Detumescence

“ They then begin to partake of the elements adapted to their organization and growth, increase to manhood, become old, decay, and pass again into the dust. Now in the first place, though I have explained this many times, what we call death is the operation of life, inherent in the matter of which the body is composed, and which causes the decomposition after the spirit has left the body. Were that not the fact, the body, from which has fled the spirit, would remain to all eternity, just as it was when the spirit left it, and would not decay. ”

“ If Fate so rules, that I should feel
The miseries of a widow's life,
Can man's device the doom repeal?
Unequal seems to be a strife,
Between Humanity and Fate;
None have on earth what they desire;
Death comes to all or soon or late ”

“ He should to antenatal night retrace, 70 And hide his elements in that large womb Beyond the reach of man-evolving Doom. And even thus, what weary way were planned, To seek oblivion through the far-off gate Of birth, when that of death is close at hand! 75 For this is law, if law there be in Fate: What never has been, yet may have its when; The thing which has been, never is again. ”

“ Yet even as he had done, who was now carried past so helplessly, that his dust might duly be returned to its kindred dust--that living mass of human beings would toil and yearn for their fancied good, till, with strength and energy all spent and gone, they saw the fair phantom of their hopes dissolve in air, disclosing to their view the grave alone--that actual reality for which they had been working! ”

“ If you faced the thing honestly, what was life, anyway, after the climacteric of youth? Nothing but a long drawn out decay of the body, a gradual dulling of the senses, an imperceptible slackening of the will—a slower and more humiliating death. ”

“ But the great diversion, coeval with the beginning of corpse disposal, was the conception of a soul separable from the body and surviving it, and this is as old as animism. Other factors, of course, contributed to the primitive belief in souls but when and wherever it arose it became the chief distractor from and the great negator of the death-thought. Now, as the body is not all, death is not complete and some part of us, however tenuous, lives on. ”

“ All sentient being who suffer by the above Defects, Deeds and Results are temporary. No being has an (immortal) soul. To understand thus (and realize these truths) is salvation.
“Consciousness, Name and Form, the Senses, Contact, Sensation, Birth, Disease, Old-age, Death, Grief, Lamentation, Dejection and Despair are (four) Distempers. The cause of these Distempers is Ignorance, Action, Desire, Attachment and Existence.
“Birth is painful; attachment is its cause: Release is joyful; absence of Attachment is its cause. ”

“ It is from the source named, alone, that the soul obtains the materials and elements whereof to construct an ethereal body—from the finest essences of matter held in absolute coalescence by the highest law, and, therefore, proof against death, division, decay, or dissolution—within its fleshly one, by processes analagous to that of gestation—and completes it as the vehicle whose true use only begins subsequent to the fact of physical death! ”

“ Till darkness and the law Of change shall o'er his sleep the mortal curtain draw. Until the darkness of the grave and the universal law of change and dissolution shall draw the curtain of death over his sleep—shall prove his apparent sleep to be veritable death. ”

“ Ought we not rather to avoid this, than death, or loss, or want, or exile, or sickness? Who would not think some blemish of body or loss of inheritance far less than some blemish of soul or loss of reputation? ”

“ One sees a ghastly figure of emaciation and decay; the eyes lying deep in their sockets, in a frightful stage of decomposition, and the whole frame exhibiting the power of death over the flesh of the Saints, but suggesting that, while patiently submitting to the worst that worms can do, it rests in hope and speaks out of the very grave—“I know that my Redeemer liveth.” ”

“ But, Sir, as it is only rarely that such a sudden transition from death to life takes place, by what signs are we to determine its actual occurrence, when it is the result of a more lengthened process? ”

“ Could the man have had any reason even dimly to foresee his own sudden death, there would have been a new feature in his act of intemperance—a feature of presumption and irreverence, as in one that by possibility felt himself drawing near to the presence of God. ”

“ Remorse then is a part of Destiny, Nature a liar, making us feel guilty Of her own faults. My grandfather—of him They say, that women— O this mortal house, Which we are born into, is haunted by The ghosts of the dead passions of dead men ”

“ The seeming injustice and blank awfulness of the fate may make one turn for relief to the hypothesis of a future arbitrary miraculous resurrection; but that is an artificial expedient, without a shadow of justification. Once admit that the body is all, its dissolution a total death, and you are gone forever. ”

“ Why should mortals, whom conscience tells that they are immortals, bewildered and bewildering ponder upon the dust! Do your duty to God and man, and fear not that, when that dust dies, the spirit that breathed by it will live for ever. Feels not that spirit its immortality in each sacred thought? ”

“ I envied these people their lofty, pure minds, and rare, physical perfection. Like blessed, celestial childhood, they seemed free of care. Death brought momentary sadness, regret. These philosophers declared dissolution the highest degree of nature, which they worshipped in the form of the Sun. ”

“ Whatever, therefore, has been taken from the body, either during life or after death, shall be restored to it, and, in conjunction with what has remained in the grave, shall rise again, transformed from the oldness of the animal body into the newness of the spiritual body, and clothed in incorruption and immortality. ”

“ Annihilation, absorption, resurrection, conveyance, recurrence, migration, transition, these seven answers to the question of our fate, and of its relation to the course of nature, are thinkable in words. We may choose from among them, but can construct no real eighth. First, there is a constant succession of growth and decay. Second, there is a perpetual flow and ebb of personal emanation and impersonal resumption. Third, there is a continual return of the same persistent entities. Fourth, all matter may be sublimated to spirit, and souls alone remain to occupy boundless space. ”

“ To be resolved into dust again, to sink away into nothing (redactio in pulverem, in nihilum) is man's return to his original condition, - man who was formed from the dust, who was called into being out of nothing. To die is to return to the dust, Psa 104:29, cf. Gen 3:19, and here it is called the return to Sheôl, as in Job 30:23 to death, and in Psa 90:3 to atoms, inasmuch as the state of shadowy existence in Hades, the condition of worn out life, the state of decay is to a certain extent the renewal (Repristination) of that which man was before he came into being. ”

“ Our lives are altered against our wills, and though the cradle stands in the background and the grave looms in front, the change of the enchanter’s hand—it may be of pleasure and joy, or more likely one of grief and pain—has passed over our lives, and we ourselves are altered too, for better or worse—God grant the former! ”

“ And, moreover, how can anything be said of the rest of an untimely birth, which has been without motion and without life, as of a rest excelling the termination of the life of him who has lived long, since rest without a subjective reflection, a rest not felt, certainly does not fall under the point of view of more or less, good or evil? ”

“ It is impossible; there is a mistake somewhere. A day ago, an hour ago, Death was lying hidden far, far off in the years. Sometime, of course, he would arrive—solemn, inevitable, but beneficent, or at least serene. ”

“ After all, if the old order crumbled, was it not because of its own weakness? Was not the fact of its decay the sign of some secret disintegration, of rottenness at the core? And if the new spirit could destroy, perhaps it could build as well. ”

“ The dissolution of the body is but the dissolution of a particular manifestation of the all-pervading soul, and the immortality of the so-called individual soul is but the persistence of that, so to speak, local disturbance in the one soul after the body has disappeared. ”

“ That to the old man I may rest,
And be in him new drest.
So holy in my head,
Perfect and light in my deare breast,
My doctrine tun'd by Christ, (who is not dead,
But lives in me while I do rest)
Come people; Aaron's drest. ”

“ When there is disintegration amongst these composing elements, that is death; that is mortality. The elements which have gone into the body of this flower and which have given existence to this form and shape will finally disintegrate; this beautiful organism will decompose; and this we call mortality, death. Consequently, the conclusion is that life means composition, and death is equivalent to decomposition. On this account the materialists are of the opinion that life is the mere conjoining of elemental substances into myriad forms and shapes. ”

“ In old age, waste slowly but surely gains the mastery; and at death the balanced process ceases, decomposition sets in, and the elements of the body are scattered to the winds or returned to mother earth. ”

“ What one misfortune or disaster in the book of embryotic evils, that could unmechanize thy frame, or entangle thy filaments! which has not fallen upon thy head, or ever thou camest into the world—what evils in thy passage into it!—What evils since!—produced into being, in the decline of thy father's days—when the powers of his imagination and of his body were waxing feeble—when radical heat and radical moisture, the elements which should have temper'd thine, were drying up ”

“ Those who reach this transition, called death, without having rightly improved the lessons of this primary school of mortal existence, — and still believe in matter's reality, pleasure, and pain, — are not ready to understand Immortality. ”

“ The most grotesque and frightful conceptions of death, and life after death, were current; and now many of even those whose understandings are emancipated wear upon their feelings the heavy chain of heredity. ”

“ Indeed, if these wise men believed in a future state of retribution, and at the same time considered a connection with the body as death of the soul, it necessarily follows, that the soul’s punishment and existence hereafter are nothing more than a continuation of its state at present, and a transmigration, as it were, from sleep to sleep, and from dream to dream. ”

“ But the assumption that the point of comparison is change, not destruction, cannot be maintained: the figures represent the slow but inevitable destruction wrought by the elements on the greatest mountains, on rocks, and on the solid earth. And if the poet had intended to contrast the slow but certain changes of nature with the hopelessness of man's lot, how many more appropriate illustrations, in which nature seems to come forth as with new life from the dead, were at his command! ”

“ Mortal man's repentance and absolute abandonment of sin finally dissolves all supposed material life or physical sensation, and the corporeal or mortal man disappears forever. The encumbering mortal molecules, called man, vanish as a dream; but man born of the great Forever, lives on, God-crowned and blest. ”

“ This goes on until the period of full maturity is reached. Then decay—and decay is but another term for death—commences. This is the case with every plant, tree, animal, and even with man considered in respect to his material organism. ”

“ The contemplation of the final judgment, and the sentence to be passed upon the wicked, is truly a solemn one, and should startle every mind, But oh, how few, comparatively, seem to stop and reflect upon this momentous subject? And yet all are rapidly hastening on to their final doom. Few are aware of the vast numbers that are passing from time into eternity—even each year, each month, each day each hour, or each minute. ”

“ A similar horror must have been produced upon man from the very first, before his heart was altogether hardened, by death as the wages of sin, or rather by the effects of death, viz., the decomposition of the body; and different diseases and states of the body, that were connected with symptoms of corruption and decomposition, may also have been regarded as rendering unclean. ”

“ What now being present, is decay and dying also present ; what conditions decay and dying ?"
Then, brethren, from attention to the cause 1 arose the conviction through reason : — " Where birth is, there is decay and dying ; birth is the condition of decay and dying."
' Then to Vipassi the Bodhisat, brethren, this occurred : — " What now being present, is birth also present ; what conditions birth ? " Then, brethren, from attention to the cause arose the conviction through reason : — " When becoming is, birth also is present; becoming is the condition of birth." ”

“ By the word death, we express that condition in which natures resembling ourselves apparently cease to be that which they were. We no longer hear them speak, nor see them move. If they have sensations and apprehensions, we no longer participate in them. ”

“ At bidding, or in fear of death;
Such suppleness, thank God, I lack,
To die is but to lose my breath.
Is death annihilation? No.
New worlds will open on my view,
When persecuted hence I go,
The right is right,—the true is true. ”

“ Unto Nature is revealed now her own impotence, and she must henceforth go with her hand to her heart; stricken with eld she must limp forward to her tomb. It is long months since we knew her young and debonair, when each of her movements was tremulous with vigour, vivid with significance. ”

“ The exultation over its decay in the twentieth century may possibly be found as premature and as vain as the exultation over its decay in the eighteenth century, or in any of the centuries which have gone before. ”