Death & Resurrection

Intrinsically dead, I live. Intrinsically nonexistent, I AM. I come home to my Centre here, only to find it exploding into infinite space. I come home to my Centre now, only to find it exploding into infinite time.  D.E. Harding

If you know yourself without existence or ceasing to be, then you know God.  Ibn Arabi 

The profit of the knowledge of the soul is, that you understand and are sure that your existence is neither existent nor non-existent, and that you are not, were not, and never will be.  Ibn Arabi

When you abide in the Unborn, you abide at the source of all the Buddhas; so it's something wonderfully precious. There's no question of perishing here, so when you abide in the Unborn, it's superfluous to speak about the Imperishable. What isn't created can't be destroyed.  Bankei

Truly, truly, I say to you, unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains alone; but if it dies, it bears much fruit. He who loves his life loses it, and he who hates his life in this world will keep it for eternal life.  Jesus

Verily, verily, I say unto you, He that heareth my word, and believeth on him that sent me, hath everlasting life, and shall not come into condemnation; but is passed from death into life.  Jesus

Be sure that it is not you that is mortal, but only your body. For that man whom your outward form reveals is not yourself; the spirit is the true self, not that physical figure which can be pointed out by your finger. Cicero  

While alive, be a dead man, thoroughly dead.  Bunan 

I am dead in me, my friend is alive in me, my God is deathless in me. Our dying is the graduated reversal of our belief that is we who live and the universe that is dead.  D.E. Harding

Owing to the I-am-the-body notion, death is feared as being the loss of Oneself. Birth and death pertain to the body only but they are superimposed on the Self.  Ramana Maharshi

There is no death of anyone but only in appearance, even as there is no birth of anyone but only in appearance.  Apollonius of Tyana

I say, there is no death.
If every hour I die,
Each time a better life
has come to me thereby  Angelus Silesius

He that beholds his own Face -- his light is greater than the light of the creatures. Though he die, his sight is everlasting, because his sight is the sight of the Creator.  Rumi

If your bonds be not broken whilst living, what hope of deliverance in death? It is but an empty dream that the soul shall have union with Him because it has passed from the body; If He is found now, He is found then. If not, we do but go to dwell in the City of Death.  Kabir 

He who dwells on the unreal universe is destroyed.  Shankara

The universe dissolves into me. Wonderful am I! Adoration to Myself! For when the world, from its highest god to its least blade of grass, dissolves, that destruction is not mine.  Ashtavakra Gita

The Universe is merely a mode of the mind. Those liberated beings are surely immortal who are identified with Reality -- which is self-luminous, and which needs no support for Its existence, but which cognizes both existence and non-existence.  Ashtavakra Gita

God made the senses turn outwards, man therefore looks outwards, not into himself. But occasionally a daring soul, desiring immortality, has looked back and found himself. He is the imperishable among things that perish. Life of all life, He, though one, satisfies every man’s desire. He that dare discover Him within, knows peace; what other dare know peace?” Katha Upanishad

The contemplation of eternity maketh the soul immortal, whose glory it is, that it can see before and after its existence into endless spaces. Its sight is its presence.  Traherne

We feel an inkling of the perfection and stability of eternity, for there is neither time nor space, neither before nor after, but everything present in one new, fresh-springing now where millenniums last no longer than the twinkling of an eye.  Meister Eckhart

Consider that your life is a perpetual perishing.  J.J. Olier

Watchfulness is the path to immortality, and thoughtlessness the path to death. The watchful do not die, but the thoughtless are already dead.  Dhammapada

Who sees the supreme Lord dwelling alike in all beings, and never perishing when they perish, he sees indeed.  Bhagavad Gita

He who knows the soundless, odourless, tasteless, intangible, formless, deathless, supernatural, undecaying, beginningless, endless, unchangeable Reality, springs out of the mouth of Death.  Katha Upanishad

What I have in place of a head is mortal animals and mortal men, mortal stars and mortal galaxies, and the immortal Whole.  D.E. Harding

Nisargadatta: You can judge the strength of this will to live by the universal horror of death.
Questioner: Quite often people die willingly
Nisargadatta: Only when the alternative is worse than death. But such readiness to die flows from the same source as the will to live, a source deeper even than life itself. To be a living being is not the ultimate state: there is something beyond, much more wonderful, which is neither being nor non-being, neither living nor not-living. It is a state of pure awareness, beyond the limitations of space and time. Once the illusion that the body-mind is oneself is abandoned, death loses its terror, it becomes a part of living.

The heavens will fold and the earth before your eyes but he who lives from the Living One will experience neither death nor fear.  Gospel According to Thomas

Long before he saw us we were able to identify the bare head of a young Bushman working energetically at something in the grass. When he heard us, he shot upright like an arrow out of the grass and grabbed his spear, but already Dabe was calling out loudly the ancient Bushman greeting: "Good day. I saw you from afar and I am dying of hunger".

The young man stuck his spear in the sand and with his right hand raised, palm open and fingers up, walked shyly towards us, saying in a tone I had never heard before: "Good day! I have been dead but now that you have come, I live again".  Laurens van der Post, "The Lost World of the Kalahari"

All that exists anywhere in the world, be it trees and plants, insects, reptiles, or any other living thing - their birth is indeed your birth, and their death your death.  Ananda Mayi Ma

When a man is awakened he melts and perishes.  Rumi

To die but not to perish is to be eternally present.  Lao-Tzu

The final experience is the annihilation of our human self, of its good qualities as well as its evil; it is --dying daily' until even the best of humanhood is gone, and spiritual identity is revealed.  Joel Goldsmith

To comprehend and to understand God above all similitudes, as He is in Himself, is to be God with God, without intermediary, and without any otherness that can become a hindrance or an intermediary. Whosoever wishes to understand this must have died to himself, and must live in God, and must turn his gaze to the eternal light in the ground of his spirit, where the Hidden Truth reveals Itself without means.  Ruysbroek

Examine closely what sort of being you are. Know your nature -- that your body is mortal, but your soul immortal; that our life has two denotations, so to speak: one relating to the flesh, and this life is quickly over, the other relating to the soul, life without limit. "Give heed to thyself" -- cling not to the mortal as if it were eternal; disdain not that which is eternal as if it were temporal.  Basil the Great

Being admonished to return to myself, I entered into the secret chamber of my soul. And I beheld with the eye of my soul the Light unchangeable. He who knows that Light knows eternity.  St. Augustine

He that beholds his own Face - his light is greater than the light of the creatures. Though he die, his sight is everlasting, because his sight is the sight of the Creator.  Rumi

I am unborn, and in the manner in which I am unborn I can never die. In my unborn manner I have been eternally, and am now, and shall eternally remain. What I am in the order of having been born, that will die and perish, for it is mortal, and so it must in time suffer corruption.  Meister Eckhart

It's this self-originated Clear Light, eternally unborn, the parentless babe of Wisdom.  Padma Sambhava

The originally existing Unborn -- all of you, be sure you don't conceal it from yourselves! This Unborn is like a great ball of fire: touch it and you'll be burned.  Bankei 

As long as you do not know how to die and come to life again, you are but a sorry traveller on this dark earth. Goethe  

Some of you will remember that in that very basic Mahayana Buddhist scripture, the Diamond Sutra, it says that if you can look into your emptiness and not be somewhat scared, congratulations! Because it is a very uncommon thing. We have a great fear of looking this way because it is a kind of death. If you are scared of it I congratulate you because it means you have got it. I say, go on with it and you will come out at the other end. Beyond the fear is the experience of death, what I call the Present Death Experience. And then Bang! the resurrection. So you die as one tiny little lump of stuff and you explode to become the lot, you are resurrected to become the lot. So if you feel a little bit scared I would say that is absolutely great. Stay with it and it will come right. Douglas Harding.

Though one should live a hundred years without seeing the Deathless State, yet better indeed, is a single day's life of one who sees the Deathless State. The Dhammapada.  

If an ordinary man, when he is about to die, could only see the real Mind as formless and neither coming nor going; his nature as something neither commencing at his birth nor perishing at his death, but as whole and motionless in tis very depths; his Mind and environmental objects as one – if he could really accomplish this, he would receive Enlightenment in a flash. He would no longer be entangled by the Triple World; he would be a World-Transcender. Huang Po.   

Do not think the resurrection is an illusion. It is the revelation of what is. Why not consider yourself risen already? Treatise On The Resurrection. 

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