Die before ye die Hadith attributed to Nabi
If you die before you die, you won’t die when you die Inscription over a door at St. Paul’s monastery in Mount Athos
The death and rebirth motif in religion is really the key and the sum total of spiritual experience, from pre-historic shamanism to modern-day NRGs (New Religious Groups). “Death” here clearly doesn’t refer to physical death, and neither can it refer to loss of consciousness, since the process of death and rebirth is experienced by a conscious subject. If “feels” like a death, even though nobody can possibly know what death feels like, if anything. And it “feels” like a rebirth, even though no one can remember what their birth was like.
The traditional language of death and rebirth may just be a dramatic way of describing the temporary suspension of brain activity. It’s not really death and it’s not really sleep – it’s something else – and you come back changed. You come back feeling refreshed, revived, rebooted, as if your operating system was running sluggishly until you turned it off and on again.
bread of life 