Buddhists call these three ‘the messengers of God’: old age, sickness, death — three messengers of God. Why? — because only through these experiences in life do you become aware of death. And if you become aware of death and you start learning how to go into it, how to welcome it, how to receive it, you are released from the bondage, from the wheel of life and death.
(Osho)
Death is different from what
Anyone knows, and luckier
(Walt Whitman from ‘Song of Myself’)
Life and death are one — one phenomenon, one energy. Life is the manifestation of that energy, and death is again relaxation. Life is coming to a form, and death is moving again into the formless. The end and the beginning meet. Life is not separate from death, death is not separate from life — they meet and mingle. Even to say they meet is not right because the mind immediately brings: “If there is a meeting then there must be two.” It is not a meeting, it is one phenomenon.
(Osho)
We do not know where death awaits us: so let us wait for it everywhere. To practise death is to practise freedom. A man who has learned how to die has unlearned how to be a slave.
(Montaigne)
Whenever anybody dies anywhere, death knocks at your doors too. And not only a human being: a dog dies, a crow dies, or a leaf becomes pale and dies and drops from the tree – you are dying, because we are involved in each other, we are parts of each other, we are members of each other.
(Osho)
Because I have loved life, I shall have no sorrow to die.
I have sent up my gladness on wings, to be lost in the blue of the sky.
I have run and leaped with the rain, I have taken the wind to my breast.
My cheek like a drowsy child to the face of the earth I have pressed.
Because I have loved life, I shall have no sorrow to die. ….
Whoever rightly understands and celebrates death, at
the same time magnifies life.
(Rainer Maria Rilke)
This life is going to end in a few days, or in a few years. It is not something to cling to. Each moment death is coming closer; before death grabs you, you have to figure out something which is eternal, which is immortal.It seems obvious that death is the end of life; that is not true. Death is only a beginning of a new life — a refreshment, a rejuvenation. The old body is tired. You need more experiences to become mature. You have to move through many other forms of life, and there are millions of forms of life.
Death can be sweet if you move from one body, one existence, one form, with pure awareness into another and higher. Then it is sweet, really sweet.When you encounter death, when you see it face to face, when you don’t avoid, when you don’t dodge, when you don’t escape, when you don’t create a cloud around you, when you face it, encounter it, the fact of death,suddenly you become aware that death is life. The deeper you move into death, the deeper you move in life because, Heraclitus says,the opposites meet and mingle, they are one.Death makes one understand fear, but it is not the death of somebody else, it is your own death, and that too with the condition that you are conscious.
(Osho)
What is dying?
I am standing on the seashore.
A ship sails to the morning breeze and starts for the ocean.
She is an object and I stand watching her
Till at last she fades from the horizon,
And someone at my side says, “She is gone!” Gone where?
Gone from my sight, that is all;
She is just as large in the masts, hull and spars as she was when I saw her,
And just as able to bear her load of living freight to its destination.
The diminished size and total loss of sight is in me, not in her;
And just at the moment when someone at my side says, “She is gone,”
There are others who are watching her coming,
And other voices take up a glad shout,
“There she comes” – and that is dying.
("The Sailing Ship"’
Bishop Charles Henry Brent)
Friend, hope for the guest while you are alive.
Jump into experience while you are alive.
Think … and think … while you are alive.
What you call “salvation” belongs to the time before death.
If you don’t break your ropes while you’re alive,
do you think
ghosts will do it after?
The idea that the soul will rejoin with the ecstatic
Just because the body is rotten –
That is all fantasy.
What is found now is found then.
If you find nothing now,
You will simply end up with an apartment in the
City of Death.
If you make love with the divine now, in the next
Life you will have the face of satisfied desire.
So plunge into the truth, find out who the Teacher is.
Believe in the Great Sound!
Kabir says this: When the Guest is being searched for,
It is the intensity of the longing for the Guest that
Does all the work.
Look at me, and you will see a slave of that intensity.
(Kabir ‘The Time Before Death’)
There’s no decision in death. People who know that there’s no hope are free. The decision’s out of their hands. It has always been that way, but some people have to die bodily to find out. No wonder they smile on their death beds. Dying is something they were looking for in life. Their delusion of being in charge is over. When there’s no choice there’s no fear. And in that, there is peace. They realise that they’re home and that they’ve never left.
(Byron Katie)
And if, in the changing phases of man’s life
I fall in sickness and misery
My wrists seem broken and my heart seems dead
And strength is gone, and my life
Is only the leavings of a life:
And still, among it all, snatches of lovely oblivion, and snatches of renewal
odd, wintry flowers upon the withered stem, yet new, strange flowers
such as my life has not brought forth before, new blossoms of me —
then I must know that still
I am in the hands of the unknown God,
He is breaking me down to his own oblivion
to send me forth on a new morning, a new man.
(DH Lawrence (from a poem he wrote as he was dying)
When your time comes to die, be not like those
whose hearts are filled with fear of death,
so that when their time comes they weep and pray
for a little more time to live their lives over again
in a different way.
Sing your death song, and die like a hero going home.
(The Teaching of Tecumseh)
Give us strength. Strength to hold on
and strength to let go.
(Michael Leunig)
In trying to avoid death, one goes on missing life.
Live life! In living life, death is avoided.
You welcome death. And unless you can welcome death, (please close space between this and next line)
one thing is certain – you have not lived.
(Osho)
Death and love go together; they are aspects of the same energy. When death fulfills your love, and when in love you are ready to die – when they have the same taste and the same flavour – then for the first time you have really become aware of the mysteries of life, love and death.
(Osho The Revolution)
Until we know that death is as good as life, and that it always comes at just the right time, we’re going to take on the role of God without the awareness of it, and it’s always going to hurt. Whenever you mentally oppose what is, you’re going to experience sadness and apparent separation. There’s no sadness without a story. What is it. You are it.
(Byron Katie)
