Near-Death Experiences: What we know about death, immortality, and near-death experiences

one thing to keep in mind is a near-death experience is a fairly specific thing many of us are in what we might call near death situations or near death constant context you know you're in a car crash and but for the grace of God you survive but you you almost died that would be a near death context but a near-death experience takes place in a near-death context but it has to involve the losing of wakeful consciousness and then a number of specific kinds of experiences that you have when you're not wake fully conscious and typically there's an out-of-body experience where you experience yourself as rising up above your body and you can often see it from above so an out-of-body experience often there's a life review where you're your life kind of comes before you it's either a highlight reel or a low-light reel sometimes it takes place simultaneously or it presents itself kind of all at once and sometimes it's like a video that is presented like a film or a sequence so there's an out-of-body experience there's a life review frequently there's a a guided trip toward a domain or a destination and that's guarded by some sort either a river or a gate well sometimes it's a dark tunnel that you're traveling through toward a light but there's almost always this travel log or travel and it's almost always guided by mentors respected trusted parents let's say or authority figures that you put your trust in and often it's religious figures so not everybody has all of these components in their near-death experience but in order to count as a near-death experience you have to have a a sufficient number of these components yeah that's a really good question and it's really challenging for instance we can't hook up someone's brain with a scanner like an fMRI or a PET scan some kind of scanner of the brain in anticipation that they're going to happen near death experience and we can't induce near-death experiences that would definitely not pass the ethics boards so we're left with people's reports and other kinds of ways of getting at the issues now one way of doing it there's a famous Dutch doctor MD PIM van Lommel is his name and he's done over time an ongoing study of people who have had cardiovascular events like heart attacks and they they come into the hospital they have heart attacks and when they survive we hope they do survive when they survive we listen to their reports or PIM van Lommel has interviewed them and listen to their reports now not everybody has a near-death experience they've all been in a near-death situation but only about 10 percent of them report a near-death experience and so we use that information then there are people who just volunteer it as I said there is this association its headquarters is in Santa Barbara that supports people who've had near-death experiences and they have their journal and they have their blogs and websites and so we can accumulate people's reports in that kind of way I want to just mention another really fascinating study that's done by an academic researcher sampar Nia it was an MD he used to be in England then he came to the US now he's at NYU New York University Medical School he's done doing a great study where he has people he sets up computers in cardiac intensive-care wards and the computers are positioned so that the people the patients can't see the computers from their beds they're not visible from their beds and those computers randomly flash numbers and when the patient wakes up again we hope they wake up if they report that they've seen a number flashing the number 17 flashed in the corner that would be really interesting that would be some evidence of an out-of-body experience because they can't see the numbers from the bed that's an ongoing study called the aware study that we supported we we gave them a grant and it's still going on so those are the kinds of ways that we try to get to people who have had near-death experiences as a young boy I heard a lot of stories in my family about my grandfather my father's father was killed in the Holocaust and although the rest of the family made it to America he never did and there was a lot of sadness about that and so I've thought a lot about it how a relatively young person can be killed and then as I was growing up my father was a cardiologist and often his patients would have heart attacks sometimes they would die suddenly and he tended to talk about it sometimes over the dinner table not the most pleasant dinnertime conversation but it really introduced me to death at an early age well it's interesting I had heard of near-death experiences but I'd never really studied them until I got the grant from the John Templeton Foundation in 2012 I received a large grant and part of the grant involved distributing money to researchers and they would send in their projects and I would start I would read and many of them were on near-death experiences and so that intrigued me because I really didn't know I didn't know much about them and I certainly didn't know there was an academic study of them and that was 2012 so for the last seven years I've read extensively and I've discussed near-death experiences with some of the world's leading researchers and I read the results in our report and as I lecture and as I read more I get more and more fascinated by them it's relatively small and partly because academics and scholars didn't take them seriously for for a long time it didn't seem as though it was a serious reputable academic study people who reported these phenomena these experiences were thought to be Kooks or exaggerating or telling stories to get attention but a number of things have come together that make the study of near-death experiences more respectable more rigorous and one is that we have better brain scans so we can look into the brain and see what activity is taking place there and for and also there is a society called the International Association for near-death experiences I ants for short and it's in Santa Barbara and it has its own academic journal and it helps people to see the patterns throughout the nation and the world in the reports of these experiences so there are MDS and neuroscientists now who are studying near-death experiences in a more rigorous way but it's still frankly it's still at the margins of science yes it was a 5.2 million dollar grant from the Templeton Foundation we administered it here at the University of California Riverside we had a number of competitions we sent out calls to first of all to scientists because we had 2.5 million dollars to distribute to scientists and they sent in their proposals and I and a committee of colleagues my team and the immortality projects evaluated those projects are those proposals and we selected 10 so each of them got $250,000 and they were from around the world there was a project in Europe and headquartered in Spain that was a project in Israel and Jerusalem there were that word projects in England and here in the United States we tried to reach out throughout the world and select these projects then there was a second competition in philosophy and religion and we gave about 25 of those grants and so total of about 35 grants that we we distributed then we also had fellowships for graduate students here at UCR who are working on these topics and that was throughout the campus yes there were differences and there were also similarities and some of the similarities are in near-death experiences because throughout time and throughout the world across cultures there are patterns in the reports of near-death experiences we can talk about those specifics but that's one of the the things that come out throughout the world another feature of human nature that again shows up in every culture that we've studies is a concern about death a question about what happens to us after we die wondering about it and quite often a fear of death and we then see again throughout the world in different cultures institutions such as religions and other institutions that help us manager managed that fear of death or addressed that fear of death and so in just about every culture you see these strategies for terror management or the management of our natural fear of death yes the reports are about 10% about 10% of the people who report near-death experiences say they're negative maybe there are actually more because there are certain reasons why people wouldn't want to admit that they've had a negative near-death experience so they're the kind of person who was bad and and therefore you had a near-death experience you have secrets that are bad so people don't like to report them but yes about 10 percent aren't negative the negative ones are really interesting in some ways they're more interesting than the positive ones they have been written about though not as widely by academic researchers there's a woman associated with the International Association of near-death studies named Nancy Evans Bush who has written a couple interesting books about near-death experiences that are negative one is called the Buddha in Hell which recounts a near-death experience reported by a Buddhist monk in which he claims to see the Buddha in hell and as a result when the monk regained weight wakeful consciousness he switched to Christianity that near-death experience it has been debunked it's probably not a sincere report but there are definitely sincere reports of negative near-death experiences and what's interesting to me is that at a basic level they're exactly parallel to the positive one so what happens is instead of traveling upward and from darkness toward life you travel downward from light toward darkness also you are guided by some sort of authority figure maybe a deceased loved one maybe a religious figure you're guided downward and you're shown people suffering and in torment now you are not suffering and in torment determine but you are shown by your guide the suffering and the torment when the emptiness the ultimate emptiness at the end and I would say the point of these is you need to reorient yourself toward the good it's to show as I said there's a carrot and a stick this is the stick you're being shown what will happen unless you live a good life you reorient yourself toward morality and goodness and health now so many people do transform themselves in a positive way at a basic level the structure is very similar there's a travel there's guided mentorship and there are certain lessons that you learn about living your life now of course the specifics are going to be different you're guided downward rather than upward but it's a travel log that's guided by someone who's loving and who cares about you he's he or she is loving because the individual is trying to show you how to improve your chances for a good life and a good death he goes all the way back to at least Plato's Republic Plato ancient philosopher a couple of thousand years ago wrote in his great work the Republic about a near-death experience called it was called the myth of Earth and it had many of the characteristics components that we've just been discussing so it goes back thousands of years I don't know whether there was an earlier description of it NDE but that's one of the earliest what usually is reported is it's kind of like a good dream where you suddenly wake up but you're really disappointed that you've awakened when you realize you're it was all a dream you kind of wish gosh I wish I could go back and dream some more and typically it is at the point where you're almost to the gated community or you've all almost crossed the river or you've almost reached the light through the dark tunnel so it's as I mentioned near-death experiences are travel logs you could call them the trip of an afterlife time they're voyages and they're voyages to the light or to some kind of heavenly realm and what happens typically is just before the individual gets there she or he awakens for some reason and it's tantalizing and the people often want to go back but they can't and as you just mentioned this is also very similar to some of the great literature on immortality or living forever because in that literature typically there's some recipe or procedure for becoming immortal and the the individual follows the procedure until the very end where they don't succeed and then so immortality is tantalizing and you can get almost there but you can't quite succeed at least in literature and that goes back to the famous epic of gilgamesh so in literature as well as near-death experience yes this has been studied pretty widely and one of the researchers that's done most of the work is PIM van Lommel and the transformations again not everybody is transformed in the same way but typically the first thing is people have less death anxiety they're less fearful or worried about debt because it's often presented as this very benign peaceful positive place they feel more at peace they feel more spiritual it doesn't have to be religious but they feel more spiritual more present they're more mindful they're more present they're more at peace and they have less significantly less death anxiety now presumably they still have some death anxiety no one is without that and I think it's healthy because it allows you to be more careful it allows you to wear your seatbelts it allows you to stop smoking but they have significantly less fear they might they don't dread death so what I have also tried to develop is a way of reducing death anxiety within a kind of secular framework again it was pretty late in my career in my life in the sense and I know if this is late in my life but it wasn't when I was a little boy it was when I was teaching at Yale that introductory course called mortal questions with a team or told questions and I read some great classic literature on immortality and that got me interested because one of the main themes in philosophical discussions of immortality is that we wouldn't want to be her model it would be inevitably boring and tedious and so we wouldn't choose to take let's say a potion or an elixir or a pill that would make us live forever so philosophers were kind of curmudgeon sore grumpy about immortality and I was fascinated by that because I thought hmm I'd kind of like to give it a chance well at least for a couple million years why are you so down on the possibility of immortality so that's what got me interested and I started writing kind of a more optimistic view about immortality but there's a famous article by the philosopher Bernhard Williams that talks about the tedium of immortality and that really got me started thinking about these issues this is an interesting and exciting time to think about that question because of the advances in medicine in the a turn of the 20th century 1900 the average lifespan in modern industrialized societies was about 40 years at the turn of the 21st century it was almost 80 years and so it's almost 80 years and that keeps going up and now some scientists and again not all and maybe this is a minority opinion but some scientists seriously think that we can defeat death that we can figure out what causes aging and address those issues or we can figure out how to to cure some of the main killers now cancer or heart disease Alzheimer's the different major ways in which people die and as we start figuring out how to address those and curing those we'll live longer and longer and as we live longer and longer we'll be able to figure out how to cure the other thing so eventually we'll be able to to defeat death I would choose immortality if I had an exit that is I would choose to be immortal if I if it but if it got bad enough I would want to be able to take a pill to end it I think if you didn't have an escape route it could be a problem I don't know that I would choose that but many people think it would be boring and in fact that's a view about heaven as well as secular immortality and Mark Twain famously wrote about how boring it would be to be in heaven and just listen to people play the harp and you know who likes harp music anyway but why listen to it all the time forever it might be really boring and you know I think but also the secular problem is that after a certain amount of time you would have done everything that a human being can do and then you'd have to start repeating and repeating remember we're not talking about just living a long time we're not talking about living a hundred two hundred five hundred we're talking perhaps about infinity and that's difficult to wrap your mind around let's say you love Thai food okay you love Thai food you don't want to eat it all the time so you distributed it maybe every couple every couple weeks you eat Thai food or maybe two or three times a week but could you enjoy it for a billion years and a billion years is just a grain in the sand of the beach of immortality you love mathematics or you love philosophy or you love athletics whatever it is or music you love music could you continue to love that music forever or wouldn't it eventually get boring these are the there are a group of philosophers I'd say most philosophers who think we wouldn't choose to be immortal we should reject that I call them the immortality curmudgeons they're very grumpy about immortality and it always struck me that that's just too pessimistic because what I think is first of all I'd like to try it for a million years and if it doesn't work out then I would I would use my exit strategy but you can mix your activities even in our finite lives we don't want to eat Thai food for breakfast for lunch for a dinner and then breakfast and lunch and a week we spread out our activities we don't listen to the same music or the same songs over and over again that Rexha so we distribute our activities we mix them so we don't get bored in our finite lives and I can't see how I could ever run out of intellectual projects you know trying to figure out how to achieve social justice or figuring out the fundamental laws of physics or where the universe came from or trying to interpret and the great literature Shakespeare I don't think that runs out because there's so many different ways of looking at great literature and philosophy and you can look at at them differently and get something different at different points in your life or just think about friendship deep friendship or love does that have to get boring it's interesting maybe it would have to get boring think about a marriage you know in our marriages even though they're not infinitely long we promise to be faithful till death do us part but if there's no death how do we think about marriage in our finite lives sometimes we have to spice up our marriages right because we're with the same person all the time we've got to spice it up but well I think that we couldn't do that in an immortal life because as I look at it the longer you with someone the more precious it is and the more difficult it is to just walk away you know if I was married to someone for ten thousand years how could I walk away from that person so I think the immortality curmudgeons are too bleak they're too pessimistic I'm much more optimistic the only thing that really worries me is the environment and whether we'll be able to solve our environmental problems to allow for humanity to live longer and longer lives it really has affected me in in a deep way first of all the Epicureans going back to ancient Greece and their followers in Rome up till the present day emphasize that when death is the person is not when the person is death is not but when death happens I'm not there anymore and I'm not there to suffer we are legitimately afraid of and sometimes terrified of boredom depression pain torture torment but those are all things where we're going to be there and we're going to suffer so we should be afraid of those things within reason and that fear can help us to avoid or to behave in ways that make us more healthy so it's a rational fear but is it really appropriate to fear a situation in which I won't have any unpleasant experiences at all it won't be there I recently had a minor surgery and I was I was under general anesthesia and when I woke up I didn't remember anything about it I assumed that I wasn't having any experiences and I don't and I think that if death is conceptualized as general anesthesia forever it's not something to be afraid of it might be a bad thing of course if I especially if I die prematurely that can be a terrible thing for me for my family for my friends but some things being a bad thing or unfortunate is different from something's being reasonable to fear and so that's maybe the first thing that I have tried to learn and try to internalize I won't be there to suffer the second thing it's one of the great lessons that we can learn from near-death experiences near-death experiences in my viewpoint to the fact that we can die well we can die surrounded by mentors and loved ones and trusted religious figures we don't have to die in cold sterile institutionalized hospitals we can die at home we can control the pain but we can also be there with our family our friends and our loved ones that's one of the lessons of near-death experiences because again it's a travel log mentored and guided by loved ones we don't have to die alone so when I think of these features of death and dying I think we can learn enough to think it's it's uncertain what will happen we wonder about it but we don't have to be terrified we may fear it to some extent and that fear might cause us to improve our lives but we don't have to be terrified of it I even do it's almost like a mantra or a a visualization I try and do it every day to try and remember that I won't be there to suffer also people are more pro-social they care more about developing relationships with their family and friends but also with others their pro morality they become more concerned in general about other people's interests they're concerned about justice so those are some of the main ways in people in which people are transformed they're more optimistic about life and less scared of death yes there was some that really surprised me now I should say that there were 35 projects some of them are in the scientist Sciences and so the research is still coming out it takes a long time and especially in the sciences you're not supposed to give away your results until they're published so we don't really know everything but one of the real surprises to me came from a project by two philosophers Sean Nichols from the University of Arizona and Jay Garfield from Smith College and the National Institute of the National University in Singapore they did a fascinating study that was international india japan united states in which they compared death anxiety or fear of death among three different groups the first group was monks who buddhist monks the other group was christians and the other group was practicing hindus and the buddhist monks are known for meditation that seeks to kind of diminish and even eliminate the sense of self it's called the no self view so to kind of diminish the idea that i have an ongoing substantial self the idea is everything is fluid I'm part of an undifferentiated reality but I am NOT a separate self and of course the Buddhist I'm sorry gives me the Hindus believe in a substantial self that gets reincarnated and so forth and the Christians believe in a self that can't go to heaven or to help at a substantial self that's not identical to the body so the idea that we had in advance was that the the Buddhist monks would be the least afraid of death because they already don't believe in a self or they believe in a very minimal self and so the annihilation of the self is not just such a worrisome thing and in fact part of the whole point of the Buddhist meditation and the no self idea is to guard against a fear of death or to reduce the thought that death is a bad thing because if you don't really have a self then it's not a bad thing that it's annihilated but it turns out the Buddhists were the most fearful of death the Buddhist monks were in fact by far the most fearful of death more fearful than the Hindus and the Christians oh why is that exactly well it was a big surprise and we're not sure quite why but one reason might be take the Christians they believe that their self will not be annihilated at death their physical body will go out of beat of go out of business it will stop functioning but their self maybe their soul will continue and it might well end up in heaven but with the Buddhist monks death is total annihilation when the body when the body stops functioning there's no person fair anymore and so it's a kind of a complete annihilation now in some Buddhist views there's the possibility of reincarnation but that's something that's totally opaque we don't know what kind of individual or what kind of animal we'll be reincarnated as so the Christian view is more comforting in a way even though you might worry that you'll end up in heaven in hell but in general you know you'll continue to exist so that was a big surprise I'll mention a different surprise though that there were there were a lot of interesting results in one of the studies there was a big gender difference in our attitudes toward living forever there are different conceptions of immortality one is in and afterlife kind of a religious conception and then another is a secular idea of living forever and not ever dying not having an afterlife what was interesting as men in general across cultures were much more positive about the possibility of secular living forever or indefinite life extension women were were less enthusiastic about it and I'm not sure why I don't think any of us really knows why one speculation was that males are more trusting of science but that seems that might be a sexist idea that might not really be what's going on I don't know maybe one of you one of the people who sees this video will get a 5 million dollar grant and figure that one out but I can't do it I think they're all ongoing in a sense I mean some of them are formerly ongoing like Sam Varney is aware study where he puts the computers in people's hospital rooms that's going on and that will go on for years and we're not the only people who are funding that projects is a huge project there's a wonderful project in Spain that studies it's just a fascinating a fascinating project it's this long-term European collaborative project that studies virtual reality and in particular immersive virtual reality which is a kind of virtual reality where you actually occupy at least you seem to occupy another person's point of view or another person's body and this kind of virtual reality has all sorts of therapeutic implications that can help people with phantom leg pain it can help teach people how to use perspect prosthetic devices it can have all sorts of interesting therapeutic value but it can also help to understand our imagination our ability to empathize and specifically they've simulated near-death experiences so through this virtual reality people seem to have death experiences and then they give them questionnaires about how their thoughts and how their attitudes have changed and it's interesting because many of the transformations that take place after a simulated virtual near-death experiences are exactly the same as the transformations that you get from a near-death experience so these are ongoing long-term research project but even when the project itself has formally ended the researchers are still thinking about these issues and still writing papers we have a a legacy page online where we collate all the research that's coming out from the immortality project and there are about already about a hundred books and articles that have been published that come out of the immortality project the project ended in 2015 so it's only been three or four years and so I anticipate that there'll be another hundred articles and books that in some way or another were sparked by the research people did with the support of the immortality project yes I've taught a course I as I mentioned I started a big introductory course at Yale called mortal questions and when I came to UC Riverside 31 years ago now I continued to teach immortal questions course and excuse me and it's not necessarily a large lecture course now it's capped I think a 30 or 40 but it deals with death immortality and near-death experiences as well as other topics sometimes I talk about God sometimes I talk about the meaning in life it's an undergraduate intermediate level course and I think it's always of course that the students get involved in and they get excited about and it's always difficult to get into I know that I often have a waiting list or people who are sitting in on the course I think it's something that we all are interested in every human being just by virtue of being a human being is a meaning seeking creature wonders about death wonders what happens after we die so people are really interested in this course not everybody is happy with what they learned many people would want to learn more many people would want to learn less but I think they all really get involved in the course and I love teaching it I've also taught an undergraduate capstone seminar specifically on near-death experiences specifically going through a book I wrote with one of the with the postdoc from the immortality the immortality project Benjamin Mitchell Yellin we wrote a book called understanding visions of the afterlife near-death experiences understanding visions of the after 11 so we went through that book chapter by chapter with a capstone seminar so I teach it in various different contexts I'm going to teach philosophy one in the fall an introductory philosophy course and I'm thinking of including at least some stuff on near-death experiences yes it's called death immortality and meaning in life and it's broader than the book on near-death experiences near-death experiences are two chapters out of ten so I start trying to tackle this difficult problem of meaning in life and that's just such a hard topic I can't solve that issue I can't tell you what the meaning of life is but I talk about different ways of understanding meaning in life for different theories of it I talk about religious ideas about fulfilling God's purpose or mission for us I talk about more secular ideas about finding your passion and pursuing something that's meaningful not just to yourself but from a broader perspective I talk about the kinds of activities that people think add to meaning in life like committing oneself to something bigger than oneself being active and living your life and not just passive not just being a blob who sits on the sofa and watches TV and I try and figure out what's behind these different ideas about what makes a life meaningful and what makes it less meaningful and it's a really hard question we don't want to be elitist we don't want to say that it's much better to what to read fine novels great novels and listen to great classical music Bach vogner that that's the only way you can live a meaningful life that you can't lead a meaningful life by listening to the Grateful Dead or The Shins we don't want to be elitist we want to try to figure out what is that the core of meaning so then I move on in the new book to set to look at what death is how do you define that and why death is particularly bad for a creature like us who can lead a meaningful life it is bad when an animal dies but is it a tragedy in the same way that it's bad when a human being dies so I look at those questions and if death is bad why wouldn't we choose to be immortal so I look at these issues about whether immortality would be attractive whether it would be a recognizably human life to live forever because we have stages and we have limits and death gives us a kind of energy and motivation to pursue projects and relationships if we had an infinite amount of time would it really be a human lunch so I look at all of those questions then I come back to near-death experiences and I come back at the end to what we can learn from all of this about how to treat elderly people because often we put them in sterile institutional context and they died after heroic medical efforts to keep them going and I think we can learn something about the way we treat elderly people and the way we die from the considerations about immortality about engagement in life and boredom and from near-death experiences so that's what the book is about and it said it's a book that's written to be accessible to a general audience one thing that's totally indisputable is that the reports come from across different cultures and across time like I say they go back to ancient Greece and they have certain patterns certain similarities and it's pretty hard to say that all of these people are alive or all of these people are exaggerating or insincere there are these patterns they report an out-of-body experience they abort that report traveling to a light or toward a river that guards a domain they report contact with respected elders or mentors or deceased family members or religious figures now they're different in different cultures so in a Hindu culture people will see Hindu gods and goddesses in a Christian tradition they're likely to see Jesus or Mary or a Christian religious figure so they're definitely different in Japan they don't see a light at the end of the tunnel but they see a rock garden and that's probably because in Japan there's there's the view that when you get older one comforting nice thing to do is to purchase some land with friends or with your family and tend it tend to rock garden there that's a comforting way to think about what you'll do in your older age in our culture in all Western cultures we have the the trope there's always light at the end of the tunnel that's the hopeful thing so we are mine somehow grasps that story and we see a light at the end of the tunnel in Japan the mind grasps the rock garden but what you see at a deeper level our patterns there's similarities the mind there's an out-of-body experience the mind grasps something comforting there's a travelogue I like to call it the trip of an after a lifetime and they're similar so researchers have to take those seriously unless they think everybody's lying now there's a separate question as what what as to what the meaning of these are did they prove that there's a heaven do they prove that there's an afterlife that's a different question and to me that's not a scientific question that's a philosophical chord that's a human question I myself am NOT a religious person I grew up in a Jewish family but I do not practice Judaism I am NOT a religious person I totally respect religion I think it's one of the great repositories of human wisdom and beauty art music architecture the stories religious stories often have morals that we can learn from and they're they're deeply important but I myself have a more secular orientation and I also think there's wisdom and beauty and secular literature and art and architecture and music religion is not the only Avenue to meaning in life I therefore have quite a bit of anxiety or at least concern about what will happen to me after I die sometimes I wish I could believe that there's an afterlife I mean I think I've been a pretty good guy not perfect but I think I I think God would recognize if God existed that I've tried my best and I've learned from my mistakes why would a perfectly good God send me to hell so I wish I were religious because that would give me some comfort and you know when in a Christian funeral or memorial service really if the people believe that the deceased individual has been good they shouldn't be grieving because the individual is going to be united with God that's the best possible situation they're grieving really because they've lost that individual they're grieving for themselves so I wish I did have that view so that's why thinking about death and thinking about meaning in life is important and that's why I try to keep in mind that I won't be there to suffer after I die even though it's kind of worrisome to think that I will go out of existence at least I know I won't be in torment or suffering and the like I say the one of the morals of near-death experiences is that that last journey perhaps the most daunting and scary journey from life to death will be guided and mentored I will be surrounded by companions and loved ones if I've lived a good life if I've loved there will be love in the end and actually now our our methods for pain control are better and so there's a real chance you know I used to think death is gonna be terrible dying is gonna be terrible there's gonna be pain I'm gonna be in the hospital it's gonna be miserable I don't think that any way any anymore I don't think that way I think death can be even beautiful dying can be almost ecstatic some people report at the end they kind of let go and they experience a kind of beauty and then after I'm dead I won't be there to suffer so even from a secular point of view I think you can you can be reassured and I also think we can learn about the meaning of life or how to live at least a more meaningful life from thinking about from thinking about death and from thinking about near-death experiences because I think we do want to be in contact with something bigger than ourselves not necessarily a heavenly being although that's one way to think about it but a project like science or philosophy or seeking justice or creating great arts something bigger than ourselves something that can be recognized by others as worthwhile and something that as we're dying we can be proud of when we have our life review so those are my thoughts it's very hard and I can tell you why it's so difficult it's because in many cases there's no way to confirm or disprove what is said it's one of these contexts like religious experience in some cases at least where no one else can verify or falsify what you say and therefore there that there's a huge literature about near-death experiences detailed reports but frequently are in the most most of these cases there's no independent empirical scientific way of figuring out whether it's true now they're sincere I'm sure they're sincere most of them are sincere there are some famous cases where people have made stories up in order to write a book or a movie I do a movie and make money there famous cases like that but I'd say most people are sincere but whether they actually saw a religious figure a Buddhist I mean excuse me a Hindu religious god or goddess whether they actually saw Jesus as Colton Burpo the young boy who had a near-death experience reported he was reported seeing Jesus and there was a famous film made of this heaviness for real a book and a film heaviness for real how can we verify that he actually saw Jesus this is not the kind of thing that we can independently empirically verify now having said that there are some near-death experiences and this is what makes them so fascinating or one reason they're fascinating where we can independently verify so there's a there are famous cases where people are under anesthesia general anesthesia or perhaps partial anesthesia and they're having surgeries and when they regain wakeful consciousness after the anesthesia's weren't worn off they report conversations of the doctors or the nurses they say the doctor complained that that there was a problem with a vein or whatever and they couldn't have known this really without having some sort of out-of-body experience or at least it seems that way so those are the really fascinating ones there's a famous case where someone was having an operation and when he regained wakeful consciousness the nurses were wondering what where his dentures were and he said oh you put them in that drawer there and that happened when he was not wakeful he conscious now you could say some of these are coincidences some of them may be the individual registered the in subconsciously and then was able to articulate it later or maybe the gentleman with the missing dentures so nurses put other people's dentures in you know the drawers near their beds but there are many reports where we we can verify the contents as being true the the problem is we can't be sure how the individual got the information did the Inspira information come in some understandable naturalistic way or did it have to come supernaturally so it is frustrating and challenging but the one thing I would say is I'm a philosopher I'm used to dealing with frustrating intellectual problems that can't be resolved by just straightforwardly looking at the world and saying yes the dentures are there or that kind of thing we're kind of skilled at being patient with problems that are difficult to resolve and it kind of keeps us in business - well my interest first of all I would like to study if I can much more in death depth the reports of near-death experiences where they are accurate they are reporting things that actually took place I'd like to study and try and figure out how the information got through the individual it's very difficult because we can't repeat or replicate the the situation we have to just look further into what the specifics were I would like to know more and if I saw certain patterns that would be interesting to me intellectually but stepping back from that because that would be very difficult to do my main point is to try and figure out the meaning of near-death experiences and what they can teach for how we should live our lives and I think once we ship from interpreting them as about the afterlife to thinking of themselves as a travel log as a journey then we can learn something about our lives because our lives our journeys or our their their sets of sub journeys when you think about it we we we actually take a journey from our mother's body to the external world and then we take a journey from the family to a broader context of friendships and that at some point we take a journey from the family to the world maybe we go to college maybe we get a job maybe we travel maybe we struggle but where we're now independent of or at least not physically with our family and then perhaps at college where we're now mentored not so much by our parents although they're there but by our sorority sisters or our fraternity brothers or our professors and then at some point we graduate and we go on to the next so we can think of life as a journey or set of journeys and again maybe this sounds trite but it's not so much the destination but the journey that matters and that comes out as I said in the epic of gilgamesh or the literature on immortality or near-death experiences where we're almost at the gate and then we wake up and one of the main things that we learn I think is that it's important to have friends and loved ones and companions and family surrounding us working as teams helping each other to excel having companionship and guy and learning from trusted elders so guidance and trust and companionship another thing that I think we can learn about living our lives is that it's important to keep mine's focused on something hopeful or positive that no matter what we're experiencing we have cancer we've been disappointed in a relationship we didn't get into the college we wanted to get into whatever it is we struggle but we do best when we can focus on something hopeful something positive something that helps us to transcend the the problems of the moment so that's kind of still very undeveloped I'd like to think about it much more but the bottom line is I think we can learn a lot about how to live our lives from thinking about immortality from thinking about death another point I'd like to make is there's a tradition of literature that are memoirs about dying Christopher Hitchens has one there's a famous neuro surgeon at Stanford Peter Kelly Nietzsche who wrote a very fascinating memoir about facing death and how it was he was young and he was a very successful neuro scientist neuro surgeon and he was diagnosed with cancer and he did die but it was all about facing death but more importantly all of these memoirs are about what's important in life and looking back yes part of them is how do I think what will happen to me after I die what will that last period be like but a lot of these memoirs are about life and about living and what you value about living so that's for me that's the main point of studying this it's been great to teach at UCR I've been here for 31 years and I love the diversity I love the students who often have a passion to succeed in life - to get to a better place perhaps than their parents but they also offer you're right different perspectives these issues they're from different religious backgrounds they're not just Christian they're not just Jewish they're Hindu they're Buddhists they're all sorts of different from different religious backgrounds and there are many people who are agnostic and atheist one thing that intrigued me is when I first got to UCR I would ask people I taught philosophy of religion and I taught introd I thought introduction to philosophy and I'd sometimes ask people raise your hands if you self-described as religious and the majority of the students did I recently asked again and the majority of the students didn't that was interesting to me I didn't know how to explain it but these things change but I've learned from the diversity here at UCR but I'll tell you I don't know if this comes from diversity or just because there was a young woman a student in my mortal questions class who was very curious and asked a wonderful question she asked something I hadn't really thought about she said well if the soul because many people think that near-death experiences prove that the soul is different from the brain or the mind is not identical to the brain and and detaches itself and floats above the body and then takes this journey toward the heavenly realm what she said is if that's right then why doesn't everybody have a near-death experience everybody in a near-death context the thing is only about eight five to ten percent of the people in near-death contexts like they've had a cardiac arrest or they've been in a car accident or they've fallen only about ten percent report a near-death experience so why should that be if the soul was different from the body why does the soul sometimes escape and detach itself and sometimes not I thought that was a great question and that you know as a professor that's what you want you want to learn from your students and in 31 years at UCR I've learned a great deal from my graduate students and from my undergraduates they ask great questions there's another question related to that that students ask me is why do some people have positive near-death experiences and some people have negative ones are the people who have negative ones more inclined to be depressed to be guilty to be shameful are they fought from fire and brimstone religious backgrounds are the ones who have positive experiences more from you might call them Universalist religious traditions in which everybody gets saved and I don't know the answer to that that's something again I hope one of them gets a grant and they work and they figure these things out we have a lot to learn but bottom line the diversity of our student body adds to the richness of teaching here and we all learn I think the faculty really learns from that you

Channel: Univ. of California, Riverside

Views: 914,275

Keywords: UC Riverside, University of California, UCR

Id: 626UaGNMdMk

Length: 65min 44sec (3944 seconds)

Published: Wed Jun 12 2019