Welcome to Death Knells

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Our selfish grief and demands

 often cause much pain and sorrow 

to our loved ones who have passed over to the other side,

 unless they have learned the true state of affairs

 before they have passed out,

 and refuse to be called back

 even by those whom they love.

  We should avoid delaying by our selfish demands 

the progress of those who have passed on,

—let them sleep on and rest,

 awaiting the hour of their transformation. 

To do otherwise, 

is to make them die their death several times in succession—

those who truly love and understand always avoid this, 

for their love and understanding 

bids them let the soul depart in peace 

and take its well earned rest and gain its full development.

 This period of soul-slumber 

is like the existence of the babe in the mother’s womb—

it sleeps that it may awaken into life and strength.” 

Yogi Ramacharaka

The Life Beyond Death 

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. 

Yogi Ramacharaka

The Life Beyond Death 

When one is able to leave the physical body behind,

 and actually travel in the regions of “the other side,”

 as in the case of many advanced individuals,

 any purely speculative discussions or arguments 

on the reality of “life after death”

 take on the appearance of dity and futility. 

As all philosophy teaches us, 

the world of the inner is far more real

 than is the world of the outer phenomena.

 In fact, man has no actual knowledge of the outer—

all he has is the report of the inner 

upon the impressions received from the outer. 

Yogi Ramacharaka 

The Life Beyond Death 

Go with the conviction 

that you are not the bodily self, 

that you are beyond births and deaths, 

that you are dynamic, 

being dynamism itself 

and are apparently experienced

 only as pure and simple awareness.

Roy Melvyn

The Essential Nisargadatta 

You are That which stands prior to the subject object nexus, 

That which existed before birth 

continues Its existence after death. 

The greatness of the Self 

lies in the fact that It cannot be found.

 It cloaks Itself in 'me'.

Roy Melvyn

Life Never Dies

He who knows how to live can walk abroad 

Without fear of rhinoceros or tiger. 

He will not be wounded in battle. 

For in him rhinoceroses can find no place to thrust their horn, 

Tigers no place to use their claws, 

And weapons no place to pierce. 

Why is this so? 

Because he has no place for death to enter.

TAO TE CHING

It doesn’t matter how long you live. 

What matters is that you really live,

 but from the deepest you know the truth of, 

until it’s all done.

For you to really live, 

let your death, whenever that is going to be, 

very sweetly occupy a little part of your heart. 

The light of that goodness 

will deeply inspire you in your living. 

You’ll not live as though everything is going to last, 

and you’ll relate to meaning in everything.

You’ll be that which doesn’t pass away i

n the midst of everything 

that you know 

is not going to last. 

John de Ruiter

Unveiling Reality

You will be just fine after you die, 

and for sure you’re going to die. 

You have no real reason to be afraid of dying.

 You’re not afraid of leaving everything behind 

and entering what you cannot really comprehend; 

you do it each time you go to sleep. 

It’s a little bit like dying.

Everything starts to fade out. 

When you lie down to go to sleep,

 your day is the first to fade away. 

As your day passes away, 

your person passes away.

 Your self remains and,

 as you become quieted in your self, 

your self begins to pass away,

 how you relate to your self passes away

 and you’re resting in your heart.

 There’s not much there anymore,

 but it’s really good.

 As you continue to relate more deeply, 

deeper than your own heart, 

you fall asleep. 

What you are deeply familiar within this is goodness.

 What comes after you being awake in your body

 is you falling asleep in your body.

 Goodness doesn’t diminish 

and what you really are doesn’t diminish.

 You come through it all in the next day 

and you start anew.

 That’s all very similar to what dying is like. 

What there is before 

and what there is after. 

John de Ruiter

Unveiling Reality

We are with those whom we have lost in material form,

 and far, far nearer to them now 

than when they were alive.

 And it is not only in the fancy of the Devachan,

 as some may imagine,

 but in reality. 

For pure divine love

 is not merely the blossom of a human heart,

 but has its roots in eternity.

 Spiritual holy love is immortal,

 and Karma brings sooner or later 

all those who loved each other with such a spiritual affection

 to incarnate once more in the same family group.

 Annie Besant

 Death-- And After?

When the grim reaper comes to get me,

 he’ll have to give me a few extra hours 

to revise my last words.

Flannery O'Connor

Howard had died in an armchair 

in an upstairs bedroom of the Hollywood Hills second home 

they’d owned since 1977, 

with Gore (Vidal) and their live-in nurse by Howard’s side. 

“Although there was no breath for speech,”

 as Gore later recalled the moment, 

“he now had a sort of wry wise guy from the Bronx expression on his face 

which said clearly to me who knew all his expressions,

 ‘So this is the big fucking deal everyone goes on about.’”

Matt Kapp

The Hard-Crusted Softy In Winter

Air Mail

Most people shrug their shoulders and say,

 “We come from nothing and we return to nothing—

and that’s the end of it.” 

But I demur.

 For it strikes me as utterly amazing 

that I did in fact come from this nothing.

 If I came from it once, 

I see no reason why I could not come from it again;

 for if, as is indeed the case,

 I did come from it once, 

this nothingness is, to say the least, 

unexplainably frisky.

Alan Watts 

 Cloud-hidden, 

Whereabouts Unknown 

Some of the students realized

 that the sensation of dying 

could be reinterpreted ecstatically as total self-release. 

As a result, death became an occasion

 for congratulations and rejoicing. 

After all, “You only die once” (as the slogan went),

 and if death is as proper and natural as birth, 

it is absurd not to make the most of it. 

Alan Watts 

 Cloud-hidden, 

Whereabouts Unknown 

When I stand by the stream and watch it,

 I am relatively still, 

and the flowing water makes a path across my memory 

so that I realize its transience 

in comparison with my stability.

 This is, of course, an illusion 

in the sense that I, too, am in flow 

and likewise have no final destination—

for can anyone imagine finality as a form of life? 

My death will be the disappearance 

of a particular pattern in the water. 

Alan Watts 

 Cloud-hidden, 

Whereabouts Unknown 

It is only after a great awakening

 that we know all this is a great dream. 

Fools, by their own accord,

 consider themselves to be awake, 

and go about in a knowingly fussy way, 

defining one man as a gentleman,

 and another as a rustic. 

How hardheaded is this! 

Confucius and you are both dreaming. 

And I, who tell you that you are dreaming,

 am dreaming, too. 

Even these words themselves 

may be called a great deception. 

William Scott Wilson  

The One Taste of Truth:

 Zen and the Art of Drinking Tea 

The old must die away

 for the new to come into being.

 But it cannot simply be replaced 

by something already known, 

no matter how illustrious or well tested.

 Rather, something new must be created. 

Rudolf Steiner 

Anthroposophy in Everyday Life 

What happens at the moment of death?

 After death,

 the etheric body, the astral body and the Ego of man

 have left the physical body.

 The corpse alone 

remains in the physical world.

 A short time after death

 the etheric and astral bodies unite.

 The etheric body imprints in the astral body

 the memory of the life just passed;

 then the etheric body slowly dissolves 

and the astral body passes alone 

into the astral world. 

Rudolf Steiner 

The Essential Rudolf Steiner 

 What abode awaits my soul

 on its release from the laws of slavery among men? 

And what is death?

 It is either the end, or a process of change.

 I have no fear of ceasing to exist; 

it is the same as not having begun. 

Nor do I shrink from changing into another state,

 because I shall, under no conditions, 

be as cramped as I am now. 

Farewell

Seneca:  

Letters from a Stoic 

"Think on death," 

or rather, if you prefer the phrase,

 on "migration to heaven." 

 The meaning is clear, —

that it is a wonderful thing to learn thoroughly how to die. 

You may deem it superfluous

 to learn a text that can be used only once; 

but that is just the reason 

why we ought to think on a thing. 

When we can never prove 

whether we really know a thing,

 we must always be learning it. 

 "Think on death." 

In saying this, he bids us think on freedom. 

He who has learned to die has unlearned slavery; 

he is above any external power,

 or, at any rate, he is beyond it. 

What terrors have prisons and bonds and bars for him? 

His way out is clear.

 There is only one chain which binds us to life, 

and that is the love of life.

 The chain may not be cast off,

 but it may be rubbed away,

 so that, when necessity shall demand, 

nothing may retard or hinder us 

from being ready to do at once

 that which at some time we are bound to do. 

Farewell. 

 Seneca:  

Letters from a Stoic 

One who is enjoying the heavenly rest after death, 

is so entirely secluded within the world of his own thought 

that nothing outside of that can affect him, 

and he is consequently absolutely safe. 

Thus is justified the grand old description of the heaven-world

 as the place "where the wicked cease from troubling, 

and the weary are at rest." 

Charles Leadbeater 

The Devachanic Plane or The Heaven World 

Its Characteristics and Inhabitants 

The sunlight ranges over the universe, 

and at incarnation we step out of it into the twilight of the body,

 and see but dimly during the period of our incarceration; 

at Death we step out of the prison again into the sunlight,

 and are nearer to the reality.

 Short are the twilight periods, 

and long the periods of the sunlight;

but in our blinded state we call the twilight life, 

and to us it is the real existence,

 while we call the sunlight Death, 

and shiver at the thought of passing into it.

Annie Besant

Death-- And After? 

“Would you say, don Juan,

 that death is the only real enemy we have?”

 “No,” he said with conviction. 

“Death is not an enemy,

 although it appears to be.

 Death is not our destroyer,

 although we think it is.”

 “What is it, then, if not our destroyer?” I asked.

 “Sorcerers say death is the only worthy opponent we have,” he replied.

 “Death is our challenger.

 We are born to take that challenge, average men or sorcerers. 

Sorcerers know about it; average men do not.” 

“I personally would say, don Juan, 

life, not death, is the challenge.”

 “Life is the process by means of which death challenges us,” he said. 

“Death is the active force. 

Life is the arena.

 And in that arena there are only two contenders at any time: 

oneself and death.”

 Carlos Castaneda 

 Power of Silence 

Ancient Egyptians used to read the Book of the Dead 

to learn practical tips on how to navigate the underworld—

like how to not have your head cut off in the underworld, 

or how to take the form of a crocodile in the underworld, 

or how to not enter the underworld upside down—

but we don’t have a Book of the Dead.

Katie Roiphe

The Violet Hour: Great Writers at the End

I had a death threat, 

I'll  get  to it. 

Andy Warhol 

Pat  Hackett 

The Andy Warhol Diaries  

Death is a wedding feast, 

and the secret of that 

is that God is one. 

Sunlight comes in through the windows 

and gets reflected around the room.

Then the windows are closed. 

Individual grapes become one dark wine. 

For someone who lives in the light of God, 

death is nourishment. 

 Jalal al-Din Rumi 

Coleman Barks  

The Essential Rumi 

Think of how PHENOMENA come trooping 

out of the desert of non-existence 

into this materiality. 

Morning and night, 

they arrive in a long line 

and take over from each other, 

“It’s my turn now. Get out!”

 A son comes of age,

and the father packs up. 

This place of phenomena 

is a wide exchange of highways, 

with everything going

 all sorts of different ways. 

 Jalal al-Din Rumi 

Coleman Barks  

The Essential Rumi 

You did not create this life. 

So you should not talk about ending it 

unless your identity as a separate being or a separate person

 has disappeared and you and the Source of Creation are the same. 

If you come to that point of evolution,

 then you can throw away your body consciously. 

You are allowed to do it. 

But you are not allowed to do it

 by damaging the body or by hanging from a tree.

 Once you are dead, 

we don’t mind burying you under the tree,

 but hanging from a tree 

is neither good for you, nor for the tree. 

Moreover, 

whether life has been a good deal or a bad deal,

 if you have a larger purpose,

 everything is a stepping stone

 for your ultimate well-being. 

Sadhguru 

DEATH 

An Inside Story 

From what we’ve seen at the end of life, 

the saying that “there are no atheists in foxholes” isn’t quite true.

 There are plenty of faithless and undecided 

who find peace close to death. 

And plenty of faithful who do not. 

The difference seems to be 

in how practiced a person is 

in bumping up against 

what he can’t necessarily command or comprehend. 

 BJ. Miller, Shoshana Berger 

A Beginner's Guide to the End: 

Practical Advice for Living Life and Facing Death 

If you tell someone today: 

‘If you do not want to miss out on immortality 

then you must activate your soul energies 

so that you yourself can pass as an active soul 

through the gates of death’—

he will not understand you. 

The status quo has got him thoroughly out of the habit 

of applying his understanding to such matters. 

Instead, he has been told that he need only believe in Christ

 and in what the state does. 

So he knows that first of all 

the state will take care of his needs,

 and when he has worked long enough 

the state will give him a pension.

 And the church goes a step further;

 it offers a person, after his death,

 a pension for his soul, 

so that he does not need to work on his soul during life 

nor do anything himself 

when his soul passes through the gate of death. 

 Rudolf Steiner 

 Guardian Angels 

 (Connecting with Our Spiritual Guides and Helpers)

Man is to-day a living Soul, 

over whom Death has no power,

 and the key of the prison-house of the body 

is in his own hands, 

so that he may learn its use if he will. 

It is because his true Self, 

while blinded by the body, 

has lost touch with other Selves, 

that Death has been a gulf instead of a gateway 

between embodied and disembodied Souls.   

Annie Besant 

Death-- And After?

The student’s physical death 

is an entirely different event 

from the death as he knew it formerly. 

He experiences death consciously

by laying aside the physical body 

as one discards a garment that is worn out

 or perhaps rendered useless through a sudden rent. 

Thus his physical death is of special importance 

only for those living with him, 

whose perception is still restricted 

to the world of the senses. 

For them the student dies; 

but for himself nothing of importance 

is changed in his whole environment.

The entire supersensible world 

stood open to him before his death,

and it is this same world 

that now confronts him after death.  

 Rudolf Steiner 

Knowledge of Higher Worlds and its Attainment

And then a Word sounds forth.  

 The descended, radiating point of light ascends,

 responsive to the dimly heard recalling note, 

attracted to its emanating source. 

 This man calls death 

and this the soul calls life. 

 Alice A. Bailey

 Esoteric Healing

Comment:  The point of living is dying. 

 Krishnamurti:  No, sir.  That has been said and achieved by so many people; 

 clever people have written about all this. 

 They have said that life has no meaning, 

and therefore we must give life a significance. 

 Death has no meaning, 

and therefore it must have another significance. 

 This is what man has done throughout the centuries, sir. 

 We are saying quite the contrary—

that one cannot find the fullness of life, 

the depth of life if there is fear, 

and to end fear is also to understand death.

  J. Krishamurti 

The Beauty of Death 

People fail to relate death and sleep.  

Death, after all, 

is only a longer interval 

in the life of physical plane functioning; 

 one has only “gone abroad” for a longer period. 

Alice A. Bailey 

A Treatise On White Magic

We can wander further into the death dystopia,

 denying that we will die 

and hiding dead bodies from our sight.

 Making that choice 

means we will continue to be terrified 

and ignorant of death,

 and the huge role it plays 

in how we live our lives. 

Let us instead reclaim our mortality, 

writing our own Ars Moriendi for the modern world 

with bold, fearless strokes.

  Caitlin Doughty 

Smoke Gets In Your Eyes 

Really, what is life about?

 You get sick and die. 

That’s it. 

So you’ve just got to keep busy.

  Andy Warhol 

Pat Hackett 

The Andy Warhol Diaries 

Death is essentially a matter of consciousness. 

 We are conscious one moment on the physical plane, 

and a moment later 

we have withdrawn onto another plane

and are actively conscious there.

  Alice A. Bailey 

A Treatise On White Magic

 “I’m still having a relationship with him

 but it is just not a physical relationship anymore. 

 If you have ever had anybody go who you have loved, 

you do feel in communication with them 

because you feel so deeply in your heart 

that if you say a prayer, it goes straight to them.  

 I have a lot of joy because I know it’s OK. 

 This physical world is not the end by any means. 

 It’s just another place you pass through.  

I don’t just believe that, I know it. 

 And the sooner one comes to terms with that,

 the easier it is, 

rather than feeling George has gone 

and is never coming back."

Olivia Harrsion

George Harrison's Wife

In the later stages of life, 

we have the crystallization of the form, 

and the man’s realization of its inadequacy. 

Then comes the happy release which we call death, 

that great moment in which the “spirit in prison”

 escapes from the confining walls of its physical form. 

 Alice A. Bailey 

The Consciousness of the Atom

Death comes to the individual man,

 in the ordinary sense of the term,

 when the will-to-live in a physical body goes 

and the will-to-abstract takes its place. 

 This we call death.

 Alice A. Bailey 

Death:  The Great Adventur

I know that without me

  God can no moment live; 

 Were I to die, then

 He  No longer could survive. 

  I am as great as God, 

 And He is small like me; 

 He cannot be above, 

Nor I below Him be.

  Angelus Silesius 

Christian Mystic 

1624-1677

Regardless of the state of their physical bodies,

 there was never any pain felt

 while floating in this observer position 

separated from their bodies. 

Even those who were struck by lightning

 or hit by a train, for instance,

 had no sensation other than weightlessness,

 freedom from the confines of their dense physical body, 

and a deep sense of inner peace. 

Most people who have experienced these near-death experiences 

admit that they felt so absolutely wonderful 

while out of their body

 that they did not want to return to it.

 That’s how blissful it feels 

to leave our bodies 

and exist in spiritual form. 

 Bob Olson   

Answers about the Afterlife: 

 A Private Investigator's 15-Year Research 

 Unlocks the Mysteries of Life after Death  

Those who, afraid of the sufferings

 arising from the discrimination of birth-and-death (samsara),

 seek for Nirvana, 

do not know that birth-and-death and Nirvana 

are not to be separated from one another; 

and, seeing that all things subject to discrimination 

have no (absolute) reality, 

(they) imagine that Nirvana consists

 in the future annihilation of the senses and their fields.

 Alan Watts 

  The Supreme Identity 

People come to me and ask,

 “What will happen after death?” 

I don’t answer them;

 I ask them another question instead. 

I ask them, “Forget all about after death, 

let me ask you one thing:

 “What is happening before death?”

 Because whatsoever is happening before death

 will continue to happen after death. 

It is a continuum: 

your consciousness will be the same – 

before or after will not make any difference. T

he body may not be the same,

 the container may change, 

but the content will remain the same.

Whatsoever happens is happening to the content,

 not to the container. 

 Osho 

 The Goose Is Out: Zen in Action

According to the orthodox Christian view,

 Death is a separation,

 and the "spirits of the dead" wait for reunion 

until those they love also pass through Death's gateway,

or--according to some--until after the judgment-day is over. 

As against this the Esoteric Philosophy 

teaches that Death cannot touch 

the higher consciousness of man, 

and that it can only separate those 

who love each other so far as their lower vehicles are concerned;

 the man living on earth, blinded by matter, 

feels separated from those who have passed onwards, 

but the Devachan, says H.P. Blavatsky, has a complete conviction 

"that there is no such thing as Death at all",

having left behind it 

all those vehicles over which Death has power. 

Therefore, to its less blinded eyes, 

its beloved are still with it; 

for it, the veil of matter that separates 

has been torn away. 

 Annie Besant

 Death-- And After?

When man recognises his own inherent nature,

 he learns to open his prison doors occasionally

and escapes from his encircling jail

 and rises above the body and its passions

 into a pure mental and moral life; 

then he learns that the conquered body 

cannot hold him prisoner, 

and he unlocks its door 

and steps out into the sunshine of his true life.

 So when Death unlocks the door for him, 

he knows the country into which he emerges,

 having trodden its ways at his own will.

 And at last he grows to recognise 

that fact of supreme importance,

 that "Life" has nothing to do with body 

and with this material plane;

 that Life is his conscious existence,

 unbroken, unbreakable,

 and that the brief interludes in that Life,

 during which he sojourns on Earth,

 are but a minute fraction of his conscious existence,

 and a fraction, moreover,

 during which he is less alive,

 because of the heavy coverings 

which weigh him down.

  Annie Besant 

Death-- And After?

The same humanitarian impulse

 which animates the workers for birth control, 

namely, that children may be properly born, 

extends to the end of life as well,

 so that we desire 

that human beings in great suffering

 may have an easy death.

Dr. Charles Potter

  founder   

Euthanasia Society of  America 

Those opponents of euthanasia 

who claim that a sufferer is only a coward

 if he or she wishes to end his life,

 forget that most such sufferers 

are much more concerned

 about the anguish they are causing their dear ones 

than they are about their own pain.  

Dr. Charles Potter

 founder 

 Euthanasia Society of  America

 The river of being flows 

between two banks of nothingnesses.

 Being is beautiful,

 but non-being is also beautiful.

 Life is good, 

but death is also good, 

because life cannot exist without death. 

Ordinarily you think that death is against life,

 that it destroys. 

No, you are wrong.

 Without death life cannot exist for a single moment.

Death supports life.

Death is life's very base. 

Because you can die, 

that’s why you can live.

 Life and death are not two things 

but two wings – 

two wings of the same phenomenon. 

Osho

 Absolute Tao

The deepest core of being is non-being. 

The foundation of isness is nothingness. 

And when I say nothingness I don’t mean nothing-ness. 

I only mean no-thingness.

 Form exists on the base of the formless. 

The form comes out of the formless 

just as waves come out of the sea,

 and then the form drops, 

dissolves into the formless again.

 The name arises out of the nameless, 

falls back, returns to the original source,

 becomes nameless again. 

Life arises out of death

 and moves to death again. 

The very basic thing to remember 

is that these opposites are not opposites,

 they are complementary.

 Death is not against life, 

nonexistence is not against existence, 

non-being is not against being. 

They are two polarities of the same phenomenon, 

which transcends all understanding. 

Osho.

 Absolute Tao

Everything “above” this formless awareness

 that is born into the world of form 

(the substrate and psyche) 

and that therefore lives in the world of space and time,

 will die. 

If you identify with these formed aspects of your relative self, 

you will suffer in direct proportion 

to that level of identification 

when those aspects inevitably decay and disappear. 

But if you realize the formless nature of your being, 

you will transcend death.

  Andrew Holecek 

 Dream Yoga: Illuminating Your Life 

Through Lucid Dreaming and the Tibetan Yogas of Sleep