such thing as death.
There is only that state of pure austerity of the mind
which is alone.
J. Krishnamurti
Meeting Life
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