Transcriber: Zsuzsa Viola
Reviewer: Michael Nystrom A man is taken to the cardiac
intensive care unit at a hospital in the Netherlands. About an hour earlier,
he was found unconscious in a meadow. He’s not breathing,
he has no pulse, he’s in a coma, and he’s starting to turn blue. He is very close to dying. In order to intubate him, one of the nurses takes out
his dentures, his teeth, and puts them in a drawer. They connect him to a ventilator, and after an hour and a half
of hard compressions, they’ve regained his pulse
and his blood pressure, but he’s still in a coma
and unable to breathe on his own. After a week, he wakes up and is transferred from intensive care
to the cardiac unit. The nurse who gives him medication there
is the same one who removed his dentures. This is now a week ago, he was unconscious, but he recognizes
her immediately and says: “That nurse knows where my teeth are.” (Laughter) He turns to her and says: “You were there when
I was brought into the hospital. You took my dentures out of my mouth,
and you put them onto this cart. It had all these bottles on top, and there was this sliding drawer
underneath, and there you put my teeth.” He goes on to say that he saw, from above,
that they were working to revive him, and he correctly and in detail
describes the emergency room, the people who worked to revive him, and the trolley with the drawer
in which he put the teeth. The nurse can confirm that
what he says agrees with the report. He knows what happened
in the emergency room. This story is from a study on near-death
experiences published in The Lancet, a renowned medical journal. But you can read about near-death
experiences in Plato or in the tabloids. They have been talked about
at all times, all over the globe. People tell of life-changing,
profound experiences that are fundamentally different
from anything they have ever experienced. During cardiac arrests, surgery,
car accidents, fires, they have suddenly found themselves
floating above the situation. Anxiety and pain immediately evaporate and are replaced by a deep calm
and contentment. They feel surrounded and filled
by unconditional love and a deep sense of coming home. They tell of meetings
with a deceased loved one who tells them that regardless
of their mistakes and flaws, they are loved for who they are. Time and space do not exist, and they say the experience is so real that it appears deeper, richer
and more real than reality. In addition, there are plenty of
documented cases like the one I just told. Patients recounting afterwards
what happened around them during a period of time when
they were clinically dead or in a coma. and their memory of the experience
is sparkling clear 5, 10, 20, 40, 50 years later. Despite the fact that none of the prerequisites
for conscious experiences have been present in the brain, they say they have never thought
so clearly, understood so much, or been so awake as when
they were lying there unconscious with the brain without blood supply, surrounded by screens
showing flat lines and no activity. So a big fundamental question arises: what is the brain’s role in this? If all of our experience is in the brain, then how can this be? So far, science has no idea. This fascinates me. Some experiences have had
zero access to oxygen. Others have had
plenty of access to oxygen. Some have been heavily medicated;
others have not been medicated. Some have been deeply religious. Others have been atheists,
at least before they had this experience. (Laughter) They have been young. They have been old. The research finds no common denominators, except that people have been dead
or very close to dying. I'm a musician and a composer,
not a scientist, so I don't feel restricted or frustrated
by the lack of a scientific explanation. Nor am I frightened
by the spiritual aspects of these stories. Quite the opposite, to be honest. My life situation makes me think
about death ... a lot. I live with a serious diagnosis. I have cancer. I have tumors in my lungs
that grow when I don’t get treatment. It goes slowly. I can’t feel them. But every three months,
pictures are taken of my upper body, and in the last three years, I’ve had
a total of 37 chemotherapy courses. The last one, a week ago. It’s a strange situation
to constantly have to be treated for an illness that
has not yet made me sick. Like many other cancer patients, it’s the treatment
that makes me feel sick. When I’m not in treatment,
I think of myself as healthy. I have both cancer and good health. As long as I have no physical symptoms, it’s the narrative and the words I use
that define my reality, not the disease itself. And the stories of near-death experiences
inspire and uplift me, mainly because they open up a wider perspective
on the nature of reality. Humans have always been fascinated
by the nature of consciousness of what it means to be alive,
and indeed of death and the afterlife. Modern, secular society
would increasingly have us throw away the beliefs and traditions
of our ancestors, yet when we turn to the closest
we can come to the experience of death, science leaves us without explanation. In my opinion, knowledge, experiences, ideas from religions, Indigenous peoples, art, literature,
my own professional field, music still have a legitimate place
in an honest attempt to comprehend the nature of reality. I think we’re missing something important when we dismiss and deride people
who turn to faith and spirituality because the physical world
seems too limited to envelop the full extent
of the human experience. Because how our consciousness arises is an unsolved mystery. Scientists and philosophers agree that we are not even close
to an explanation. For the last couple of hundred years, Western natural science
has almost taken it for granted that the brain is behind it all. But this is by no means proven. Do near-death experiences indicate that
there is something fundamentally wrong with the premise for this idea? There are many such unexplainable
phenomena and experiences. Deathbed visions, out-of-body experiences, mystical experiences in deep meditation
or through the use of psychedelics, terminal lucidity, and a wide range
of so-called paranormal phenomena. Some, well-documented and investigated, others that are powerful and unexplainable
stories of individual experience, which are both meaningful and real
for those who have experienced them. There are serious researchers at the University of Virginia,
at Oslo University Hospital who work according
to traditional scientific methods to map and analyze cross-border phenomena. They are nowhere near an explanation
of what is going on either, but they seem sure of one thing:
there is something here. It is subtle, but they are convinced
that these phenomena are real and that they can tell us something
about the nature of reality. In my situation, finding, discovering that someone was working
methodically and seriously to understand such cross-border phenomena
as near-death experiences was like finding a mental emergency exit. Behind the door hid a lush garden where one interesting subject
after another revealed themselves to me like beautiful trees I could climb
to give my mind something good to do. I readily admit that I need
something to believe in. However, I have never been able
to relate to the idea that faith and spirituality
spring from a desperate need to create meaning
in a meaningless existence. Not before I got cancer. Not now. My pull towards a worldview
where death is not the end but a transition to another state is like a warm longing for home
that is just there, outside of time and space. It comes from a deep place
within me that has no language. It is an intuitive quality that
does not come from an intellectual place. Stories of near-death experiences appeal
to both my intellect and my intuition. On days when thoughts of death
become unpleasant and invasive, it is comforting to be able
to fix my gaze on these stories, because if what they tell us
about death is true - then we have nothing to fear. Thank you. (Applause) (Music)
