“Old age is tremendously beautiful, and it should be so because the whole of life moves towards it. It should be the peak. How can the peak be in the beginning? How can the peak be in the middle? But if you think your childhood is your peak, as many people think, then of course your whole life will be a suffering because you have attained your peak – now everything will be a declining, coming down. If you think young age is the peak, as many people think, then of course after thirty-five you will become sad, depressed, because every day you will be losing and losing and losing and gaining nothing. The energy will be lost, you will weaken, diseases will enter into your being, and death will start knocking at the door. The home will disappear, and the hospital will appear. How can you be happy? No, but in the East we have never thought that childhood or youth is the peak. The peak waits for the very end.” ~ Osho, The Art of Living and Dying
“If you have lived your life, you will welcome death. It will come like a rest, like a great sleep. If you have peaked, climaxed in your life, then death is a beautiful rest, a benediction. But if you have not lived, then of course death creates fear. If you have not lived, then certainly death is going to take time from your hands, all future opportunities to live. In the past you have not lived, and there is going to be no future: fear arises. Fear arises not because of death but because of unlived life.” ~ Osho, The Art of Living and Dying
“Once you know what death is you will receive it with great celebration. You will welcome it. It is the fulfillment of your whole life’s effort. It is the fruition of your whole life’s effort. The journey ends. One comes back home. In death you don’t die. Just, the energy that was given to you through the body and through the mind is released and goes back to the world. You return home.” ~ Osho, The Art of Living and Dying
The fear of death is the fear of time.
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“The fear of death is fear of time. And the fear of time is, deeply down, fear of unlived moments, of an unlived life. So what to do? Live more, and live more intensely. Live dangerously. It is your life. Don’t sacrifice it for any sort of foolishness that has been taught to you. It is your life: Live it! Don’t sacrifice it for words, theories, countries or politics. Don’t sacrifice it for anybody. Live it! Don’t think that it is courageous to die. The only courage is to live life totally; there is no other courage.” ~ Osho, The Art of Living and Dying
“The fear is not of death, the fear is of time, and if you look deeply into it then you find that the fear is of an unlived life – you have not been able to live. If you live, then there is no fear. If life comes to a fulfillment there is no fear. If you have enjoyed, attained the peaks that life can give – if your life has been an orgasmic experience, a deep poetry vibrating within you, a song, a festival, a ceremony, and you lived each moment of it to its totality – then there is no fear of time. Then the fear disappears.” ~ Osho, The Art of Living and Dying
“Once you understand that death is not the opposite of life but part of it, an intrinsic part of it, which can never be separated from it – once you accept death as a friend, suddenly a transformation happens. You are transfigured, your vision now has a new quality in it. Now there is no fight, no war, you are not fighting against anybody, now you can relax, now you can be at home. Once death becomes a friend only then does life become a friend also. This may look paradoxical but it is so, only the appearance is paradoxical. If death is the enemy, then deep down life is also the enemy, because life leads to death.” ~ Osho, The Art of Living and Dying
“The more you fight with death, the more anxiety-ridden you will become, you are bound to become. It is a natural consequence. If you fight with death you know that you are going to be defeated. How can you be happy with a life which is going to end in defeat? You know that whatsoever effort you make, nothing is going to succeed against death. Deep down you are certain about only one thing and that is death. In life everything else is uncertain, only death is certain. There is only one certainty, and in that certainty you have an enemy. Fighting with certainty and hoping for uncertainties how can you be in a repose? How can you be relaxed, calm, collected? Impossible.” ~ Osho, The Art of Living and Dying
“You start dying really when you start breathing, at the same moment. It is not right to say that death comes in the end, it has always been with you from the very beginning. It is part of you, it is your innermost center, it grows with you, and one day it comes to a culmination, one day it comes to flowering. The day of death is not the day of death’s coming, it is the flowering. Death was growing within you all this time, now it has reached a peak; and once death reaches a peak you disappear back into the origin.” ~ Osho, The Art of Living and Dying
“Hell is not part of geography, it is part of your psychology, and so is heaven. You create your hell, you create your heaven. And it is not in the future. Herenow somebody is living in heaven and somebody is living in hell – and they may be sitting together, they may be friends. Don’t be worried about hell and heaven; they are just your states. If you live in the mind, you live in hell. If you live in the no-mind, you live in heaven.” ~ Osho, The Art of Living and Dying
“If you have not lived rightly, you will not be able to die rightly. Death is the final offering. It is the highest; it is the crowning or the peak. Death is the essence and the flowering of life. How can your death be right if you have spent your life wrongly? How can your death be full of meaning if your life has been a waste? How can a tree whose roots are rotten bear sweet fruit? It is impossible.” ~ Osho, The Art of Living and Dying
“A man is really a mature man when he has come to this conclusion: ‘If death is happening to everybody else, then I cannot be an exception.’ Once this conclusion sinks deep into your heart, your life can never be the same again. You cannot remain attached to life in the old way. If it is going to be taken away, what is the point of being so possessive? If it is going to disappear one day, why cling and suffer? If life is not going to remain forever, then why be in such misery, anguish, worry?” ~ Osho, The Art of Living and Dying
“Life is spread out over a long time – seventy years, one hundred years. Death is intense because it is not spread out – it is in a single moment. Life has to pass one hundred years or seventy years, it cannot be so intense. Death comes in a single moment; it comes whole, not fragmentary. It will be so intense you cannot know anything more intense. But if you are afraid, if before death comes you have escaped, if you have become unconscious because of the fear, you have missed one of the golden opportunities, the golden gate. If your whole life you have been accepting things, when death comes, patiently, passively you will accept and enter into it without any effort to escape. If you can enter death passively, silently, without any effort, death disappears.” ~ Osho, The Art of Living and Dying
“If you learned you were going to die in a few days, what regrets would you have? Which of them could you resolve if you were given another 5 years? …Do you try to envision your future and live now as you think you’ll one day wish you had?” ~ Gregory Stock, The Book of Questions
“After a medical examination, your doctor calls and says you have a rare lymphatic cancer and only a month to live. A week later, she informs you that the lab test was wrong and you’re perfectly healthy. Do you think the insights from having to face death this way would be worth the pain? …What life changes do you think a close brush with death might provoke for you?”
Gregory Stock, The Book of Questions
“Would you rather die peacefully among friends at age 50, or painfully and alone at age 80?” ~ Gregory Stock, The Book of Questions
“It does not matter how long you live. It only matters that you love it while you’re here.” ~ Ellen Gilchrist, Acts of God
“If you were to die right now, what would be the feeling texture of your last moment? Are you feeling the infinite mystery of existence, so that your last moment would be one of awe and gratitude? Is your heart so wide open that your last moment would dissolve in perfect love? Or, are you so absorbed in some task that you would hardly notice death upon you, until the last instant, whoosh, and everything is gone?” ~ David Deida, The Way of the Superior Man
“Long life is indeed a blessing, but maybe we overdo our concern for the length of our lives and give insufficient attention to the passion we bring to whatever time we have. The meaning and purpose of life are great mysteries, and in that light a very brief life, of only minutes, can be full and rounded. The soul has appeared in the flesh; then it returns to its home of origin.”
Thomas Moore, Original Self | ★ Featured on this book list.
“Almost every day we are asked to extend the range of our acquaintance with life. It is one of several ways to live intensely, and it is also a way to prepare for death. For death is the ultimate stranger. This is not necessarily a morbid thought, because only by allowing death to play a role in daily life do we really live. Opening to another society or another individual – they are two levels of culture – we die a little death in relation to what has become familiar. But those little deaths create openings to new life.”
Thomas Moore, Original Self | ★ Featured on this book list.
