Joel Goldsmith: Life Has No Opposite

There is only one answer to any claim

that relates to the fear of death,

and that is that life has no opposite

for life is infinite.

Life, the life which is God, is universal;

it is the life of all being

whether the life of man, woman, child, animal, or plant.

Life is always God;

there is no other life.

Whatever you know about the life

which is God

is the truth about the individual life

which is appearing as you and as me.

Joel Goldsmith

The Master Speaks

Ramana Maharshi: Birth and Rebirth Pertain to the Body

Questioner: How long does it take a man to be reborn after death?

Is it immediately after death or some time after?

Ramana Maharshi: You do not know what you were before birth,

yet you want to know what you will be after death.

Do you know what you are now?

Birth and rebirth pertain to the body.

You are identifying the Self with the body.

It is a wrong identification.

You believe that the body has been born and will die,

and confound the phenomena relating to the body with the Self.

Know your real being

and these questions will not arise.

Birth and rebirth are mentioned

only to make you investigate the question

and find out that there are neither births nor rebirths.

They relate to the body and not to the Self.

Know the Self

and don’t be perturbed by doubts.

Sri Ramana Maharshi

Be As You Are: The Teachings of Sri Ramana Maharshi

Q: Can a yogi know his past lives?

Maharshi: Do you know the present life

that you wish to know the past?

Find the present, then the rest will follow.

Even with our present limited knowledge,

you suffer so much.

Why should you burden yourself with more knowledge?

Is it to suffer more?

Sri Ramana Maharshi

Be As You Are: The Teachings of Sri Ramana Maharshi

It is hard to have patience with people who say, ‘There is no death’

or ‘Death doesn’t matter.’

There is death.

And whatever is matters.

And whatever happens has consequences,

and it and they are irrevocable and irreversible.

You might as well say that birth doesn’t matter.

I look up at the night sky.

Is anything more certain than that in all those vast times and spaces,

if I were allowed to search them,

I should nowhere find her face,

her voice, her touch?

She died.

She is dead.

Is the word so difficult to learn?

C.S. Lewis

A Grief Observed

Ignorance or delusion shrinks our sense of self.

It makes us forget our bigger self,

the self that is one with God,

and causes us to believe we are the little self, the body.

The body performs actions, and we believe we are the body,

this individual performing all these activities.

We become concerned with the achievements of the body.

We strive for a good education, to amass wealth,

to gain recognition and success in our worldly life;

and towards the end of our life,

we become fearful when death approaches.

All this while we forget about our bigger self, our soul.

Our soul is the witness within us

that observes the ups and downs in our life.

It is not interested in the success and failures of the body,

and nor is it concerned about the death of the body.

As Vasugupta beautifully explains in the Spanda Karikas (Verses 14-16):

Two are found to exist here, called the Creator and the created. Among them, created matter is subject to decay but the Creator is imperishable.

Looking at created matter dissolving into the whole, examine carefully what is being destroyed here. At the time of his death, an ignorant man thinks, “I will cease to exist”.

But the Being within us, who is the abode of the quality of omniscience, cannot be destroyed. Due to lack of knowledge of this other Self, a man believes sooner or later, he may cease to exist.

Ranjit Chaudhri

The Shiva Sutras

Deepak Chopra: A Living Possibility

I am not afraid of death.

I want to say this clearly,

not as a performance of spiritual courage

but as an honest description of where I find myself,

after eight decades of living and exploring

and attending to the dying.

I am not afraid because I have come to believe—

through reflection, through meditation,

through the witness accounts of people

who have had near-death experiences,

through the testimony of the great wisdom traditions

and, yes, through something in my own direct experience

that I cannot fully articulate—

that what I most essentially am

does not end when this body stops.

The body is a temporary form.

Consciousness is the field in which all forms arise and pass.

The wave is not the ocean,

but the wave is made of ocean.

When the wave dissolves, the ocean remains.

The pattern of awareness that I call ‘Deepak’

has a particular history,

a particular set of relationships,

a particular body that will, in time, return to its elements.

But the awareness in which all of that arises,

the witnessing presence,

the sakshi, that, I believe,

is not subject to the laws that govern bodies.

I hold this lightly.

I do not offer it as metaphysical certainty.

No one knows.

But I hold it as a living possibility,

which is more than adequate for living fearlessly.

Deepak Chopra

Awakening in the Final Chapter: Aging with Grace, Love, and Freedom

Your idea of death

is based upon your dependence upon the outer senses.

You will learn that it is possible,

through no physical act

(and underline that, through no physical act),

to relinquish the physical body,

expand the self,

using atoms and molecules

as stepping stones to a given destination,

and reforming the physical body

at the other end.

Jane Roberts

The Early Sessions: Book 2 of The Seth Material

Death loses its sting and the grave its victory

when we realize that life is eternal.

We are not permitted to stay too long in any one place,

just long enough to gather the experience necessary

to the unfolding and advancement of the soul.

This is wise,

for should we stay here too long

we would become too set, too rigid, too inflexible.

In the process of evolution change is inevitable,

and when this change comes

we should welcome it with a smile on the lips

and a song in the heart.

While it is true that we weep for our friends,

we should know that their life goes on.

We are thinking, then, of eternity from this larger viewpoint,

as a continuity of time,

ever and ever expanding,

until “time” as we now know and experience it

shall be no more.

Realizing this,

we should see in everyone a budding genius,

a becoming God,

an unfolding soul,

an eternal destiny.

Ernest Holmes

You Will Live Forever

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

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

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

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)

“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

www.andrewholecek.com

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