Tags / 46 quotes from 15 sources
#death
Adesso basta (Simone Perotti)
Vivete come destinati a vivere sempre
«Vivete come destinati a vivere sempre, mai vi viene in mente la vostra precarietà, non fate caso di quanto tempo è trascorso: continuate a perderne come da una provvista colma e copiosa, mentre forse proprio quel giorno […] è l’ultimo […]. È cosa di uomo grande non farsi…
L'eredità, un tema tabù
Nessuno parla dell’eredità. È un tema collegato alla morte dei nostri parenti, dei nostri genitori, dunque è un tema tabù. Siamo pur sempre un Paese dotato di un cospicuo senso di colpa collettivo, grazie a ragioni culturali e di formazione. Però bisogna farlo, in onore del…
Togliersi le scarpe e bagnarsi i piedi
Del resto possiamo prevedere tutto? Sappiamo quando moriremo? Magari i nostri denari sono anche troppi se moriamo anzitempo! E chi ci dice che non sarà così? E nel frattempo, per questo dubbio, gettiamo via la vita che invece ora abbiamo sul serio, che tocchiamo con mano? E che…
Brain Rules for Baby (John Medina)
Dismissing a child's grief over a goldfish
How might the attitudes of discouraging or ignoring emotions play out in real life? Imagine that the family goldfish, the only pet your 3-year-old son Kyle has ever known, suddenly dies. Visibly upset, Kyle mopes around the house all day, saying things like “I want fishy back!”…
Durante (Andrea De Carlo)
Ogni vita è una cosa piccola
Durante ha detto “Qualunque sia la tua vita, devi tenere conto che è una cosa piccola”. “Lo so” ho detto, ancora completamente incerto sulle nostre rispettive posizioni. “Ti sembra sconfinata perché ci sei dentro” ha detto lui. “Al punto che la maggior parte del tempo non…
Erik Davis - On Psychedelics
Psychedelics can serve as flight simulators
Like many of the death-prep meditations practised in Tibetan Buddhism and other initiatory traditions, psychedelics — provided, again, within an appropriate set and setting — can serve as flight simulators hurtling us through the shadow of death, test runs of the inevitable…
Human, All Too Human: A Book For Free Spirits
Death and suicide
Prevention of Suicide.—There is a justice according to which we may deprive a man of life, but none that permits us to deprive him of death: this is merely cruelty.
La Formica Zen (italian Edition) ( )
Siamo l'immaginazione di noi stessi
" Tutta la materia è semplicemente energia condensata a lenta vibrazione ... Noi siamo tutti un'unica Coscienza che ha esperienza di sé soggettivamente ... La morte non esiste ... La vita è solo un sogno ... E noi siamo l'immaginazione di noi stessi..." ( Bill Hicks)
Lo Spirito del Giappone (Leonardo Vittorio Arena)
Lo shintoismo, arte del vivere e del morire
Le origini dello shintoismo sono materia di discussione. Se ne trovano tracce prima degli Yamato, ma non si riesce a stabilire la data di nascita di questa religione. La componente sciamanica, con i suoi riti ancestrali, non è separabile dall’amore per la natura, i culti della…
La morte giunge al momento giusto
L’onnipresenza dei kami vi si trova ribadita. Ogni elemento della realtà può conseguire un carattere divino o spirituale. Lo stesso spirito regnerà nell’haiku: niente soggetti privilegiati, ma solo la devozione del poeta all’ispirazione. L’uomo, certo, ma anche l’insetto, la…
Pensiero non duale e coraggio dei samurai
L’epistemologia buddhista inclina alla coltivazione di un pensiero non duale. Finché si ragiona per opposti non si coglierà mai il nucleo della realtà. I samurai buddhisti lo concepiranno nei termini della loro prospettiva esistenziale: la vita e la morte sono strettamente…
Il ciclo vita/morte è il nirvana
«Cercate soltanto di capire che lo stesso ciclo vita/morte è il nirvana. Non esiste qualcosa come un ciclo vita/morte da evitare; non esiste qualcosa come il nirvana da cercare. Soltanto quando avrete capito questo, vi libererete dal ciclo vita/morte.»8 Come va affrontata la…
Il seppuku non è un semplice suicidio
Estremamente complesso, il fenomeno del seppuku. Chiunque tenda frettolosamente a etichettarlo come suicidio puro e semplice ne fraintende l’essenza. Non rappresenta una disfatta, né una fuga, bensì un antidoto alla umiliazione e alla vergogna. Chi vi ricorre ridimensiona…
Perfezionismo e morte per superlavoro
La mente giapponese tende al perfezionismo e all’estremismo. Esiste la malattia o persino la morte per superlavoro, un fenomeno che sembra prevalentemente o esclusivamente nipponico. Il perfezionismo soddisfa lo stesso scopo, come realizzazione di un’esistenza tatemae. Gli…
Samsara (definizione)
Samsara. Il ciclo o ruota delle nascite e delle morti, quindi delle reincarnazioni. Lo si considera sede della sofferenza, ma nel Grande Veicolo è equiparato al nirvana. Come dire che l’inferno è il paradiso. Termine sanscrito.
Mircea Eliade - Wikipedia
Shamanism initiation
According to Eliade, one of the most common shamanistic themes is the shaman's supposed death and resurrection. This occurs in particular during his initiation.[137] Often, the procedure is supposed to be performed by spirits who dismember the shaman and strip the flesh from…
The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People (Stephen R. Covey)
Addison among the tombs
Consider the words of Joseph Addison: When I look upon the tombs of the great, every emotion of envy dies in me; when I read the epitaphs of the beautiful, every inordinate desire goes out; when I meet with the grief of parents upon a tombstone, my heart melts with compassion…
The Acid Diaries (Christopher Gray)
Grof's transpersonal realm
the transpersonal realm One of Grof’s most provocative findings was that birth and death appear to be deeply interrelated in the unconscious mind. Reliving their own birth, subject after subject believed they were in fact dying—dying for real—and, emerging from their ordeal…
Living in the light of death
There was one very clear episode where a sort of voice-over was saying how the only authentic life was one lived in the light of death;
The perinatal crisis of ego death
For Grof insisted there was no way of stably accessing the transpersonal without living through the full implications of the perinatal—implications that climaxed in a convulsive death/rebirth crisis. And, frankly, I wasn’t sure how much I was up for this. I double-checked by…
Shamanic flight between three worlds
Only after this experience of death and resurrection were they apprenticed to an established shaman. The teaching they received was substantially the same over a vast geographical area—that they were not their physical body, but were capable of sidestepping time and space. For…
Ego death and the risk of psychosis
The next morning I still felt dislocated and physically in shock. What had happened? I’d had experiences of overload before, brief episodes from trips I couldn’t recollect . . . but never total blackout for hours on end. Were the official warnings I dismissed with such…
Acid outflanking my defenses against religion
I think it must have been ten days or a fortnight after Anna’s cremation—it was an afternoon, I remember—when abruptly I understood what had been happening. In a flash I saw that all of it was an ongoing form of the opening to religion, to Christianity in particular, that I had…
The death instinct and the Nirvana Principle
I leaned back against the tree and tried to relax. Let go, I told myself. Let go, and let it take you where it wants . . . the trouble was, I liked the look of where it wanted to take me less and less. There was growing pressure on my chest, and I was finding it hard to…
The culture-wide denial of death
When my mind cleared I was sitting quietly, leaning up against the beech trunk, thinking about death. Gurdjieff used to speak of two higher “centers” in us, a higher emotional center and a higher intellectual one; and I know that on several trips I have touched on a…
Fear of death is the cement of slave society
I saw that I had not been so wide of the mark in the woods. Ultimately, fear of death is the cement of slave society—that’s at the root of our fear of freedom, and we’ll never get out of this mess until we have integrated both life and death in a higher unity. Because it’s…
Standing apart as the pure witness
Again I found a luminously clear reflection of what had happened in Nisargadatta Maharaj. Consciousness coming apart from its identification with matter plays a crucial role in I Am That. Speaking of meditation, Nisargadatta says: When the mind is quiet, we come to know…
The connection between beauty and death
Why, or so it was impressed upon me that evening, we hang on to life so desperately is because we are enjoying it so little; but once we are living life to the full, then the meaning of death changes entirely. Somehow it becomes the consummation of life. Before, whenever I…
The Book Of Dead Philosophers (critchley, Simon)
Death
Montaigne writes, ‘He who has learned how to die has unlearned how to be a slave.’ This is an astonishing conclusion: the premeditation of death is nothing less than the forethinking of freedom. Seeking to escape death, then, is to remain unfree and run away from ourselves. The…
To philosophize is to learn how to die
It is in stark contrast to our drunken desire for evasion and escape that the ideal of the philosophical death has such sobering power. As Cicero writes, and this sentiment was axiomatic for most ancient philosophy and echoes down the ages, ‘To philosophize is to learn how to…
Death as a curative slumber
Having been condemned to death, Socrates concludes his speech with the following extraordinary words: Now it is time that we were going, I to die and you to live;but which of us has the happier prospect is unknown to anyone but God. These words encapsulate the classical…
Knowing when to walk out of the world
As Marcus Aurelius writes, it is one of ‘the noblest functions of reason to know whether it is time to walk out of the world or not’. Unknowing and uncertain, the philosopher walks.
Books of the dead treat death as illusion
The Book of Dead Philosophers is not a ‘Book of the Dead’, whether Egyptian or Tibetan. These exquisite ancient writings carefully describe the rituals necessary to prepare with certainty for the afterlife. The Egyptian Book of the Dead comprises 189 spells to ensure that the…
Epicurus and the four-part cure
My own view of death is closer to that of Epicurus and what is known as the four-part cure: don’t fear God, don’t worry about death, what is good is easy to get and what is terrible is easy to endure. He writes in the final of the four extant letters attributed to him, Get used…
No cure for the deaths of those we love
Highly tempting as it is, the obvious problem with this position is that it fails to provide a cure for the aspect of death that is hardest to endure: not our own death, but the deaths of those we love.
Thoreau had never quarreled with God
Following a typical late-night excursion to count the rings on tree stumps during a rainy night, Thoreau contracted bronchitis. His health declined over the next three years and he seems to have been fully aware that his end was nigh and calmly accepted death. When asked if he…
The Book: On The Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are
Death is not a sickness
Premature death may come as a result of sickness, but—like birth—death as such is not a sickness at all. It is the natural and necessary end of human life—as natural as leaves falling in the autumn. (Perpetual leaves are, as we know, made of plastic, and there may come a time…
A human body is like a whirlpool
our bodily cells, and their smallest components, appear and disappear much as light-waves vibrate and as people go from birth to death. A human body is like a whirlpool; there seems to be a constant form, called the whirlpool, but it functions for the very reason (that no water…
Celebrating the great awakening of death
This is no more saying that we ought not to fear death than I was saying that we ought to be unselfish. Suppressing the fear of death makes it all the stronger. The point is only to know, beyond any shadow of doubt, that “I” and all other “things” now present will vanish, until…
Is birth the cause of death?
Moreover, as the egg/chicken relation suggests, not all the features of a total situation have to appear at the same time. The existence of a man implies parents, even though they may be long since dead, and the birth of an organism implies its death. Wouldn’t it be as…
Differentiation is not separation; the death of the individual is not disconnection but simply withdrawal
For every individual is a unique manifestation of the Whole, as every branch is a particular outreaching of the tree. To manifest individuality, every branch must have a sensitive connection with the tree, just as our independently moving and differentiated fingers must have a…
The Ego Trick (baggini, Julian)
Death like changing house
For him, all that matters is that everybody says he is the first reincarnation of Akong, and that means he must have the same qualities. ‘Then I have to serve the best that I can for the benefit of people whenever I can. I’m not here to investigate the first Akong.’ Nor does he…
Accumulating good karma for a good house
‘Death is trying to change another house. If I want a good house then I have to accumulate good karma, positive things.’
Where reincarnation gets slippery
This is where I think the doctrine of reincarnation gets slippery. On the one hand, for it to make any sense, it clearly can’t involve the straightforward transference of one life to another body. You have a set of memories, plans, projects, friends and family. All of these…
To Win Without Fighting
To Win Without Fighting (martial arts)
Miyamoto Musashi was the greatest swordsman in 17th Century Japan. He killed 25 men in duels by the time he was 21. One day, he was sleeping in a boat on a river, when a drunken samurai started terrorizing the passengers. Miyamoto calmly asked the drunk to be quiet so he could…
Zack De La Rocha - Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia
Vegetarianism
De la Rocha became a vegetarian as a teenager,[8] stating in 1989: "I think vegetarianism is really great, and I stand really strongly behind it...I think that an animal goes through a lot of pain in the whole cycle of death in the slaughterhouse; just living to be killed...I…