It is old age, rather than death,
that is to be contrasted with life.
Old age is life's parody,
whereas death transforms life into a destiny:
in a way it preserves it by giving it the absolute dimension.
Death does away with time.
Simone de Beauvoir
The Coming of Age
Silence is for bumping into yourself.
Death is for slamming into yourself.
It's for slamming into space.
That's fundamentally what's going to happen to you when you die.
You are going to slam into space.
And unless you understand the spacelike dimension of your being,
you are going to contract out of fear because it's too much.
And that contraction itself
will be generative of what will throw us back into form.
Andrew Holecek
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 of
Euthanasia Society of America
All suffering is based on the notion that death is bad.
Whether we are aware of it or not,
suffering is about the fear of death.
People are willing to suffer a great deal of physical pain rather than die.
The belief that we are subject to death is the cause of suffering
and this suffering prevents us from truly living,
because instead we live a life based on this false belief.
This belief projects us into the past and future.
It is incompatible with happiness.
Understand that there is no death.
Francis Lucille:
The Perfume of Silence
Dying may not be a joking matter,
but I would not mind dying to the sound of loving laughter.
Susan Abel Lieberman
Death, Dying and Dessert. Reflections on Twenty Questions About Dying
Many people don’t realize until they are on their deathbed
and everything external falls away
that no thing ever had anything to do with who they are.
In the proximity of death,
the whole concept of ownership stands revealed as ultimately meaningless.
In the last moments of their life,
they then also realize that while they were looking throughout their lives
for a more complete sense of self,
what they were really looking for,
their Being, had actually always already been there,
but had been largely obscured by their identification with things,
which ultimately means identification with their mind.
Eckhart Tolle
Oneness with All Life
The "sage" accustoms himself to do, even during his earth life,
what others experience after death;
namely, to grasp the thought that he himself is related to all things,
the thought "Thou art that."
During the physical life this is an ideal to which the thought life can be devoted;
in the "Land of Spirits" it is a plain fact,
one which grows ever clearer to us through spiritual experience.
And the man himself comes to know ever more and more clearly in this land
that he in his own inner being
belongs to the spirit world.
Rudolph Steiner
Theosophy
In this transformational age
there is more awareness that death is simply a shift,
like stepping from one room to another;
that you are still conscious,
that you are still alert,
that you are still aware,
that you are still alive,
but in a different form
as a different expression of consciousness.
You can go anywhere you wish, really.
Because there are no physiological limitations.
You can, as you think it,
be where and when you wish to be, instantaneously.
All these things are possible
within what you call the spirit realm.
Bashar
Quest For Truth
I’ve often wondered why the people who seem most certain about the existence of God are the ones who want to keep the respirator plugged in.
If you were sure that God was waiting for your father,
wouldn’t you want him to go?
Wouldn’t you want him to go even if you didn’t believe in God,
because death is the completion of our purpose here?
He’s finished his job
and now is free to send his atoms back into the earth and stars.
Isn’t that really kind of great?
Anne Patchett
Finding Joy in My Father’s Death
According to end-of-life experts,
the sadness about things which we failed to do
is the lament that most commonly comes up on deathbed.
People wish they’d spent less time in the office and more with family,
or been truer to themselves and quit that albatross job,
or had the courage to move on from a destructive relationship.
The first remedy for this, of course, only applies to those who will go on living.
Just think of yourself facing the end,
and ask yourself what you will regret not having done.
Benjamin Franklin observed that most people die at 25
but are not buried until they’re 75.
Now is the time, however old you are,
to take stock and realise that life is precious and finite,
and if you’re prioritising status or wealth,
or feeling stuck and loveless, or putting things off,
or waiting until retirement (and the heart attack that will fell you
before you do get to trek through Bhutan),
you are not making the most of it
Aaaaalways remember,’ (said Peter Cook, cruelly)
‘if your life seems dull and‘ dreary . . . it is.’
Simon Boas
A Beginner's Guide to Dying
All your life you think you are your body.
Some of the time you think you are your mind.
It is at the time of your death
that you find out Who You Really Are.
Neale Donald Walsch
Conversations With God
Let’s not go back to life as usual.
Because for many, when someone we love deeply dies,
life is not “normal” —
not yesterday, not today, and not tomorrow.
Life is forever changed.
We feel grief because we have deeply loved.
And while this hurts,
most of us would not return one moment with that person,
even if it meant the promise of abated grief.
Our beloved dead are worth our pain.
They are worth our tears.
They are worth remembering.
Joanne Cacciatore
Grieving is Loving
Our identity remains intact,
spiritual, and perfect,
not only after the grave,
but it was so even before we were born
Our life from the cradle to the grave
is that experience which has been likened to a parenthesis,
but when the parenthesis is removed
we live in the full circle of immortality.
.
Joel S. Goldsmith
Realization of Oneness
Meek young men grow up in libraries believing it their duty
to accept the views which Cicero, which Locke, which Bacon have given,
forgetful that Cicero, Locke, and Bacon
were only young men in libraries when they wrote those books.
Life is wasted in the necessary preparation
of finding what is the true way,
and we die just as we enter it.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
The language of the dying is not static;
it is a language of movement, of platforms, tickets, passports and maps,
visitations and greetings, entrances and exits.
A language of arrivals and departures.
They will often ask if their bags are packed
or if there is a full tank of gas in the car.
They repeat themselves, asking if the train is on time;
asking if you will be coming with them.
You must enter this as you would enter a foreign land;
signs will be of little help.
You must see what they see.
It is never planes they wait for;
rather, they pull away slowly from the earth—
the fields of fall rye rolling as far as the eye can see.
Eve Joseph
In The Slender Margin The Intimate Strangeness of Death and Dying
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
Even if we can make some sense of the larger questions of control, death, and meaning, we will be left with difficult problems in the way we live our lives.
How and when should I want to die?
How much pain and suffering should I be willing to bear, and for what reason?
What do I owe others in my dying,
especially those who would still have me with them if they could?
When I am in doubt about my living or dying,
where should I locate the benefit of doubt,
toward life or death?
What kind of person should I be to ask questions of that kind?
Daniel Callahan.
The Troubled Dream of Life: In Search of a Peaceful Death
'
All individuals die.
Only those
Who are no longer individuals
Live forever.
Wu Hsin
In the Shadow of the Formless
Death to oneself is the improbable source
of a way of life so new and so alive
that it feels like having been born again.
In this metaphorical sense,
the ego dies on finding out its own incapacity,
its inability to make any difference to itself that is really important .
Alan W. Watts
Become What You Are
When human beings pass through the portal of death, they first have certain experiences.
DEVACHAN
The human being now enters devachan
where he or she prepares in the spiritual world for a new life in the future.
Here human beings live with spiritual events and beings
until they are again called into the physical world,
be it because the karma of a person demands it
or because an individual is needed on the physical earth.
Rudolf Steiner
The Principle of Spiritual Economy
When human beings pass through the portal of death, they first have certain experiences.
KAMALOKA
There follows the condition of what is called kamaloca,
the time of weaning the soul from the effects of physical, sensuous existence,
which lasts about a third of the time of a person’s physical life.
After the etheric body has been cast off,
the astral body still contains all the passions, desires, and so on
that it had at the end of life;
they must be lost and purified, and that is kamaloka.
Then the astral body is cast off and here, too,
the fruit, the astral essence, is taken along; but the rest — the astral corpse —
dissolves into the astral world.
Rudolf Steiner
The Principle of Spiritual Economy
When human beings pass through the portal of death, they first have certain experiences.
ETHERIC CORPSE
Then the etheric body leaves the astral body, where the ego lives.
All three had been connected from the time they left the physical corpse,
but now the etheric body separates itself from the other two
and becomes an etheric corpse.
However, today’s human beings do not lose their etheric body completely
but take an extract or excerpt along with them for all the times to follow.
So in this sense the etheric corpse is cast off,
but the fruit of the last life is carried along by the astral body and by the ego.
If we want to be quite precise, we will have to say
that something is taken along from the physical body as well:
a kind of spiritual abstract of this body —
the tincture medieval mystics spoke about.
However, this abstract of the physical being is the same in all lives;
it merely represents the fact that the ego had been embodied.
On the other hand, the essence of the etheric body is different in all lives,
depending on what one has experienced in a life
and on the degree of one’s progress in it.
Rudolf Steiner
The Principle of Spiritual Economy
When human beings pass through the portal of death, they first have certain experiences.
MEMORY TABLEAU
The second experience after death
consists of a human being’s attaining a “memory tableau” of the life just completed,
so that all events in it recur in comprehensive memory.
This process lasts a definite amount of time.
For reasons that cannot be stated here today,
the duration of this memory is shorter or longer,
depending on the individual.
In general, the duration of this state can be determined
from the length of time each human being
was able to stay awake during the past life,
continuously and without once succumbing to the forces of sleep.
Supposing that the outer limit for a person’s staying awake
continuously had been forty-eight hours,
then the memory tableau after death will also be forty-eight hours.
And thus, this stage is like an overview of the past life.
Rudolf Steiner
The Principle of Spiritual Economy
When human beings pass through the portal of death, they first have certain experiences--
EXPANSION
Their first experience is the feeling that they are growing larger
or that they are growing out of their skin.
This has the effect of the human being attaining another perception of things
than was the case earlier in physical life.
Everything in the physical world has its definite place —
either here or there — outside the observer,
but that is not so in this new world.
There, it is as if the human being were inside the objects,
extended with or within them,
whereas earlier he or she was only a separate object in its own place.
Rudolf Steiner
The Principle of Spiritual Economy
Our usual understanding of impermanence is that the world is full of things,
like tables and chairs and you and me,
and that these things are all impermanent.
But in Buddhism they say that the true understanding of impermanence
reveals that there is actually no impermanence
because nothing ever forms in the first place
as a persisting, separate, independent “thing” to be impermanent.
There is only thorough-going flux, seamless unicity—
this ever-present, ever-changing Here/ Now.
This is what Buddhists mean by emptiness
and what Advaita calls the one, immutable Self.
When this is seen clearly, there is no fear of death,
for there is no one separate to die.
And there is no “me” to be unworthy or to fail.
Joan Tollifson
Nothing to Grasp
There is nowhere to go and nothing to become.
There is simply this present happening,
the boundless unicity that includes absolutely everything
and that holds on to nothing.
Sometimes it seems that we can recognize or allow this simplicity of being,
and sometimes it seems that we can’t.
In times of stress, old habits tend to return and take over.
We jump back onto our imaginary treadmill of suffering.
The dream of separation and lack seems believable.
We chase the carrot.
It happens.
But all of this is the movement of life,
vanishing instant by instant into thin air.
It’s not personal.
And in the end,
in waking up or in deep sleep
or at the moment of death,
we see
that nothing has ever really happened.
Joan Tollifson
Nothing to Grasp
I guess I could be pretty pissed off about what happened to me,
but it’s hard to stay mad, when there’s so much beauty in the world.
Sometimes I feel like I’m seeing it all at once,
and it’s too much, my heart fills up like a balloon that’s about to burst.
And then I remember to relax,
and stop trying to hold on to it,
and then it flows through me like rain
and I can’t feel anything but gratitude
for every single moment of my stupid little life.
—Lester (voiceover), after being shot in the head in the movie American Beauty,
screenplay by Alan Ball
quoted in:
Joan Tollifson
Nothing to Grasp
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
like an eagle
soaring up into the blue sky.
Dilgo Khyentse Rinpoche
Dying is the event for the remaining family and friends.
For the dying person, their evolutionary path is the event —
crossing the bridge into another dimension.
I’ve found that as the physical body declines,
the spiritual activity increases.
Consciousness is still in the body,
but they're starting to have out-of-body experiences .
They talk with deceased loved ones.
I let them know they’re in a safe space.
They’ll smile and say, "I just saw was my husband."
I'll ask, "How did that make you feel?
Are you looking forward to seeing him again?"
I don’t challenge their experience.
Susan Buhlman
Quote from Art of Dying Magazine, Volume III
You are not the victim of the world you see
because you invented it.
You can give it up as easily as you made it up.
You will see it or not see it, as you wish.
While you want it you will see it;
when you no longer want it,
it will not be there for you to see.
A Course In Miracles
The Stoics, thought the prospect of death, rather than depressing us,
could make our days far more enjoyable than would otherwise be the case.
By imagining how our days could go worse—
and in particular, by contemplating our own death—
we could increase our chance of experiencing joy.
In our youth, it takes effort to contemplate our own death;
in our later years, it takes effort to avoid contemplating it.
Old age therefore has a way of making us do something
that we should have been doing all along.
William B. Irvine
A Guide to the Good Life
(the ancient art of stoic joy)
By contemplating the impermanence of everything in the world,
we are forced to recognize that every time we do something
could be the last time we do it,
and this recognition can invest the things we do
with a significance and intensity that would otherwise be absent.
We will no longer sleepwalk through our life.
Some people, I realize, will find it depressing
or even morbid to contemplate impermanence.
I am nevertheless convinced that the only way we can be truly alive
is if we make it our business
to periodically entertain such thoughts.
William B. Irvine
A Guide to the Good Life
(the ancient art of stoic joy)
As a Zen master lay dying he cried out in pain.
Upset by his cries, one of his students said,
“Master! Why are you calling out like that?”
The master responded,
“My crying in pain is no different from my laughing in joy.”
Philip Kapleau
The Zen of Living and Dying
Paradise is our primordial pure consciousness,
which is free of all limitations
but embodies the infinity of the divine.
I remember seeing a bumper sticker that said,
"I believe in life before death."
To me this means that we don't have to imagine a future paradise.
Paradise can happen right here, right now,
while we're in this human incarnation.
The choice is ours.
Anam Thubten
No Self No Problem
If we are to be able to face our own inevitable death with honest acceptance,
before we have reached that time,
then we need to shift our priorities well before it’s too late.
This gives us the opportunity to put our energies
into directions of true value.
Once we acknowledge that limited time is remaining,
although we don’t know if that is years, weeks or hours,
we are less driven by ego or by what other people think.
Instead, we are more driven by what our hearts truly want.
Acknowledging our inevitable, approaching death
offers us the opportunity to find greater purpose and satisfaction
in the time we have remaining.
Bronnie Ware
Top Five Regrets of the Dying:
A Life Transformed by the Dearly Departing
So living is dying.
You understand?
Living means that every day you are abandoning
everything that you are attached to.
Can you do this?
A very simple fact but it has got tremendous implications.
So that each day is a new day.
Each day you are dying and incarnating.
There is tremendous vitality, energy there
because there is nothing you are afraid of.
There is nothing that can hurt.
Being hurt doesn't exist.
Krishnamurti
The Future is Now
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