This site shares Life-affirming meditations
that heal misconception about Death.
Living beautifully and dying beautifully,
Embrace Death as Birth
into limitless Life Awareness.
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
I have heard from others
who are disturbed by the way Ramana Maharishi died,
but when the physical karma is exhausted
and the prana begins to withdraw from the body,
something has to go first.
Whether the body exits
through cancer, kidney failure,
heart disease, or a stroke,
it really doesn’t matter to spirit.
Deepak Chopra
Ask Deepak About Death and Dying
I saw the death phobia that permeates our time
brought to bear upon dying people
in the name of caring for them.
And I saw that as a culture
we have a withered psychology
of coping and accepting
where we might once have had a mythology
and a poetry of purposed, meaningful dying.
This poverty was the constant companion and chimera
of almost every dying person I worked with.
I discovered that few wanted to die well,
fewer still, wisely.
Most didn’t want to die at all,
and they spent their dying time
refusing to do so.
Stephen Jenkinson
Die Wise: A Manifesto for Sanity and Soul
A conscious death
allows you to utilize the death process in a way
that transforms what appears to be
a mere biological dysfunction, or accident,
into a spiritual art form—
the tool for the transformation of consciousness that it should be.
Conscious dying has effects
exponentially powerful, benign
and beneficial to the individual,
society and all life.
Anya Foos-Graber
Deathing
You need not bring your dream to a definite conclusion,
or make it noble, or happy, or beautiful;
all you need is
to realize that you are dreaming.
Nisargadatta Maharaj
Pretend for a moment that you are a child,
and I am trying to undertake the particular chore
of explaining to you what your most developed adult self will be like -
and in my explanation,
I say that this adult self is to some extent part of you,
an outgrowth, or projection of what you are.
And the child says
"But what will happen to me?
Must I die to become this other self?
I do not want to change.
How can I ever be this adult self,
when it is not what I am now,
without dying as what I am.
Jane Roberts
Seth Speaks
Whatsoever I wanted to paint,
I have painted.
Now, just to exist is pointless.
I have given that which I came to give;
now I can go back to the original source.
There is no need to live in the body anymore.
I have contributed.
Osho
Living On Your Own Terms
That transitional experience
will go on and on and on
until the ascension above all sense of this world.
Then, there will be no more reincarnation
because there will be no place
into which to be reborn.
Joel S. Goldsmith
Leave Your Nets
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.
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.
Rudolph Steiner:
The Dead Are With Us
You are afraid to die?
Buddha says: “You cannot die,
because in the first place, you are not.”
How can you die?
Look into your being, go deep into it.
See, who is there to die –
and you will not find any ego there.
Then there is no possibility of death.
Only the idea of ego creates the fear of death.
When there is no ego there is no death.
You are utter silence, deathlessness, eternity –
not as you, but as an open sky,
uncontaminated by any idea of “I,” of self
– unbounded, undefined.
Then there is no fear.
Osho
Next Time You Feel Suicidal:
instead, live and celebrate your life in your own way
You grieve for those that should not be grieved for.
The wise grieve neither for the living nor the dead.
Never at any time was I not.
Nor thou, nor these princes of men.
Nor will we ever cease to be hereafter.
For the unreal has no being
And the real never ceases to be.
Bhagavad Gita
Now more than any other time in human history,
humans are presented with this choice:
Do we want quality of life or quantity of life?
Do we want to extend life through artificial means,
or do we forego medical aid
and die on our own terms?
We are being asked to make decisions
that were previously “left up to God.”
We are, as we grow and expand our knowledge of the human body,
determining more and more of our fate.
And as medicine has created “miracle” after “miracle”
there has to be a point when we say,
“I’m tired of the miracles.
I’m ready to die.”
Caleb Wilde
Confessions of a Funeral Director
After the ego is gone one
finds that the self no longer exists,
and one has died what Zen calls the Great Death,
daishi.
With that death, though,
we have at last become free.
In Zen literature,
this state is described in this way:
The blue mountains,
from the beginning,
do not move;
The white clouds,
of themselves,
come and go.
Yamamoto Tsunetomo
Hagakure: The Book of the Samurai
You can be of great assistance to an individual
if they have chosen to become non-physical,
to allow them to become non-physical with dignity,
with joy and effortlessness,
with love, with ecstasy, with ease…
to allow them to know,
to allow them to remember
that it is only the idea of stepping from one room to another room
in the same house.
That is all that death is.
They have made their choices.
Allow them to do so with dignity.
Bashar
Quest for Truth
We know intuitively and by being with dying people
that there is generally a twofold process
which takes place during the dying experience:
a letting go of the world, family, friends, hopes, and dreams;
and an embracing of something infinite within ourselves (soul, essence)
and greater than ourselves (God, Ultimate Reality).
The dying process tends to initiate
a natural detachment from the finite
and a movement toward the Infinite.
Philip Jones
Light On Death
The individual, of his own accord,
without suggestion but through direct experience,
begins to know, rather than believe,
that he does survive physical death.
It doesn’t make any difference
what he does during his physical life,
what he believes;
he will go on after his physical body dies.
Survival beyond physical death
is not a belief system,
but a simple fact
as natural as being born.
Robert Monroe
Far Journeys
Learn about yourself.
Your consciousness will give you
the appropriate answers to immortality.
There is no definition of what constitutes a good death.
To die at a young age in ancient Greece
was considered a blessing.
Today it is looked upon as a tragedy.
Conscious dying is, in my opinion,
the best death.
Dr. Bruce Goldberg:
Peaceful Transition: The Art of Conscious Dying & the Liberation of the Soul
Even if death were to fall upon you today like lightning,
you must be ready to die without sadness and regret,
without any residue of clinging for what is left behind.
Remaining in the recognition of the absolute view,
you should leave this life life an eagle
soaring up into the blue sky.
Dilgo Khyentse Rinpoche
I was nursing my friend
who had definite views that there was no afterlife.
In her last couple of hours
she became very peaceful
and arose from her unconsciousness periodically,
saying clearly and happily
such phrases as 'I will know soon',
'Come on, get on with it then, I am ready to go now',
and 'It is so beautiful'.
She would immediately lapse back into unconsciousness
after uttering these phrases.
She was very obviously content,
happy and at peace.
It was a wonderful experience
for her partner and me.
Elizabeth Fenwick
The Art of Dying
Think...and think...while you are alive.
What you call "salvation" belongs to the time before death.
If you don't break your ropes while you're alive,
do you think your ghost will do it after?
The idea that the soul will rejoin with the ecstatic
just because the body is rotten- that is all fantasy.
What is found now is found then.
If you find nothing now, you will simply end up
with an apartment in the City of Death.
If you make love with the divine now,
in the next life you will have
the face of satisfied desire.
Kabir
I've learned that people will forget
what you said,
people will forget
what you did,
but people will never forget
how you made them feel
Maya Angelou
Shared through Victor and Wendy Zammit's AFTERLIFE REPORT
Always remember, you are like a seed.
When the seeds are totally buried
the new crop comes up.
Until the grains of wheat die in the earth,
they cannot yield a new crop.
The periphery is finite,
but deep within you are infinite possibilities.
Just as a seed needs to give up its seed-hood
to grow into a plant,
unless we are ready to lose ourselves completely
we cannot grow anew.
The art of wise living
is the art of dying.
Dada J P Vaswani
You have no philosophical problem with sleep
and yet you seem to have a philosophical problem with death.
And it is not because of what you know about death—
it is because of what you think happens to life
when you die.
What you fear is the objectlessness
that death seems to promise.
It is ignorance that makes you fear death—
a lack of knowledge, a lack of experience.
Why should you fear death
any more than you fear sleep?
Why are you so afraid
of the loss of objects?
Why are you afraid
of the Very Condition you are in?
Adi Da Samraj
Easy Death
"You have entered this reality because you are ready to awaken.”
She pauses and makes eye contact with each of us.
“You suffer from deep amnesia.
You have forgotten what you are,
your purpose, where you come from,
and where you are going.
You have wandered for many lifetimes
in the outer worlds."
William Buhlman
Adventures in the Afterlife
Death approaches naturally, calmly,
long before we experience
whatever appears to take us away.
I remember the first signs,
the strongest that waking from sleep
felt like a return from another dimension of Life.
Before, I felt a distinct difference
between my waking and sleeping consciousness.
That difference has slowly blended
into an experiential continuity.
I know now that I am as active and aware while sleeping
as I am while awake.
And because of this continuity,
I feel the continuity of Life with Death.
I am always alive.
I am always dead.
FloatingWorlds
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
To most people, death remains a hidden secret,
as eroticized as it is feared.
We are irresistibly attracted
by the very anxieties we find most terrifying;
we are drawn to them by a primitive excitement
that arises from flirtation with danger.
Moths and flames,
mankind and death—
there is little difference.
Sherwin B. Nuland
How We Die: Reflections on Life's Final Chapter
Life and Death,
holding one another closely
swaying eternally
to the music of the Universe.
Karen Wyatt:
What Really Matters: 7 Lessons for Living from the Stories of the Dying
The first thing I would like to tell you about death
is that there is n 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
What doe mean to die?
To give up everything.
Death cuts you off with a very, very, very sharp razor
from your attachments, from your gods,
from your superstitions,
from your desire for comfort next life and so on.
I am going to find out what death means
because it is as important as living.
So how can I find out,
actually, not theoretically,
what it means to die?
I actually want to find out,
as you want to find out.
I am speaking for you, so don't go to sleep.
What does it mean to die?
Put that question to yourself.
While we are young, or when we are very old,
this question is always there.
It means to be totally free,
to be totally unattached
to everything that man has put together,
or what you have put together
totally free.
No attachments, no gods,
no future, no past.
You don't see the beauty of it, the greatness of it,
the extraordinary strength of it
while living to be dying.
You understand what that means?
While you are living,
every moment you are dying,
so that throughout life
you are not attached to anything.
That is what death means.
Krishnamurti
The Future is Now
If you want to know what death is like
then become aware of your own consciousness
as it is divorced from physical activities.
You will find that it is highly active.
With practice you will discover
that your normal waking consciousness
is highly limited,
and that what you thought of once as death conditions
seem more like life conditions.
Seth
When you identify as a soul,
you don’t fear death,
because the soul doesn’t die.
I identify as a soul now.
I’m not afraid.
Ram Dass
Walking Each Other Home:
Conversations on Loving and Dying
There is no man so fortunate
that there shall not be by him
when he is dying
some who are pleased
with what is going to happen.
Marcus Aurelius
It is now, fortunately,my time to face death.
Elisabeth Kubler-Ross
Since impermanence is an intrinsic characteristic
of everything in existence,
life is really a series of small opportunities
to rehearse the process of dying.
In a sense, every breath represents a “little death”
and can be used as training ground
in the work to accept impermanence.
Each complete breath,
consisting of an inhalation and an exhalation,
enacts the balance between fullness and emptiness,
which is a characteristic of the present moment.
The end of exhalation,
when the lungs are completely empty,
resembles the moment of death
when the breath is “given up.”
Karen Wyatt:
What Really Matters:
7 Lessons for Living from the Stories of the Dying
Good thoughts are like balm to the dead.
No selfish love must be sent to them,
no grieving because the departed is not around any longer;
this bothers the deceased
and brings to them a heavy burden.
The love that remains
and makes no claim to still want the dead here with us,
benefits the deceased
and increases his or her happiness.
Rudolf Steiner
At The Gates of Spiritual Science
Life is tragic
simply because the earth turns,
and the sun inexorably rises and sets,
and one day, for each of us,
the sun will go down for the last, last time.
Perhaps the whole root of our trouble,
the human trouble,
is that we will sacrifice all the beauty of our lives,
will imprison ourselves in totems, taboos, crosses,
blood sacrifices, steeples, mosques, races,
armies, flags, nations,
in order to deny the fact of death,
which is the only fact we have.
James Baldwin,
The Fire Next Time
DEATH is an acronym...
Departing Earth Arriving True Home..
Cynthia Clayton
Death in the morning,
at evening another birth –
this is the way of things,
no different from the bubbles on the stream.
Kenko & Chomei
Essays in Idleness
At the moment of death,
when the human being goes through the portal of death,
he sees numerous hindering, malevolent forces approaching him.
These forces, however,
are usually drawn near through the fear of death.
The greater the fear of death,
the stronger their power is.
Fear has always been a cause of anxiety at the moment of death.
When, however, the dying person is aware
that fear cannot change anything
about the dying process that he has to go through,
these forces and powers appear like desiccated bags.
The human being can only gain victory over the fear of death
and bravely face it if he knows
that in him is an immortal, eternal inner core
for whom death is only a metamorphosis of life,
a change of life form.
As soon as the human being
discovers his immortal inner core through spiritual science,
he learns more and more how to overcome anxiety
and in the long run all fear of death disappears as well.
The more materialistic a person is however,
all the more will he fear death.
Rudolf Steiner
If we are afraid of death
it is because we have not understood
that things do not really die.
Thich Nhat Hanh
No Death, No Fear
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 only apparent absence of life,
otherwise there is no such thing.
The word only indicates the absence of the presence of life.
To think of death as such is senseless.
There can never be any such presence,
for phenomenally it is only an absence.
'Life' is a concept extended in space-time,
and as such it is only an image in mind.
Conceptually also it is the absence of 'death'
which-as we have seen-is the absence of 'life'.
Evidently, therefore, there is no such factuality as 'life',
nor any such factuality as 'death'.
Nor can there be any factual entity
such as a 'liv-er' of life
or a 'dy-er' of death.
Wei Wu Wei
Posthumous Pieces
At death on your plane
the ego merely changes the focus of its awareness.
Jane Roberts
The Early Sessions: Book 3 of The Seth Material
During that period you refer to as old age,
once again emotionally and psychologically
the individual is less bound by physical time.
He no longer, that is the whole self no longer,
makes available sufficient psychic energy
for the maintenance of the physical organism.
The main focus of the whole self
has already begun to stray,
and the energies
used in necessary pattern organization for the physical plane
are already being returned,
taken from their attention to physical matters,
and becoming more attuned to the whole self
from which they were originally delegated.
Jane Roberts
The Early Sessions: Book 3 of The Seth Material
Each present moment of your experience
is dependent upon the future as well as the past,
your death as well as your birth.
Your birth and your death are built in, so to speak,
together, one implied in the other.
You could not die
unless you were the kind of creature who was born,
nor could you have a present moment as you consider it.
Your body is aware of the fact of its death at birth,
and of its birth at its death,
for all of its possibilities for action
take place in the area between.
Death is therefore as creative as birth,
and as necessary for action and consciousness, in your terms.
Jane Roberts
The Nature of the Psyche: Its Human Expression
According to Seth,
each case of senility is different,
but generally speaking,
the personality transfers the vital parts of consciousness
into the next area of existence,
and is often fully aware there, and functioning.
Gradually the personality’s mental focus leaves this life
and begins to operate entirely on another level.
The physical disease—the hardening of the arteries—
is caused by the personality’s gradual refusal
to accept new physical stimuli,
thus avoiding physical experience
(either purposefully or through error).
People who are terrified of physical death might take this path,
since when physical death occurs,
consciousness is already acquainted with its new environment
and the organism’s death is relatively meaningless.
In any case, the individual’s inner decision
causes the physical symptoms,
not the other way around.
Jane Roberts
The Seth Material
You exist in time,
but you belong to eternity.
You are a penetration of eternity into the world of time.
You are deathless,
living in a body of death.
Your consciousness knows no death, no birth.
It is only your body that is born and dies.
But you are not aware of your consciousness;
you are not conscious of your consciousness.
OSHO
It hurts my heart to know
that so many people feel frightened
as they approach their time of passing into the next world,
to say nothing of when they are in this one.
Life was meant to be a constant joy,
and death is a time of even greater joy,
when it would be wonderful
if all people could know
only peace,
and happy anticipation
Neale Donald Walsch
Home With God
Birth is not a beginning;
death is not an end
Chuang Tzu
The classical man’s worst fear was inglorious death;
the modern man’s worst fear is just death.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
The Bed of Procrustes:
Philosophical and Practical Aphorisms
If, at the time of death, death inquires of you,
“Would you like to live your life,
the same life that you have lived, one time more?”
What do you think your answer is going to be?
Only a man who has really lived intensively and totally
and who has not been lukewarm and tepid,
who has burned his life’s torch at both ends together,
will be ready to go through life again
because he knows he can change everything that has been.
He can find new spaces,
he can find new mountains to climb,
he can find new stars to reach,
he can trust in himself.
He knows his courage
and he knows that to live dangerously
is the only way to live.
Osho
In Love with Life:
Reflections on Friedrich Nietzsche's Thus Spake Zarathustra
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