Breaking the Death Habit

Author’s Foreword

This book is a practical discussion of the basic ideas and practices for personal mastery and health. I have presented here the minimum foundation for personal immortality, which I learned from true immortal yogis. These practices are also referred to if not explicitly described in the Bible and all great scriptures. For example, Elijah was the fire master of the Bible, but nowhere does he discuss the theory of fire purification or the spiritual power of fire. 

I believe we are moving into a new age of physical immortality and personal mastery–an age of divine human beings who don't forget their humanity. God has been systematically working behind the scenes of human history. He/she is the God of science and technology and even the United Nations as well as religion, or he/she is no God at all. The governments of the world do God's will for the enlightenment of individuals. It has to be a gradual process. It is invisible except to those who have eyes to see. 

God has given us the practical tools to be immortal. The bottleneck is dead orthodoxies, philosophies, and beliefs, not only in churches, but in education, science, business, and government. 

After meeting and studying eight immortal yogis who mastered over 300 years in the same body, I condensed the common denominators that make them immortal. I present those principles to you here. They are simple and pleasurable to work with. If the path of physical immortality were not pleasurable then the Creator would be a sadist who requires eternal pain and misery. The spiritual practices that make us immortal are so simple, they are easy to ignore. This is how physical death became so popular. 

Being immortal is on the same level of difficulty as earning a living or supporting a family. It takes focus and self discipline, along with a certain amount of intelligence and endurance, to raise children and pay their bills through college. Becoming an immortal yogi master may be easier than this, but it takes focus and persistence in the right habits. I call them the habits of personal aliveness and the disciplines of pleasure. You will learn what they are in this book. 

My central point is that victory over death is within your reach. I describe the spiritual purification practices used by all the immortal yogis I have met in terms of Western civilization. Our civilization can either suck away our life energy and kill us, or support our everlasting life in comfort and pleasure. It is up to you! You can focus on life and mastery or defeat and death. Obviously, the more people who adopt this focus on personal immortality and mastery, the easier it becomes for all of us. Although some of the immortal yogis participate for many years in society, it is definitely easier for them to live in small, supportive communities in the Himalaya, for example. 

To get everyone in a small town or large city engaged in a dialogue about physical immortality and personal mastery is an intelligent contribution to your own survival. But it is not necessary or perhaps even feasible to persuade anyone to be immortal. Some people desire to die and they deserve this right. However, everyone deserves the right to choose life or death. Without the information in this book, people do not have a meaningful choice. 

Most people are too immersed in the death urge and death consciousness to care about immortal yogis or even their own divine potential. Unfortunately, mass death urge has a tendency to precipitate disasters. The best thing you can do for the health of a neighborhood or a nation is to master and spread the ideas of physical immortality and voluntary spiritual purification before God makes it involuntary. Physical death in all its forms is involuntary purification.

— Leonard Orr, 1998