On death…
It isn’t until we really grasp the truth of our own mortality that we awaken to the preciousness of being alive.
There is no before life...or afterlife...simply transitions.
We are a formless life force...an unimaginable mystery...beyond imagination...imagination can only occur in the dreamlife of our units...there is no afterlife...just life....perhaps other forms, but the death of awareness is not possible as you would have to be aware to notice a lack of awareness....there is no other place...there is no place period...there is only life in all its variations...there is no right or wrong...no judgement or boundary.
All is just life showing itself to itself in a particular manner.
“Find what you love and let it kill you.”
~ Charles Bukowski
There are fates much worse than death.
Memento Mori!
"One is never afraid of the unknown; one is afraid of the known coming to an end."
~ J. Krishnamurti
All meat suits have an expiration date.
Death is an uncertain certainty, something that we all know will eventually happen to us but that can strike us at any moment of our lives.
As I get older, the it feels that the boundaries between me and other people, dog, spiders, blocks of wood are all fading away. and, soon, I will fade away as well.
Remembering daily that you will one day die is not depressing, it is empowering… imbuing a sense of value for use of time and instilling a poignancy to even seemingly insignificant acts like the twinkle in ones eye, smile of a child or the contact of an animal.
Death isn't a bad guy…he’s just doing his job.
It is our mortality that gives our lives meaning.
Death is not your enemy, it is your destiny.
“It is not death that a man should fear, but he should fear never beginning to live.”
~ Marcus Aurelius
The ego does not like this subject because it may mean its demise.
“The biggest ego trip going is trying to get rid of your ego. And the joke is it all is that your ego doesn’t exist.”
~ Alan Watts
When you unconsciously disconnect yourself from the awareness of death, you forge a rather loose relationship with time, imagining you have more time than you really do. Your mind drifts to the future, where all your hopes and wishes will be fulfilled. Fulfill those dreams now…not later.
Death is coming. We have no idea when or now.
What would you do differently if you knew the day of your death?
Live each day as if given another day of life.
No other animal has a fear of mortality.
Perhaps death is not an infinity or absence or nonexistence but a different kind of dimensional existence where although death is a permanent, irreversible state, the individual doesn’t do the sorts of things that living beings typically do.
The pain we feel from loss is the last reminder of the gift of a life deeply loved.
Death is often viewed as a loss or ‘leaving for somewhere else’ which can cause us to suffer and grieve. But ‘death’ is just a word, it isn’t really what’s going on. What’s going on is just another moment, the flow of change.
Death is an undulation in consciousness. How would you know you were alive unless you’d once been dead?
Perhaps dying isn’t a binary thing where you’re either dead or alive – rather, there’s a whole continuum of states.
Consider the flow of life and death in a different way, like a stone being tossed and landing in the middle of a lake. Out of it, tiny waves are ‘born’ out of the event and spread across the lake. They eventually slow down, ‘die’, and merge back into the whole.
The entire time it’s just the lake taking a different form, it’s never a separation of “that’s a wave, and that’s the lake”. It is always the lake. Nothing was lost either, it’s just changing form.
“Death is psychologically just as important as birth. We are not quite certain that death is the ‘end’. Because you know there are these peculiar faculties of the psyche that isn’t entirely confined to space and time. You can have dreams or visions of the future; you can see around corners and such things…only ignorance denies these facts. These are quite evident that they do exist and have existed always. Now these facts show that the psyche, in part at least, is not dependent upon these confinements. And then what? When the psyche is not under that obligation to live in time or space alone, and obviously it doesn’t, then to that extent, the psyche is not suppurated to these laws. That means a practical continuation of life, of a sort of cyclical existence beyond time and space.”
~ Carl Jung, 1959 Interview
“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.”
~ CJ Jung
Death is not an end to your consciousness. In fact, it's an unfathomable expansion in consciousness.
Link: This Is What Happens When You Die, According to Science
“the brain might still be processing information after clinical death”
“Everyone is so afraid of death, but the sufis just laugh: nothing tyrannizes their hearts. What strikes the oyster shell does not damage the pearl. Death is just sun setting. The tomb looks like a prison, but it's really release into union. It is wedding with eternity.”
~ Rumi
“I’m acutely aware that I’m, you know, could go any day now but I don’t know why it doesn’t concern me, I’m not afraid of it. I have that feeling, totally against anything intellectual, that I’m going to be all right.”
~ Dick Van Dyke @ 99 years old
Do not fear death. We should regard death is being a goal and to shrink away from it is to evade life. Old people should look forward to the next stage. Don’t shrivel up and die before your time. Live to your last breath.
“At times I have been tempted to believe that the creator has eternally intended this department of nature to remain baffling, to prompt our curiosities and hopes and suspicions all in equal measure.”
~ William James
What if there is nothing?
There is a comfort in the nothing. No thinking. No feeling. No pain. No suffering. Just like before you were born.
What if there is something?
Keep looking forward to the great adventure…the journey beyond human experience. Say Yes to life.
“My attitude toward death isn’t fear at all; it’s intense curiosity.”
~ Tolstoy
“After your death, you will be what you were before your birth.”
~ Schopenhauer
"The day which we fear as our last is but the birthday of eternity."
~Seneca
“Nature does not know extinction; all it knows is transformation. Everything science has taught me, and continues to teach me, strengthens my belief in the continuity of our spiritual existence after death.”
~Werner Von Braun
After your death you will be what you were before your birth. Pure consciousness.
Death is the opposite of time.
The universal infinite consciousness exists outside of space and time.
We give death metaphors. We cloak it in meaning and make up stories about what will happen to us, but we don’t really know. When a person dies, we cannot see beyond the corpse. We speculate on reincarnation or talk in terms of eternity. But death is opaque to us, a mystery. In its realm, time ceases to have meaning. All laws of physics become irrelevant. Death is the opposite of time.
What dies? Is anything actually destroyed?
Certainly not the body, which falls into its constituent parts of water and chemicals. That is mere transformation, not destruction. What of the mind? Does it cease to function, or does it make a transition to another existence? We don’t know for sure, and few can come up with anything conclusive.
What dies?
Nothing of the person dies in the sense that the constituent parts are totally blasted from all existence. What dies is merely the identity, the identification of a collection of parts that we called a person. Each one of us is a role, like some shaman wearing layers of robes with innumerable fetishes of meaning. Only the clothes and decoration fall. What dies is only our human meaning. There is still something underneath. Once we understand who that someone is, death no longer bothers us. Nor does time.
When nature needs my atoms somewhere else, when the body wears itself out…death takes place and a reshuffling of the atoms reoccurs.
Also see “On Loss”
“No one knows whether death may not be the greatest of all blessings for a man and yet men fear it as if they knew that it is the greatest of evils.”
~ Socrates, Plato’s Apology
“The day which we fear as our last is but the birthday of eternity.”
~ Seneca, “De Brevitate Vitae” (c.48 C.E.)
“Don’t cry because it’s over, laugh because it happened.”
~ Dr Seuss
“Don’t grieve. Anything you lose comes round in another form."
~Rumi
"It is foolish and wrong to mourn the men who died. Rather we should thank God that such men lived."
~ Patton
“How lucky am I to have something that makes saying goodbye so hard.”
~ Winnie the Pooh
“Death smiles at us all, but all a man can do is smile back”
~ Marcus Aurelius
In the original Greek:
"Μὴ καταφρόνει θανάτου, ἀλλὰ εὐαρέστει αὐτῷ, ὡς καὶ τούτου ἑνὸς ὄντος ὧν ἡ φύσις ἐθέλει."
"Think not disdainfully of death, but look on it with favor; for even death is one of the things that nature wills."
~ Meditations. ix. 3.
“Like a well spent day brings a good night’s sleep, so does a well spent life bring a welcoming death.”
~ Leonardo Da Vinci
“Death is an illusion; life is a dream and we are the creator of our own imagination. The present moment is the only moment available to us and is the doorway to all moments.”
~ Thich Nhat Hanh
"It’s one of the great wonders of life: What will it be like to go to sleep and never wake up? And if you think long enough about that, something will happen to you. You will find out, among other things, that it will pose the next question to you: What was it like to wake up after never having gone to sleep? That was when you were born. You see, you can’t have an experience of nothing. Nature abhors a vacuum."
~Alan Watts
Perhaps sleep is just death being shy.
What if when we actually wake up when we die?
“Death is nothing to us since when we are, it has not come and when it has, we are not.”
~ Epicurus
“The soul is simple. It has no parts that can be detached from another. Moreover, because the soul is not a physical thing, it cannot be burned, crushed, or mangled. Thus, it cannot be destroyed.”
~ Socrates
"Soul doesn't have a fear of dying. Ego has very pronounced fear of dying. The ego, this incarnation, is life and dying. The soul is infinite."
~ Baba Ram Dass
"We need the matrix of thoughts, feelings, and sensations we call the ego for our physical and psychological survival.
The ego tells us what leads to what, what to avoid, how to satisfy our desires, and what to do in each situation. It does this by labeling everything we sense or think. These labels put order in our world and give us a sense of security and well-being. With these labels, we know our world and our place in it."
~ Ram Dass
Perhaps the conservation of energy applies to the soul as pure energy theory, thus can neither be created or destroyed, and that, independent of religion, each human being is composed of a physical body and a nonphysical soul.
The purported evidence is of three kinds: near-death experiences, instances of reincarnation, and mediums who communicate with the dead.
The survival of consciousness after biological death is a metaphysical concept with an ample body of empirical evidence which supports it in the form of widespread testimonies of near-death experiences (NDEs) and even verified cases of past-life memories in certain children despite the tendency of the modern worldview to doubt its possibility. The afterlife and some kind of reincarnation of souls are logical conclusions if we suppose that consciousness constitutes a fundamental property of the cosmos and that the material universe is none other than an emergent reality simulated by a primordial intelligence of pure mind as many forms of idealism assert. In accordance with this postulate, our individual consciousness is simply an individuated fragment of the original source and as such preexists and incarnates itself time and again in one of the many emergent realities of dense matter for its progressive evolution. The demise of the physical body would only mean the liberation of the soul from its temporary vessel and its subsequent return to the more fundamental reality of its origin.
There is a single, intelligent consciousness that pervades the entire universe. Death is like an implosion, an inward withdrawal of consciousness from a physical body into this universal consciousness. Our ‘souls’ are in fact constructed from the very fabric of the universe and have existed since the beginning of time. Our brains are just receivers and amplifiers for the proto-consciousness that is intrinsic to the fabric of space-time.
If the hypothesis of consciousness-as-dimension is correct, it would explain the universal claim of mystics that a whole panoply of worlds exists within the psyche or mind. It could explain dreams as symbolic images of these inner dimensions, and explain the near-death phenomenon of entering a dimension of light and intelligence. Death then, might be something like an implosion, an inward withdrawal of consciousness from a physical body into another dimension, or many dimensions.
Death is simply a natural transformation, a change, just like the progression of the four seasons.
“I do not fear death. I had been dead for billions and billions of years before I was born, and had not suffered the slightest inconvenience from it.”
~ Mark Twain
Death makes life meaningful. Immortality would be monotonous and boring.
Embracing the finite nature of life brings freedom from worry in that your mistakes (and accomplishments) are of little importance in the grand scheme.
“Life is a constant process of dying.”
~ Schopenhauer
Dying is the greatest adventure of life.
Picture a wave in the ocean. You can see it, measure it - its height, the way the sunlight refracts as it passes through - and it's there, you can see it, and you know what it is, it's a wave. And then it crashes on the shore and it's gone. But the water is still there. The wave was just... a different way for the water to be for a little while. That's one conception of death, the wave returns to the ocean, where it came from and where it's meant to be.
Pure consciousness
Mind had detached itself from the physical senses and is now free
What Buddhists call the state of nirvana
Mind/soul becomes a spectator
So now you can let go…Let go…Let go of this poor old body. You don't need it anymore.
Death is like psychedelic trip, set and setting make the difference between a confusing scary experience into a loving, joyful and most wonderful life experience.
You can observe yourself lying there.
After flatlining then you are free to start the unexplainable unimaginable journey we have been preparing for our entire lives…
You begin dissolving of the perspective from which you are standing…
You are then catapulted out into non-conceptional space…
You are free
You are one with the universe
One becomes love
Life and death are one
You are ecstatic
You are God
Love death as you love life
Allow the mystery of the universe to be something awesome and beautiful
Death may be the greatest of all human blessings.
~ Socrates
"The shortness of life, so often lamented, may be the best thing about it."
~ Arthur Schopenhauer
“Sometimes even to live is an act of courage.”
~ Seneca
This facilitates the imbuement of the moments we do have with intrinsic meaning.
Mortality is a gift to human beings.
JRR Tolkien's elves saw mortality as a gift to human beings that they themselves lacked.
"I do not especially like the idea that one day I shall be tapped on the shoulder and informed, not that the party is over but that it is most assuredly going on—only henceforth in my absence... Much more horrible, though, would be the announcement that the party was continuing forever, and that I was forbidden to leave."
~ Christopher Hitchens
We are going to die and that makes us the lucky ones. Most people are never going to die because they are never going to be born.
Death doesn’t lie off in the distance. It’s with us right now. It’s the second hand on the clock. It’s the setting sun. As the arrow of time moves, death follows, claiming every moment that has passed. What ought we do about it? The answer is live. Live while you can. Put nothing off. Leave nothing unfinished. Seize it while it still belongs to us.
One should not fear death because it is inevitable.
The only choice we have is how we will live. Adversity will inevitably happen to people, so it is how you deal with that adversity that matters. Your response to that adversity is the only thing you can control.
“How ridiculous to worry about passing into freedom from all worry! Just as birth brought us the birth of all things, so will our death be the death of them all. And so, to be sorry we will not be alive a hundred years from now is as foolish as to be sorry we were not alive a hundred years ago.”
~ Montaigne
“What you leave behind is not what is engraved in stone monuments but what is woven into the lives of others.”
~ Pericles
"Never forget what it is like to see the world as a child, where every autumn leaf is a work of art; every rolling cloud, a moving picture.. every day a new story. We too emerge from this magic, like a wave from the ocean, only to return back to the sea. Do not mourn the waves, the leaves and the clouds. Because even in darkness the wonder and beauty of the world never leaves. It's always there, just waiting to be seen again."
“Life, it is thanks to Death that I hold thee so dear. Think how great a blessing is a timely death, how many have been injured by living longer than they ought.”
~ Seneca
See stuff from Seneca on dealing with the sorrow of death:
“Everything’s destiny is to change, to be transformed, to perish. So that new things can be born.” Nothing is permanent. Not failure. Not pain. Not fame. Not fortune. Not you. Not anyone.”
~Marcus Aurelius
It's better to live and even thrive in an imperfect world than to be a martyr.
When we die, the whole world as seen by us, dies together with us.
In the face of impermanence and death, it takes courage to love the things of this world. It is courage born of the ever-unexpected discovery that acceptance of mortality yields an expansion of being.
“All things are made of atoms. They are everywhere and they constitute everything. They are fantastically durable. Every atom you possess has almost certainly passed through several stars and been part of millions of organisms on its way to becoming you. We are so atomically numerous and so vigorously recycled at death that a significant number of our atoms – up to a billion for each of us, it has been suggested-probably once belonged to Shakespeare …..and any other historical figure you care to name ……. So we are all reincarnations – though short lived ones. When we die, our atoms will disassemble and move off to finds new uses elsewhere – as part of a leaf or other human being or a drop of dew. Atoms themselves, however go on practically forever.”
~ Bill Bryson
"I'd hate to die twice. It's so boring."
~ Richard Feynman’s last words
Death smiles at us all; all we can do is smile back.
What do you say to comfort someone after a loss, when words seem hollow and potentially glib?
Oftentimes we will say something because we don’t know what to say, or because it will make us, rather than the mourner, feel better, or because death is not an easy thing to think about or face, so we deflect.
Perhaps a simple I am here for you is enough?
Tell me what you loved about the deceased, or share with me a memory of them in life that you’re not going to forget anytime soon.
Compassion manifests as heartfelt empathy and the willingness to be present to a fellow being in pain, and nothing else. Comforting the person should always be paramount, rather than expressing a well-meaning but possibly unhelpful ideological belief.
Making yourself available, sincerely empathizing with a person’s sense of grief or pain, and not trying to ‘fix’ those feelings tends to be the most helpful way to offer support,