Dale Borglum: How to Live So You Can Die Without Fear

Summary

Dale Borglum, a Stanford-trained mathematician turned spiritual teacher and founder of the Living Dying Project, explains how facing death consciously can transform the way we live. Drawing on decades at the bedsides of thousands of dying people, and on teachings from Ram Dass, Stephen Levine, and Tibetan Buddhism, he argues that all fear is rooted in the fear of death and that compassion and non-duality are the keys to dying without fear. Host Cliff Dunning opens with his claim that the Maya used optical sky-watching equipment at Chichen Itza's El Caracol observatory.

Key takeaways

• 1Host Cliff Dunning claims the Maya had lens or telescope technology, citing the Venus tables of the Dresden Codex and shafts in the El Caracol observatory excavated by archaeologist Karl Ruppert in the 1920s.
• 2Dunning suggests El Caracol is much older than its 10th-century dating and shows signs of water erosion, possibly from a tsunami-like event.
• 3Borglum, Ram Dass, and Stephen Levine taught conscious dying under the Hanuman Foundation, and Borglum founded the Dying Center in Santa Fe around 1980, the first Western facility devoted to conscious dying.
• 4Aldous Huxley's novel 'Island' described a utopian center where people came to die consciously, which inspired Ram Dass's interest in the idea.
• 5Stephen Levine argued that Elisabeth Kubler-Ross's final stage of grief, 'acceptance,' is really resignation.
• 6Borglum's equation: all fear is based in fear of death, and fear of death is exactly where you are not enlightened. He also claims dying people, children, and drunks are very psychic, and that Tibetan teachings describe a light as bright as a thousand suns at death.

Glossary terms

Source

Transcript excerpt

Welcome to Destiny. Now here's your host, Cliff Dunning. Wow. It's September. Can you believe it? Autumn is approaching. It's a hot one this week. I don't know where you're at, but it's in the... High 90s here in the Northern California region of, well, it's here. Yeah, we're getting it. It's about time we got blasted with a little bit of heat. This is your host, Cliff of Destiny, and I am continually being confounded with the research data received from my AI search. I mentioned a while ago that I was writing a chapter on the observatory. I've written a couple of articles about One in 2017 with the engineer Jim O'Conn. And it was on the El Caracol, which is known as the snail by the Spanish. But it was and still is a real fascination for archaeologists and researchers alike because it is an observatory. And not just a simple observatory that we see in many of the Maya ruins around Mexico and Central America. This is a very large building. built up on a major foundation platform, and then topped off with a tubular observatory that has been damaged in some form of earthquake or something. But we have enough data to understand that it was used for sky watching. Now, what makes this building interesting is in the 1920s, approximately 1925, and forward, an archeologist named Carl Ruber, who was a specialist in Mayan archeology, began excavating the interior of this building and found a number of strange anomalies. The most important is that it had this spiral staircase that went into the belly of this observatory and also, showed that it was divided into different sections. Now, there was a base section that had pinholes for sightings. ...

Excerpt from Earth Ancients, Sep 9, 2026. Rights remain with the original creators. Hear the full episode at the source.