The Neuroscience of Near Death Experiences – Dr Tamara Russell, PhD

[Music] so thank you now for about that warm introduction and definitely I would recommend to check out the mindfulness center of excellence webpage for the variety of innovations that are taking place under this umbrella of being thoughtful about what it means to develop our awareness what it means to evolve our consciousness how we can do that skillfully and where are the places that we can get some teaching and understanding of how to do these things that may be liable beyond the mainstream of our scientific endeavor and I have a resource list which I will circulate via Nile after this presentation and you're also warmly welcome to use a copy of the slides which can be provided for you afterwards and I suppose they were a bit late coming because I've recently been working on this near-death experience virtual reality project and thinking quite deeply about what happens in the mind and brain in these experiences and so when Nile said oh do you want to do a talk about the neuroscience of NDEs I said oh yeah that'd be that'd be great yeah we've really been thinking a lot about this topic recently but actually this is this is a challenging topic I realized after that hasty agreeing to do the talk because we're grappling with some pretty serious issues here around the nature of consciousness and and where is the meeting of mind and brain what's what's sometimes referred to as the hard problem but I'm willing to I'm willing to have a go at this and I can't really claim to be an expert philosopher of mind the neuroscience work that I do now is more consultation rather than active research but I do have a kind of particular perspective and and and orientation over a landscape where lots of different tools and techniques from ancient and modern from east and west from arts and science begin to mix and meld and kind of bubble up perhaps into something new and I really want to share with you today the breadth of that to help you maybe think of it differently or or open up awareness to some of the things that are going on in this space particularly if we have a wider aperture and we can tolerate a little bit of uncertainty discomfort or in our process so we get a show of hands how many people in the room have either themselves experienced a near-death experience or know somebody know somebody that has yeah hands up okay great so a few hands going up there and and perhaps some numbers there that maybe might represent the frequency of this phenomena that's that's in the general population when we actually stop to ask and listen to people's experiences and then I guess another kind of metaphor that I want to bring in here is this notion of we're here in London and I don't know how many people here were born in London or lived in London a long time how many I know London's such as super diverse yeah so we've got some we might have some old-school Londoners here and if you talk to them in the break or in the pub afterwards they'll probably be able to tell you that there's this kind of like north-south London divide yeah the people that live in the North Sea they kind of rarely go south and they find it all a bit odd and weird down there and they can't really cope and the people that live in the South kind of go north they're never mighty stone west and you know we have this kind of tendency to to split actually and I was trying to really think about you know what the near-death experience brings in terms of the challenge to consciousness you know which on the one hand and maybe it's north maybe it's south is a position that says well actually when the brain when the brain dies when when the physical matter dies there is no more consciousness and actually what we need to do is try and explain these phenomena on the basis of just understanding the biology of things and how these phenomena relate to the biology and then what that means when the biology ceases to be functioning and then on the other side maybe we can call that South London you know we've got a multitude of spiritual checked spiritual traditions what we might call contemplative technologies and different perspectives that are coming at the same experiences but from a very different viewpoint and so I'm going to use this metaphor of the Tower Bridge here because I think we want to begin to move to a position where we're able to accommodate both sides and both narratives in order to kind of really grapple with this very interesting and provocative topic of near-death experiences and what people report and maybe an option for us to to meet somewhere in the middle in the service of trying to understand and go deeper and and be helpful be helpful to people so that's always really one of the overarching intentions how can we use our science how can we use our understanding to be helpful to people and particularly to be helpful to them in times of challenge and crisis like having a near-death experience or going through trauma or or having some challenges in life and so this is kind of really what we're grappling with this kind of you know is the mind in the brain or do we have some other consciousness that can be located elsewhere so let's get a quick sense of who's in the room in terms of this position so I'm going to ask three questions like are you kind of on the the brain side are you more on the non-local side or if you you not quite decided so hands up people here that are kind of thinking okay my sense is that consciousness is something to do with the brain that the brain produces yeah okay good yeah yeah and how about on the other side I guess people that are kind of saying no I'm fully open to the fact that there could be this non-local stuff going on and I'm not really convinced yet and my own personal experience is telling me something different yeah great great great and what about the kind of don't knows sitting in the Middle's yes let's get right on that fence there but as my friend said if you're even on the fence that means you've already made a move yeah it was a great line that's me my dear friend Kathy he said if you're already on the fence you kind of already gone there so this is what we're going to be playing with today and I suppose that that is some of the language that I use when we get to these nitty-gritty questions there are a lot of very amazing very focused kind of serious scientists who are doing this work a depth you know far beyond my my musings and and what I'm intending to share with you today I will be picking and weaving and and pointing you to some of the people that have inspired my thinking in this work if you do want to go deeper but we're going to be playful with this and and the intention is to to help you kind of shake up things a little bit in the brain and mind and maybe go away with a few questions to reflect on after the talk but it's helpful to come into this space in a mindful way so I just invite you to join me now this this talk will be interactive it will be embodied because this is how we can cope well when we're faced with challenging questions and things that are going to upset the system a bit maybe by challenging some of our assumptions and our needs so I just invite you maybe to take a moment to pause and if you feel comfortable to shut your eyes and let's just transition mindfully into this dialogue about near-death experiences what happens to our consciousness when it seems that we're dead or dying and let's just take a breath in and out to see what we bring with us into this conversation the beliefs and assumptions from our training or education or culture I'm just kind of honoring those allowing them to be there but being cognizant of them our training our early developmental experiences what the people who were important to us in our lives told us about these things taught us or shared and having acknowledged that just clocked it no need to do anything more just clock it notice let's come to here and now the contact of the body with the chair and the sounds of the room the sense of the body in the heart the space of the room and the nearness of the other people around us here now breathing in breathing out and from this position mindful of what we bring into the discussion grounded present through the breath and the body setting intentions for our time together and a suggestion for orienting mind and brain towards curiosity courage and compassion really being on the alert for those moments when we lose curiosity we get alarmed or we move to a position of judging intending curiosity courage compassion I'm just taking one or two breaths to finish the exercise and transition so very briefly now I'll oriented you to some of my work which really does span a number of sectors including mainstream academic neuroscience and clinical psychology but also a deep passion for the martial arts and and more laterally diving into contemplative traditions and contemplative technologies for exploring awareness and part of that journey you know really has been changes in my ways of thinking about brain and mind and when I first went to the Institute of Psychiatry I remember I was super excited I just saw all these brains in jars I mean I think I was a really pure materialist I was like wow here's all the answers I can figure it all out you just need to work out what the brain does and then you've got it all sorted and as part of that life which somehow seems a million miles away now I was editor of a book methods in mind and I mean you know even to admit that we didn't even really kind of have the discussion about putting mind on the front of that book you know it was kind of a given that that brain equals mind and even though there's some evolution in the neuroscience laboratories around the world now in part stemmed by this interest in mindfulness and contemplative traditions you know there's there's been a lack of really kind of checking of the foundations of some of these technologies that we are now relying on to give us the kind of the facts and the truths and I suppose I can speak to that position from from having been involved in really trying to understand the evolution of these technologies EEG fMRI pet studies all these different methods that we have for trying to understand the brain and the behavior of people yeah we've got a lot of information and the technology advances and we get more and more processing power and the pictures that we get look more and more compelling and wowing but there is some fundamental underpinnings of some of this work that really needs to be questioned now and I think now is the time to begin to do that you know the take-home message really is I think that even the the scientists that are really trying to be open and and look at both sides of the question are saying you know there are some fundamental assumptions that have been made about brain and mind within the neuro scientific community that don't currently hold up so just to bear that in mind as we go through it's not throwing out the baby with the bathwater it's not saying science is wrong but it is about taking a very critical and open view around what's helpful from this narrative and and what do we no longer need and I just wanted to say that this is a really great book if you're interested in looking at these issues jeffrey gray a former head of department where I did my PhD and what I loved about him is he was really talking about consciousness as something arising and because it has a causal role is it serving something for the human species and it helps us he says with our language our science and our appreciation of beauty and I just pop that in there because as we go through the talk today and we talk about near-death experiences it seems clear that we need to be using some different tools and maybe a different side of our brain in order to understand some of these phenomena and this is not then the language of science and concepts and analytics and and kind of strategies we're now moving into the language of gist metaphor poetry movement expressiveness and actually the arts have a lot to offer us here for helping us to understand this an Allgood work of course comes from collaboration so these CyArk collaborations are are really kicking off now and I think this is a great time to be living because we're beginning to honor all the different ways that humans can understand the world around them and of course these are our teachers so I really encourage you as we go through to the session today to have this kind of child's view you know what would this what would we be thinking about here if we were able to look at this as if for the first time as if for the first time and let me tell you I mean you know as somebody with two PhDs it's actually really hard to do this especially when you've really really trained your mind and brain in a particular model I love working with creative collaborator I love being challenged but it is challenging yeah when someone's poking you and saying your whole concept of how you understand the world is maybe not quite what you think it was this isn't this is a pain point often yeah and then especially when you have to say we'll look what what do I need to let go of from my model in order to accommodate something from another model even when that other model is like whoa what are they doing over there that's like a bit that's like a bit weird that's a bit odd you know we don't do that we don't do that in our clinical services we don't do that in our psychology room psychology rooms but you know many many minds are really you know becoming clear that actually some of these assumptions need questioning and actually if you thought science was certain and maybe you just need to check that a little bit because there could be some erroneous thinking there and what's coming out now actually particularly through the mindfulness work is that there are lots of people who are trying to approach this from a different view whether it's contemplative traditions like meditation or yoga many many different ways that people are trying to understand what happens in the conscious experience without the need to draw on the brain as a model at all so these are kind of from the Tibetan traditions very very precise methods of kind of training consciousness kind of very integrative methods of using body and mind and consciousness together in order to reach altered states we can look as well - perhaps shamanic traditions the use of audio stimuli - to provoke certain brain States that allow us to access states that look and feel a bit like what is described in the near-death experience you know and beyond yeah and sometimes maybe for the kind of neuro scientific colleagues you know this stuff kind of gets a little bit out there and yet we see that there is within even the medical community in the academic community human here in the UK interest in the psychedelic Renaissance and particularly the use of of psychedelics and things that kind of pharmacologically induce these sorts of experiences for helping people to transform and heal and that's ultimately again that's the endgame helping people to transform and heal and that's one of the really interesting things that comes out with the NDE is that when people have these near-death experiences they often come back very transformed yeah they're really clear about their purpose in life they've had a sense of kind of who they are they're clear about what they need to let go of about what's important and they do tend to come back sometimes with this very more world oriented service passion yeah they come back with a more world centric view rather than a self-centered view and and we'll we'll kind of touch on that as we go along because I think that's really one of the important things that inspired me in the work that I'm doing with the deaf incubator is how can we support people to access these transformative experiences without the need for having a heart attack or a major life scare or you know the cancer scare or the or the heart attack these are the things that normally propel people into these expanded states of awareness that then allows us to to kind of revisit our life and to find a different sort of meaning in what we're doing and again I just point to some of these things you know there's people that are interested in this mixing and blending of approaches and the mind and life Institute is something that I've been connected with for some time and their conferences are amazing where they bring together dialogue particularly between Eastern and Western traditions they have a slight focus more on the Tibetan Buddhism and I was fortunate enough to take part in a lot of mind and life event but it was this interdisciplinary event looking at states of consciousness with the Dalai Lama in in San Paulo I think that was in 2011 and that really for me was the opening point actually for food for diving into this other world that looked a bit different from the neuroscience labs and the library at the Institute of Psychiatry at Kings but really was was another world one where people were talking about altered states of consciousness talking about all sorts of different phenomena and actually saying we have methods and tools and technologies can allow people to get to these types of altered states where there is transformative potential at the other end of it and fundamentally what this is about is what's what's your lens what lens of attention have you got on this question and very basic category there or very basic classification might be near or far and much of our modern world we have this very very close focus to what's going on it's kind of the fear-induced narrow lens of attention that's kind of all about me and my safety and protection and what I've got this kind of separateness that we're experiencing at the moment in quite dramatic ways all over the world and actually this kind of notion that we can widen the aperture of attention we can kind of do it slowly perhaps if we're in a in a mindfulness training or in some sort of training program we practice slowly widening the lens of attention maybe we just get a different sort of perspective with ageing yeah this is why we call them the wise elders yeah they got that longer perspective the broader view they've got a bit of a landscape going on here they're not quite so so close to things and then what happens in a trauma and specifically in an NDE is this you know very rapid expansion of the lens of awareness and I'm going to talk a bit about some of the the brain networks that I believe might be helpful for us to examine a bit more and one particularly called the salience network yeah this is the network that kind of taps us on the shoulder and asks us to pay more attention when something unexpected happens so the salience network is really important because it kind of says look hey something important important is happening and if there's a quality of fear around it first of all we do tend to go quite narrow because we're like oh my god I need to be safe but then another thing that can happen is actually we can pop very very wide with our awareness and some suggestion that that might be happening when people have a psychosis experience coming from trauma their salience network has kind of just popped open and they're suddenly experiencing the world in a very different way not only a lot of their own stuff coming up but also accessing different realms of consciousness many of which do sound quite similar to the reports that come from very experienced meditators who've spent decades and decades of practice trying to access these states and this is relevant because some of the things that are experienced by the nd years are are these same things and I guess that's that cross-disciplinary piece that I kind of bring but this warning that when we when we widen when we open the lens of attention we can meet things that our mind and brain just doesn't know about and isn't familiar and so we need to go gently in this work particularly if we're having conversations around beliefs yeah because people have beliefs they hold them in different ways and that is important in terms of how we language our discussions how we come to a shared understanding and how we talk about experiences and within the NDE research what seems to be coming out is people are saying well you know the way that people interpret these experiences and how they express and communicate about these experiences is related to their early developmental experiences and how their brain and mind has been conditioned so those that maybe have come from a family where there was a strong faith practice are likely to use language related to their faith practices when they describe some of these more ethereal experiences that are going on yet there is also a suggestion and eben Alexander particularly talks about this that there is still something else that's there that's beyond that yeah so we might call that the kind of the transcendent experience there's something beyond that that that often doesn't have words that we can't quite language people need to use our or metaphor or poetry to kind of capture the meaning of their experience and so in that requires it requires a gentleness and it requires courage and so you know from a neuroscience point of view we're talking about something called the salience network it's this combination of like what we're feeling and how our brain is kind of choosing to orient our attention to things and it comes into play when we meet something novel something that might be dangerous the shock and awe Network is what I call this because your salience network comes into play moments of shock and moments of all and that's kind of what the near-death experience is for many people it's like a massive shock yeah because usually much of the research on near-death experiences is coming from the cardiac units yeah these are people that were not planning to have a massive rapid awakening or awareness enhancing experience usually that's sometimes what makes these narratives so compelling from people is you know they're not you know they're just kind of on their way to work right and then just in their normal lives and they're doing the do and they're taking the kids and all the rest of it to school and dealing with the day to day and then very suddenly very rapidly that they're popped out into these different states of consciousness they're having all sorts of experiences that they've never had before and so naturally their brain is like wow what's that and yet some of those experiences are also all full yeah they are full of awe and you know there's a few features of the nd which I'll come to in one second which people just like I couldn't believe what I was experiencing and so when the salience network pops wide open the the hypothesis I'm working with is actually we get this possibility to engage differently with our default mode network and so this is the network that kind of stores our memories that holds together are our personal narrative our sense of who we are over time it includes the hippocampus as a key structure which some of you may know is is the is the memory region of the brain and so this is important right because one of the features of an ende is the life review yeah people talk about a life review I suddenly all my life flashed before me it was like a video it was kind of some pictures I saw myself Theresa May running through the cornfield you know and and all sorts of other experiences majority of people do report kind of pleasant memories not everybody the research suggests between 15 and 30 percent of people don't have a positive experience when they have an NDE and and one reason for that in my hypothesis is actually well you know your hippocampus is basically just going like that and it's going to spit out the memories that are probably closest to the top or perhaps the ones that have the most emotional tone wrapped around them so when we encode our memories you know we really encode deeply the ones that have got good stuff attached to them and bad stuff attached to them so if we imagine that in a near-death experience something in the something in the hippocampus degrades you know then I'm suddenly gonna start seeing my memories popping up and I might meet the ones where I felt bad or ashamed or guilty or happy or joyful you know so it's going to be how the person that I hurt the birth of my first child the death of my grandparent you know you you might you might hypothesize that you get those sorts of memories coming up first and yet we also have reports of of people kind of connecting with past lives yeah and we know that there's there's something that that's kind of very often reported within the kind of non-local consciousness literature of particularly children having experiences of past lives so you know does that depend on the hippocampus not sure yeah are these things stored in a kind of physical structure well maybe some of them some of them but the notion of memory and remembering is important in this work and so the nd you really is a challenge to us it is actually quite common so some statistics here from ions a really great source of information if you want to go in and dig deeper and actually you know the majority of this work is now from the cardiac units particularly after resuscitation came into effect after the 1960s so people were surviving these very traumatic incidences where often they were kind of brain-dead or they went into these coma states of consciousness but there's a number of reasons why you might have an NDA and I think critically this one here as well as thinking that you might die can also trigger an NDA so that's important because that we're right in the language of mind there now yeah so this is mind acting on brain maybe rather than here which could be brain acting or mind fainting is the most common cause but most of the research as I say coming from cardiac arrest and so here are some of the features seeing a tunnel of light seeing a loved one who has passed away very common feeling a sense of bliss euphoria oneness with the universe heightened sense of cognition real vividness and stimuli often a great sense of love of feeling held of trust there is this experience of reviewing your life that feels kind of like it can be done quite rapidly and then this almost like this out-of-body experience people talk about feeling like the soul has left the body something has left the body but as I said not not necessarily Pleasant for everyone and that's important to acknowledge and dr. Raymond Moody is really a kind of go-to guy he coined the term near-death experience in some of his early writings and he has these nine points so again very similar usually a strange sound something about feeling peace and and painless nurse particularly those that are in trauma they report that they no longer feel the pain out-of-body the tunnel rising map sense of the body moving meeting kind of beings with light beings of light the life review and often a reluctance to return and the other thing that's really intriguing to me from a neuroscience point of view as well is the often there's a choice there's a choice about whether to return or not many people who experience them you say well I kind of had option to come back or not or like there was a lever that I could pull that would allow me to come back into my body and and kind of complete my mission and you know that's important too because people use this language I had this experience where it was I was invited to consider what am i doing why am I here what is my purpose Who am I all of these very fundamental spiritual questions right there the starting point of anybody on the spiritual path yeah Who am I and what am I doing here so there's something about these experience that really catalyze or catapult people and you know is it just stuff emanating from a brain yeah it's a bunch of chemicals or like the brain is hallucinating when the brain dies you know it's clear that even when there's a flatline EEG we don't really know what's happening in the in the more subcortical in the lower parts of the brain so you know the EEG is kind of measuring with cortical electrodes and then people say okay well there's a flatline there you know that means the brain is dead but that doesn't necessarily ring true and I guess the more nuanced argument is saying well what's happening down here in the brainstem you know we've got this quite primitive consciousness down here in these deep regions of the brain that we can't access with EEG and there's also some super interesting bits that we can't access our current resolution with fMRI and you know the cortex is great but quite a lot of the quite a lot of the meditation literature and even in my own martial arts tradition Bruce Lee don't think feel yeah so he's really pointing to us giving us some top tips which is we've got all this fancy-pants thinking that we can do great but I mean much of the meditation work is about stripping that away do less do less do less feel more do less sense more so actually it may be that some of them or juicy stuff is happening down here and the techniques that we've got measuring flat lie yuuji for example that that in the surface of the brain I mean it's interesting but I wonder if we're looking at putting our attention in the right place and I love this guy fellow Canadian half Canadian I am and while there Penfield from the university of montreal he was you know he's a you know neurosurgeon or a physiologist working for decades and he says I was working as a scientist trying to prove that the brain accounted for the mind and demonstrating as many brain mechanisms and mechanisms as possible hoping to show how the brain did so and he was doing like single-cell recordings in like direct single-cell recording of the brain so this guy was right up close to the phenomena of brain and he said in the end I conclude that there is no good evidence in spite of new methods that the brain alone can carry out the work that the mine does yeah so you know we need to listen these are some of the elders of science and I suggest you catch them when they're on their way out about to retire find these people yeah because they get quite bold with their statements in a way that they often can't be when they're inside and mainstream institution and that's often the case and Peter fennec is a great kind of hero of mine he's a collaborator on our death incubator project and he's one of those you know he had a very mainstream career working in epilepsy coming across all this amazing data about seizures and God experiences and oneness experiences from people having temporal lobe epileptic seizures but he didn't really start flying until he kind of left and retired and and now he's really a proponent of I guess a non-local conscious experience and you know this is what this new edge is inviting us to consider if we were able to consider you know what what does this work tell us and it's not new you know these reports have been around for four centuries you know there's always been interesting kind of sigh what we call sigh phenomena you know even to the extent that the US military invested millions of dollars in various programs for remote viewing for example or precognition psychokinesis who knows maybe some of this work is still going on but these are these are not new ideas and not new ideas but there's a resistance to them because maybe they they frighten us a little bit but my sense is that that's changing and so we want them to be really open-minded and again I've been Alexander is somebody I really would point you to his book a mindful universe is a great description of his experience of having an NDE and he comes from he's a neurologist yeah so he's got a really great dual perspective both of the kind of awesome experience of death and the transformative potential of connecting to this sense of oneness and and purpose but at the same time a good grounding in the neuroscience and this is the gap that we want to look at and this is where I believe NDEs have got something to really offer us yeah let's let's look what is that thing that's happening between the brain and the mind so these are the people that I think can maybe help us when we're trying to go into this topic and get an understanding of what's brain what's mind how can your science help how can the other traditions help and so as I said Evan Alexander's book is one of my top once it's not the only one I mean if you go to the ions web page you can find tons and tons so these are just my my top recommendations I also really like Jill Bolte Taylor has any hands up here who's seen that video okay great I'm gonna show a couple of clips from that I mean it's a bit weird like me giving a talks showing somebody else's talk but she really says it in a way that I can't so she was a neuroscientist who had a stroke she basically had a mindful stroke and she watched herself having a stroke and I think it was what was curious and amazing about that experience was because she had some prior knowledge when the experience started to happen to her she didn't panic and that's my top takeaway for you guys you know this is the impetus for that for the death incubator it's like we are all going to die and something will happen with our consciousness so let's do some training and have a bit of psychoeducation around that before we do it not new for me to say that yeah the Buddhists certainly have been saying that for for millennia you know preparation for death death practices all the main thinkers artists life it's like a therapists great thinkers of the world agree regular contemplation of death and preparation for death is something that lets you live fully so it's not a topic to be shied away from but if we kind of have a sense of what's going on that really helps us not to panic and for me one of my hypotheses is is like when you're in that transition from brain to mind or you're making that leap of faith from brain to mind it really helps if you're not panicking because if you're panicking your brain is in a whole different kind of hormonal state that will just change everything it'll be full of cortisol and adrenaline and yeah thinking will have a particular flavor and then I like this as well so Marjorie's book here infinite awareness so this again was a kind of a scientific mind that had an awakening experience and I suppose when I'm reading her book you know reflecting on my own journey with this which as I pointed to you before it's not always an easy one when you're coming from a very strong training background lots of undoing but Evan Thompson as well if those of you that have kind of come across embodied cognition may be familiar with him he's really jumping into this topic and there's some resources including some podcasts that I've got on a list for you if you want to dive into that but I haven't read the full one I've read some excerpts of his book that's on Amazon it's a little ebook very quick and easy to buy and then this book waking dreaming being trying to look at that that almost like that liminal space between science and spirituality between a biological model and a spiritual model and just increasing the range of our understanding to a biopsychosocial model and it's coming you know it's coming in in in individuals who are interested in collaborating between the scientific and the traditions Tara Brack is the top recommended practitioner clinical psychologist also a Buddhist teacher and she really weaves these things together well to help us understand and Evan has this lovely phrase staying with the open question staying with the open question and I again in this moment of transition we've had this kind of polarization we're now trying to come back together and it's really important that we stay long enough in this mess of not knowing because if we go too quickly to our solutions then I think we're going to not get the best out of both worlds and really make something that can that can gel together and it's not easy because it invites us to to have courage to be curious to to be in a space of not knowing and there's nothing a brain likes less than uncertainty let me tell you it likes to know what's going on and some of us have that trait more than others the controlling monkeys and learning to let go anyone that's tried to do it is hard right but if we want to go there and some people are really are saying you know what actually there is a need to blend but actually we also really want to now embrace another way we're interested in bracing another way and some people have kind of really jumped into that non-local medicine energy medicine consciousness ways of working with healing that are becoming more and more popular some of the work that that I've been doing in the various collaborations around you know opening up to a biopsychosocial spiritual model that allows us to have conversations with people having these different kinds of experiences whether it's in a psychotic trauma related psychotic experience whether it's within the context of taking pharmacological compounds whether it's in a kind of religious experience mystical experiences or whether it's from something like an NDE as a result of a medical procedure how can we talk about these things how can we understand them from a brain point of view and from a spiritual point of view and we need these three things yeah we need these three things curiosity courage and compassion part of what I want to introduce now and then we're going to do a little practice is a little bit sorry I got the wrong way of a model that can help us to understand what's going on so I talked a little bit about the salience network the thing that taps us on the shoulder and says hey something important is going on you better take a look you want to go narrow or you want to go big with that when we go big we get a chance to see some of the stuff that's happening in the space of the mind we get the memories we see the conditioning we understand what's going on a little bit from our own patterning in our history but then something also allows us to kind of keep going up out there into the realm of common shared understanding into the realm of cosmic understanding even and when we're doing that actually we do disconnect from kind of the reality of what's happening here and now and there's that sense that if we can really drop into the present moment then actually the things that I hear around us can begin to fade away and many meditators talk about this and the schemata tradition talks about that sense of withdrawing the senses in order to expand the consciousness and that's maybe something that people are experiencing when they have that out-of-body experience they lose a sense of kind of self that comes through being embodied and they get into a more expanded state of consciousness where the self other boundaries are no longer as obvious and that for me is you know that's part of our default mode Network it's it's not the kind of basic level but it's the part where we learn as kids like I've got my mind you've got your mind my body's here your body's there I've got my intentions you've got your intentions we're all kind of doing we're doing our own things in life we're doing where an ego that does were an identity that does but yet when we go big around this when we pop out of that yes something really shocks us something really surprises us and we go oh my goodness look at that bigger picture we come out of that self identification we come out of that individuation we begin to get into that sense of common humanity compassion practices really tap into this you know there's no i' anymore it's we there's a sense that how I am with myself is how you are with yourself what I do internally maps out into the creation of the reality around me so there's no separation anymore and I call this the bigger why you know we get in touch with the bigger why and people report this in the NDE experiences they say I went through my life review I did some stuff about who I needed to forgive and saw all the people that I'd harmed and you know then I met some kind of beings I was looking above the earth I saw kind of how small I was or I realized how interconnected we all were and then I felt I was being given this invitation to come back and be in the world in a different way and often it is choices about work priorities what's important who's important how am I going to spend my time what am i doing on the planet how are we treating the planet yeah this kind of sense of my whole orientation of life has been shifted and for me my understanding is it's because we've gone from doing yeah which is when we like I have to do things and pay attention to this and think about that and notice that and then get to work and think about that and then notice that and then come back and then I'm doing work and I'm going round and round and round and then it's suddenly like hey tomorrow Paul or guess what you got a cancer scare or guess what you had a heart attack or guess what something really unexpected happen to you breaks your whole routine yeah bridge you out of doing you're not doing anymore you're not working anymore you're not planning anymore you're like wow am I still alive yeah what's going on so it shifts us from this doing into this being mode and it seems like this stays with us stays with us when we come back from a near-death experience people have a catalytic experience that can often really do the work of many decades of meditation practice actually yeah because there's other ways to get to it as I've said you can kind of go the slow and steady route which is like I just get wise with age I get wise with age and experience that's kind of how I'm going into my being mode you can do it through the meditation practices yeah you can do it through movement practices my work is is through the body you can do it through a more rapid expansion with psychedelics and then the near-death experiences is also one version of that so just trying to capture that there that shift from this busyness of doing doing doing doing and then coming out into being and we're going to take a little break now just to let you stand up and and shake your legs but maybe to just be thinking about that you know what the near-death experience work and this mix and blend of the scientific and the spirituality brings to us is this recognition that actually if all of this doing stuff is very abruptly brought to a halt by such a kind of catastrophic and traumatic incident it pops us out into this other kind of realms we need to go through some of our own stuff you know we need to do some of our psychology work we need to do some of our reflections our forgiveness letters on gratitude letters are our life reviews yeah get that work done people I really really recommend that and we'll do that in the in the death incubator but this is kind of the edge of where brain and mind a meeting in my view and after the break we'll come back and we'll we'll do an exercise and then we'll think about well what are the tools that we've got to kind of swim in this in this zone yeah because we can learn a lot about the brain from this thing here the brain can help us understand a little bit about this transitional mode into mind but my suggestion is that we need some other skills and tools if we really want to make sense of some of the more out there elements of the experience of an NDE so let's just pause a moment again I just guide you in a little mini practice and then we'll have a break so just if you feel like closing your eyes or just settling into the body and aware that I've shared a number of things and your task is to see particularly in your body or maybe even in your heart if you can and your mind what landed and how was there a word or a phrase that landed in a way that resonated or something that caused a reaction I'm just using your hippocampus there a light review of the first part of the talk but just see what had the energy of who around it and what had the energy of huh what and anything in between I'm just taking a breath and if you wanted to note down anything that came up for you then maybe we can we can pick that up in the in the Q&A so we're going to pause now for just a comfort break so I'm gonna bring you back in sharing a clip from Jill Bolte Taylor zas stroke of insight talk so this was a neuroscientist who had what in my view was kind of a mindful stroke experience she didn't panic she was able to watch she was able to observe what was going on in her body and she was doing so from a position of a deep scientific knowledge and training about what was happening in her in her brain and in her body and this bit of the clip particularly struck me let's see my body I can't define where I begin and where I end because the atoms and the molecules of my arm blended with the atoms and molecules of the law and only could detect was this energy energy and I'm asking myself what is wrong with me what is going on and in that moment my brain shattered my left hemisphere brain chatter when totally silent just like someone took a remote control and push the mute button total silence and at first I was shocked to find myself inside of a sign mind but then I was immediately captivated by the magnificence of the energy around me and because I could no longer identify the boundaries of my body I felt enormous and expansive I felt at one with all the energy that was and it was beautiful there and then all of a sudden my left hemisphere comes back online and it says to me hey we have a problem we got a problem so it's like okay okay I got a problem but then I immediately drifted right back out consciousness and I sectionally refer to this face as law and so she's here talking about I guess an experience of being acutely aware of that transition from from kind of one type of consciousness to another and here she's she's devoting the concept of the left and the right brain as different modalities that we can use to understand experience on the one hand the language the science that jeffrey Gray talks about in terms of the the rationale for consciousness but then on the other hand this kind of this beauty these things that we can perceive only maybe when we're not thinking about stuff but more so when we're when we're feeling and many of the things that she described are are things that are talked about when people have a near-death experience so we're going to do like a mini a mini meditation now to to give you a sense of what are some of the key features of a near-death experience so if you will it would be a little sort of pretend near-death experience in a guided meditation for you so we'll be using the imagination will be using visualization and I'll be using my voice as a guidance to just give you a sense a little mini snippet I suppose of what are the things that people report and this is the work of Penny Satori who's very well known near-death experience researcher a nurse who worked for many years on the cardiac units and as I said this is where a lot of the data comes from but also point you to the ions website and for many other reports and videos and things you want to dive a bit deeper so I will be showing some pictures which you can look at as well but if you want to sit with your eyes closed will go for about maybe 5 5 5 or 7 minutes or so with this practice so I just encourage you to to come into a posture now that's comfortable for you and and almost begin to imagine that moment where you're lying or sitting and there's a sense that there's a part of self that might rise up from the physical body having a sense of the mind moving upwards and outwards and the option at any point to just disengage from the exercise if you need to but seeing now if you can have that experience of moving your mind up and out expanding awareness beyond the physical body and aware as you do that you may bump into the expanded bodies of the others in the room sensing connecting bringing this attitude of friendliness to that and kindness and we're doing this quickly but imagine if you can then a tunnel with a light those with meditation practice may be able to visualize this more easily a sense of visualizing light in the mind in the body in the heart and having the impulse to move towards the light an understanding that this is the way to move towards the steps maybe fast or slow often the experience is something that has a quality of speed and then time slows down from this position getting a sense of the body and the mind being somewhere else having this helicopter view or astronaut view not only of the body here sitting not only of the venue in London and England Europe but looking down on the whole world mind observing the earth zooming in zooming out recognizing how small we are how fragile the earth is small the earth is in comparison to everything else that's there and when the mind reach reaches these states and expanded states of consciousness here maybe we find that time changes the perception of time changes such that we can do a review of our whole life very quickly maybe just asking yourself now in a light way what am I most proud of in my life what am I most ashamed of in my life what can I let go of should be free from those narratives and conditioning and what's really important now for me in this moment and in the process of the life review we might meet some emotions strong emotions both positive and more challenging and an invitation in this moment to open to the whole breadth of our emotional life without fear in order to clear clear that baggage clear those narratives in order to then approach with this child's view seeing the world with fresh eyes people in Andy's report this connection with are the types of realities symbols fractals geometric patterns codes language and contact in ways that are not familiar to us here including the experience of meeting energy in different forms communicating in different ways being invited to check-in what am I doing here who is this I and why am I here and then coming back from our mini experience holding in mind if we can the memory of somebody who was for us a type of perfect nurturer giving us unconditional love somebody that has our back at all times no matter what who we can trust deeply and who we know we can really be ourselves with holding that sense in mind as we begin to come back to this body and this time aware that we can make choices at the micro and the macro level every day every moment to use our neural architecture to tune our lens to a different type of sensing experiencing and sharing of life and us in the final moments tuning into that question for you what is my purpose what is my mission I'm finishing with three breaths opening the eyes so it's not quite an indie but it's a mini experience of what people report and and the reports do seem to have these commonalities something about disconnecting from the body having an out-of-body experience traveling up above getting a broader view a wider perspective making contact with with things that have this more energetic quality some of it with intentional qualities including communications the opportunity to see loved ones often grandmother's in in this space a chance to review your life to work through the emotional baggage and then a chance to almost start again and reenter life and so I'm going to talk a little bit then about how some of these experiences might map to this neurocognitive model so you know this is a what we call a triple network model that helps us understand how our brain organizes itself when we're doing stuff when we're trying to pay attention and we need to focus and recruit our attentional networks we need to set goals and targets and activate circuits in the brain that allow us to stay on track with what we meant to be doing this beautiful imaginative creative but often clogged space of the default my default mode Network our wonderful source of creativity and imagination that's often gets a bit stuck with all the baggage of our narrative and our stories and this sense of I I that was wronged I that was bullied either did or didn't get what I wanted or needed the salience network again this critical network here that I believe is really implicated in the moment of of trauma or how we can get these moments of often what's called post-traumatic growth when our salience network pops wide open it forces us to take a different look a different view on what's happening and what sense we're making of it and when we have this more helicopter view we can do it as I said through meditation through therapy through supervision through mentoring through taking various compounds through a near-death experience it allows us to come out of this doing mode and into the being mode and certainly when when a near-death experience is occurring there's not much doing to be done you know the body doesn't need to do anything there's no need for planning or strategizing you don't need to use your your kind of executive attentional networks to make plans for the things that you're going to do in the future because as far as your body is concerned there is no future you're only in this moment of now literally a life-and-death moment of now and how the brain responds to that is by kind of opening up I believe the salience Network in this very rapid and wide way that gives us some interesting opportunities and so within the default mode Network we have I believe a number of things that could be happening that help us to explain some but not all of what might be going on in a near-death experience and I think that's the thrust of really won't want you to take away is that we need to have these blended models the science can give us a lot of information actually you know well what happens when the brain doesn't receive enough oxygen when we know that the hippocampus is affected by that that's one of the most common outcomes from a stroke is to people have memory problems some of that gets repaired some of it doesn't you know so we can have this understanding that something happens in an NDE maybe where there's a degradation of memory and the time locking feature of memory such that we no longer have a sense of time or things running one after the other or time slows down or speeds up in some way because those networks in the brain have been disrupted by the trauma we know that there are alterations in the attention networks of the brain when we begin to take what's called a more monitoring rather than focused attention view on the world and again we can train that with meditation practices lots of very specific practices that are brought to us by the Buddhist traditions around focusing attention versus widening the attention and when we do that we recognize we begin to dissolve the self eye boundaries some of that may be being experienced as the dissolution of the body so that sense of I that's contained within a single body becomes degraded and we get a big more expansive view of what's going on but then there seems to be these these kind of phenomena that really defy our scientific understanding and then these are the things that I think perhaps some of the work with psychedelics or maybe with cyber Daleks will be able to help us unpack in a way that will allow the the communities of science and spirituality to mix and blend together and these are you know kind of the fractals the energetic aspects this sense of dissolution and oneness and wholeness that people report the whole thing though does require that we manage our emotional life and again we we meet our emotional life here in the here in the 3d world but also people report that they can have experiences that are all for all for extremely kind of compelling joyful heart expanding moments when they're in these altered states but also things that can be quite scary too yeah the classic bad trip of LSD might be an example of that you know the person is in an altered state of consciousness but they are still feeling yeah so feelings for me are this interesting intersect because we have a lot of information about how the body regulates our emotional state you know we have a lot of information about the the chemicals and the hormones that are involved particularly around fear States but how these are influencing our perception of things at this level is is still not clear but it seems that it is important that we are calm and that we don't panic and one of the things that helps us not to panic is something else that's kind of over here which is related to the same in its network which is our capacity to respond rather than react and it's curious to me that people have this experience of feeling loved trusted they're in a position of trust they're feeling hell they're feeling nurtured because actually what some of this points do for me is that there's there's a sense of what we call the perfect nurturer in psychology we have this language of the perfect nurturer somebody that just kind of holds you like this yeah their hands are just literally holding you there and you you can't really get anything wrong and you know you can have that if you have a nice upbringing with a parenting experience of somebody who has a good secure attachment themselves who's able to give you that sense of trust in the world and an optimism that things will be okay not everybody gets that many people have experiences of being raised by by families or in situations where they don't have that sense of fundamental safety and Trust and then it seems that we meet a version of that we meet a version of that you know in in this kind of part of the ende experience where people just say I felt everything was going to be okay I felt that I just needed to trust I knew that if I just may surrender and these are sort of the words of spiritual language but the brain is involved because we have to make that choice we have to make that choice and it is a jump and it is a jump into something different in my view in my view and in the work of therapy this is this is kind of what we're doing we're working through the layers where we're kind of you know we're talking to people that are not able to regulate and they are reacting all over the place and they're not able to respond their salience network is getting triggered all the time and it's creating problems of anxiety and depression rumination and fear so we're working with the emotions and we're understanding their stories and we're inviting them to kind of take a longer view or a bigger perspective but what we also know from the literature that you know people that are really struggling with long-term physical and mental health conditions they find it very helpful to have a spiritual perspective and there is evidence for that yeah the transpersonal view on chronic disease allows people to have a sense of everything will be alright even though it's not and that's very valuable from a treatment point of view even if you're not fully able to understand what is the mechanism of that but for me I understand that there's a mechanism there which is something about retuning the Samians Network meditation retuns it in a slow way traumatic experience can reach unit in quite a dramatic and rapid way but where we get to whether it's through meditation or near-death experiences or therapy or mindfulness training is an orientation of mind that's much bigger yeah much bigger much broader it's more about the bigger why it's more about how am I connected to everybody else it's more about what I call this big green container the brain sits inside of all of this yes we need our brain to make sense of things but one of the things we can use our brain for is to choose which lens we want to look at the world through and we need a different way to do this and again I'm going to just pull up a few minutes of Jill Bolte Taylor here because she just says it in such a great way I think our scientific methodology has led us too much into the left-brain ways of thinking and then that means that we're we're missing some valuable detail but partly we don't want to go there because it involves a different way of being in the world and that can be a challenge so I'm gonna just see what she says so she was a neuroscientist and she really came from a position of a deep knowledge of what the brain is doing but here she talks just briefly about the right in the left brain all right human hemisphere is all about this present moment it's all about right here right now our right hemisphere it thinks in pictures and information in a form of energy streams in simultaneously through all of our sensory systems and then it explodes into this enormous collage of what this present moment looks like what this present moment smells like and tastes like what it feels like and what it sounds like I am an energy being connected to the energy all around me through the consciousness of my right hemisphere we are energy beans connected to one another through the consciousness of our right hemispheres as one human family and right here right now we are brothers and sisters on this planet here to make the world a better place and in this moment we are perfect we're whole and we are beautiful [Music] so again she's great because she comes from this dual perspective but I think she really nails it there and this me again for me this is where mind and brain meet and exactly how they're doing it is still an open question but it seems that there is something very important about you know what I call going going big and going right yeah so going big is about expanding the aperture and really going much broader and wider and we need to use our brain to do that we need to adjust our attentional networks to kind of go big she's also really suggesting go right yeah so the arts movement based practices creativity music poetry all of the things that stimulate our right brain these are the things that can help us to get access to these transcendent experiences perhaps on a more regular basis or even on a permanent basis and then that need to manage our emotional life do that emotional training do that kind of life review process to soften up loosen up all that stuff that's stored in the hippocampus or the emotion that's stored in the body so that when we go into these altered states whether it's at death or perhaps we might be doing plant medicines or something like that in order to heal you know we have the capacity to be with courage there to not let fear take over so that's shown here very very generically in this sort of you know again some people think all is a bit old hat you know kind of like didn't they debunk that thing about left and right brain you know years ago and actually there was some confusion about this but my modern take on this is actually the left and the right brain do have some fundamental differences that the Mac at the micro cellular level in terms of the number of nodes and the types of connectivity so here in the left brain we tend to have very big nodes for example for language and other kinds of concepts and then there's lots of long-range interconnections between them so dense nodes and then lots of kind of long motorways let's say whereas in the right brain it's a little bit of a mess actually there's lots and lots of tiny net1 nodes all over the place there's kind of little country lanes there's a few super highways but there's all sort of I think of the back lanes of Somerset I don't know if anybody's been to Somerset I was born in Somerset like these little tiny lanes that you just like where are you going you can't even see over the hedges you know so they do have some fundamentally different properties and you know we we have this division on our society don't mean like well I'm a scientist and I'm an artist or like he does you know accounting and that person does painting yeah when we have these preferences but if we want to kind of be able to be in these altered states of consciousness or understand more about our human experience in this way then there is an invitation as I say to go right and to go big and what comes out of these experiences then I think is is also part of the fascinating picture you know something has fundamentally altered the perception individual so what's changed at the level of the brain and my hypothesis really here is that we've we've changed something about how the salience network is tuned we've changed something within the attentional networks of the brain that mean that we now have a capacity to notice when am i narrow and when am i wide yeah when is it helpful for me to narrow down you know and that's the left brain like very narrow focused attention task oriented goal-oriented focused attention fantastic we need it but like can we introduce a flexibility there to also know that we can configure our attention network in a different way this is the work of Anton Lutz we can configure our attention network in a different way that gives us an expanded perception of what's going on and some of that is about being able to sense the world differently and this is the work of Alex gray a visionary artist who actually started his career doing medical illustrations so again he's that he's an interesting guy because he came from drawing medical illustrations highly detailed technical biological information but actually his kind of experiences and his visions took him to a different way of sensing the body which he captures here in in this amazing diagram how we can sense the gross body yeah and absolutely pen for pen fields work here very important different parts of the brain associated with different body parts and we have this thing here that's called a homunculus yeah Penfield stuck a electrode in one part of the brain here and somebody's thumb Wiggles you know then he stuck an electrode here and somebody's knee jerked so we have mapped out here in the cortex you know lots and lots of information about how the brain is processing the physical body and the moving body but what becomes less clear when we're looking at it from a neuroscience point of view is well what are we actually sensing here yeah what is that experience that people have of energy of light of more subtle sensing and you know at the very basic level there might be an intermediate picture here which is you know even the hardcore materialists many of them might be people within the medical community very bought into the biomedical model they will still use the language of gut instinct yeah they will use the language I mean especially these very experienced cardiologists and oncologists you know the really experienced ones they they're operating really on their right brain they just said I I just knew that that patient was going to have a heart attack no I just knew that that was a Stage four I knew that that was a stage four tumor and if you ask them to kind of recount in in logical conceptual analytic language how they made that decision they're often not able to so you know even within the biomedical model I think that people are tapping into different sorts of subtleties within the body system maybe they're not quite at this level here and I don't know I don't know if I want my doctor to be like that because if I need some medical procedure done maybe I need them to be like more here but you know if you want to go to non-local medicine and energy medicine then actually your doctor is somebody that's able to to work here and we have this already in some of our communities of healers so this is this is the evolution but it requires us to go you know to go through our staff to go through our conditioning to go off through our conditioning of our body and as I say into this bigger bigger question of like what is it for how am i approaching it which lens is going to be helpful what meaning do I want to make from this experience and this is I guess whether the clinical psychology work and and the psychoanalytic work comes in what is the meaning that we want to make from our lives or from experiences such as NDEs you know when we were invited to question and challenge as any big trauma event might invite us to do what's important now how are we going to reorganize ourselves and I think the NDE experience you know really is inviting us to think about this and providing some some provocative challenges and my takeaway really I think for you guys is is to be prepared and to to consider this as an art form yeah this is Peter hood Phoenix and Elizabeth Phoenix book the art of dying and you know both of these authors have tried to bring together recognize methods of scientific inquiry to questions of what happens next so Monica wrens doing very large-scale qualitative mixed-methods approach in a kind of normal dyeing environment and finding that large numbers of people are reporting deathbed visions different sorts of communications a sense of expansiveness moving into different sorts of environments this is just in the kind of normal dying and much of that also documented by Peter Phoenix book and some of this is the work that we're tapping into with the with the death incubator is how to provide a multi-sensory multimodal mixed blended art science kind of ancient meets modern practices to help people prepare for the shifts in consciousness that they're going to meet in the dying process and how we deal with it is really critical because there is a tendency I think in some parts of the of the medical community to just dismiss this and from a psychological point of view I really believe that that's not helpful even if we don't have a full answer on like is this thing like a real thing that people are kind of going to is it a place that people travel to or or what is it we still don't really know but actually to honor and value the experiences of people in this very delicate and sensitive moment of their life I think is really important I found this cartoon it says why Filmart Hospital has the highest incidence of near-death experiences and you can see here that some of the medical staff have dressed up as doctors and shining a light on the guy's face and I suppose you know we often use we use humor don't we when things are difficult and painful and that's always a kind of clear sign sometimes that you've poked somebody a little bit British of course the famous for that yeah our sarcasm and and making jokes out of things that are uncomfortable thinking of like Blackadder and all this kind of Monty Python kind of classic British comedy and humor and I wonder if some of this is about that you know the challenge to the the medical community and the challenge to the biomedical model that seems to be gathering pace now requires us I think to have some sensitivity but I think I'm going to pause now on on this slide here because I think this also for me sums up what's necessary with this work whether it's the attempts to look at blended approaches and the need to step into other models whether you're a neuroscientist who's now really being invited to to come to a new opinion or a different opinion or a slightly expanded opinion of what is this brain mind connection or whether you're somebody who's facing a terminal diagnosis or experience of trauma or challenge or even just everyday stuff how can we be kind to our salience network these brain regions that that tell us that something needs our attention that something might need us to revisit our intentions to revisit our bigger why our purpose what we're doing here and to see what it might be like to to have an experience that invites us to connect to the world through our right brain more than through our left brain so I realized that I've kind of covered a lot here and you know I went I went quite high level and the science that I presented was more around the use of this network modelling which is just one approach to using the brain side because of course there are many areas of neuroscience but I'd like to leave time now for some questions but I would encourage again maybe just a little pause to see what's landed before we go into the question period so again that might be closing the eyes and if you wish you could even put the hands on the heart so a very quick fire way to regulate the vagal nerve which can be helpful if we're being provoked or challenged in some way placing hands on the heart feeling the contact of the hands against the body maybe feeling the heart beating inside the chest it's that miracle of breath and circulation focusing attention on that region initially using that attention network to shift and then sustain focus on the hands and the heart and then see if you can deliberately shift the type of attention to one that's more diffuse almost like you're using the peripheral vision of your internal attention still in the region of the heart what's true for me what's landed in a way that resonates what's landed in a way that jars what might might I like to find out more about what's true for me I'm finishing with three breaths opening your eyes time for questions you think there's a mic great so yeah let's take one from here yeah I mean the main best website is the ions International Association of near-death studies they've got very comprehensive lists the other one is Raymond Moody's website yeah I've got I have actually got a list of resources that I will share that includes that but Raymond moody site is also very very good yeah I mean this is the the choice the free will the free won't actually is kind of what the modern or a scientist is really saying the free won't they're choosing not so I'm not I'm choosing not to remain there in order to come back and do something yeah it's fascinating but I think for me the thing is we have that choice every moment also so it's just maybe a big massive amplified version of something that happens in the micro moment by moment and I really recommend this practice just like what's true for me now what do I need what's important to me okay then they go to my next step what's true for me now what simple one okay now I go to my next step yeah every moment and micro death thank you yes somebody near to you yet yeah yeah yeah yeah well for me I mean it's the the multiple routes to altered states of consciousness so some some routes you go you stay still in order to detect the motion and the movement of mind and that's what the kind of sitting on a cushion practices tend to do there's a sense of stealing the body in order to amplify your possibility to detect movement of mind and be able to study it and then a constant loop of movement and stillness and movement and stillness whereas martial arts often starts with the movement practice as part of the discipline and actually it's about reaching some of those same states but through a different means and so there's a variety of martial arts and it's a bit like the yoga you know you can do yoga in the gym or you can do yoga with a kind of guru who's really teaching the full package of the yoga practices not just the stretching not just the kind of breathing practices but actually also the the more meditative aspects and the deeper wisdom of the traditions same as in martial arts you can go to a kind of normal martial arts class where they're practicing kicking and punching and all the sparring but there are versions of martial arts that that have a more spiritual quality to them and actually the movements are fundamentally about training you into how to connect to the subtle energies of the body and how to connect to kind of cosmic experiences bah guar is the one that I would refer you to one called ba gua ba gua so Babar is kind of like a mixture of what we might almost call kind of the traditional kung fu which is a hard style Tai Chi which is then that more internal styles which then does begin to bring in the sensing of the energy the the use of the imagination as part of the the tool and then ba gua has a has a particular structure to the martial art that involves a lot of spire and twisting and turning that can then to create altered states of reality a bit similar to the whirling dervishes of Turkey I don't if people are familiar with that so within the within the Sufi tradition there's also an option to just basically spin around and around and around whilst in a meditative trance like state and pop into transcendent States as a result of movement practices so different ways to to access different things yes bagua be a gu8 you a yes someone here I mean there is a growing and interesting literature on this it tends to be minimized by the mainstream community who are famous for making the bar higher and higher for proof and I heard somebody present recent and she said something like these kind of mind intention experiments have been validated by more than 30 randomized control studies which is way more than any kind of medical drug trial has ever proved efficacy of a drug that's being used you know to treat people so there is this this issue there about kind of who owns the knowledge and there are many people that have been working on side phenomena from the 60s from the 70s it's having a bit of a resurgence now but it's still problematic in terms of getting people to really be able to have open conversations about what is the meaning of this because they get stuck on the consciousness bit now Peter fennec is my go-to guy for this because he has this kind of dual training but he's extremely open minded and he's really got this expert witness expert wisdom with this childlike enthusiasm for finding out new things and and being open to what's going on and and he talks about some of the deathbed experiences very reliably saying they're not hallucinations they don't have that quality of a hallucination they don't have some of the same features that we might find if we were for example doing an assessment in a mental health clinic of somebody who had very classically defined auditory or visual hallucinations it seems that there's a different quality to them and often it's it's to do with it's a bit more obvious like the memory element of it so the deathbed visions might be a family of relatives of pets of old friends there might be sounds that could be sound sort of things that have have meaning from your life before but he his his claim is that they're not hallucinations there's something distinct going on there yeah Peter Fenwick who's in the list let's throw somebody next year yeah hi [Music] yeah well we need to currently need to rely on the qualitative data so these are the first person reports and again that's that's a type of data that's usually poo-pooed by mainstream science there's nothing more unreliable than asking somebody what they think you know this kind of we've got a latitude but that's shifting I really do see that that's shifting we're in this process of really moving from a data and as a science that's driven by data of purely observable phenomena because that's also being called into question is it still got an observer there still got a human observing and actually coming to light let's listen to what people say and I guess from my experience I I'm was like you I was interested in the commonality so you know I do work with people with the diagnosis of schizophrenia or depersonalization dissociative experiences you know and really listening to what those what those people say about their experiences some of that some of that sounds a bit like when you're over here having conversation you know in dialogue with the Dalai Lama talking about very experienced meditation practitioners who are then talking about experiences that sound a bit similar yeah and then you talk to somebody that's coming at it from maybe like ayahuasca ceremonies or plant-based medicine against how they're describing it might have a cultural wrap around how they're interpreting the meaning will have their own personal meaning wrap around but there do seem to be these commonalities of the elements of people get to an experience of you know feeling energy feeling loved expansiveness a deep sense of trust a deep sense of surrender and I think as humans we've been seeking that you know we've been trying to understand that in various ways throughout throughout our history and some of them that's through the more religious and faith and spirituality practices and science is its own way to try and understand the world so yeah let's let's get these people together and have these conversations and see what what's what's similar and what's not that's where the juicy stuff is I think yeah and let's have a couple from the back just to make sure we get some coverage just five more minutes so we maybe take two more questions yeah yeah you choose just a good spread of yeah that's a really really good that's a really good really good question actually and I need to say I don't know I mean I guess my my hypothesis is it's variable because we're humans and you know some people do make very dramatic changes to their lives and they live very very differently because they have that sense of trusting and they're just not worried anymore it's not worried about anything anymore and they day-to-day life can look very very different to them but you're absolutely right you know there's I heard one shaman talking about you know this kind of trend for people to do ayahuasca ceremonies and he was saying well I heard that somebody did 50 ceremonies well why why would you do 50 ceremonies that doesn't make sense it's not for recreation it's not somebody that didn't integrate yeah so they had to keep going back and these are tools these are tools and technologies to help us in the transformation process not things that we then need to rely on necessarily on a day to day basis but yeah I guess you know in that awakening experience I think jack Kornfield book speaks nicely to this which he says after the ecstasy the laundry the scene yes and the Buddhists have a name for this kind of people that get it fast it's called they say something like not not much dust on your eyes so you just only had a tiny bit of dust to wipe and then you can see clearly where's everybody else is like yes yeah yeah yeah thank you for sharing that really important and perhaps that's a good note to finish it twelve o'clock so thank you very much for your attention [Applause]

Channel: The Weekend University

Views: 97,867

Keywords: the weekend university, psychology lectures, Near Death Experiences, Neuroscience of near death experiences, Near death experience stories, Near death experience reaction, Near death experiences talk, Near death experiences compilation, Tamara russell, Mindfulness

Id: iYwgwfrHOSk

Length: 107min 41sec (6461 seconds)

Published: Sun Jan 19 2020