As an animal, the human being cannot but feel repulsed by death; as a spiritual being, he does not know death and therefore can neither feel repulsed by it, nor want it.
The reason why the notion of death does not have the effect that it could have consists in the fact that we, by our nature as active beings, should really not be thinking about it at all.
— Kant
Life has nothing in common with death. This is probably why the vague hope which clouds reason and forces us to doubt the veracity of our knowledge about the inevitability of death never leaves us. Life strives to preserve its existence. It keeps repeating, like the parrot in the fable, even as its neck is being wrung: “It… it… will be nothing!”
— Amiel
In one’s final dying minutes, the spiritual source departs from the body and, leaving it, either merges with the eternal, extra-dimensional Universal Source, or moves into another limited form. We do not know which it is, we only know that whatever was animating the body leaves it as a result of death, and the body becomes merely an object of observation.
Death is a change in or a disappearance of the object of consciousness. The consciousness itself cannot be destroyed by death in the same way that a change in a spectacle does not destroy the spectator.
You do not know how you entered this life, but you know that you entered it as a particular self, which you are, and then you kept walking and walking, and you have reached the halfway point, and suddenly you are either happy or frightened, and you dig your heels in and do not want to move from your spot, you do not want to go any further because you cannot see what lies ahead. But you have not seen the place you came from either, and yet you did come. You came in through the entryway but refuse to leave through the exit.
Your whole life has been a procession through a corporeal existence; you were walking, you picked up the pace, and all of a sudden you feel pity that the very thing that you never stopped doing is continuing to happen. You are terrified of the great change in your state at your bodily death, but such a great change also took place when you were born, and not only did this not lead to anything bad but, on the contrary, it led to something so good that you do not want to part with it.
If we believe that everything that happened to us in our life happened to us for our own good—and a human being who believes in a benevolent origin of life cannot believe otherwise—then we cannot but also believe that what happens to us when we die happens for our own good.
