“It will be impossible to understand death and its mysteries as long as one concentrates attention on the mere bodies or sheaths in which this ray or flame of consciousness periodically enwraps itself. It is necessary to follow the peregrinations of the consciousness per se, if a man desire to know his postmortem destiny. When a man can do this he will no longer fear death, because he will see its non-existence except as a phase of life opening into peregrinations through inner worlds and spheres, till the devachan is reached; and he will recognize death exactly for what it is, the gentlest helper and friend that a man has.”

Source: The Esoteric Tradition (1935), Chapter 16

Adopted from Wikiquote. Last update Aug. 4, 2021. History

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

Do you have more details about the quote "It will be impossible to understand death and its mysteries as long as one concentrates attention on the mere bodies or…" by Gottfried de Purucker?

Gottfried de Purucker45

Author, Theosophist 1874–1942

Related quotes

“With the maturity of his soul, a man desires to probe the depths of life, he desires to discover the power latent within him, he longs to know the sources and goal of his life, he yearns to understand the aim and meaning of his life, he wishes to understand the inner significance of things, and he wants to uncover all that is covered by name and form. He seeks insight into cause and effect, he wants to touch the mystery of time and space, and he wishes to find the missing link between God and man — where man ends, where God begins.”

Hazrat Inayat Khan (1882–1927) Indian Sufi

The Unity of Religious Ideals, Part I : Seeking for the Ideal.
The Spiritual Message of Hazrat Inayat Khan

“Man has many wishes that he does not really wish to fulfil, and it would be a misunderstanding to suppose the contrary. He wants them to remain wishes, they have value only in his imagination; their fulfilment would be a bitter disappointment to him. Such a desire is the desire for eternal life. If it were fulfilled, man would become thoroughly sick of living eternally, and yearn for death. In reality man wishes merely to avoid a premature, violent or gruesome death. Everything has its measure, says a pagan philosopher; in the end we weary of everything, even of life; a time comes when man desires death. Consequently there is nothing frightening about a normal, natural death, the death of a man who has fulfilled himself and lived out his life.”

Ludwig Feuerbach (1804–1872) German philosopher and anthropologist

Lecture XXX, Atheism alone a Positive View <br class="br"> Lectures on the Essence of Religion http://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/feuerbach/works/lectures/index.htm (1851)

“The concentration camps, by making death itself anonymous (making it impossible to find out whether a prisoner is dead or alive), robbed death of its meaning as the end of a fulfilled life.”

Hannah Arendt book The Origins of Totalitarianism

Part 3, Ch. 12, § 3.
The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951)
Context: The concentration camps, by making death itself anonymous (making it impossible to find out whether a prisoner is dead or alive), robbed death of its meaning as the end of a fulfilled life. In a sense they took away the individual’s own death, proving that henceforth nothing belonged to him and he belonged to no one. His death merely set a seal on the fact that he had never existed.

“Man cannot possess anything as long as he fears death. But to him who does not fear it, everything belongs. If there was no suffering, man would not know his limits, would not know himself.”

Leo Tolstoy book War and Peace

Source: War and Peace

“The Prophet is essentially a one-sided man. A certain moral idea fills his whole being, masters his every feeling and sensation, engrosses his whole attention. He can only see the world through the mirror of his idea; he desires nothing, strives for nothing, except to make every phase of the life around him an embodiment of that idea in its perfect form. His whole life is spent in fighting for this ideal with all his strength; for its sake he lays waste his powers, unsparing of himself, regardless of the conditions of life and the demands of the general harmony. His gaze is fixed always on what ought to be in accordance with his own convictions; never on what can be consistently with the general condition of things outside himself.”

Ahad Ha'am (1856–1927) Hebrew essayist and thinker

Source: Selected Essays (1904), "Priest and Prophet" (1893), p. 130

“Only in this age and generation, is it at last possible to impart the laws of magnetic healing, and to indicate the causes of those diseases - originating in the three inner bodies - which today devastate the human frame, cause endless suffering and pain, and usher man through the portal which leads to the world of bodiless existence. Only today is man at the point in the evolution of his consciousness where he can begin to realise the power of the subjective worlds, and the new and vast science of psychology is his response to this growing interest.”

Alice A. Bailey (1880–1949) esoteric, theosophist, writer

Source: Esoteric Healing (1953), p. 1

“This is probably the fundamental dimension of 'ideology': ideology is not simply a 'false consciousness', an illusory representation of reality, it is rather this reality itself which is already to be conceived as 'ideological' - 'ideological' is a social reality whose very existence implies the non-knowledge of its participants as to its essence -that is, the social effectivity, the very reproduction of which implies that the individuals 'do not know what they are doing'. 'Ideological is not the false consciousness of a (social) being but this being itself in so far as it is supported by "false consciousness"'. Thus we have finally reached the dimension of the symptom, because one of its possible definitions would also be 'a formation whose very consistency implies a certain non-knowledge on the part of the subject': the subject can 'enjoy his symptom' only in so far as its logic escapes him - the measure of the success of its interpretation is precisely its dissolution.”

Slavoj Žižek book The Sublime Object of Ideology

The Sublime Object of Ideology (1989)

“Anarchism is the only philosophy which brings to man the consciousness of himself; which maintains that God, the State, and society are non-existent, that their promises are null and void, since they can be fullfilled only through man's subordination.”

Emma Goldman book Anarchism and Other Essays

Anarchism: What it Really Stands For http://books.google.com/books?id=U5ZYAAAAMAAJ&q=&quot;Anarchism+is+the+only+philosophy+which+brings+to+man+the+consciousness+of+himself+which+maintains+that+God+the+State+and+society+are+non-existent+that+their+promises+are+null+and+void+since+they+can+be+fullfilled+only+through+man's+subordination&quot;&pg=PA58#v=onepage (1910)

“The culture of a civilization is the art and literature through which it rises to consciousness of itself and defines its vision of the world.”

Roger Scruton (1944–2020) English philosopher

"What is Culture?" (p. 2)
Culture Counts (2007)

“At the core of the Perennial Philosophy we find four fundamental doctrines.
First: the phenomenal world of matter and of individualized consciousness — the world of things and animals and men and even gods — is the manifestation of a Divine Ground within which all partial realities have their being, and apart from which they would be non-existent.
Second: human beings are capable not merely of knowing about the Divine Ground by inference; they can also realize its existence by a direct intuition, superior to discursive reasoning. This immediate knowledge unites the knower with that which is known.
Third: man possesses a double nature, a phenomenal ego and an eternal Self, which is the inner man, the spirit, the spark of divinity within the soul. It is possible for a man, if he so desires, to identify himself with the spirit and therefore with the Divine Ground, which is of the same or like nature with the spirit.
Fourth: man’s life on earth has only one end and purpose: to identify himself with his eternal Self and so to come to unitive knowledge of the Divine Ground.”

Aldous Huxley (1894–1963) English writer

Introduction to the Bhagavad-Gita (1944)

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

Gottfried de Purucker45

Related quotes

Related topics