This site shares Life-affirming meditations
that heal misconceptions about Death.
Living beautifully and dying beautifully,
Embrace Death as Birth
into limitless Life Awareness.
No one knows for sure what happens after death,
and I may be surprised;
but I assume that dying will be just like going to sleep
or going under anesthesia.
Conscious experiencing—my movie of waking life and the experience of being present—will vanish as it does every night in deep sleep or under anesthesia.
And, as in deep sleep,
I won’t be there to miss myself or my movie of waking life.
The fear of dying only exists during waking life,
and only as a fearful idea.
In deep sleep, the problem—
and the one who seems to have it—
no longer exist.
Joan Tollifson
Death: The End of Self-Improvement
Is death enlightenment?
No, death is the dissolution of the body-mind mechanism.
When there is nothing there, is that enlightenment?
No, enlightenment is the falling away of the sense of personal doership.
Is death nothingness?
Nothingness for whom? Who are we talking about?
Wayne Liquorman
Acceptance of What Is: A Book About Nothing
We can see, then, that when we die
we simply move from one world into another.
This is why in the inner meaning of the Word, “death”
means resurrection and a continuation of life.
Emanuel Swedenborg
Our Life After Death
Accepting negativity is the concept of,
“Hey, we’re in an infinite evolution.”
You’re not looking at a group of dead bodies.
You’re looking at a group of dead bodies
whose infinite being has departed and is still alive.
There is no death.
All the agony we experience emotionally and psychologically
is agony of the ego.
When you understand that,
a big door opens inside you.
Stuart Wilde
Infinite Self
First, even more than taxes,
I saw how death is inevitable.
But I also learned from those for whom death
is so much more present than for most of us
that this needn’t detract from the living of life to the full.
Not in a devil-may-care nose-thumbing way,
a last whisky before the ship goes down,
but in a calmness and realism
that I also now see in the oncology transfusion room.
Running away from death is not only a waste of energy;
it sets life in opposition to it.
Which it isn’t.
Death is a natural part of life,
and the more we understand that,
the more we can enjoy living.
Simon Boas
A Beginner's Guide to Dying
Please try not to fear death so much.
We hide and run from it;
we follow joyless diets, or subscribe to transactional belief systems,
or try to drown it out with pleasures and purchases.
We change the subject.
But without death we are not human.
I used to think that death was the frame of our brief lives,
but now I see it as the canvas on which each of us is painted.
Talk about it.
Let it help you put your quotidian worries and squabbles into perspective.
And accept it.
Meditation and (with a guide) psilocybin can help.
Simon Boas
A Beginner's Guide to Dying
I have called all of this ‘A Beginner’s Guide to Dying’
because the intention was to show some of the things that,
for me at least,
made the road a bit smoother,
and the destination a little less frightening.
It’s also only partly about ‘Dying’.
I hope you’ll find that it’s mostly about living and life.
Because, in an almost paradoxical way,
I’ve found that having a really positive view of existence
has helped me to be completely accepting of non-existence.
I don’t even really think of them as opposites now.
And of course, it may well be that ‘we’ don’t cease to exist when our bodies do –
I think that’s a very real possibility –
but none of us will ever know that for sure.
The ‘certainties’ provided by both science and religion
all ultimately rest on us believing something unknowable and unprovable.
And that’s how it should be.
Simon Boas
A Beginner's Guide to Dying
Nothing is known about the happening called death,
except that there is an organic death:
life will go out of the body and the body will be cremated or buried.
Is it not possible for the mind to look at the phenomenon called death
as something inevitable, and without any fear?
The answer is: only if it understands who the ego-centre “me” really is.
The “me” is without the slightest doubt, only Consciousness –
Impersonal Consciousness which has identified itself
with a particular body-mind organism as a separate entity as “identified consciousness”
so that life and living can happen through that entity according to “Cosmic Law.” Therefore, obviously,
all that happens at death is that identification gets dissolved
and Consciousness regains its impersonality.
Ramesh Balsekar
The Relationship Between "I" and "Me"
The whole fear about death has come simply because you have no idea what it is.
You have formed ideas about everything.
But it does not matter what ideas you have formed about life,
when you are confronted with the moment of death,
you really do not know anything.
That is one space of life which has remained uncorrupted by the human mind. Everything else we have corrupted.
Death is one thing that we are still clueless about--
though a lot of people would like to talk authoritatively about it.
They know they are going to heaven;
they are dead sure about it.
If they are so sure, I don't see what they are waiting for!
They are doing everything not to go to heaven.
Why?
Sadhguru
Life and Death in One Breath
Not all will admit they are dying, not even to themselves.
Unbelievable as it may seem,
some people go through the dying process with such denial
that they realize their condition is irreversible only after death.
Several dead I have worked with
took days to fully come to terms with their new situation.
Difficult adjustments are usually short-term,
lasting no more than a few days from our standpoint.
And someone is always on the other side ready to assist.
If the dying were to explore the afterlife as it is actually lived,
postmortem turmoil would all but cease.
Julia Assante
The Last Frontier: Exploring the Afterlife and Transforming Our Fear of Death
When we disregard the paranormal events that surround the deathbed,
we also miss a great deal of essential information
about the death process and the afterlife itself,
as well as messages about what the dying need, what they want for us,
and, sometimes, what day or hour they will draw their final breath.
Nearing-death awareness seems to arise when people make peace with death.
It is most noticeable in those whose bodies are gradually shutting down.
In situations where mortality is sudden,
victims of accidents, crimes, and war are still lovingly assisted.
Julia Assante
The Last Frontier: Exploring the Afterlife and Transforming Our Fear of Death
Dr. Leyva has become a preeminent palliative care physician
in the western suburbs of Chicago.
She is living her dream of helping children, and now adults,
achieve their goals and live their last days with pride and dignity.
She related some interesting observations of patients at the end of life.
“People who are near death often have experiences
that are beyond this world, and they are universally positive.”
She is convinced that when people are dying,
they are sometimes comforted by loved ones from the other side.
She remembers watching a terminal ninety-year-old woman
get all dressed up in imaginary clothes and jewelry
so that she would be pretty enough for her departed friends.
Scott Kolbaba
Physicians' Untold Stories:
Miraculous experiences doctors are hesitant to share with their patients, or ANYONE!
Why has the brain separated living and death?
Why has this division taken place?
Does this division exist when there is attachment?
Can one live in the modern world with death –
not suicide, we are not talking about that –
but end all attachment, which is death, while one lives?
I am attached to the house I am living in.
I have bought it, paid a great deal of money for it,
and I am attached to all the furniture, the pictures, the family,
the memories of it all.
And death comes and wipes all that out.
So can you live every day of your lives with death,
ending everything every day,
ending all your attachments?
For that’s what it means to die.
We have separated living from dying,
therefore we are perpetually frightened.
But when you bring life and death together –
the living and the dying –
then you will find that there is a state of the brain
in which all knowledge as memory ends.
J. Krishnamurti
Meeting Life
The vibrant aliveness Here-Now,
is the only place where we ever actually are.
Whether it is the personal death that awaits each of us,
or the inevitable planetary death in which the earth itself will be no more,
or even the end of the entire known universe,
death is the single reality that most clearly informs us
that the future is a fantasy
and that the person and the world
and everything that we have been so concerned about
are all fleeting bubbles in a stream.
We all know, intuitively,
that this bubble is not all we are,
nor are we some kind of lost soul trapped inside it.
The wholeness we long for is actually all there is
. The bubble has never been a solid, separate, independent thing.
Joan Tollifson
Death: The End of Self-Improvement
In my view, what happens after death is a flat earth question.
Worrying about what happens to us when we die
is like worrying about what happens to us if we fall off the edge of the earth.
People used to worry about that,
but their fear was based on a misunderstanding.
Just as there is no edge to the earth,
there is no actual boundary,
no edge where life begins or ends.
The things we are worrying about are all conceptual abstractions,
artificially pulled out of the whole.
Like the lines on a map dividing up the whole earth,
birth and death are artificial dividing lines on an indivisible reality.
Joan Tollifson
Death: The End of Self-Improvement
No one knows for sure what happens after death,
and I may be surprised;
but I assume that dying will be just like going to sleep or going under anesthesia. Conscious experiencing—
my movie of waking life and the experience of being present—
will vanish as it does every night in deep sleep or under anesthesia.
And, as in deep sleep,
I won’t be there to miss myself or my movie of waking life.
The fear of dying only exists during waking life,
and only as a fearful idea.
In deep sleep, the problem—
and the one who seems to have it—
no longer exist.
Joan Tollifson
Death: The End of Self-Improvement
What is death? A bogey mask.
Turn it around and you’ll see it for what it is.
Look! Now it can’t bite!
Now or later your body is bound to be separated from your spirit,
just as it was separated before.
If it’s now, what is there to complain about,
seeing that, if not now, it’ll be later?
Why is there such a thing as death?
For the cyclical perpetuation of the universe.
The universe needs not only the things that currently exist in it
but also those that are to come
and those that have already been and gone.
Epictetus
The Complete Works: Handbook, Discourses, & Fragments
It’s not death or pain that’s frightening,
but the fear of pain or death.
That’s why we approve of the line
‘It’s not dying that’s dreadful, but dying in disgrace.'
Death should therefore be the object of our confidence,
and the fear of death the object of our caution.
At the moment, we do the opposite:
we treat death as something to flee from,
while we’re careless, negligent, and unconcerned
in forming a judgment about it.
Socrates was right to call death and so on ‘bogeys.’
Epictetus
The Complete Works: Handbook, Discourses, & Fragments
What every man, whether he has patience or not,
has always expected is, of course, death.
But he knows this only when death comes …,
when it is too late to be able to enjoy it.
E.M.Cioran
The Trouble With Being Born
People are troubled not by things but by their judgments about things.
Death, for example, isn’t frightening,
or else Socrates would have thought it so.
No, what frightens people is their judgment about death,
that it’s something to fear.
So whenever we’re obstructed or troubled or distressed,
let’s blame no one but ourselves—that is, our judgments.
Epictetus
The Complete Works: Handbook, Discourses, & Fragments
It's dark because you are trying too hard.
Lightly child, lightly.
Learn to do everything lightly.
Yes, feel lightly even though you're feeling deeply.
Just lightly let things happen and lightly cope with them.
I was so preposterously serious in those days, such a humorless little prig.
Lightly, lightly –
it's the best advice ever given me...
So throw away your baggage and go forward.
There are quicksands all about you sucking at your feet,
trying to suck you down into fear and self-pity and despair.
That’s why you must walk so lightly."
Aldous Huxley
Island
The subjective (more accurately termed the non-objective,
since it can have no definite characteristic,
which would make it an object) cannot die, since there is no 'thing' to dissolve,
and it cannot therefore be reborn,
nor, for the same reason, can it ever have been born at all.
Being non-objective
it is altogether outside the range of both birth and death,
which are phenomenal events subject to Time.
Nor can anything that is not an object be subject to time,
nor anything objective be intemporal.
The non-objective, therefore, suffers neither birth nor re-birth,
neither death nor re-death
(each repetitive event as ludicrous as the other).
Wei Wu-wei
The Tenth Man: The Great Joke (Which Made Lazarus Laugh)
Now, when a man with whom we have been united through various ties
leaves the physical world and passes through the gates of death,
at first there remains to us the memory of this man,
that is, a number of feelings and thoughts have arisen
as a result of our relation to him, and which we ourselves have experienced.
But since he passed away from us through the gates of death
these thoughts and feelings which united us with him,
now live on in a very different manner.
While he lived with us here on the physical plane, we knew that at any time,
in addition to the relation our souls had formed to him,
the outer physical presentment itself might also appear;
we knew that we could bring our inner experience to bear upon this outer reality of his. And if at any time by some means the man changed,
we had to expect that the feelings we formerly had towards him
would also change in one way or another.
We do not often think of the radical difference it makes
when suddenly, or even not suddenly, the moment comes,
when henceforward we can only carry in our soul the memory of our friend,
when we know, ‘Never more will our eyes see him, or our hands grasp his.’
The picture we formed of him remains fundamentally as already fixed.
But a radical change appears in the relation of the two people.
As has been said, it may sound trivial,
but it cuts deeply into the inner life in each individual case,
when a human soul which formerly impressed us from without
by means of its physical embodiments,
becomes nothing but a memory.
Rudolf Steiner
The Forming of Destiny and Life after Death
There have been more troubles caused by birth than by death.
We do not always like to think that, but it is true.
So never think for a moment
that it makes any difference to your daily experience,
whether you are living in this country or that country,
this side of the veil or that side of the veil,
for when the veil is torn aside,
we will understand the scripture,
“The darkness and the light are both alike to thee.”
Never forget that.
Darkness and light are not two different things:
they are the same thing.
So, too, are life and death the same thing.
Joel S. Goldsmith
The Journey Back to the Father's House
Unrecognized thought is the daytime equivalent of falling asleep.
Each discursive thought is a mini-daydream.
Drifting off into mindless thinking
is how we end up sleepwalking through life—
and therefore death.
Saying “thinking” in our meditation
is therefore the same as saying “wake up!”
We wake up and come back to reality—
not to our dreamy visions (thoughts) about it.
If we can wake up during the day and be mindful,
we will be able to wake up in the bardo after we die.
This is what it means to become a buddha,
an “awakened one.”
Andrew Holecek
Preparing to Die
TO SAY GOODBYE
Music & Lyrics by Nan Schwartz
HOW TO SAY GOODBYE
HOW TO LET YOU GO
WOND’RING IF WE’LL MEET AGAIN
IF ONLY I COULD KNOW
DON’T WANT TO SAY GOODBYE
WE’VE BOTH HELD ON SO LONG
BUT NOW I KNOW YOUR TIME HAS COME
AND SO I’M TRYING TO BE STRONG FOR YOU
IF THIS IS GOODBYE
YOUR SPIRIT WILL HAVE WON
YOU’LL SOAR AMONG THE ANGELS
YOUR STRUGGLES WILL BE DONE
SO AS I LET YOU GO
I ASK WITH ONE LAST CRY
PLEASE PROMISE YOU WILL COME TO ME
IN DREAMS THAT I FOREVER SEE.
YOUR SMILING FACE WILL ALWAYS BE.
THEN I CAN SAY GOODBYE
LET THE PAST DIE AWAY
NOW AT LAST FLY AWAY
ONLY WHEN, ONLY THEN
YOU’LL BE FREE…...
SO AS I LET YOU GO
I ASK WITH ONE LAST CRY
PLEASE PROMISE YOU WILL COME TO ME
IN DREAMS THAT I FOREVER SEE.
YOUR SMILING FACE WILL ALWAYS BE.
THEN I’LL KNOW THAT I CAN SAY GOODBYE
GOODBYE
GOODBYE…
In Loving Remembrance
of
Amy Elizabeth Bruno-Linder
1961-2024
When you get ready to die,
do not worry about the usual things,
like following rituals or taking care of everyday business.
Be prepared so that you can die in the best way possible.
Use all the mighty influence of those powerful strong minutes of death,
when a person exists partially in the other world,
and his words and deeds
have special power over those who remain in this world.
Leo Tolstoy
A Calendar of Wisdom
Dying people answer research questionnaires
to determine their quality of life,
but neither they nor most people around them
are willing to ask for quality of death,
or advocate for one, or make one,
or imagine quality of death as the last privilege of a dying person.
Stephen Jenkinson
Die Wise
When you have overcome the fear of death
you will have overcome death itself.
Do not ever think that anyone overcomes death
until he has overcome the fear of death,
until he can agree within himself,
“Living or dead, I’m still alive.
Living or dead, I can never be separated from the love of God,
so it is not important to me whether I’m alive or dead
because dead or alive, I’m alive in God.”
In that kind of overcoming, death has no power;
there is then no sting in passing from human sight.
By that time you realize that everyone has to pass from human sight
at least to make room for someone else to come along.
But passing from human sight is no longer a tragedy;
passing from human sight is no longer a source of grieving.
Joel S.. Goldsmith
The Journey Back to the Father's House
Questioner:
Yesterday I couldn’t sleep. When I was lying on my bed
I kept hearing sounds and seeing lights.
I was scared, sweating.
I thought I was dying.
Maharaja:
Whatever is happening is happening as it should.
Even if whatever you felt was dying actually was dying,
you were not dead.
Keep that firmly in mind.
Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj
Seeds of Consciousness
The chief mourner does not always attend the funeral.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
I have always found that the people who have quite genuinely died to themselves
make no claims of any kind to their own part in the process .
They think of themselves as lazy and lucky .
If they did anything at all , it was so simple that anyone else could do the same —
for all that they have done is to recognize a universal fact of life ,
something as true of the weak and foolish as of the wise and strong .
They would even say that in this respect
there is some advantage in being weak and foolish ,
for the possession of a strong will and a clever head
makes some things very difficult to see .
Alan W. Watts
Become What You Are
Shamanism is closely related to death and dying.
The career of many shamans begins with a spontaneous visionary state.
This initiatory crisis, or “shamanic illness,” as Western anthropologists call it,
usually takes the form of a profound experience
of psychospiritual death and rebirth
and represents extraordinary experiential training for actual death.
After the experience of death, dismemberment, and total annihilation,
the shaman experiences rebirth.
He or she acquires new flesh, new blood, and new eyes
and ascends to the supernal realms.
Stanislav Grof
The Ultimate Journey
And now here I am living in this unimaginable world.
It feels really strange, and I can’t tell if I’m fortunate or not.
Maybe it doesn’t matter.
For me—and for everybody else, probably—
this is my first experience growing old,
and the emotions I’m having, too, are all first-time feelings.
If it were something I’d experienced before,
then I’d be able to understand it more clearly,
but this is the first time, so I can’t.
For now all I can do is put off making any detailed judgments
and accept things as they are.
Just like I accept the sky, the clouds, and the river.
And there’s also something kind of comical about it all,
something you don’t want to discard completely.
Haruki Murakama
What I Talk About When I Talk About Running
And that’s my very promising job,
to find a way to oblige people
to learn something they don’t want to learn
and to learn it well and to learn it soon.
I have to teach people
how to love someone who’s leaving,
not someone who’s staying.
Nobody wants to learn to love like that.
Stephen Jenkinson
Die Wise
That white light you hear of people seeing during near-death experiences?
It’s love. Seen by “tired” eyes.
You sense both that it emanates from intelligence
and that in some uncanny way it is that intelligence.
You get that it knows you far better than you know yourself;
it understands you; it adores you.
Like a doting parent, times infinity.
This recognition, being so understood, is “heaven.”
You are the face of God as It’s never before been seen.
Mike Dooley
The Top Ten Things Dead People Want to Tell YOU
From a Dearly Departed
I’ve never cried as much as I have here. Or laughed.
I thought I knew what to expect when I died—
you know, either “God, judgment, a few deceased relatives”
or “lights out, game over, absolute nothingness”—
but I had no idea.
Nothing could have prepared me for all I’ve found.
How the whole world had it so wrong is beyond me.
If I had had just an inkling of the truth about life
and what I now know while I was alive,
things would have been so different for me!
Imagine living amid the all-or-nothing romance of time and space
while learning how to change what you don’t like,
add more of what you do,
and never be afraid of anything!
Where everything is so precious, ephemeral, and fantastic!
Where there is so much love, love, love,
everywhere, always.
Why didn’t I see it then?
Mike Dooley
The Top Ten Things Dead People Want to Tell YOU
Two conditions must exist
in order to classify a death as a suicide.
1. You must be aware of what you are doing—
that is, you must be making a conscious choice to die.
2. You must be making the choice to die
for the purpose of escaping, rather than completing, your life.
Neale Donald Walsch
Home With God
WHAT HAPPENS WHEN YOU DIE
Well, first of all, you won’t.
Which is all you really have to know about death
and why it’s the first thing “dead” people want to tell you.
Many of them found this hard to believe themselves at first,
gazing upon their own funerals,
lingering around their old stomping grounds,
stunned and amazed as they gestured and shouted to the friends left behind.
There’s an abrupt disconnect, of course,
that comes from leaving behind all things time and space
and learning to maneuver in the unseen.
The nature of this transition depends entirely
on the beliefs of the dearly departed at the time of transition,
because their beliefs and thoughts carry over to their new environs.
Mike Dooley
The Top Ten Things Dead People Want to Tell YOU
IF I WOKE UP
IN THE MORNING
AND NOTHING HURT,
I WOULD THINK
I WAS DEAD
Tourist T-Shirt
Virginia Beach, Virginia
All our feelings have significance
only in relation to their relative opposites.
While the human individual abhors pain and discomfort,
he would never be able to understand, let alone appreciate,
pleasure and comfort by themselves.
And yet, in his abysmal ignorance, he forgets this basic fact of life
and strives with all his might for pleasure without pain
and life without death.
Ramesh S. Balsekar
Final Truth: A Guide to Ultimate Understanding
I live without inhabiting myself
In such a way that I am dying
So that I do not die.
St John of the Cross
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?
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