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Welcome to Death Knells

The Death of Fearing Death

This site shares Life-affirming meditations
that heal misconceptions about Death.
Living beautifully and dying beautifully,
Embrace Death as Birth
​into limitless Life Awareness.



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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