Die before you die…

• Die before you die, there is no chance after. C. S. Lewis
• But,’ he thinks, ‘it’s possible to die before you die. Patrick Ness
• The phrase, ‘You must die before you die,’ is found in most of the world religions. If you don’t learn how to die early, you spend the rest of your life avoiding failure. When you can free your True Self, the whole spiritual life opens up. Richard Rohr
• There are two kinds of death, the death which is inevitable and common to all beings, and the death which is voluntary and particular to certain ones of them only. It is the second death which is prescribed for us in the words of the Messenger of Allah: “Die before you die.” The resurrection is accomplished for him who dies this voluntary death. His affairs return to God and they are but one. He has returned to God and he sees Him through Him. As the Prophet said – on him be Grace and Peace! Abdelkader El Djezairi
• To die before one fears to die may be a boon. Emily Dickinson
• You have to be prepared to die before you can begin to live. Fred Shuttlesworth
• Life after spirituality is a constant dying. Emerging from our own ashes becomes no big deal, but just the way things are. Robert Augustus Masters
• In terms of the ego, most religions teach in some way that all of us must die before we die, and then we will not be afraid of dying. Suffering of some sort seems to be the only thing strong enough to destabilize our arrogance and our ignorance. I would define suffering very simply as whenever you are not in control. Richard Rohr
• You have to die a few times before you can really live. Charles Bukowski

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…by dying to the ego

• Die before you die by dying to the ego. Anthony Lambert
• Renunciation means death of false ego. Radhanath Swami
• Meditation is not growth of the ego, it is death of the ego. Rajneesh
• The path of dying to self and being reborn leads to life abundant. Jesus Christ
• The attainment of enlightenment from ego’s point of view is extreme death. Chogyam Trungpa
• The illuminated life can happen now, in the moments left. Die to your ego, and become a True Human Being. Rumi
• Die! Die to the ego, die to your past, and you will be resurrected. That resurrection will make you go beyond death, beyond time, beyond misery. Rajneesh
• This one life has no form and is empty by nature. If you become attached by any form, you should reject it. If you see an ego, a soul, a birth, or a death, reject them all. Bodhidharma
• When the pain that the little me creates for itself becomes intense enough, the ego will self-destruct. It has a self-destruct mechanism built in, fortunately, so eventually every ego dies. Eckhart Tolle
• We human beings are born in ego, live in ego, are brought up in ego and will die in ego. We need a certain degree of vision when we live in this world for achieving and attaining our goals in life. Mata Amritanandamayi
• To be cured, we must rise from our graves and throw off the cerements of the dead. Nobody can do it for another – it is a private affair which is best done collectively. We must die as egos and be born again in the swarm, not separated and self-hypnotized, but individual and related. Henry Miller
• But the soul must abandon her own being. This is where the death that is spiritual begins. If the soul is to undergo this death, then she must take leave of herself and all things, holding herself and all things to be as insignificant as they were before they existed … I do not mean that the being of the soul falls into nothingness as she was before she was created, rather we should understand this cessation to be the eradication of possessing and having. Meister Eckhart
• To become spiritual, you must die to self, and come alive in the Lord. Only then will the mysteries of God fall from your lips. To die to self through self-discipline causes suffering but brings you everlasting life. Rumi

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…by dying to the world…

• The moment you know your real being, you are afraid of nothing. Death gives freedom and power. To be free in the world, you must die to the world. Then the universe is your own, it becomes your body, an expression and a tool. The happiness of being absolutely free is beyond description. Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj
• Charisma- the divine force that manifests itself in men and women. The supernatural power we don’t need to show to anyone because everyone can see it, even usually insensitive people. But it only happens when we’re naked, when we die to the world and are reborn to ourselves. Paulo Coelho

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…by dying to all attachment and identification…

• One must die; that is, one must free oneself from a thousand petty attachments and identifications. . . . One is attached to everything in one’s life, attached to one’s imagination, attached to one’s stupidity, attached even to one’s sufferings, possibly to the sufferings more than to everything else. . . . Attachment to things, identifications with things, keep alive a thousand useless “I”s in a person. These “I”s must die in order that the big I may be born. But how can they be made to die? They do not want to die.  It is at this point that the possibility of awakening comes to the rescue.  To awaken means to recognize one’s nothingness. G.I. Gurdjieff
• Usually we derive our sense of self from the various things that mark us out as individuals–our bodies and their appearance, our history, our nationality, the roles we play, our work, our social and financial status, what we own, what others think of us, and so on. We also derive an identity from the thoughts and feelings we have, from our beliefs and values, from our creative and intellectual abilities, from our character and personality. These, and many other aspects of our lives, contribute to our sense of who we are. Such an identity is, however, forever at the mercy of events, forever vulnerable, and forever in need of protection and support. If anything on which our identity depends changes, or threatens to change, our very sense of self is threatened. If bne criticizes us, for example, we may feel far more upset than the criticism warrants, responding in ways that have more to do with defending or reinforcing our damaged self-image than with addressing the criticism itself. Peter Russell

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…by seeing through the illusion of self…

• What is it about a mere arrangement of matter and energy that gives rise to a subjective sense of self? It must be a collective property of the neurons in your brain, which have mostly stayed with you throughout life, and which will cease to exist after you die. But why a given bundle of neurons can give rise to a given sense of selfhood, and whether that subjective sense can ever reside in a different bundle of neurons, may forever remain a mystery. Jan Westerhoff
• What is the ego? But a dream of what you really are. A thought you are apart from your Creator and a wish to be what He created not.  It is a thing of madness, not reality at all.  A name for namelessness is all it is.  A symbol of impossibility; a choice for options that do not exist. We name it but to help us understand that it is nothing but an ancient thought that what is made has immortality.  But what could come of this except a dream which, like all dreams, can only end in death?  A Course in Miracles
• The self… is not an organic thing that has a specific location, whose fundamental fate is to be born, to mature, to die; it is a dramatic effect arising diffusely from a scene that is presented. Erving Goffman
• Attraction and aversion create a sense of self. There is no self. They are just thoughts. They are insubstantial. When you die, all the ideas of self will go away. Frederick Lenz

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…through radical acceptance of what is (including the apparent existence of the ego)…

• How does the ego die? The ego dies by you accepting what you are. That you say, “I am fine as I am, where I am is good. I will remain just as existence keeps me. Its will is my will.” Rajneesh
• We’re all born with an ego – it’s a natural part of who we are here. We’re only completely without it in death. Fighting against this during life only creates more self-judgment. Plus, only when we love our ego unconditionally are we able to accept everyone else’s. This is when it stops being an issue, and your humility and magnificence really shine through. Anita Moorjani

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…through meditation and witnessing…

• Meditation is not growth of the ego, it is death of the ego. Rajneesh
• To begin with it may seem like a watching of the apparent ‘me,’ seeing that it is just one more appearance amongst many. However, in time this ‘me’ appearance tends to appear less and less. It dies of neglect. Rupert Spira

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…through contemplation…

• To enter into the realm of contemplation one must in a certain sense die: but this death is in fact the entrance to a higher life. It is a death for the sake of life, which leaves behind all that we can know or treasure as life, as thought, as experience, as joy, as being. Thomas Merton

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…through mystical and peak experiences…

• In some experiences the identity of the self with the ego is considerably less than usual. An example is the creative experience in which the experiencer often describes the act as an act of God. Another example is the “peak experience” studied by the psychologist Abraham Maslow. Such experiences occur with a clear discontinuity in contrast to the more ordinary ego-continuity of the stream of consciousness. These experiences will be called transpersonal-self experiences since the identity with the particular persona of the experiencer is not dominant. Amit Goswami

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…including psychedelic experiences…

• The “ego death” that Bradley describes is an extreme state brought on by psychedelic drugs that is becoming increasingly popular with online psychonauts: an initially terrifying sensation of dying, where the user enters a trance and occasionally screams, before their entire sense of self disappears and they’re left with nothing but the awareness that everything in the universe is connected. James Nolan
• Researchers believe the ego death sensation stems from the part of the brain responsible for our sense of self – the “default mode network” – being quietened by psychedelic drugs, which disrupt negative thought patterns and open up new perspectives. James Nolan
• First written about by LSD advocate Timothy Leary in 1964, he defined ego death as “complete transcendence − beyond words, beyond space-time, beyond self. There are no visions, no sense of self, no thoughts. There are only pure awareness and ecstatic freedom.” James Nolan
• What do psychedelics do to the human mind? The honest answer: nobody quite understands. We’re really just at the beginning of exploring that frontier. But psychedelics appear to diminish activity in one very important brain network called the default mode network. That network is very involved with operations having to do with our sense of self: how we integrate what’s happening to us in any given moment, with our abiding sense of who we are. The interesting thing about psychedelics, both LSD and psilocybin — the ingredient in magic mushrooms — is that they take this network offline. When that happens, you have this sensation of ego-dissolution: that your self is evaporating or dissolving. Michael Pollan
• The very first study in the modern era of psychedelic research, of any importance, was a 2006 study done at Johns Hopkins by a scientist named Roland Griffiths, a very prominent drug-abuse scientist. He found that what the psychedelics did in about 80% of cases was induce a mystical experience, which is a spiritual experience that was studied closely by William James 100 years ago. It has various aspects to it. Prominent among them is this dissolving of a sense of self, but that is followed by a merging with the universe, or with nature, or other people. It’s called the noetic sense — this sense that what you’re seeing or feeling or learning on this experience has the status of revealed truth. It’s not just an opinion — it’s objectively true. Michael Pollan

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…through unconditional loving…

• The only love language is ‘die to self.’ Christine Caine
• I have been continuously surprised by people who come to me and say they are afraid of love. What is the fear of love? It is because when you really love somebody your ego starts slipping and melting. You cannot love with the ego; the ego becomes a barrier. and when you want to drop the barrier the ego says, ‘This is going to be a death. Beware!’ Rajneesh

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…through absolute stillness and silence…

• Unfortunately, in seeing ourselves as we truly are, not all that we see is beautiful and attractive. This is undoubtedly part of the reason we flee silence. We do not want to be confronted with our hypocrisy, our phoniness. We see how false and fragile is the false self we project. We have to go through this painful experience to come to our true self. It is a harrowing journey, a death to self—the false self—and no one wants to die.  But it is the only path to life, to freedom, to peace, to true love.  And it begins with silence.  We cannot give ourselves in love if we do not know and possess ourselves. This is the great value of silence. It is the pathway to all we truly want. M. Basil Pennington

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…through transcendence of all sense of separateness, agency and specialness…

• Can you dissolve your ego? Can you abandon the idea of self and other? Can you relinquish the notions of male and female, short and long, life and death? Can you let go of all these dualities and embrace the Tao without skepticism or panic? If so, you can reach the heart of the Integral Oneness. Lao Tzu
• What is actually the birth of our spiritual identity feels to the ego like death. The ego, our small and separate sense of self, is an imposter personality. It is a false self.  It resists our genuinely remembering God, because in the recognition of our oneness with him lies the death of the ego and the end of all fear.  Marianne Williamson
• The hallucination of separateness prevents one from seeing that to cherish the ego is to cherish misery. We do not realize that our so-called love and concern for the individual is simply the other face of our own fear of death or rejection. In his exaggerated valuation of separate identity, the personal ego is sawing off the branch on which he is sitting, and then getting more and more anxious about the coming crash! Alan Watts
• People are not afraid of death, they are afraid of losing their separation, they are afraid of losing their ego. Once you start feeling separate from existence the fear of death arises because then death seems to be dangerous. You will no longer be separate; what will happen to your ego, your personality? And you have cultivated the personality with such care, with such great effort; you have polished it your whole life, and death will come and destroy it. Rajneesh
• As one grows older, the sense of separateness is slowly reduced. Old people do not live on an ego level. Their concerns are not about their individuality but about the river of life, the family, the community, the nation, people, animals, nature, life. They can die easily if they are assured that life will continue positively, for they feel part of the river again, and soon they will be part of the ocean. When they are very old, they no longer belong to our time and space, but to all time and all space. Alexander Lowen
• The truth of Brahman may be understood intellectually. But (even in those who so understand) the desire for personal separateness is deep-rooted and powerful, for it exists from beginningless time. It creates the notion, ‘I am the actor, I am he who experiences.’ This notion is the cause of bondage to conditional existence, birth and death. It can be removed only by the earnest effort to live constantly in union with Brahman. By the sages, the eradication of this notion and the craving for personal separateness is called Liberation. Shankara
• The sense of being somebody special (a legend in our own mind!) helps immunize “I” against the bare facticity of its own mortality, here-and-now instability, and innate insubstantialness. Even when “I” dreams of transcending itself – as in those programs that have (or advertise) as their central agenda the eradication of ego – it is still an “I” who has now achieved the incomparable goal of self- transcendence! “Look, Ma, no ego!” we announce as we unicycle past our rapt inner audience, too proud to notice our pride, forgetting that self- conceit persists well into advanced transpersonal stages of development. In our craving to be somebody special – and don’t forget that we may find our specialness through being “nobody” – we bypass exploration of that very craving, committing far more of our passion to fulfilling our dreams than to actually awakening from them.  Robert Augustus Masters
• We may never be martyrs but we can die to self, to sin, to the world, to our plans and ambitions. Vance Havner
• Die to self: die to criticism, die to praise. Lee Roberson

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…through attainment of enlightenment…

• The attainment of enlightenment from ego’s point of view is extreme death, the death of self, the death of me and mine, the death of the watcher. It is the ultimate and final disappointment. Chogyam Trungpa

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…and in so doing, realise there is no death…

• When the ego dies, the soul awakes. Mahatma Gandhi
• Die before you die and find that there is no death. Eckhart Tolle
• Death is a stripping away of all that is not you. The secret of life is to “die before you die” — and find that there is no death. Eckhart Tolle
• Ego death is awareness identifying with a body, then removing the body. James Nolan
• The death of specialness is not your death, but your awakening into life eternal. A Course in Miracles
• I ask you only to stop imagining that you were born, have parents, are a body, will die and so on. Just try, make a beginning– it is not as hard as you think. Nisargadatta Maharaj
• But even if ego-death is regarded as the optimum model for human existence, one of liberation from ourselves, it still remains a compromise with being, a concession to the blunder of creation itself. We should be able to do better, and we can. To have our egos killed off is second-best to killing off death and all the squalid byplay that flitters around it. So let all lands be small, and grower smaller and smaller until no lands are left where any human footstep need press itself upon the earth. Thomas Ligotti
• This little separate self must die. Then we shall find that we are in the Real, and that Real is God, and He is our own true nature, and He is always in us and with us. Let us live in Him and stand in Him. It is the only joyful state of existence. Life on the plane of the Spirit is the only life, and let us all try to attain to this realization. Swami Vivekananda

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…for what we really are (pure, unbounded, transpersonal consciousness) is beyond death

• The new life created by the final integration is self-aware yet without ego, capable of inhabiting a body yet not attached to it, and guided by wisdom rather than emotion. Whole and virtuous, it can never die. Laozi
• The hero of the story is the one that survives all the vicissitudes of life, the one that never fears death, the one that looks on all seeming things with equality, the one that is eternally anchored in love and truth – that one is your self, Awareness, never an individual entity. Rupert Spira
• The body is born. Birth and death only have to do with the body. Ego also relates only to the body. Similarly, reincarnation relates only to the body. Do not think of the body. Think of the Atma. The Atma is one; it is unchanging. For Atma there is no incarnation, there is no reincarnation. Sathya Sai Baba
• If you can be absolutely comfortable with not knowing who you are, then what’s left is who you are – the Being behind the human, a field of pure potentiality rather than something that is already defined. Give up defining yourself – to yourself and others. You won’t die. You will come to life. Eckhart Tolle
• I am dead already. Physical death will make no difference in my case. I am timeless being. I am free of desire or fear, because I do not remember the past or imagine the future. Where there are no names and shapes, how can there be desire and fear? With desirelessness comes timelessness. I am safe, because what is not, cannot touch what is. You feel unsafe, because you imagine danger. Of course, your body as such is complex and vulnerable and needs protection. But not you. Once you realize your own unassailable being, you will be at peace. Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj

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The ego is terrified of death…

• Ego is a ghost who is terrified of dying. Mooji
• The ego/mind believes that if it stops thinking/feeling, the personal self will die. David R. Hawkins
• Whenever ego suffers from fear of death and your practice turns to seeing impermanence, ego settles down. Tsoknyi Rinpoche
• Fear seems to have many causes. Fear of loss, fear of failure, fear of being hurt, and so on, but ultimately all fear is the ego’s fear of death, of annihilation. Eckhart Tolle
• Our ego never wants to die and it will do anything to prolong its life. But the truth is, we are both spirit and ego and you have to have a balance between the two. Your spirit never dies, but the ego is all about beginnings and ends. RuPaul
• Most of us are convinced that we are our egos, which is who we think we are. The ego is part of our incarnation. It dies with the body, which is why we are so afraid of death. Death scares the hell out of who you think you are, especially if you think you are this body. Ram Dass
• If you identify with a mental position, then if you are wrong, your mind-based sense of self is seriously threatened with annihilation. So you as the ego cannot afford to be wrong. To be wrong is to die. Wars have been fought over this, and countless relationships have broken down. Eckhart Tolle
• Fear seems to have many causes. Fear of loss, fear of failure, fear of being hurt, and so on, but ultimately all fear is the egos fear of death, of annihilation. To the ego, death is always just around the corner.  In this mind-identified state, fear of death affects every aspect of your life.  Eckhart Tolle
• The will of the individual self is focused on survival. Its foundation is the survival of the organism, fulfilling our bodily needs, avoiding danger or anything that threatens our well-being. In other words, keeping us alive and well, fending off the inevitability of death as long as possible. Added to this are various psychological and social needs. We want to feel safe and secure, to be feel stimulated and fulfilled, to be respected and appreciated. We believe that if we can just get the world to be way want it—and here the world includes other people—then we will be happy. Peter Russell

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…and to die to ego is to transcend the fear of death

• The little me had to carry the burden of the fear of death, whereas the real Me is immortal and beyond all time and space. David R. Hawkins
• The ego is frightened by death, because ego is part of the incarnation and ends with it. That is why we learn to identify with our soul, as the soul continues after death. For the soul, death is just another moment. Ram Dass

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Death of the ego is an end to troubles and psychological suffering…

• All troubles come to an end when the ego dies. Ramakrishna
• Self-realization: No ego, no desires, no weight problems, no tax forms, no death to die, no life to live. Frederick Lenz
• Your ego can become an obstacle to your work. If you start believing in your greatness, it is the death of your creativity. Marina Abramovic
• Equating the physical sense-perceived body that is destined to grow old, wither, and die with “I” always leads to suffering sooner or later. Eckhart Tolle
• We are identified with the ego, and with the ego there are many things: anger and hatred and jealousy and possessiveness and greed – the whole train. The ego functions like an engine and there are many many compartments following it. Once the ego dies the whole train stops. Rajneesh
• Happiness is the death of the ego. If you want to remain a separate entity from existence as almost everybody is trying to do, you will be afraid of being blissful, cheerful. You will feel guilty in being blissful. You will feel suicidal because you are committing suicide on the psychological level, on the level of the ego. Rajneesh
• The greatest of all crosses is self. If we die in part every day, we shall have but little to do on the last. These little daily deaths will destroy the power of the final dying. Francois Fenelon

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…and makes us come alive

• The ego can exist only if you take yourself and everything seriously. Nothing kills the ego like playfulness, like laughter. When you start taking life as fun, the ego has to die, it cannot exist anymore. Ego is illness; it needs an atmosphere of sadness to exist. Seriousness creates the sadness in you. Sadness is a necessary soil for the ego. Hence your saints are so serious, for the simple reason that they are the most egoistic people on the earth. They may be trying to be humble, but they are very proud of their humbleness. They take their humbleness very seriously. Rajneesh
• When we die to something, something comes alive within us. If we die to self, charity comes alive; if we die to pride, service comes alive; if we die to lust, reverence for personality comes alive; if we die to anger, love comes alive. Fulton J. Sheen

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Meditation, in particular, is a dress rehearsal for death…

• Meditation is a dress rehearsal for death. Adyashanti
• Meditation is not growth of the ego, it is death of the ego. Rajneesh
• Meditation is the art of dying. Then your ego will be shocked. And it is also truer to cal I it the art of dying, because you r ego is not going to grow, your ego is going to die in meditation. Rajneesh

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..and helps us realise that what we are is beyond death

• The purpose of meditation is to awaken in us the sky-like nature of mind, and to introduce us to that which we really are, our unchanging pure awareness, which underlies the whole of life and death. Sogyal Rinpoche
• When you meditate deeply, you will see beyond life and death. You will see that you can’t die and you can’t be reborn. You are existence itself. Frederick Lenz
• You have to do your own work; Enlightened Ones will only show the way. Those who practise meditation will free themselves from the chains of death. Gautama Buddha
• There is a way beyond this life and beyond death, the path of liberation. In order to be liberated, you have to enter into the world of advanced meditation. Frederick Lenz
• When it comes time to die, you will not be afraid. By meditating, you will have already seen beyond life and death and you will see there is nothing to fear. Frederick Lenz
• Meditation is a refocusing on symbols. It’s not emptiness. We are using symbols, doorways to step from one world to another, from darkness into light, from death to immortality. Frederick Lenz
• Enlightenment is to be outside the circle, the circle of death and rebirth. There is a circle inside you. If you meditate and focus on your third eye, you will see a circle of light. Frederick Lenz
• Meditation is nothing but an effort to drop all the foreign elements so that you can see yourself as you were before you were born, mirrored in its purity. It is a great silence and a great joy to be there, and once you start abiding there, there is no death and no time. All fear, all greed, all anger, disappears: one is just there with no idea, no desire. Rajneesh
• When we raise ourselves through meditation to what unites us with the spirit, we quicken something within us that is eternal and unlimited by birth and death. Once we have experienced this eternal part in us, we can no longer doubt its existence. Meditation is thus the way to knowing and beholding the eternal, indestructible, essential centre of our being. Rudolf Steiner