Welcome to Death Knells

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“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