If the body dies, it does no harm to the mind, but if the mind dies, one can no longer act as a man even though the body survives.

I hope that I may die before my mind fails to a sensible extent.

Death is a state of mind — -many people on Earth spend their entire lives dead.

people can die of mere imagination

The mind is alive when it is flexible and adaptable. It can be updated, take new form, endure change.

The mind is dead when it is fixed and immovable. It cannot absorb new ideas or thoughts. It is stiff and brittle.

When we lose our ability to adapt, to move with the environment, to tolerate new beliefs and reshape our old ones, our mind is at risk of becoming outdated. The fixed mind becomes a relic.

Every thought that is born has to die. It is what they call the death wish. If a thought does not die, it cannot be reborn. It has to die, and with it you die. But you don’t die with each thought and breath. You hook up each thought with the next, creating a false continuity. It is that continuity that is the problem.

Now, can one die every day to everything that one knows — except, of course, the technological knowledge, the direction where your home is, and so on; that is, to end, psychologically, every day, so that the mind remains fresh, young and innocent? That is death. And to come upon that there must be no shadow of fear. To give up without argument, without any resistance. That is dying. Have you ever tried it? To give up without a murmur, without restraint, without resistance, the thing that gives you most pleasure (the things that are painful, of course, one wants to give up in any case). Actually to let go. Try it. Then, if you do it, you will see that the mind becomes extraordinarily alert, alive and sensitive, free and unburdened. Old age then takes on quite a different meaning, not something to be dreaded.

If I am killed I can die but once. But to live in constant dread is to die over and over again.

If one is able to convey to the dying person that his mind is bound to this decaying body only for the present life span, it is calming. If one adds that mind is beyond death and birth, like space, emerging appearances of confusion and aging become more acceptable. This view confers the often missing dignity on the last part of life. It helps the dying to increasingly relax, and oneself to face one’s own death more fearlessly.

The mind, in proportion as it is cut off from free communication with nature, with revelation, with God, with itself, loses its life, just as the body droops when debarred from the air and the cheering light from heaven.

If I am killed, I can die but once; but to live in constant dread of it, is to die over and over again.

I can remember how when I was young I believed death to be a phenomenon of the body; now I know it to be merely a function of the mind — and that of the minds who suffer the bereavement. The nihilists say it is the end; the fundamentalists, the beginning; when in reality it is no more than a single tenant or family moving out of a tenement or a town.

Perhaps a man really dies when his brain stops, when he loses the power to take in a new idea.

I can remember how when I was young I believed death to be a phenomenon of the body; now I know it to be merely a function of the mind - and that of the minds of the ones who suffer the bereavement. The nihilists say it is the end; the fundamentalists, the beginning; when in reality it is no more than a single tenant or family moving out of a tenement or a town.