ARCHIVE FIVE
Joan Tollifson — Fleeting Bubbles in a Stream
The vibrant aliveness Here-Now,
is the only place where we ever actually are.
Whether it is the personal death that awaits each of us,
or the inevitable planetary death
in which the earth itself will be no more,
or even the end of the entire known universe,
death is the single reality that most clearly informs us
that the future is a fantasy
and that the person and the world and everything
that we have been so concerned about
are all fleeting bubbles in a stream.
We all know, intuitively,
that this bubble is not all we are,
nor are we some kind of lost soul trapped inside it.
The wholeness we long for is actually all there is.
The bubble has never been
a solid, separate, independent thing.
Joan Tollifson
Death: The End of Self-Improvement
Bashar: A More Rarefied Existence
Q. Do you know or can you tell us where we go when we die?
Bashar: Where do you go You allow yourself
to accelerate your vibration to another level.
Right now you are vibrating at a certain frequency.
It is only the frequency of this vibration of energy that you are,
of the consciousness that you are,
which determines that you experience yourself as physical.
Dying is simply a matter of shifting your frequency,
much in the same way
that you shift gears in your automobile to go faster.
The idea is that you accelerate your frequency
and take on what you might call a more etheric or rarefied existence.
Bashar
Quest for Truth
Pat Rodegast, Judith Stanton — Consider Death a Cure
Is there truly a cure for all illness?
I would say yes, if you would be wise enough
to consider death a cure.
The body knows, in its infinite wisdom,
what is needed for equilibrium.
You are your own diagnostician
and your own doctor, if you will but listen.
Let me tell you
that when the soul is ready to leave the body
you could be walking around
as a strong and healthy athlete
and the heart would stop.
If the soul is not ready to leave
the body will heal itself.
You need to recognize the power
of the liberated consciousness of the human being—
not the will, but the liberated consciousness—
that has the ability to reconstruct and heal
its own body.
Pat Rodegast, Judith Stanton
Emmanuel’s Book: A Manual for Living Comfortably in the Cosmos
Joy in the smallest things
comes to you only when you have accepted death….
To be,
and to enjoy your being,
you need death,
and limitation enables you
to fulfill your being.
Carl Jung
quoted in:
Joanna Ebenstein
Memento Mori: The Art of Contemplating Death to Live a Better Life
Joanna Ebenstein — Just Before Revelation
The idea of the descent and return
might also be seen as living psychologically
through what is called “the dark night of the soul,”
a term drawn from the writings of
the sixteenth-century Spanish Catholic mystic Saint John of the Cross.
He used it to describe a painful but necessary stage
in the process of enlightenment or spiritual awakening.
Today the term is sometimes used to describe a crisis in one’s life—
such as the death of a loved one,
the loss of a relationship,
or the diagnosis of a terminal illness—
and the subsequent feeling of being
in a dark and unknown place of confusion and despair.
This dark night of the soul
is often regarded as a state of development
that, although painful, is necessary for growth and transformation.
In the words of mythologist Joseph Campbell,
“The dark night of the soul comes just before revelation.
When everything is lost, and all seems darkness,
then comes the new life and all that is needed.”
Or, as Jung put it,
“There is no coming to consciousness without pain.”
Joanna Ebenstein
Memento Mori: The Art of Contemplating Death to Live a Better Life
Henry Miller: An Artist Dies Many Times
It is not that the artist is incapable of living.
On the contrary, their zest for life is so powerful,
so voracious,
that it forces him to kill themselves
over and over.
They die many times
in order to live innumerable lives.
Henry Miller
The Wisdom of the Heart
Chagdud Tulku Rinpoche: Your Dream of Life
From the day we were born until the day we die,
our life experience is an ever-changing relative truth
that we hold to be very real.
It is not, however, absolutely real or permanent.
This is very important to understand.
When you wake up from your dream of life,
there are no possessions, no relationships,
no emotional dramas.
All of your experiences, which seemed true,
were not really true in the absolute sense.
Chagdud Tulku Rinpoche
Life in Relation to Death
Chagdud Tulku Rinpoche — A Meeting, a Passing
We were born alone and naked.
As our life unfolds we go through all manner of antics:
needing, having, losing, suffering, crying, trying …
but then we die,
and we die alone.
It does not make any difference whether we are rich or poor,
known or unknown.
Death is the great leveler.
Our relationships with one another
are like the chance meeting of two strangers in a parking lot.
They look at each other and smile.
That is all there is between them.
They leave and never see each other again.
That is what life is—
just a moment, a meeting, a passing,
and then it is gone.
If you understand this,
there is no time to fight.
There is no time to argue.
There is no time to hurt one another.
Whether you think about it in terms of humanity,
nations, communities, or individuals,
there is no time for anything less than truly appreciating
the brief interaction we have with one another.
Chagdud Tulku Rinpoche
Life in Relation to Death
Jane Roberts — Signals Meant to Free You
You read yourself in too-narrow terms.
Much of the pain connected with serious illness and death
results because you have no faith in your own continuing reality.
You fight pain because you have not learned to transcend it,
or rather to use it.
You do not trust the natural consciousness of the body,
so that when its end nears —
and such an end is inevitable —
you do not trust the signals that the body gives,
that are meant to free you.
Jane Roberts
The Nature of the Psyche: Its Human Expression (A Seth Book)
Andrew Holecek: We Believe We're Somebody
“Our fear of death is an inauthentic, secondary fear —
born of denying the harsh noble truth
that we’re already dead in the way we think we exist.”
“We’re not human beings, we’re human doings.”
“We take on existence because we believe in existence.
We take on a body because we believe we’re somebody.”
“On one level, dying is the easiest thing you could possibly do –
you simply open and relax.”
Andrew Holecek
from The Preparing to Die Program
MORE RANGE
We are friends with the one who kills us,
who gives us to the ocean waves.
We love this death.
Only ignorance would say,
Put it off a while,
day after tomorrow.
Do not avoid the knife.
This friend only seems fierce,
bringing your soul more range,
perching your falcon on a cliff of the wind.
Jesus on his cross, Hallaj on his—
those absurd killings hold a secret.
Submit to love without thinking,
as the sun this morning rose recklessly
extinguishing our star-candle minds.
Rumi
The Big Red Book
Elizabeth Taylor described a near-death experience
during a life-threatening illness in 1961,
when complications from pneumonia
left her clinically critical and reportedly
without a detectable pulse for several minutes.
She later recounted the sensation
of separating from her body and observing the scene from above,
describing a calm detachment.
She reported encountering the spirit of her third husband,
producer Mike Todd, who had died years earlier in a plane crash.
According to Taylor, he communicated that it was not her time
and that she needed to return.
The experience profoundly altered her relationship to death.
She stated in later interviews
that she no longer feared dying,
describing death as a transition rather than an end.
Throughout her life, she spoke of the event
as deeply real and transformative,
insisting that it was not a hallucination
but an encounter that reshaped her understanding of existence.
Brandon M. Procak
Your Mind, After Death: The Case for Consciousness beyond the Body
The question has been asked if I regard treatment as illumined reason,
and I have pointed out that treatment would have to be illumined reason
because the ordinary reason of the human mind
would not be a very good treatment.
In other words, treatment as illumined reason
would be the realization of the presence of life,
even where death appears to be.
The reasoning mind would say,
“Well, this is death; there is no use doing anything about it,”
but illumined reason would know
that there never had been a death in the spiritual universe.
Joel Goldsmith
God, The Substance of All Form
Alan Clements: The terminal diagnosis or the death reality has become for me,
not a koan or a mantra or riddle to be recited or solved,
or even a tab of existential LSD to illuminate the unseen.
It’s been a heart opener,
illuminating non-complacent and intimate co-abiding;
‘me’ in context.
A more transparent self-presence with the whole, if you will.
But I don’t know what death actually is,
nor do I have any direct experience of it,
other than the obvious — momentary cognitive change, perceptual change,
and then the more obvious projection of biological discontinuity:
‘Me’, this skin-draped skeleton, becoming a corpse.
Reverend Bodhi Be: You’re doing the work of preparing for death:
Coming to terms with the life we’ve lived.
What is my relationship to myself?
Did I live the life I wanted to live?
What is my relationship to community?
What is my relationship to the planet?
What is my relationship to the Holy?
Have I contributed to the greater good in some way?
How have I lived?
Is there a mess I need to clean up?
Are there people I need to apologize to, or forgive,
or make sure they know I love them?
Or do I need to thank them?
What’s most important?
Did I cultivate a living relationship with ‘God’
that is helping me now that I’m dying?
I say don’t wait till you find out you’re dying to do this work,
it’s harder then.
This is the deep inner work
that leads to living ‘fully alive’,
and to dying well.
Alan Clements
Facing Death: A Conversation with Reverend Bodhi Be
To change our culture,
to change our lives,
requires the transformation of consciousness,
and few things shift consciousness
as quickly as an awareness of death.
Reverend Bodhi Be
Quoted in:
Alan Clements
Facing Death
When we witness death,
we must grapple with its finality,
but also with our own mortality
and the knowledge that one day we too will die.
Whereas once this was understood as the natural order of things,
we now find ourselves conflicted
and less willing to see death as ‘natural’.
If anything, death breaks into our lives as an unexpected surprise.
Rather than continuing to avoid death,
or to fear it, what if we changed our perception?
Might we conceive of death, instead,
as the winding down of life’s frantic clock –
and dying as a means of coming to terms
with our identities, our loved ones, ourselves?
Brandy Schillace
Death's Summer Coat
KAREN WYATT: If everything is impermanent, will you also die one day?
CHATGTP: Yes, as a language model, I do not have a physical body
and therefore do not experience death.
However, as a general rule,
all things that are born or created
will eventually come to an end or cease to exist.
This is the nature of impermanence.
This includes living beings,
as we are subject to the laws of nature
and the cycle of birth, aging, sickness, and death.
Therefore, it is inevitable that all living beings, including humans,
will eventually die one day.
Karen's Note: Chat acknowledged that all things "created" will eventually cease to exist, then went on to include itself in the statement "we are subject to the laws of nature."
Karen Wyatt, MD
Conversations on Death with ChatGPT: Resources for Navigating the End-of-Life Journey
The moment you are absolutely empty
and you don’t see anything inside of you,
suddenly all becomes light.
Suddenly thousands of flowers open in your being.
You become full of fragrance and music,
a music that has not been heard before,
a fragrance that is not of the earth.
And you are liberated in that experience,
liberated from life,
liberated from death,
liberated from time itself.
You become part of the eternal flow of existence.
Osho
First in the Morning: 365 Uplifting Moments to Start the Day Consciously
In life, we endure storms of various kinds.
Some of us have been terrified
by tornadoes, hicanes, fires, and ice storms.
However, these storms are part of our natural world.
If and when we can surrender to something that powerful
(when we are so powerless),
it can almost be comforting.
Death can be like this.
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
Death nesting is about preparing the nest for one who is dying,
just as we might prepare a nest for one who is about to give birth.
Some individuals begin “nesting” before menstruation or during pregnancy
in preparation for birth.
Once the environment feels safe, orderly, and ready,
a spaciousness opens for the internal work to begin
and the release to happen.
When you consider the construction of a nest,
it is quite similar to the care that should be taken
to make way for death.
The coarse, outer pieces of straw and mud form the hard protective shell,
while the soft, fine materials inside comfort the chicks.
This is similar to the womb of mammals,
and then bassinets that we put our babies in.
Among humans and in nature,
we prepare sacred spaces for sacred acts.
Just as we prepare safe and comfortable birthing spaces,
we should create safe and comfortable deathing spaces.
Anne-Marie Keppel
Death Nesting
You live like this, sheltered, in a delicate world,
and you believe you are living.
Then you read a book (Lady Chatterley, for instance), or you take a trip,
and you discover that you are not living,
that you are hibernating.
The symptoms of hibernating are easily detectable:
first, restlessness.
The second symptom
(when hibernating becomes dangerous and might degenerate into death):
absence of pleasure.
That is all.
It appears like an innocuous illness.
Monotony, boredom, death.
Millions live like this (or die like this) without knowing it.
They work in offices.
They drive a car.
They picnic with their families.
They raise children.
And then some shock treatment takes place,
a person, a book, a song,
and it awakens them and saves them from death.
Some never awaken.
They are like the people
who go to sleep in the snow and never awaken.
Anaïs Nin
The Diary of Anaïs Nin, 1931–1934
Things go better if we practice the steps of the dance beforehand.
Perhaps if we find ways
to make the pathway to natural death sacred and familiar again,
we will recover the courage to face our deaths.
If we don’t, technological medicine at the end of life
will continue to collude with our fear and ignorance
and profit from it.
Unless we create new rites of passage
to help prepare for death long before it comes,
we will remain vulnerable
to the commercial exploitation of our fears
and to the implied promise
that death can forever be postponed.
Dying is a sacred act.
Even in the worst of circumstances,
it can be made holy.
Katy Butler
Knocking on Heaven’s Door: The Path to a Better Way of Death
The individual in associating death and decay with evil,
conceives God as "being" and "life"
as opposed to "non-being" and "death".
This totally ignores the basic fact
that pure being and pure non-being are both conceptual myths.
But as soon as the inner identity of these inseparable correlatives
is felt with total conviction,
so is the identity between the individual dividual and nature.
Then death is accepted as part of living,
a return to that unknown inwardness
out of which the individual was born
as an intrinsic part of nature.
Ramesh S. Balsekar
Final Truth: A Guide to Ultimate Understanding
There is obviously much about death I do not understand.
Yes, and that is because you do not like to think about it.
Yet you must contemplate death and loss
the instant you perceive any moment of life,
or you will not have perceived life at all,
but know only the half of it.
Each moment ends the instant it begins.
If you do not see this,
you will not see what is exquisite in it,
and you will call the moment ordinary.
Each interaction “begins to end” the instant it “begins to begin.”
Only when this is truly contemplated and deeply understood
does the full treasure of every moment—
and of life itself—open to you.
Life cannot give itself to you if you do not understand death.
You must do more than understand it.
You must love it,
even as you love life.
Your time with each person would be glorified
if you thought it was your last time with that person.
Your experience of each moment would be enhanced beyond measure
if you thought it was the last such moment.
Your refusal to contemplate your own death
leads to your refusal to contemplate your own life.
Neale Donald Walsch
The Complete Conversations with God: An Uncommon Dialogue
Once we have used up an item, we say it is finished.
We don’t say it is dead.
However, when the vital breath leaves the living body,
we say the person has died.
When the body dies, the vital breath leaves the body.
Does anything else leave the body other than the vital breath?
No, the body becomes unconscious
and is cremated soon thereafter,
and the vital breath becomes all-pervasive.
The vital breath leaves the body
and merges into air and space.
For the Self, there is no coming or going.
This is a fact of Reality.
Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj
I Am Not the Body: Discovering the Truth Beyond Bondage
At the moment of your death,
you will not see yourself as letting go of life,
but simply enjoying it at a higher level.
When at last you see that there is no separation in God’s World—
that is, nothing which is not God—
then, at last, will you let go of this invention of man
which you have called Satan.
If Satan exists,
he exists as every thought you ever had of separation from Me.
You cannot be separate from Me,
for I Am All That Is.
Men invented the devil to scare people into doing what they wanted
, under the threat of separation from God if they did not.
Condemnation, being hurled into the everlasting fires of hell,
was the ultimate scare tactic.
Yet now you need be afraid no more.
For nothing can, or ever will, separate you from Me.
You and I are One.
We cannot be anything else if I Am What I Am:
All That Is.
Why then would I condemn Myself?
And how would I do it?
How could I separate Myself from Myself
when My Self is All There Is,
and there is nothing else?
My purpose is to evolve, not to condemn;
to grow, not to die;
to experience, not to fail to experience.
My purpose is to Be, not to cease to Be. I
have no way to separate Myself from you—or anything else.
“Hell” is simply not knowing this.
“Salvation” is knowing and understanding it completely.
You are now saved.
You needn’t worry
about what’s going to happen to you “after death” anymore.
Neale Donald Walsch
The Complete Conversations with God: An Uncommon Dialogue
I’ve observed a number of people die.
When they’ve made a relationship to death,
they’re usually able to let go
and make the transition more easily.
But if they’re afraid of death,
it can be painful to watch.
You see a terror in their eyes
as if they’re being pushed into a deep pit.
Having witnessed both of these kinds of death, I
know which way I want to go.
This has been a very important inspiration for me
to keep contemplating death.
Now, having worked with it for a long time,
I no longer see death as frightening.
And I’ve started to teach more about death
because I feel that being so afraid of it is really unnecessary.
Pema Chodron
Welcoming the Unwelcome
It was a silent invisible festival
permeated by an incomparable, indescribable feeling of eternal bliss,
such as I never could have imagined
as being within reach of human experience.
Death is the hardest thing from the outside
and as long as we are outside of it.
But once inside
you taste of such completeness and peace and fulfillment
that you don’t want to return.
As a matter of fact, during the first month after my first vision I
suffered from black depressions
because I felt that I was recovering.
It was like dying.
I did not want to live
and to return into this fragmentary, restricted, narrow,
almost mechanical life, where you were subject to the laws of gravity and cohesion, imprisoned in a system of 3 dimensions
and whirled along with other bodies in the turbulent stream of time.
There was fullness, meaning fulfillment,
eternal movement (not movement in time).
C.G. Jung
Letter to Kristine Mann
From Letters, Vol. 1
As you know, the angel of death has struck me down too,
and almost succeeded in wiping me off the slate.
I have been practically an invalid ever since,
recovering very very slowly
from all the arrows that have pierced me on all sides.
Fortunately enough my head has not suffered
and I could forget myself in my scientific work.
On the whole my illness proved to be a most valuable experience,
which gave me the inestimable opportunity
of a glimpse behind the veil.
The only difficulty is to get rid of the body,
to get quite naked and void of the world and the ego-will.
When you can give up the crazy will to live
and when you seemingly fall into a bottomless mist,
then the truly real life begins
with everything which you were meant to be
and never reached.
It is something ineffably grand.
I was free,
completely free and whole,
as I never felt before.
C.G. Jung
Letter to Kristine Mann
From Letters, Vol. 1
Throughout my illness something has carried me.
My feet were not standing on air
and I had the proof that I have reached a safe ground.
Whatever you do, if you do it sincerely,
will eventually become the bridge to your wholeness,
a good ship that carries you
through the darkness of your second birth,
which seems to be death to the outside.
I will not last too long any more.
I am marked.
But life has fortunately become provisional.
It has become a transitory prejudice,
a working hypothesis for the time being,
but not existence itself.
Be patient and regard it as another difficult task,
this time the last one.
I greet you, CARL G. JUNG
C.G. Jung
Letter to Kristine Mann
From Letters, Vol. 1
Death is psychologically as important as birth
and, like it, is an integral part of life. ...
As a doctor, I make every effort
to strengthen the belief in immortality,
especially with older patients
when such questions come threateningly close.
For, seen in correct psychological perspective,
death is not an end but a goal.
C.G. Jung
On Death and Immortality
You determine the meaning of the form you “see”
by your perception of what is real for you.
Seeing through and beyond the limitation of these beliefs
allows you to see the form in its reality
which is infinite.
You will not then even perceive a change in form,
because the form will no longer be the object of your focus.
You will experience the changeless,
the absolutely infinite expression of the Mind of God.
There is nothing created by God,
which is the expression and the extension of the Mind of God,
that is changeable.
There is no need to alter perfection.
As your fundamental belief in guilt and fear changes,
it won’t be a matter of seeing energy change form;
you won’t experience the illusion of forms.
You will not experience war
nor will you see war;
you will not experience death
or confusion or chaos in any form.
As it leaves your mind,
it must also leave your experience.
Tom Carpenter
Dialogue on Awakening: Communion with the Christ