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 are so much attached to our own feeling , to our individual existence.
For us , just now, we have some fear of death,
but after we resume our true original nature,
there is Nirvana.
That is why we say,
“ To attain Nirvana is to pass away. ”
“ To pass away ” is not a very adequate expression .
Perhaps “ to pass on, ” or “ to go on, ” or “ to join ” would be better.
Will you try to find some better expression for death?
When you find it,
you will have quite a new interpretation of your life.
Shunryu Suzuki
Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind
One realizes that they are and always will be,
and therefore lives in the now.
One knows that they cannot be injured or destroyed —
that they exist in accordance with Law (and that Law is Good).
One seeks no explanation, knowing that as the time comes,
they will progress through matter,
discarding sheath after sheath in its unfoldment,
attaining greater and greater degrees of knowing.
One sees Death and Life as one.
One sees Death as Birth.
One loses all its fear of Death, knowing it as it is.
One sees behind the hideous mask of Death,
the beautiful face of the radiant creature — Life.
These and other experiences come to the Soul when it awakens.
William Walker Atkinson
Nuggets of The New Thought
Life takes on a new meaning
when one reaches the borders of Spiritual Consciousness,
and takes a few steps beyond the borders.
Words cannot convey the idea —
it must be experienced to be comprehended.
One becomes conscious of having always existed — existing now —
and being intended for existence forever.
One does not reason out these things — one knows them,
just as before one had felt that they existed at any particular moment.
The “I Am” has taken on a new meaning — has apparently grown,
although one knows that they have not really grown,
but that one for the first time has arrived at a stage of consciousness
capable of recognizing themselves as they are.
One knows that they are in but the borderland of the Cosmic Knowing —
and that beyond lie regions of marvelous beauty
which in turn will be traveled.
One sees endless phases of existence
opening up to the vision.
William Walker Atkinson
Nuggets of The New Thought
In ancient Egypt,
to capture and mummify dangerous animals
like hundreds of crocodiles who served as messengers
from this world to the next
demonstrated the ancients’ reverence for death.
And did you know that a tribe in Africa
hangs the skull of the deceased over their doorway
and consults the dead regularly?
From the study of death,
my students and I learned a lot.
John Abraham
How to Get the Death You Want: A Practical and Moral Guide
Of course I do not think about death and dying all the time.
Nor does anyone.
La Rochefoucauld commented:
“One can no more look steadily at death than at the sun.”
At the same time we must not neglect one of the essential realities of life,
in ignoring death.
People tend to build up fears about topics hidden from them,
and these fears grow to be worse than the realities.
Death is a biological reality, a cultural phenomenon,
a spiritual event, an economic reality and a psychological process.
The topic is taboo in our society,
making it important to address the reality of death
seriously, realistically and helpfully.
We sorely need an objective and comprehensive kind of education
informing our understanding of death.
John Abraham
How to Get the Death You Want: A Practical and Moral Guide
I believe wholeheartedly in assisted death.
Not assisted suicide for depression.
Depression is a treatable, reversible condition.
Suicide is inappropriate, except in untreatable, unbearable suffering.
Death is not treatable or preventable.
Death can be easy or it can be utterly, devastatingly miserable.
It can be totally destructive of all dignity, privacy, and autonomy,
much less comfort. We have all seen it.
I fully respect the right of individuals to their own beliefs and end-of-life wishes.
I do not condone the imposition of personal religious beliefs
on someone who does not share the same convictions.
I believe it to be morally, ethically, humanely, and mercifully unconscionable
that a dying person must accept prolonged suffering
if that individual does not wish it.
This sometimes is justified by the myth
that physical and emotional suffering at the end of life can be controlled.
We all know that this is often not possible.
Sometimes we resort finally to medicating the individual into a semiconscious state.
And just what is the point of that?
Two months ago, I was diagnosed with advanced myelodysplastic syndrome.
My estimated survival time is 4 to 6 months,
which I suspect is optimistic.
At my age, 73, and general medical condition,
bone marrow transplant is not an option.
Chemotherapy might offer a few months of extended existence,
at the risk of spending it all sick from adverse effects.
I have opted for palliative care in hospice.
I will eventually die of anemia or infection of some sort.
And there is the rub.
What sort of death will it be?
I personally opt for as easy as possible.
John Rowe III, MD, Medford, Oregon
Journal of the American Medical Association
Also published in:
John Abraham
How to Get the Death You Want: A Practical and Moral Guide
Death is now the result of the will of the soul.
Eventually it has to be the result
of the united will of the soul and the personality,
and when that happens,
there will be no fear of death.
Ponder on this.
Alice A. Bailey
Discipleship in the New Age
The person you think is going to die is not the person you are now
Who you are now is impossible to lose –
and this will be true at all future moments at which you exist.
You fear death because you imagine your self to be a static thing
which will continue unchanged (amid an ever-changing world)
until the dreaded moment at which your brain stops working.
But it is logically impossible for you –
the feeling of being one brain in the present – to die.
And what else can you ever be
except the feeling of being one brain in the present?
Death only marks a limit to what new experiences can arise
based on the memory chain that a brain has access to.
David Darling
Zen Physics, The Science of Death, the Logic of Reincarnation
The act of dying is like falling asleep,
the effect of dying is to forget all about being one particular person,
and the sequel to dying is the gradual laying down
of new memories in a new brain,
which will define another particular person.
What is crucial is that, from the subjective point of view,
although one set of memories (and life circumstances)
is completely replaced by another,
and one brain by another,
there is no cessation of experience,
of consciousness, of being.
One story ends and,
in the wink of an eye as felt from within,
another story begins.
David Darling
Zen Physics, The Science of Death, the Logic of Reincarnation
No one who has experienced death ever mourns the death of anyone.
Neale Donald Walsch
The Complete Conversations with God: An Uncommon Dialogue
You think that life on Earth is better than life in heaven?
I tell you this,
at the moment of your death you will realize the greatest freedom,
the greatest peace, the greatest joy,
and the greatest love you have ever known.
Shall we therefore punish Bre’r Fox
for throwing Bre’r Rabbit into the briar patch?
Neale Donald Walsch
The Complete Conversations with God: An Uncommon Dialogue
Every man is related to the dead,
as shown by clairvoyant consciousness.
When the young—children or juveniles—pass through the gate of death,
it is seen that the connection between the living and the dead
is different from that of older people,
those dying in the twilight of their life.
There is a decisive difference
. When we lose children,
when the young are apparently taken from us,
they do not really leave us at all,
but remain with us.
This is seen by clairvoyant consciousness
by the fact that the messages we receive on awakening
are forceful and vivid when the dead concerned died as children or young people.
The connection between those remaining behind and the dead
is then such that we can only say
that a child or young person is not lost at all;
they really remain present.
Rudolf Steiner
Earthly Death and Cosmic Life
There’s no such thing as dying.
You just go on to a different stage of your life.
Dying is pleasant.
If people are worried about it,
tell them to go to a place in the river that has a deep pool.
Tell them to dive down to the bottom of the pool.
And then, at the bottom push up vigorously with their feet
and come plunging up to the surface.
Tell them it is like that.
Dolores Cannon
Between Death and Life: Conversations With A Spirit
Dying is the most important thing you do in your life.
It’s the great frontier for every one of us.
And loving is the art of living as a preparation for dying.
Allowing ourselves to dissolve into the ocean of love
is not just about leaving this body;
it is also the route to Oneness and unity
with our own inner being, the soul,
while we are still here.
If you know how to live and to love,
you know how to die.
Ram Dass
Walking Each Other Home: Conversations on Loving and Dying
You have created a society in which it is very not okay to want to die—
very not okay to be very okay with death.
Because you don’t want to die, you can’t imagine anyone wanting to die—
no matter what their circumstances or condition.
But there are many situations in which death is preferable to life—
which I know you can imagine if you think about it for even a little bit.
Yet, these truths don’t occur to you—they are not that self-evident—
when you are looking in the face someone else who is choosing to die.
And the dying person knows this.
She can feel the level of acceptance in the room regarding her decision.
Have you ever noticed how many people wait until the room is empty before they die? Some even have to tell their loved ones—
“No, really, go. Get a bite to eat.”
Or “Go, get some sleep. I’m fine. I’ll see you in the morning.”
And then, when the loyal guard leaves,
so does the soul from the body of the guarded.
Neale Donald Walsch
The Complete Conversations with God: An Uncommon Dialogue
The best dying practice, the best way to die,
is to have already ‘made real the wisdom mind of the buddhas’ within oneself. Enlightened practitioners have already before their deaths,
reached the highest levels of Western developmental psychology,
through their spiritual practices, and their service to all life.
The body is no longer a sarcophagus,
imprisoning the consciousness within flesh,
bone and the material world; it is a tool merely.
Consciousness does not exist within the body;
it is the reverse case for the highly evolved:
body exists within consciousness.
These highly evolved ones are able to consciously dissolve the physical elements
drawn together to form the vehicle of manifestation:
they may choose not to leave behind a dead container
for others to disintegrate using burning (the best way) or burial.
Sogyal Rinpoche tells of one instance of many,
the death of Sonam Namgyal, in Tibet in 1952.
He asked that his body be wrapped and left undisturbed for a week.
In that time, the lamas, monks and family
noticed the mass in the wrappings shrinking.
When unwrapped for burial, only his hair and nails remained.
Great rainbows (and other phenomena)
mark the assumption of the Body of Light or the Rainbow body, by such saints.
Susan Elizabeth Shore
Death, Our Last Illusion: A Scientific and Spiritual Probing of the Life Beyond Death
As the Tibetan Book of the Dead teaches,
the dying should face death not only calmly and clear-mindedly
but with an intellect rightly trained and rightly directed,
mentally transcending, if need be, bodily suffering and infirmities,
as they would be able to do had they practiced efficiently
during their active lifetime the Art of Living,
and, when about to die, the Art of Dying.
But in the Occident,
where the Art of Dying is little known and rarely practiced,
there is, contrastingly, the common unwillingness to die,
which, produces unfavourable results.
As here in America,
every effort is apt to be made by a materialistically inclined medical science
to postpone, and thereby to interfere with, the death-process.
Walter Evans-Wentz
Quote from:
Susan Elizabeth Shore
Death, Our Last Illusion: A Scientific and Spiritual Probing of the Life Beyond Death
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
Is death to be understood as within, or outside of, human life?
It is said, often enough, that death is a "part of life."
But what does that phrase, almost a cliche, mean?
It has been explored much less than it should be.
That exploration inexorably leads to perhaps the most troubling problem of all—
how we are to find meaning in death,
if there is any meaning to be found.
Daniel Callahan
The Troubled Dream of Life: In Search of a Peaceful Death
Death is our eternal companion.
It is always to our left, an arm’s length behind us.
Death is the only wise adviser that a warrior has.
Whenever he feels that everything is going wrong
and he’s about to be annihilated,
he can turn to his death and ask if that is so.
His death will tell him that he is wrong,
that nothing really matters outside its touch.
His death will tell him,
I haven’t touched you yet.
Carlos Castaneda
Journey to Ixtlan
Jung tells us that from the perspective of the Self—
which he defined as our entire psyche, including the conscious, unconscious,
and ego, as well as a self-regulating center—
death is understood not as an end, but rather as a transformation.
From the broader, more holistic point of view of the Self,
death is seen as an initiation into a new life, one we cannot yet imagine.
This way of understanding death—
as a transformation rather than an end—
can also be found in the sciences.
Albert Einstein’s first law of thermodynamics asserts that
energy cannot be created or destroyed;
it can only be changed from one form to another.
Following this model, the elements that once made our body
are recomposed after our death, into other structures or organisms.
As astronomer Carl Sagan poetically noted,
we ourselves are “made of star stuff,”
which is to say that the matter that makes up our physical bodies
was “forged in the bellies of distant, long-extinguished stars.”
Joanna Ebenstein
Memento Mori: The Art of Contemplating Death to Live a Better Life
Death is just infinity closing in
Jorge Luis Borges
When death attacks, all study and contemplation becomes useless.
Only what you know will work.
One who knows will look at death and laugh.
Mansoor laughed loudly.
People asked, ”We are killing you, why are you laughing?”
Mansoor said, ”I am laughing because the one you are killing is not me.
And what I am you cannot even touch – killing is out of the question.”
Krishna has said, weapons cannot pierce it, fire cannot burn it.
Mansoor said, ”I am laughing because it is very strange.
You had said, ’We will kill you Mansoor.’
Now you are killing someone else, who is not me.
You are cutting my hand, I am not my hand.
You have cut off my feet, the feet are not me.
Now you will cut my neck also.
I say unto you that I am not the neck,
I am the witness sitting within.
How will you cut him?
No weapon can pierce it and no fire can burn it.
These are words of experience.
The well-read scholar cannot say this.
Osho
Death Is Divine
Nowadays most people die of a sort of creeping common sense,
and discover when it is too late
that the only things one never regrets
are one’s mistakes.
Oscar Wilde
The Picture Of Dorian Gray
Sociological research tells us that befriending death
is good not only for ourselves but for society.
Terror management theory—
a field of study based on Ernest Becker’s Pulitzer Prize–winning book, The Denial of Death—demonstrates that if one has not come to conscious relationship with one’s own death, reminders of mortality can lead to anxiety, aggression, xenophobia,
and even violence against others, genocide, and dictatorships.
Interestingly, these findings reaffirm one of the most important Buddhist tenets
—that acceptance of the impermanence of life
is the only way to true happiness.
Joanna Ebenstein
Memento Mori: The Art of Contemplating Death to Live a Better Life
Most interestingly, Seneca quibbled with the idea
that death was something that lay ahead of us in the uncertain future.
“This is our big mistake,” he wrote,
“to think we look forward toward death.
Most of death is already gone.
Whatever time has passed is owned by death.”
That was what he realized,
that we are dying every day
and no day, once dead, can be revived.
Ryan Holiday, Stephen Hanselman
Lives of the Stoics: The Art of Living from Zeno to Marcus Aurelius
When the future disappears,
we are brought home to the immediacy that we may have avoided all our lives—
the vibrant aliveness Here-Now,
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.
Joan Tollifson
Death: The End of Self-Improvement
“Death will come, no matter what anyone may think about it.
Accept it as a necessity, and pass the thought out of your mind.
It must be a necessity, or it would not come to all.
Perhaps it is not as bad as it has been pictured.
The entire world is made up of only two things, ENERGY and MATTER.
In elementary physics we learn that neither matter nor energy
(the only two realities known to man) can be created nor destroyed.
Both matter and energy can be transformed,
but neither can be destroyed.
Life is energy, if it is anything.
If neither energy nor matter can be destroyed,
of course life cannot be destroyed.
Life, like other forms of energy,
may be passed through various processes of transition, or change,
but it cannot be destroyed.
Death is mere transition.
If death is not mere change, or transition,
then nothing comes after death except a long, eternal, peaceful sleep,
and sleep is nothing to be feared.
Thus you may wipe out, forever, the fear of Death.”
Napoleon Hill
Despite my many encounters with death, I must be totally honest:
It wasn’t until I began my journey as a hospice nurse
that I became captivated by the death and dying process of us humans.
It wasn’t until I stood at the bedside,
watching as human existence beautifully and uniquely transitioned from life to death - from here in our physical realm to somewhere beyond my eyes’ sight -
that I fully came to appreciate life as an extraordinary journey
from birth through death, from beginning to end, and maybe, beyond.
What I have come to realize is that
there are many similarities between birth and death.
We know and understand that birth is a process.
To come into this world, it takes transitions; it takes labor; it takes time.
Some births are fast, and some are slow.
Every birth is unique. Every birth has a way of being beautiful.
Death and dying are just the same.
Dying is a process consisting of transitions.
Death is the final transition.
Sometimes it is sudden, and sometimes it is gradual.
Dying is intimate, personal, and the most vulnerable part of our lives.
It can occur any time, any day.
Death and dying are unique.
And like birth, death and dying can also be one of the most beautiful experiences
we will face in this adventure we call life.
Katie Duncan
The Dying Process:
Your Essential Guide To Understanding Signs, Symptoms & Changes At The End Of Life
Death ends in a birth.
It is a form of closure.
Death, understood in this way, is not an end, not a loss.
It is imagined as a new beginning.
The death canal,
at the end of which a bright light can be seen,
becomes the birth canal.
The hour of death turns into the hour of birth.
Thus, there emerges a cyclical connection between death and birth,
which creates an infinity.
Byung-Chul Han
The Disappearance of Rituals: A Topology of the Present
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
A burial in a Norman village.
I ask for details from a farmer watching the procession from a distance.
“He was still young, barely sixty.
They found him dead in the field.
Well, that’s how it is. . . . That’s how it is. . . .”
This refrain, which struck me as comical at the time,
has haunted me ever since.
The fellow had no idea that what he was saying about death
was all that can be said and all we know.
E. M. Cioran
The Trouble with Being Born
In some cultures, death is held as something that is to be celebrated, not mourned.
After all, from somewhere you got released into this planet
within this atmospheric space.
Within that, however large a space you occupy,
it is still a small prison.
But death is an endless possibility.
So there must be much more joy,
much more of a sense of excitement about this than birth.
For someone who is aware of this possibility,
there is no such thing as life and death.
Life is death, and death is life;
they are not different.
Death is in fact life in a very intense form.
Sadhguru.
Death; An Inside Story - A Book for all Those who Shall die
The greatest calamity of the human mind is that it is against death.
The moment you reject death, you also reject life.
You think life is right and death is wrong.
It is not so.
Life is what it is only because death is.
One who does not embrace death will not know life at all.
If you sit here saying, ‘I don’t want to die, I don’t want to die, I don’t want to die,’
all that will happen is you will not live.
You will anyway die, but by denying death,
you will not live well until then either.
If you are afraid of death, you will only avoid life;
you cannot avoid death.
Sadhguru.
Death; An Inside Story - A Book for all Those who Shall die
In the Indian tradition, cremation grounds are always held to be very sacred.
When someone dies, even if it is someone that you do not know, it hits you somewhere. In any genuine spiritual practice, there is always the smell of death.
If you go deep enough into it, it will remind you that you are mortal.
Whatever sadhana we have been teaching you, essentially, there is a tinge of death in it. If there is no tinge of death in it, there is no spirituality; it is just entertainment.
If someone taught you a superficial la-la practice
it may make you feel good, but there is nothing more to it.
Sadhguru.
Death; An Inside Story - A Book for all Those who Shall die
The grand phenomenon of life
cannot be constrained to the period between birth and death,
as seen by modern science.
It goes back all the way to the beginning of Creation
and extends all the way to wherever the Creation is heading.
Hence, any understanding of death that does not take this fact into account
is bound to be incomplete and incorrect.
Sadhguru.
Death; An Inside Story - A Book for all Those who Shall die
“I died for beauty, but was scarce
Adjusted in the tomb,
When one who died for truth was lain
In an adjoining room.
He questioned softly why I failed?
“For beauty,” I replied.
“And I for truth,—the two are one;
We brethren are,” he said.
And so, as kinsmen met a night,
We talked between the rooms,
Until the moss had reached our lips,
And covered up our names.”
Emily Dickinson
One used to sit under that old tree before the sun was up,
in the silent dawn when the world was silent.
The large trunk was massive, peaceful, the life of several hundred years.
One sat there utterly still,
without a single movement of thought,
without time, in utter emptiness,
with the essence of absolute order and so of the universe.
Then the sun was among the leaves, with dappled shadows.
The leaves were awaking.
Each year it offered the silence of trees,
and each year it was older and slowly dying.
When one came back,
it was losing its leaves but was still beautiful.
Two years later it was gone,
and in its place was a small plant of the same kind, protected and cared for.
All nature is beautiful in its death.
J. Krishnamurti
The Beauty of Life: Krishnamurti's Journal
As soon as we are born, we are dead.
Our birth and our death are just one thing.
It’s like a tree: when there’s a root there must be branches.
When there are branches there must be a root.
You can’t have one without the other.
It’s a little funny to see how at death people are so grief-stricken and distracted,
and at birth how happy and delighted.
It’s delusion; nobody has ever looked at this clearly.
I think if you really want to cry,
it would be better to do so when someone’s born.
Birth is death, death is birth;
the branch is the root, the root is the branch.
If you must cry, cry at the root; cry at the birth.
Look closely: If there were no birth, there would be no death.
Can you understand this?
Don’t worry about things too much;
just think, “This is the way things are.”
Ajahn Chah
Koshin Paley Ellison and Matt Weingast
Awake at the Bedside: Contemplative Teachings on Palliative and End-of-Life Care
There is a path that goes into the high mountains through woods,
meadows and open spaces.
And there is a bench before the climb begins
and on it an old couple sit, looking down on the sunlit valley.
They come there very often and sit without a word,
silently watching the beauty of the earth.
They are waiting for death to come.
And the path goes on into the snows.
J. Krishnamurti
The Beauty of Life: Krishnamurti's Journal
When people are willing to discuss the end of their lives
and accept that they’re going to die,
their whole being changes.
They seem to carry with them a special kind of freedom,
an attitude that truly helps them live their last days.
Their fear decreases, they feel freer, and, ironically,
they actually seem more full of life, even though they’re dying.
I think this change in perspective can apply to all people because,
technically, we’re all dying.
If we can face that fact and allow in a bit of that freedom,
I believe we all can live better lives here and now.
Julie McFadden RN
Nothing to Fear: Demystifying Death to Live More Fully
Ask most dying people how they are doing, and listen with this in mind.
Their first, usually most enduring and often only response
is to talk about what their body is doing.
This isn’t inevitable. It is a learned response,
learned often during the diagnostic and treatment phase of an illness.
Offer a dying person a home visit from a physician, and it will be usually welcomed.
This is true also of a visit from a nurse.
But offer a home visit from a nonmedical practitioner, a counselor,
and the welcome vaporizes and the compliance plummets.
The patient and family are saying:
The body comes first. I am what my body needs,
and my body needs this medical expertise.
Whatever I might need I can likely conjure myself.
Or at least it can wait.
This considerable focus on the body,
the treatment of dying as primarily a physical reality,
and the preoccupation with pain and symptom,
all of it is carried on in broad daylight with the general willingness and compliance
of everyone in the treatment stream,
usually with the full support and encouragement
of everyone who loves the one who is dying.
I wonder if we can make this overarching focus
on the body and on pain and symptom management earn its keep
and pay the rent for all the practical, emotional, and political real estate
it takes up in the real process of dying
that happens every day in urban North America.
This is not too much to ask.
Stephen Jenkinson
Die Wise: A Manifesto for Sanity and Soul
DYING WISE IS AN ACT OF LOVE
It carries an abiding faith in life,
it carries love for the world,
and it asks that same faith and love of those who attend to it when it comes.
Dying well is not the end of parenting
, but the fullness of parenting,
not the end of a marriage,
but the last great act of a married life.
Dying well is a bequest that you leave to those you love,
probably the only thing that in the end will not be eaten by moths,
apportioned by lawyers, or bought for quarters in a yard sale.
Dying well is the way you could be known
by those you won’t live long enough to meet,
the way by which they might feel loved by you
after you die.
Stephen Jenkinson
Die Wise: A Manifesto for Sanity and Soul
We have no mentors for dying,
no National Living Treasures skilled in the traditional arts of dying well.
Instead, we have legions of accomplices in the project of not dying,
and others in the project of hiding it away.
We have just about no tradition of dying well.
If you are not born with the instinct for dying well,
you have to learn it.
I wish you every success in finding someone who is good at it
and is willing to teach you.
You have to learn how to die,
or you probably will not die wisely or well.
Stephen Jenkinson
Die Wise: A Manifesto for Sanity and Soul
As we became physical human beings,
the spirit and soul did actually transform itself into physical corporeality,
and now we transform this physical corporeality back into spirit and soul again.
We could understand how physical corporeality transforms back into spirit and soul
if this occurred gradually, so that, let us say,
we saw that a person had become entirely physical around the age of 35
and then began to grow spiritual again,
and by the end of their life had been spiritualized to such a degree
that death would be merely a slow transition back into spirit and soul.
This does indeed happen inwardly, but not outwardly,
and here we are deceived by appearances.
In our declining years we bear our body with us as something of a burden,
as something that no longer entirely belongs to us.
We slowly become a corpse,
and death consists only in the fact that this corpse of ours grows too heavy,
that gravity becomes too strong when, on awakening each morning,
our soul comes back into this body.
But if we direct our senses only to outward appearance,
we cannot discern these changes already occurring in us,
do not notice that this second half of life
is already a gradual dying.
Rudolf Steiner
Growing Old: The Spiritual Dimensions of Aging
BIRTHLESS AND DEATHLESS
The Spirit within me is Birthless and deathless;
It was not born and It cannot die.
I have no fear of death, for I perceive that
Death is an illusion and not the Truth.
I was born of the Spirit, and I live in the Spirit,
And shall continue to live in and by the Spirit.
The Spirit within me lives forever.
Ernest Holmes
The Science of Mind
It is not that the artist is incapable of living.
On the contrary, his zest for life is so powerful, so voracious
that it forces him to kill himself over and over.
He dies many times
in order to live innumerable lives.
Henry Miller
WIsdom of the Heart
In cosmic terms,
what does it actually mean to be a free being?
To be a free being,
to be able to transform ourselves back from physical corporeality
into spirit and soul,
actually means to be able to die.
Love, on the other hand,
means being able to transform ourselves
from the realm of spirit and soul
into that of physical corporeality.
In cosmic terms,
being able to love
means being able to live.
Rudolf Steiner
Growing Old: The Spiritual Dimensions of Aging
We are born through cosmic love,
and we pass through the gateway of death into the world of spirit and soul
through the power of freedom that we have within us.
If we develop love in the world,
this love is basically the echo,
the continuing resonance of our being of spirit and soul
as we possessed it before birth,
or let us say before conception.
And if we develop freedom in our existence between birth and death,
soul-spiritually we are prefiguring development of the power
that will be most important to us
once we have departed from the body at death.
Rudolf Steiner
Growing Old: The Spiritual Dimensions of Aging
People talk of immortality only as the negation of death.
Certainly, this side of immortality is as important as the other —
we shall have much more to say about it —
but the immortality we first come to know in the way I have briefly indicated
is not the negation of death, but “unbornness,”
the negation of birth;
and both sides are equally real.
Only when people come once more to understand
that eternity has these two sides —
immortality and “unbornness” —
will they be able to recognise again in man
that which is enduring, truly eternal.
Rudolf Steiner
The Evolution of Consciousness as revealed through Initiation-Knowledge Lecture 1
If we cannot celebrate death as we celebrate birth,
we will not know life.
—Sadhguru
Birth and death are just passages,
not of life but of time.
Death is a fiction of the unaware.
There is only life, life, and life alone,
moving from one dimension to another.
—Sadhguru
Mourning is not the index of true love.
It betrays love of the object, of its shape only.
That is not love.
True love is shown by the certainty
that the object of love is in the Self
and that it can never become non-existent.
There will be no pain
if the physical outlook is given up
and if the person exists as the Self.
Ramana Maharshi
The shock of the fear of death drove my mind inwards
and I said to myself mentally, without actually framing the words:
‘Now that death has come; what does it mean?
What is it that is dying? This body dies . . .
But with the death of the body am I dead?
Is the body I? . . .
The body dies but the Spirit that transcends it cannot be touched by death.
That means I am the deathless Spirit.’
All this was not dull thought;
it flashed through me vividly as living truth which I perceived directly. . .
From that moment onwards the ‘I’ or Self
focused attention on itself by a powerful fascination.
Fear of death had vanished once and for all.
Absorption in the Self continued unbroken from that time on.
Ramana Maharshi
I doubt that death will come. Death?
Could it be that the days, so long, will end?
That’s how I daydream, calm, quiet.
Could it be that death is a bluff?
A trick of life?
Is it persecution?
And that’s how it is.
Clarice Lispector
One Day Less (“Um dia a menos”)
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
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
At the moment of death
and every night in deep sleep
and actually instant by instant,
everything disappears.
We disappear.
In deep sleep,
even the first, bare sense of awareness or presence disappears.
Nothing perceivable or conceivable remains.
What a relief!
Joan Tollifson
Nothing to Grasp
To convince me that people live on after death,
I was allowed to talk and spend time with many people
known to me during their physical life,
which I did, not just for a day or a week,
but for months and almost as much as a year.
Our interactions were the same as they had been in the world.
These acquaintances were positively astounded
that while living the life of the body they had been
(and many others still are) so skeptical—
skeptical to the point that they did not believe
they would continue to live after death.
The truth, they found,
is that little more than a day passes after the demise of the body
before we enter the next life,
since that life is a continuation of this.
Swedenborg, Emanuel Swedenborg
Secrets of Heaven
All the time you are awake, your two bodies, remain together
interpenetrating each other, but when you fall asleep
the greater part of your etherc slips out of the physical;
and in reality this slipping out of the etheric is what constitutes sleep.
it is this etheric body which is the repository of all your thoughts and feelings.
It includes what are often called the conscious and the subconscious minds.
It is the “psyche” of the psychologist,
and it is in fact, your human personality.
That is why personality survives death;
because it resides in the etheric which passes over intact,
and not in the physical
which breaks up into decomposition when it is left alone.
Emmet Fox
Life After Death Described and Explained
You have to realize that you really possess not one body but two.
It may surprise you to be told that right here at the present moment
you have not only the physical body that you know about—
the thing that you see when you look into the glass—
but a second body which is none the less substantial because you cannot see it
, and that this body is made of ether.
This statement may surprise you, but it is true.
The etheric body is the same shape as your physical body,
but it is slightly larger and it interpenetrates the physical body as air fills a sponge.
It does not surround it but interpenetrates it.
It may help you to think of it as a replica of the physical body in ether.
Emmet Fox
Life After Death Described and Explained
When we are awake,
our whole spiritual journey loses its seriousness.
It melts away like a cloud formation.
No one was actually running from a tiger,
and no one was actually saved from this danger.
The whole problem never really existed.
It was only a dream.
To realize this is to be totally intimate with the world as it actually is
(and not as we think it is),
open to everything,
holding on to nothing.
Joan Tollifson
Nothing to Grasp
I have often thought that more people should die in less traditional places.
If you have a care system that can travel with you,
and you have spent all your best days on the shores of your private beach,
why not set up a bed and die there?
If you have the care and the ability
and have spent the best hours of your life in the forest,
why not die in a bed there?
I would love to be bedside at a forest death.
Anne-Marie Keppel
Death Nesting: The Heart-Centered Practices of a Death Doula
...prepare for your own last great transformation
by living a death-aware life for all the rest of your days.
Karen Wyatt, MD
introduction to:
Anne--Marie Keppel
Death Nesting: The Heart-Centered Practices of a Death Doula
Let the soul speak for itself,
and you will find that its song will ring forth clearly, strongly, and gloriously:
“There is no Death; there is no Death; there is no Death;
there is naught but Life, and that Life is Life Everlasting!”
Such is the song of the soul.
Listen for it in the Silence,
for there alone can its vibrations reach your eager ears.
It is the Song of Life ever denying Death.
There is no Death—there is naught but Life Everlasting,
forever, and forever, and forever.
William Walker Atkinson
The Life Beyond Death
Many think the most important question in the world is:
“Is there a life after death?”
Wrong!
Nobody seems to be grappling with the problem of
: Is there a life before death?
Yet my experience is that it’s precisely the ones
who don’t know what to do with this life
who are all hot and bothered about what they are going to do with another life.
One sign that you’re awakened
is that you don’t give a damn about what’s going to happen in the next life.
You’re not bothered about it;
you don’t care.
You are not interested, period.
Anthony de Mello
Awareness
The fear and the morbidness which the subject of death usually evokes,
and the unwillingness to face it with understanding,
are due to the emphasis which people lay upon the fact of the physical body,
and the facility with which they identify themselves with it;
it is based also upon an innate fear of loneliness,
and the loss of the familiar.
Yet the loneliness which eventuates after death,
when the man finds himself without a physical vehicle,
is as nothing compared to the loneliness of birth.
At birth, the soul finds itself in new surroundings,
and immersed in a body which is at first totally incompetent to take care of itself,
or to establish intelligent contact
with surrounding conditions for a long period of time.
Alice A. Bailey
A Treatise On White Magic
If you’re thinking a natural death is like a natural birth,
probably because the term “transitioning” is used in both,
it’s not.
A natural birth means the expectant mother
labors and births her child without any medications.
None.
But a natural death allows the dying person
to take medications that will ease their suffering.
The dying process isn’t necessarily always painful;
our bodies instinctively know how to stop living.
Penny Hawkins Smith
Influencing Death: Reframing Dying for Better Living
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