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, pp. 357–59

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, pp. 357–59

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, pp. 357–59

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.J. 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

I know that it is quite difficult to understand

that as you see birds and plants dying,

they are dying because of your belief system,

they are dying because you are seeing them die.

Once you have lifted the veil

of identifying them and yourself as being perishable,

you will no longer experience

that which you have identified as the process of death.

Tom Carpenter

Dialogue on Awakening: Communion with the Christ

Life has to continue,

not “you” have to continue.

Life is not your lifespan or your children’s lifespan

or the lifespan of what you hold dear.

How about holding dear the fact t

hat nothing you hold dear lasts?

How about holding that close to your bosom?

That’s making meaning of the end of life,

the willingness to do that.

Stephen Jenkinson

When someone’s body can no longer perform its functions in the natural world

in response to the thoughts and affections of its spirit

(which it derives from the spiritual world),

then we say that the individual has died.

This happens when the lungs’ breathing and the heart’s systolic motion have ceased.

The person, though, has not died at all.

We are only separated from the physical nature

that was useful to us in the world.

The essential person is actually still alive.

I say that the essential person is still alive

because we are not people because of our bodies

but because of our spirits.

After all, it is the spirit within us that thinks,

and thought and affection together

make us the people we are.

Emanuel Swedenborg:

AFTERLIFE: A GUIDED TOUR OF HEAVEN AND ITS WONDERS

Questioner:

Yesterday I couldn’t sleep.

When I was lying on my bed

I kept hearing sounds and seeing lights.

I was scared, sweating.

I thought I was dying.

Maharaj:

Whatever is happening is happening as it should.

Even if whatever you felt was dying

actually was dying,

you were not dead.

Keep that firmly in mind.

Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj

Seeds of Consciousness

“Because, Lord, by every innate impulse

and through all the hazards of my life,

I have been driven ceaselessly

to search for you

and to set you in the heart of the universe of matter,

I shall have the joy, when death comes,

of closing my eyes

amidst the splendor of a universal transparency

aglow with fire…”

Teilhard de Chardin quoted in:

Cynthia Bourgeault

The Mystery of Death: Awakening to Eternal Life

Tibetans describe the moment of death

as a time where the mind is “imprinted” —

either by fearless love and compassion,

or by strong emotions such as fear, regret, and doubt.

For that reason, the yogis of Tibet spend their lives

attempting to surpass ordinary fears,

so that when they suddenly see the face of death,

they can fearlessly rely upon their spiritual training

and die in perfectly relaxed, mindful meditative equipoise.

Anyen Rinpoche, Allison Choying Zangmo

Living and Dying With Confidence

Death gives man the opportunity

of posing his first completely personal act;

death is, therefore, by reason of its very being,

the moment above all others for the awakening of consciousness,

for freedom, for the encounter with God,

for the final decision about his eternal destiny.

Ladislaus Boros

The Mystery of Death: Awakening to Eternal Life

You are waiting for me

to describe what this silence is

so that you can compare it, interpret it,

carry it away and bury it.

It cannot be described.

What can be described is the known,

and the freedom from the known

can come into being

only when there is a dying every day

to the known, to the hurts, the flatteries,

to all the images you have made,

to all your experiences.

Krishnamurti

Freedom from the Known

Death in the morning, at evening another birth –

this is the way of things,

no different from the bubbles on the stream.

Where do they come from, these newborn?

Where do the dead go?

I do not know.

Nor do I know why our hearts should fret over these brief dwellings,

or our eyes find such delight in them.

An owner and his home vie in their impermanence,

as the vanishing dew upon the morning glory.

The dew may disappear while the flower remains –

yet it lives on only to fade with the morning sun.

Or perhaps the flower wilts while the dew still lies –

but though it stays,

it too will be gone before the evening.

Kamo no Chōmei

Hōjōki “An Account of My Hut”

1212

Dying is not a condition that you actually go through.

No one has ever died.

There is no death.

God has no pleasure in your dying

and has never arranged for a death.

Therefore, death is an experience only of corporeal sense,

the sense that tells us we are physical, mortal, finite.

Death is never an experience of our own being.

Joel S. Goldsmith

Living By Grace: The Path to Inner Discovery

Our effort to separate one pole of a magnet from the other

can only mean breaking the magnet itself.

The “freed” sage is no longer interested in manipulating the opposites

so as to choose one from the other.

He is content to accept both as the very basis of life.

He fully understands that what-is,

is not good against evil,

not life against death.

There is a center of attention,

an awareness that witnesses and transcends both.

Ramesh S. Balsekar

Final Truth: A Guide to Ultimate Understanding

Jung believed it was important for individuals

to develop a personal myth about death.

This myth was not meant to be a literal story,

but rather a psychological framework

to help us grapple with the inevitability of death

and to find meaning in it.

Jung believed that death was an archetype,

a universal symbol that combines with our individual lives

to make them whole.

From his perspective,

death was not an end, but a goal,

and he understood life’s inclination toward death

to begin as soon as we passed life’s meridian.

In his autobiography, Memories, Dreams, Reflections, he advised:

A man should be able to say he has done his best

to form a conception of life after death,

or to create some image of it—

even if he must confess his failure.

Not to have done so is a vital loss.

For the question that is posed to him

is the age-old heritage of humanity:

an archetype, rich in secret life,

which seeks to add itself to our own individual life

in order to make it whole….

The more the critical reason dominates,

the more impoverished life becomes;

but the more of the unconscious

and the more of myth we are capable of making conscious,

the more of life we integrate.

Joanna Ebenstein

Memento Mori

The Art of Contemplating Death to Live a Better Life