What if you knew that you were at the end of your life?
Would you have done anything differently?
A friend of mine volunteers at a hospice,
and she hears one regret over and over from patients:
letting relationships wither.
They wish that they had made more plans with good friends,
or they thought about getting back in touch with an old buddy,
and talked themselves out of it.
For the past few years, I have been trying to prioritize my friendships,
but after hearing her words, I’m making a bigger effort.
I send silly texts. I invite friends to dinner. I squelch that inner voice that says,
“They’re probably too busy to hang out.”
I do not want any regrets.
Dr. Vicki Jackson, president of the American Academy of Hospice
and Palliative Medicine Board of Directors, said that for the same reason,
she doesn’t hesitate to tell people that she loves them.
“I am not Pollyanna; I’m a big academic,” said Dr. Jackson,
who has treated dying patients for a quarter century.
“But I tell people I appreciate them a lot.
I have a lot of deep gratitude,
because I know it is dumb luck that it’s not me in that bed.
And I know tomorrow it could be.”
Jancee Dunn
3 Lessons for Living Well, From the Dying
New York Times
What is my destination afterwards?
What abode awaits my soul
on its release
from the laws of slavery among men?
Seneca
One of the attributes of a good death
is to acknowledge that death and dying at an advanced age is appropriate.
Unburden your family.
Share with them the peace of a decision to stop fighting.
Avoid magical thinking and the inevitable failure
of perpetually soldiering on.
Replace misguided hope in the future with guided optimism
and focus on the promise of the present.
Samuel Harrington
At Peace: Choosing a Good Death After a Long Life
In the Republic, Plato delineates four levels of experiential reality:
imaginary, physical, conceptual, and direct transcendental cognition,
which he calls direct seeing or “the Good.”
In the story of Er (Republic, 616–17)
the story is told of a valiant man, Er, who died in battle
and who later revived and told a story whereby his soul had departed from him.
Plato claims something utterly alien to the modern mentality;
he says that only after death, when we are free of bodily influence,
shall we know the whole crux of being.
Plato feels that freeing the psyche from the body
is an essential condition for the philosophic journey to ultimate wisdom.
Robert A. Monroe
Far Journeys
Is death nothingness?
Nothingness for whom?
Who are we talking about?
Is death like a deep sleep state where there are no thoughts?
Yes, in death as in deep sleep there is no 'one' there
to experience the phenomenal manifestation.
But the main point in all this is
that what is experiencing through all of these body-mind mechanisms
is Consciousness.
So when one body-mind dies,
the experiencer remains which is Consciousness.
That is the only experiencer.
Wayne Liquorman
Acceptance of What Is: A Book About Nothing
Empty handed I entered the world.
Barefoot I leave it.
My coming, my going -
Two simple happenings
That got entangled.
Kozan Ichikyo,
Death Poem
1583-1660
Archaic societies do not make a sharp distinction between life and death.
Death is an aspect of life,
and life is only possible in symbolic exchange with death.
Rituals of initiation and sacrifice are symbolic acts
which regulate numerous transitions from life to death.
Initiation is a second birth, following upon death,
that is, the end of a phase of life.
The relationship between life and death
is characterized by reciprocity.
Byung-Chul Han
The Disappearance of Rituals: A Topology of the Present
The Hungarian writer Péter Nádas describes his own near-death experience.
Here, 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:
I slipped out of my mother’s womb …
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
Matter wears out,
but Spirit does not because Spirit is substance.
Herbert Spencer defines substance as that which is not subject to discord or decay. Webster says, “that which underlies all outward manifestation …
real, unchanging essence or nature … that in which qualities inhere…
that which constitutes anything what it is.”
All this can only apply to spiritual things.
You are Spirit.
Your body is spiritual, but you are Spirit.
Spirit cannot die and was never born.
Your true self was never born and will never die.
You are eternal, divine, unchanging Spirit, in your true nature.
The whole universe is a spiritual creation
but we see it in a limited way,
and that limited way we know as matter.
Emmet Fox
Alter Your Life
There is no time in a quantum state.
That is why it is called a state,
and it is a perpetual state in the quantum field.
All that you have been living,
you have already in your state had.
It is called a state because it has no time,
because your birth is known
and so is your death.
Ramtha
Parallel Lifetimes
Some of us believe creation has never taken place,
that humanity is the child of perception,
and the universe a hallucination.
We are stuck in this world
like a silkworm caged in its self-made cocoon.
Seldom do we suspect that our limited perception
put us in this predicament.
Some of us believe there was no beginning,
and that there is no end.
If no one has ever been born,
then no one ever dies.
Nevit O. Ergin, Will Johnson
The Forbidden Rumi
Hope and beliefs alone are not an effective spiritual plan
for our transition of consciousness at death.
We have the ability to break free from the institutional indoctrination
and become an active explorer of consciousness during our life and at death.
A pivotal shift of awareness is now occurring worldwide
as millions realize that we design not only our current reality,
but our afterlife as well.
As spiritual beings we are not victims at death,
we are empowered to design and experience
an enhanced spiritual transition of consciousness.
William Buhlman
Higher Self Now! Awakening to the Infinite Journey of Soul
Without the awareness of death,
everything is ordinary, trivial.
It is only because death is stalking him
that a warrior has to believe
that the world is an unfathomable mystery.
Carlos Castaneda
The Wheel Of Time
When you are on earth,
the spirit world is regarded as the “life after death”,
the next world”,
and is treated solely from the religious standpoint,
except by a comparatively select few.
I call them select because those few possess the truth—
not all the truth, naturally, but sufficient for absolute comfort.
The religions of the earth have assumed rights over this life
to which they are not entitled.
The passing from earth to the spirit world is not a religious affair whatever,
it’s a purely natural process,
and one that cannot be avoided.
Living a good life on earth is not a religious matter.
Why should it be?
Anthony Borgia
More About Life in the World Unseen
Birth is much more of a shock than death.
Sometimes when you die you do not realize it,
but birth almost always implies a sharp and sudden recognition.
So there is no need to fear death.
And I who have died more times than I care to tell,
speak these words to tell you so.
--Seth
Since I was born
I have to die
and so….
Kisei
Q. You mean that the Beat people want to lose themselves?
A. Yeah. You know, Jesus said to see the Kingdom of Heaven you must lose yourself . . . something like that.
Q. Then the Beat Generation loves death?
A. Yeah. They’re not afraid of death.
Q. Aren’t you afraid?
A. Naw . . . What I believe is that nothing is happening.
Q. What do you mean?
A. Well, you’re not sitting here. That’s what you think. Actually, we are great empty space. I could walk right through you . . . You know what I mean, we’re made out of atoms, electrons. We’re actually empty. We’re an empty vision . . . in one mind.
Q. In what mind—the mind of God?
A. That's the name we give it. We can give it any name. We can call it tangerine . . . god . . . tangerine . . . But I do know we are empty phantoms, sitting here thinking we are human beings and worrying about civilization. We’re just empty phantoms. And yet, all is well.
Q. All is well?
A. Yeah. We’re all in Heaven, now, really.
Q. You don’t sound happy.
A. Oh, I’m tremendously sad. I’m in great despair.
Q. Why? A. It’s a great burden to be alive. A heavy burden, a great big heavy burden. I wish I were safe in Heaven, dead.
Paul Maher, Jr.
Empty Phantoms: Interviews and Encounters with Jack Kerouac
Life, far from being what Bichat once called
an ensemble of functions for resisting death,
is rather an ensemble of functions for bearing us toward it.
Our substance diminishes with every step,
yet it is of this very diminution
that all our efforts should tend to make a stimulant,
a principle of efficacity
. Those who cannot benefit from their possibilities of nonexistence
are strangers to themselves: puppets, objects “furnished” with a self,
numbed by a neutral time that is neither duration nor eternity.
To exist is to profit by our share of unreality,
to be quickened by each contact with the void that is within.
To this void the puppet remains insensible, abandons it,
permits it to decay, to die out . . .
E. M. Cioran
The Temptation to Exist
What characterizes the rare one, the wise one,
is the fact that he lives in this world as if he is not in it.
He is in fact not even concerned whether he lives or dies.
He thinks and lives vertically
in a world that moves horizontally.
Hence, he remains unintelligible and unrecognizable to the average person.
Ramesh S.. Balsekar
A Net of Jewels
We do not rush toward death,
we flee the catastrophe of birth,
survivors struggling to forget it.
Fear of death is merely the projection into the future
of a fear which dates back to our first moment of life.
We are reluctant, of course, to treat birth as a scourge:
has it not been inculcated as the sovereign good—
have we not been told that the worst came at the end,
not at the outset of our lives?
Yet evil, the real evil, is behind, not ahead of us.
What escaped Jesus did not escape Buddha:
“If three things did not exist in the world, O disciples,
the Perfect One would not appear in the world. . . .”
And ahead of old age and death
he places the fact of birth, source of every infirmity, every disaster.
E.M. Cioran
The Trouble with Being Born
What happens after death is so unspeakably glorious
that our imagination and our feelings
do not suffice to form even an approximate conception of it.
The dissolution of our time-bound form in eternity
brings no loss of meaning.
Carl Jung
Religion wants to assure the future beyond death,
and science wants to assure it until death, and to postpone death.
But tomorrow and plans for tomorrow can have no significance at all
unless you are in full contact with the reality of the present,
since it is in the present and only in the present that you live.
There is no other reality than present reality,
so that, even if one were to live for endless ages,
to live for the future would be to miss the point everlastingly.
Alan Watts
The Wisdom of Insecurity
Love is a madman,
working his wild schemes,
tearing off his clothes,
running through the mountains,
drinking poison,
and now quietly choosing annihilation.
Rumi
We are so much attached to our own feeling ,
to our individual existence.
For us , just now, we have some fear of death,
but after we resume our true original nature,
there is Nirvana.
That is why we say, “ To attain Nirvana is to pass away. ”
“ To pass away ” is not a very adequate expression .
Perhaps “ to pass on, ” or “ to go on, ” or “ to join ” would be better.
Will you try to find some better expression for death?
When you find it,
you will have quite a new interpretation of your life.
Shunryu Suzuki:
Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind
While we are living in our bodies,
each one of us is, with respect to our own spirits,
in a community with other spirits even though we are unaware of it.
We are not visible as spirits in our spiritual communities
while we are living in the world,
because we are thinking on the physical level.
However, if our thinking is directed away from our bodies
we are sometimes visible in our communities
because we are then in the spirit.
When we are visible,
it is easy to tell us from the spirits who live there
because we walk along deep in thought,
silent, without looking at others,
as though we did not see them;
and the moment any spirit speaks to us,
we disappear.
Emanuel Swedenborg
Our Life after Death
During my father’s last days,
I sat alone for hours in that clean but generic hospice room,
holding his hand, bereft of the “habits of the heart,” long practiced by my ancestors,
that could have made his dying a more bearable and sacred rite of passage.
We live in a time when advanced medicine
wards off death far better than it helps us prepare for peaceful ones.
We feel the loss.
Many of us hunger to restore a sense of ceremony, community,
and yes, even beauty, to our final passage.
We want more than pain control and a clean bed.
We hope to die well.
Katy Butler
The Art of Dying Well: A Practical Guide to a Good End of Life
It is very important to send our thoughts and feelings
to a loved one who has died and is now in the spiritual worlds.
Our thoughts must not contain yearnings to have the departed back with us,
as this complicates his life in the spheres in which he must now enter.
What we need to send to the spiritual worlds is not the suffering we endure
but the love we bear towards the departed.
Spiritual research has shown that feelings of love give wings that bear the dead up, whereas longings like: “Oh how I wish you were still with us” create obstacles in his path.
Rudolf Steiner
The majority of mortals, Paulinus,
complain bitterly of the spitefulness of Nature,
because we are born for a brief span of life,
because even this space that has been granted to us
rushes by so speedily and so swiftly
that all save a very few find life at an end
just when they are getting ready to live.
Lucius Seneca
On the Shortness of Life
The ancient seers of the Upanishads have a beautiful prayer.
It is one of the most beautiful prayers ever uttered:
"Mrityorma amritam gamay –
oh my lord, lead me from death to deathlessness.”
I would not say “Lead me from death to deathlessness”
because death does not exist;
I would say “Lead me from deathlessness to more deathlessness,
from life to more abundant life."
Osho
Last in the Evening
The decision to allow a natural death,
to refuse artificial nutrition and hydration,
to refuse to be treated for pneumonia or a urinary tract infection
other than to manage symptoms, or to refuse dialysis or ventilators
is not an act of negligence.
It is an act of love.
Just because we have technology
doesn’t mean we are required to use it
if it only creates or prolongs suffering.
The question to keep asking
is if we are prolonging living
or prolonging dying.
Tani Bahti
Dying to Know: Straight Talk About Death and Dying
The ego arises by identification with form,
and deep down it knows that no forms are permanent,
that they are all fleeting.
So there is always a sense of insecurity around the ego
even if on the outside it appears confident.
Once you realize and accept that all structures (forms) are unstable,
even the seemingly solid material ones,
peace arises within you.
This is because the recognition of the impermanence of all forms
awakens you to the dimension of the formless within yourself,
that which is beyond death.
Jesus called it “eternal life.”
Eckhart Tolle
A New Earth
When we say a spiritual process, we are not just helping people to live well.
We also help people to die well.
Helping people to die well does not mean we will assist them to die,
as euthanasia enthusiasts are talking about--not in that sense.
It is very important that the moment of passing from the physicality to the beyond,
from being embodied to being disembodied,
happens in utmost awareness and grace.
We can create that moment for every human being,
if that human being is willing to cooperate
and pay some attention to themself now.
Sadhguru
Life and Death In One Breath
Is death enlightenment?
No, death is the dissolution of the body-mind mechanism.
When there is nothing there, is that enlightenment?
No, enlightenment is the falling away of the sense of personal doership.
Is death nothingness?
Nothingness for whom? Who are we talking about?
Is death like a deep sleep state where there are no thoughts?
Yes, in death as in deep sleep there is no 'one' there to experience the phenomenal manifestation. But the main point in all this is that what is experiencing through all of these body-mind mechanisms is Consciousness. So when one body-mind dies, the experiencer remains which is Consciousness. That is the only experiencer.
Wayne Liquorman
Acceptance of What Is: A Book About Nothing
As I observe my past physical life unfold
I realize that my entire experience on Earth
was just a brief, passing drama designed to educate me.
If I had known the truth and opened my mind,
I would have been a different man.
William Buhlman
Adventures in the Afterlife
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
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