The Unintelligible Afterlife: A Panel Presentation Featuring Dr. Raymond Moody

[Applause] hey everybody welcome to the unintelligible afterlife presented by bernathan college my name is curtis childs i'm going to be your host i'm with the non-profit swedenborg foundation and the swedenborg foundation is partnering with bernathan college to stream this out on the internet so everybody who's watching online hello or whatever camera you're on everybody who's here hi thanks for coming excited okay it's a it's my job to get that going don't worry i'm not one of the speakers uh so a little housekeeping stuff uh before we start cell phones i i know you're probably not going to turn them off but you could put them on vibrate airplane mode would be great and then if you see this coming towards you at the intermission don't panic this is for you were handed two cards when you came in one of them is a donation if you're so moved you can fill that out make a donation which will support the research that they're doing and then the other one is a question card because we're going to have the presentations then there's going to be a short intermission and then we're going to come back and sit down and we're going to answer some of your questions so if you have something that comes up during the show you you want to know more about or you want to hear something we didn't cover get those in and we'll try to do that don't worry that'll they'll be passed out during a video so you'll have plenty of time time to react so to begin sorry about that to begin uh the the feel of the night i was thinking about how things become more precious when there's a limited supply of them you know that happens with art or it can happen with materials of that kind of thing but it can also happen with words when we think about the people you love and sometimes it can seem like they have an endless supply of words but if you started to realize that i'm not going to get to hear this person talk that many more times and doesn't that bring a new potency to those words don't we want to grab onto them and know what they mean and understand where they're coming from i was thinking about when my grandfather was dying he couldn't talk anymore but he could write and so he would write down people would ask him something he would write it down and so i got to read those it was before i was born but i got to sort of read what his last words were and some of this stuff that he wrote was was really clear and really hopeful but others other things he wrote was really cryptic and what what did he mean by that and if we could figure out what he was trying to say there not only would we know more about him as a person but we'd know about the place he was in right i mean the position he was in that's somewhere we're all going to be someday and so is he from there from the edge of the end of life trying to give us some kind of hope or instruction you know about what's going on so that's what we're trying to look into tonight research into the communications of the dying is the research project which is seeking to explore the last words of those who are approaching death the scientific protocol has been created with an interdisciplinary team uh in mind from philosophy to medicine to linguistics to psychology and spirituality they are seeking to record translate or transcribe analyze and categorize the language of the dying not only to help the people who are dying but clinical care providers and loved ones address the process of dying with more understanding and less fear so thanks for being a part of this tonight and what we're trying to do is take the structure of scientific scientific inquiry and place that alongside and intertwined with the emotional potency of these questions around love and the end of life so if you're ready we're gonna get started [Applause] my father said these simple words before passing well then goodbye i need my pearls for the big dance tonight my mom said i'm trying to get out of a big storm [Music] tell everyone [Music] just before dying he opened his eyes looked towards the heavens and smiled broadly i'm too happy i had never before heard him use the word to like that [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] is a very important clinical study that i think will just from my clinical experience i think will be very valuable to the families of the terminally ill and also for clinicians who treat them and want to say also at the beginning which i always do is that i am known of course for the near-death experience and so on and what i constantly hear about this is that um people say oh scientific proof of an afterlife and so on and i have always said in my career no way i am not a parapsychologist and in my opinion at least in 2015 scientific inquiries just not yet set up to investigate a question of an afterlife okay for one reason for those of you who are into science and so on well understand that the sentence there is life after death is not falsifiable right you can't think of any observation that if you could make it would show you that the sentence is false so we're in a different category of study here and to me the question of life after death is i think and having been convinced of this by plato that it is probably the biggest question of human existence and it is still a philosophical question and a very profound one and not yet a scientific question and you may wonder what in the world does the notion of unintelligibility have to do with this so i want to start by reading something to her reciting something to you that unless pennsylvania is different from most of the other parts of the country many of you will recognize one bright day in the middle of the night two dead boys got up to fight back to back they faced each other drew their swords and shot each other um a blind man came to see the fray a dumb man came to shout hooray a deaf policeman heard the noise and came and killed those two dead boys how many of you remember that playground rhyme from your childhood let me look around oh yeah a lot of people so it's in pennsylvania too this goes way way back it's the playground rhyme and what i want to do is to point out some things about it one is that it's deliberate nonsense it's a nonsense poem it's a volley of self-contradictions but nonetheless that as you hear those lines it brings a very vivid story alive in your mind right you see the images and so on so as alice said in alice in wonderland she's about the poem jabberwocky she said well it's very pretty and it seems to fill my head with ideas only i don't know exactly what they are so nonsense has plato very beautifully pointed out even though it's unintelligible brings vivid images to our mind secondly i can assure you from decades of dealing with this subject that that playground rhyme brings many very poignant and touching memories to alive in people's minds who remember this as a kid and also that it was very often coupled as other nonsensical playground rhymes with were with physical activity typically tossing a ball around to the rhythm of the poem and which shows incidentally that nonsense has a role which we can be we can demonstrate in many other contexts too in social bonding that it can be a social bonding experience also it's it's associated with various magical practices a few years ago in aspen a colorado businessman told me that he was talking about that poem and he said when he was a kid every time he would walk by the graveyard near his home he would recite that poem as a sort of magical protection again what does this have to do with um question of the afterlife well not being a person who ever had any religious background i the only way i have to think about this notion of an afterlife is in terms of reason and question arises is there a rational proof or rational pathway to to getting some sort of credence to the notion of the afterlife and in my experience um everybody that i know who really looks at this not from the point of view of wanting to make it be true but rather just to try to figure out what is which is what i'm interested in when they think of this question of the rational investigation of the afterlife they come up against the difficulty that david hume one of my favorite philosophers 1711-1776 so beautifully put and if you listen to this and try to follow along the thoughts as i read this you'll see what he's talking about by the mere light of reason it seems difficult to prove the immortality of the soul by what arguments or analogies can we prove any state of existence which no one ever saw and which no way resembles any what that ever was seen some new species of logic is requisite for that purpose and some new faculties of the mind that they may enable us to comprehend that logic and what he's getting at there is that in terms of classical logic the sentence there is life after death is a self-contradiction because if you look up the words in the dictionary death just means the final irreversible cessation of life so the sentence translates to there is life after the final irreversible cessation of life which may seem rather trivial and petty but if the genuine problem is the rational investigation of the afterlife it becomes a major difficulty so what i need to do now is to give you a little brief thumbnail sketch of the history of logic which is one of the most fascinating stories of history but we get it up to plato and plato was the very first person to distinguish between the literal and the figurative domain of language and also they had about 100 years before plato they had for permanentes had articulated the notion of truth that is truth is that which is the case independently of what anybody thinks about it and um and for that reason parmenides is called the father of deduction but about a hundred years later plato was thinking of it and he thought just a minute here we know that there are some sentences that are the case no matter what anybody call thinks and that's the quality of truth but he said so also these other sentences that are not the case no matter what anybody thinks about it and that he defined as falsehood and in doing and formulating the true false distinction he linked it with the literal domain of language and that's why we say today the literal truth okay now meanwhile plato was also aware that this other domain of language the nonsensical or the unintelligible was also very important and in his dialogue on this makes some very brilliant observations about nonsense in the next generation his wonderful pupil aristotle was you know to characterize aristotle he must have been pretty severely obsessional as you can tell from reading his will and he was anything that smacked of a rationality to him was like this so when he articulated not the the logic that we're using in everyday life he predicated it on the literal domain of language and the true false distinction and his favorite word for nonsense was random talk so he eliminated this strain that had been in platonism one thing i think we can see very quickly is that nonsense is not random talk as a matter of fact nonsense is less random than ordinary meaningful language i know it sounds paradoxical but basically how should i put this well that's too technical let me go on this this other um way of putting it i think most people kind of think of nonsense as if you think of this as the level of ordinary meaningful language people think of nonsense as something down here that is something sublinguistic but that is not correct in fact nonsense is something that accrues on top of ordinary meaningful language it's called a supervision form of language so it is it's more complex than ordinary meaningful language now what are we talking about here let me start with the definition of nonsense and the the common sense view of what nonsense is is all distorted but if you want to go to the dictionary you'll see that this is what it means nonsense is number one language when we say when the kid is misbehaving running in a circle or something stop your nonsense where we're referring to non-linguistic behavior that is a secondary sense that's derivative and primary sense nonsense is language but language which is unintelligible that is it conveys nothing clear to the mind and the intellect can't comprehend it but you know when you're listening to tv and there's that or 404 or on the 911 or something and they say well that that's there is unintelligible that's unintelligible because the transmission got mixed up right so nonsense is language that is unintelligible because it is meaningless and that's what it means and one trouble we are really deeply into in all of the west is some popular misconceptions about nonsense which are all demonstrably false one people think that nonsense is something intrinsically bad and undesirable it's a um term of at disapproval approvation right um and yet people have a adverse response to the notion or to the word nonsense but they love actual nonsense and it's a part of a lot of things for example for those of you who might have been raised in the 50s will remember doo-wop music right now get a job where the mixture of the nonsensical and the intelligible elements are the essence if you will look up in the dictionary that's what um doo-wop means it has a nonsense as the main line or the harmony okay so in reality nonsense is part of humor as part of song as part of playground rhymes children's literature so it's a very par positive part of life in reality secondly people think of nonsense is something like nothingness or non-existence and chaos they think of it as the absence of something but that's just a grammatical illusion based on the non in the beginning in fact as i said nonsense is a more complex layer of language than ordinary meaningful language thirdly and this is the the worst of the four common misconceptions about nonsense to think that nonsense is the same as falsehood a lot of people unthinkingly use it that way but that's just not correct the true false distinction is one thing and nonsense is a different thing and nonsense is not a form of falsehood and it's not going to be fatal if you fail to distinguish between nonsense and falsehood but it will certainly get you into trouble in various kinds of abstruse areas of inquiry i met this wonderful man a few years ago who is a teacher an air force colonel who is a professor of analysis at the cia and he was talking with me about my work and he said you know it's very important for our agents he told me to understand the difference between nonsense and falsehood so it may seem trivial or abstract or whatever but in the real world of inquiry it's a very important distinction to make and because of all these misconceptions people think of nonsense as something unknowable unfathomable and utterly beyond the reach of logic and reason well that's not true either because we do now have ways of investigating this very complex problem and because of these four mis assumptions that are so deeply embedded in ordinary thought as i can show me i'm sorry i got to apologize here in a way this i'm trying to condense something that is ordinarily for me a full semester-length course that i teach to philosophy students and psychology students and a lot of attorneys take it and um literary professors come a lot too so um but i know this is going to sound crazy but you know at 71 that's all right you know um but because of these misconceptions there is a sort of collective cognitive flaw that is inbuilt in all of us we we learn these this sort of misconceptions early in life and they complicate our ability to reason logically when a sentence may appear to be meaningful but on the depth level it's unintelligible and if we in try to apply aristotelian logic to that our minds go berserk so it's a collective cognitive deficit that we can actually correct now um what if we're trying to talk about nonsense and somebody says well you say that's nonsense but i say it makes sense to me how do we handle that well um we need a criterion for selecting actual examples of nonsense and there's a very simple way to do this and that's to distinguish between deliberate nonsense and involuntary nonsense deliberate nonsense written by such people as one of my favorites dr seuss that you see there incidentally i read in the new york times a few weeks ago that dr seuss's has sold 600 million books and uh this is pretty amazing and my wife said well you've bought a million of them yourself and and um so deliberate nonsense if the writer engineers it and writes it to be nonsensical we can accept that it is but there's another domain of language of nonsense the involuntary and as any medical doctor here could assure us that um people talk nonsense involuntarily all the time when they are delirious or when they are intoxicated for example with mercury or nitrous oxide or just when they are under stress i mean i guess probably everybody who's ever worked in an emergency room has had the experience a patient come or a patient who's severely injured in an accident comes in but then their companion who was in the accident but was who was uninjured no no problem at all and so you're trying to get a straight story from this uninjured person and it's all you know it doesn't make any sense right you can't so stress will make us talk nonsense involuntarily now at this point you say well if you're gonna base your examples as i am entirely on deliberate nonsense because we can be sure of it then you're excluding a whole side of it the involuntary but guess what i've learned in my medical career which anybody can verify that when patients talk nonsense involuntarily they talk nonsense of identically the same pattern that nonsense writers come up to amuse us so there is something nonsense has its own structure that is independent of whether we produce it deliberately or involuntarily and this gentleman down here is obviously probably demented or alzheimer's and again many of you know that your alzheimer's relatives sometimes lapse into nonsensical talking well in my investigation i've just for many years been a great lover of nonsense writers edward lear lewis carroll was one of my favorites when i was a kid dr seuss and shel silverstein for those of you who know him lost a lot of wonder wonderful nonsense writers and you're just gonna have to take my word for this one although you could confirm it for yourself if you read a lot of nonsense works that lo and behold nonsense which because of these misconceptions we think of of as an undifferentiated unitary phenomenon actually is a very complex phenomenon with many many different types as a matter of fact in my investigation of nonsense which goes back in a way to when i was a kid i have identified over 70 different types of nonsense and incidentally i and also other friends of mine who is investigating this from a psychological point of view have um thought that each one of those types of nonsense has its own identifiable and describable effects on the mind which i had more time to go into detail but this is rather astonishing some of the effects of nonsense on the mind so i've said here that there are 70 plus different types and don't worry i'm not going to go through 70 types but i'll give you some examples of nonsense and i'm going to talk about three different types here okay which you can plainly see are different types the shiny phlesuma easily tubaled five serbic glusters away that's one right but now listen to this one holiness breeds the vestigial lipstick of spontaneity [Music] or listen to this one that cannibal we just ate was the last one around these parts now i'm assuming that you would all agree that those are all nonsense but that you can hear the difference and the types right so much so that if i said to you a smiling square root repeated the electric limp of potatoes you would be able to recognize that as an example of the second type i gave right or if i said i'm not an actor but i play one on television you would recognize that as an example of the third type or if i said twas brillig and the slithy toves did gyron gimble in the wave you would recognize that as an example of the first type okay now um one thing that we quickly get into complications when you're trying to put order into this thing um is that let's see oh i'll go back a minute on that one nonsense can be modeled on absolutely any form of ordinary meaningful language for example i can take the format of a definition and i can write nonsense that looks like a definition or i could why could i could focus nonsense around pronouns for example and listen to this this is they told me you had been to her and mentioned me to him she gave me a good character but said i could not swim he sent them word i had not gone we know it to be true if she should push the matter on what would become of you if i or she should chance to be involved in this affair he trusts to you to set them free exactly as we were right now that's an example of nonsense that's formulated around pronouns because we can understand pronouns very well but there has to be some way to establish the referent of the pronoun and that's what carol undermines here so it's nonsense we could do it with conjunctions we could do it with all kinds of things but most significantly for the kind of thing that we are talking about here i need to point out that even when you take a certain format of language and you lay nonsense down on the layer of it you nonce on to layer on top of it you nonetheless nonetheless have a sense of that form of language now that's abstract but let me give you an example when i was in high school i was eighth grade and i read this biography of lincoln by carl sandburg i think was where i read this story but when lincoln was president and i forgot the occasion it was very solemn state occasion and everybody was gathered around and his uh part in the ceremony called for him to mount a horse and to lead the procession away from the scene but in the event when he got up on the horse the horse put its own back hoof up and got it caught in the stirrup so the horse was jumping around and everybody shocked him to silence so poor mr lincoln it's so embarrassing for the president so lincoln looked down at the horse and he said well if you're getting on i'm getting off now if you think about it for a moment you've got to agree it's nonsense but that nonetheless right it brings a very vivid image into your to your mind of that very motion right this is a very favorite technique of nonsense writers is to take the format of a travel narrative and lay a layer of nonsense down on it and you can feel that sense of motion in your mind listen to this when a 19th century nonsense poem why and wherefore set out one day to hunt for a wild negation they agreed to meet at a cool retreat on the point of interrogation but the night was dark and they missed their mark and driven well night to distraction they lost their ways in a murky way maze of utter abstruse abstraction and so on now i've been monitoring the effects of that poem on my students since 1969 and i can tell you the normal response is people say that even though they know full well that that's nonsense that nonetheless it nonetheless gives them a sense of motion in their mind okay now um all of this nonsense the many types nonetheless have a single universal structural principle in common and that is that all types of nonsense have the following structure in common that they respect some rules of language but they violate other rules of language so that the sum or the outcome of it is unintelligible and let me give you just one example we could go through all the types but for example when i say twas brillig and the slithy toads did gyron gimble in the way is that a grammatically correct english sentence yes it's grammatically correct all the adjectives and nouns are in proper order but and also there's it has some made up words in it that don't mean anything but let me ask you this um brillig and uh twas brilliant the slithy toves did garen gimble and the wife do they sound like russian words no do they sound like polish words or portuguese words or no do they sound like english words yes so this type of nonsense uses the phonetic structure of ordinary meaningful english words and makes up nonsense around them and it puts them in a grammatically correct format and the grammatically correct format enables you to say even though the word is meaningless what part of speech it is twas brillig and the slithy toves what part of speech is slightly adjective right um now so that is the structural formula as i said that underlies all nonsense now to bring this to a close here because you know we have a lot of folks to get through now um i want to point out that one thing we can realize once we start thinking about nonsense in a systematic way it's a very simple way of showing that when the mind switches from one state of existence or framework of existence to some other incompatible framework of existence then the mind necessarily generates nonsense in that transition this here is a picture by escher it's one of his drawings and i just put this one up here to which is a good example of it but is the general principle of all of these things is the same that he drew impossible geometry right and maybe the one that most are familiar with was the one of the water wheel you know the water is coming off the mill shooting it goes over the wheel and then you follow the water and it goes down one trough and then it turns an angle goes down the other then another angle goes down the other then another angle it goes down the other and then it's right back at the top of the wheel okay so one thing this shows us if you took a protractor and a ruler and what graphic artists call a value scale you could you could create a perfectly intelligible and meaningful description of this is a two-dimensional surface you can say that angle that line there is seven inches long it goes off of this line at a 43 degree angle and and so on and the the value scale is what um artists used to evaluate all the shades from bright white to complete black and you could do it it would be a complicated task but you could do it but if you try to describe the scene in the drawing it's nonsense that the water goes down down down down down down and then it's up you know where it started so what this indicates to me is that if somebody let's say by hypothesis were to go to some other dimension of existence take a trip to another realm of existence and came back then when they came back and tried to put it into words they would be forced to talk nonsense about it so what this indicates to me is it's a very critical thing whether we can put credence on near-death experiences or not depends on are they literally nonsensical and if they are then we're in trouble because that's an indicator in my mind that the person didn't go to another realm of existence so the question is do near-death experience narratives are they nonsense and my answer is yes because it's a type of nonsense we just discussed because um you know the presupposition with a near-death experience is that people say it's there are no words and it wasn't in time it was a timeless experience and it wasn't in space and yet how do they synthesize all these things to try to describe it to us they say i got out of my body body i went through a tunnel into a light i met my deceased relatives i saw my life pass in review i returned to my body and came back to life that's a travel narrative but we grasped the meaning of travel narratives because of the concepts of space and time so we're dealing here with a nonsensical travel narrative which sounds shocking in the light of these common misconceptions about nonsense but if you take the real deal about nonsense and realize this is a very important and essential domain of human expression then you get to realize that uh well this is a good thing because now we're we're safe at least this far okay now as i mentioned i am not a parapsychologist and in my opinion in 2015 near death the question of life after death is not yet a scientific question but it is still a very important philosophical question and maybe the most important one and so i think that rational principles of nonsense which we now have um as i mentioned this book of mine on it is being published in france in december but not yet here so um it's obviously i'm at a disadvantage here in terms of of getting all the salient points here across but what i would say is that this opens up two genuinely rational ways or pathways to getting elucidation on this question of an afterlife that are not yet which is not yet a scientific question but nonetheless i think we can make inroads on it and um an experience i had as a young medical doctor was um because i don't i went into medicine already with this interest in nonsense and the different patterns and so on and what i quickly realized was that um as i said when people talk nonsense involuntarily like because of delirium or psychosis or whatever the nonsense they talk has identically the same patterns of nonsense that deliberate writers come up with so that there's an inherent structure there that we can investigate and one of the things i quickly realized in my work with terminally ill patients was that it's a very common thing i've seen this just repeatedly i see it all the time where people will tell you yeah in the last few days my husband was alive this is a religious studies professor i talked with a few years ago it's the last few days my husband were alive he was talking nonsense and i knew it was nonsense she said but somehow in the back of my mind i thought it was important i kind of understood now let me show you something here in all honesty how many people here know of this from your own personal experience with dying relatives and if you could just hold your hands up for a minute look at those hands just look around this is a very common clinical problem or issue which is not addressed because we tend to just brush aside nonsense right and it's people say oh it's the drugs that is not the drugs because i we had a lot of terminally ill patients that we didn't have on drugs at all they were not medicated but nonetheless they had the same experience this is something somehow built into us it will be a very very important thing for us to investigate the kinds of enigmatic utterances that people come up with in the last few days of life because we've seen right here this is important and memorable to people but now we have a way of investigating it so the idea is to record the nonsense and other modes of language the enigmatic um figurative and nonsensical modes of language that the dying instinctively resort to and now with a typology of nonsense and a very adequate catalog of the cycle uh the um the psychological dimension of it the the effects on cognition and emotion of nonsense we will be able to get a clear analysis of this phenomenon for the first time it's always been of interest to people you know how many um anthologies that you've seen at the bookstore on the last words and it's that that's a literary genre of of last words but it's not very accurate as to what really is going on because um people won't remember the nonsensical parts of it they will remember something that's easy to memorize i was recently reading about gerta and his last days famously said merlicht more light and so i was reading about that and that's just almost a watch word i was reading about that a few months back and it said that one of the person said the last intelligible thing goethe said was merely implying that there were other things that they didn't pick up on and that's just a very common phenomenon i think we have the real opportunity now to change this from a um a literary genre which is important in itself but it's always predicated on imminent men you know like famous people and it's always ones that are sort of pre-selected to root out the ones that you didn't like or something now we have a real way to look at this is this related to life after death i don't know but i think that this is a genuine opening to a gender like a rigorously rational way to look at the question because sorry folks i'm not having a stroke or anything that's just me i it's like oh it's like for years even back in medical school they said oh raymond you got asperger's syndrome and then all of my psychiatry for all my wife my st my kids language language instructor and i says oh it's just a fad but then a few years ago in new york times i read about asperger's syndrome and all the hell yeah that's me so i just i can work logic problems but i can't tie a tie or and fumble with things but um so if if there is some sort of transition during the dying process from this domain to some other then that would be an example right of the cross-dimensional nonsense and there are markers for this that we would be able to tell if somebody during the dying process flips over into another state of existence that would show up in the language but i want to that is not the object of this study the object of this study is for clinical reasons to help clinicians and especially to help the families and to understand the dying process what goes on in the dying mind if you think about it that universal structural formula of nonsense that it violates some rules of language but um respects others that is a backhanded way into the mind of the dying person we want to know what sort of rules of languages that they respect in this process and which one is it that they abrogate so i think that we just have a really interesting opportunity here to delve into a very important dimension of the human mind and um and in this i had been wanting to do this kind of study for a long time i thought it was very important but you know at 71 i i just really i got two kids i it's too much work and um you know i mean as much as i'd like to do it i just didn't have the energy to get all this together and i was talking about this about what four years ago at a university and so this talked about my ideas and a very wonderfully nice woman named lisa smart bounced up and she said that she was a graduate in linguistics from the university of california which is by the way the best linguistic school in the country and that the reason she was coming to this lecture which was partly about near-death experiences was that her her father had died how long before two weeks about three months before and that as a linguist what was most puzzling to her was that she knew that he was talking nonsense incidentally he's a very famous poet um but that he and also a clinical psychologist but she knew he was talking nonsense she was very puzzled about this so she in her grief she came to my lecture and to talk about near-death experience she heard me talking about this and oh my god so she quickly volunteered i want to do my doctoral dissertation on this and um came a couple of months later with all these amazing things figured out and now she is starting this i think is going to be a very important study you know throughout my life i've just been interested in knowing what is and i've investigated all sorts of things that are caught off the beaten path and one thing i realized that with the what i call the nonsense taboo which is not just a factor in america but it's all over the world where i've been is the same thing people look at nonsense negatively rather than positively as they should and so i know this sounds crazy and you know counterintuitive all these things but hey i'm really great at extrapolation all my life i've been able to extrapolate watch this let's go five years forward i conjecture i project that in five years what now sounds so bizarre and outrageous and you know just kind of offensive in a way that in another five years people are going to be looking at this and say yes this is something it's one of those things that got sort of muffed in the ancient thought and has been carried forward but now we have entirely new ways to look at it we can see nonsense is a domain of language that is completely continuous with the literal and the figurative and exists and is defined in relation to this very same rules and conventions that define ordinary meaningful literal and figurative language so like i said i confidently project that we're on the verge of something here that's going to tell us a lot of interest to know about the human mind and how it copes with the dying process and what the transition is like so i am just very happy and honored and i'm you know i'm i'm 71 i'm past the age of politeness folks you know i just say what i think and i am honestly deeply honored that you know that you would um be open and thank you all folks say um and uh willing to to wade out into the unknown and it looks already from what i'm hearing of the research it's very consistent with what i've heard over the years that we're seeing some remarkable patterns in these utterances of the dying so again it's always great to be here i first came here in 77 i have such wonderful memories of this place and thank you very much for having me a few days before my grandmother died she said to my aunts and uncles can i go home now [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] um this is a remarkable moment for me um i was a special ed teacher for most of my career and then my father passed away i never in my wildest dreams that i would be standing in front of a room full of people i've never stood in front of this many people in my life and following the wonderful kind and generous and brilliant raymond moody thank you all for being here [Applause] [Music] as i said i have never done this before i've never stood in front of this many people to share something this dear to my heart my knees are shaking my heart is racing i've never done this before did this slide change i think i'm just going to say change slide these are the same words my father said when his editor alice asked him a few days before he died how are you doing morty and he said this is very interesting alice i've never done this before as a linguist i was very intrigued by these words i've never done this before what was this this my father was speaking about was it that dying was such a terrifying and incomprehensible concept that he couldn't even use the words dying is very interesting alice i've never died before or was it that his experience was so ineffable so beyond words that it left him only with the word this a non-referential pronoun of this without any point of reference for me as a listener or for him perhaps as the speaker these words and all the words my father spoke in the last three weeks as he died were remarkable to me and being trained in linguistics it was second nature for me to write down every word i heard capturing all the utterances without judgment and with respect for the beautiful potency and complexity of language for the legacy my dear father was leaving and as i transcribed my father's final words during his last weeks of life it was as if i were entering a new and foreign territory i was witnessing something remarkable his language was changing in startling ways and as it was changing his consciousness appeared to be changing too next slide thank you a few months before my father died this picture was taken i'm just a visitor just visiting the planet he told our friend who took the photo it was as if he knew he would be dying soon although at that time there was no indications that death was near and i've heard now that i've been doing this research that that's not uncommon many times people have a premonition of some kind before they die it was as if he knew he'd be dying i beg your pardon but while he joked about being a visitor to this planet in truth my father did not feel he would be returning anywhere he did not believe there was another home he did not believe in god or any higher power of any kind he told me many times there is nothing beyond this world this is it matter of fact when people asked him about his relationship to god and judaism he would say i'm a gastronomical jew i pray with my stomach my god is a corned beef on rye and coleslaw on the side drinking cream soda is my divine sacrament he was a phd psychologist and believed in nothing beyond the power of the mind and this five sense world we live in wait there was one thing and that was my mother for 56 years my father believed in her next slide please my mother was an artist and during the five decades they were married my father would carry boxes for her to all her art exhibitions and that is why this sentence i'm bringing these boxes to the big art exhibition for my wife's art show a particular pregnancy on january 25 2012 while my mother was sleeping my otherwise lucid highly intelligent father walked out the front door at midnight in his underwear and wandered onto one of the busiest streets in our hometown no alzheimer's no indication no difficulty um before that when the police asked what he was doing there he said oh i'm bringing these boxes there were no boxes to the big art exhibition from my wife's art show shaking their heads in pity the police officers took my cold and shivering father to the hospital and that was when my mother received the call my father at the time was undergoing routine treatment for prostate cancer and had just started a new medication so we thought at the time that his mixed up crazy words were just the medications talking however as i have learned through my years of research now it's very common for people in the days or weeks before dying to announce that a major event is coming by using a metaphor like my father's of the art show a momentous moment metaphor and the metaphors people use are often associated with the things that matter most to them in their lives like carrying boxes to art exhibitions for a man who deeply loved his wife and we know from the work of callan and kelly they have a marvelous book called final gifts and other health care providers and researchers that the use of these momentous moment metaphors seem to cut across medications and illnesses the effects of meds on the language of end of life is something we are going to research more fully in our upcoming study here at bryn athen college let's take a look at my father's final words representative i believe in final words in general though at the time i didn't know that alrighty next slide there is so much so in sorrow this is technically nonsense i mean does sorrow have sowness in it technically no but it felt like i understood the meaning it was like he was saying there's so much soul sorrow in me there's so much so and the grammar the sentence is correct right there is so much so in sorrow but it's nonsense next one please my father was a gambler cigar chomping gastronomical jew who loved to gamble so there he was about this was maybe two weeks before he passed on and when you're packing for las vegas susan better bring the oxygen tent [Music] well one of the things we know it's very common that as people are in their final days they start talking about metaphors of travel making references to travel of all kinds next please i can't reach jack my modality is broken jack was a friend of his who had passed away a few years earlier was he trying to reach him once again the grammar is correct but the meanings are unusual modality sounds to me like modem in english one of the central metaphors we use when we talk about the mind is the mind is machine george lakoff looks at the prominent metaphors and that's one of the prominent metaphors so we i've found already there's a lot of breaking i'm out of order things are not functioning kind of metaphors and we'll be researching this particular um all right next one now this is the one that stunned me the most my father i i talked about angels in my life and my father would roll his eyes and chomp on that cigar so you got to be kidding so i was sitting there with him my father had always teased me and even kindly questioned my spiritual beliefs but one afternoon a few weeks before he died he held my hands as he was sleeping and then his eyes popped open and he looked up at the corner of the ceiling then turned to me and said lisa you were right about the angels next one please okay so this again is technically nonsense something is going on here right paradoxical phrases are another relatively common construction in final words and if you if we didn't analyze it if we didn't take nonsense seriously we would just let this go by but as we're looking at the language of those who are dying we're seeing this pattern of these kinds of self-contradictions and paradoxical speech and what's interesting is we find paradoxical speech in the language of people who have had near-death experiences and return people say things like i've never felt so alive as when i was dead right it's paradoxical or yes my near-death experience it felt like it took a minute but also a thousand years right paradox okay next slide please there are so many people here i don't have time to talk with all these people there were no people there from what i saw here was another case that there was no reference point for me as a listener i did not see many people in the room non-referential let nonsense what people and this too is very common the dying very often see people in the room with them and often predecessed friends and relatives are spiritual figures but technically in the five sense reality it's nonsense next please the angel said enough that's it enough no one's to blame go now enough three days left the repetition here is also very common in end of life speech as is a premonition that turned out to be absolutely correct three days later he did pass on and um my father was speaking at angels next please hurry up get me down please raymond was talking about this idea the nonsense travel narrative and here again here's my father lying confined to bed but he's talking about getting down and hurrying up so very common end of speech to see change in the prepositions and hear about people's movements and finally thank you i love you with the last words he spoke to my mother okay all righty next slide please oh there's something missing there one of the things that i noticed and maybe all of you noticed also is that in that language there are a lot of metaphors and nonsense many many many more than we would find in regular healthy spoken language is that an accident or is there maybe something we haven't yet explored and that's part of what we hope to answer next slide please once i noticed my father's language and i was interested in what i saw i i graduated from berkeley and i went to the library there to look for answers to my questions surely there was going to be hundreds of journal articles about end of life language and use of metaphors and nonsense but there was almost nothing i just couldn't believe it and i was gripped by curiosity i wanted to know more why did we see changes in the language as people die so the first thing i ask myself is what do we know about language that might help me answer the questions how's time i just want to make sure that i respect everybody else's time okay so what we know next slide we know there's many kinds of language but tonight we're going to talk about literal language and literal language is like the stone we all know what a stone is we'd all agree with what a stone is one to one meaning correspondence to the five senses and all of our reality but then you might say he has a heart of stone that is metaphorical language and is that is when we use objective five sense reality to help us explain more subjective less concrete things like cruelty and meanness we can say he's mean but saying his heart is like a stone offers all of us a touch point we all share the same definition of a stone but maybe different ideas of meanness okay and then when it comes to nonsensical language that has little relationship to the five sense reality we all share the stones with their zippered mouths are chatting nonsense has a little connection to the reality we all know and love it is a language of complete disorientation and has multiple meanings so those are the different types of language but here is where it gets really interesting to me in the early research with brain scans what they're finding is that when people are speaking literal language the left hemisphere is engaged right that has to do with analytical thought and reasoning however when people start speaking metaphorically guess what there's an engagement of left and right brain hemispheres okay but what happens when people are speaking what happened to what happens when people are speaking nonsense suddenly you see the engagement of the right hemisphere which is traditionally associated with music and mystical and transcendental states next one please there are pieces of my powerpoints that disappeared so the question is is the change did the changes i see in my father's language somehow track changes in consciousness next one please are the changes associated with changes in the brain as we die are we wired for transcendental experience at end of life so if our language reflects changes in predominance in terms of what parts of the brain we're using is it possible that we are wired for more mystical transcendental experience so i'm really short even with my heels on and the monitor i was going to use for the rest of my presentation i can't see it so what should i do [Music] how's that that's great you all can hear me thanks so as i started to see these changes i i i wanted to know more and that was when i took the seminar with raymond moody and i could not believe that he was talking about unintelligible language and i was very touched by the fact that not only did he have depth of experience with the near-death experience but he understood language in a way that really amazed me so i i i started studying with raymond i actually moved from california to georgia so i could work with him and learn more from him which was one of the best decisions in my life and at just a year ago i established the final words project and the aims of the final words project is to research final words with the same attentiveness we bring to researching first words if you look in the databases there's tons of stuff on language acquisitions in the early part of life but almost nothing on final words i also wanted to move past the nonsense taboo to a systematic study of unintelligible language and i wanted to study the language of near-death experience to see how it might relate to the language of the dying and these are all things that i've been doing just in the last year and a half to two years alrighty next slide so what i'm going to do is just give you some examples of so this is very early research very early findings i'm just going to show you a little bit of what i've discovered in the language of people in their final days alrighty next calendar and kelly were two nurses and they wrote a beautiful book that was very anecdotal about the metaphoric language of those people and at the end of life and we are going to build upon their anecdotes to a more systematic study of this topic next one please so do we die as we live perhaps the metaphors symbols and nonsense of final words are often rooted in the personality and lifetime narrative of the person dying quote this came from one of my participants my dad had been a roofing contractor and carpenter during his life and my father's bedside when he was dying he could he would awaken and look over me and smile so big and he told me they had all these kitchen nets over there there were miles and miles of them he said and he would be helping to build them he certainly was having an amazing time during his passing away judging from the smile and excited look on his face when he would wake up hmm pretty remarkable i think a few more examples uh jeffrey holder i don't know if anyone knows the the dancer he passed away recently and his son explained that the very final words were arms two three four turn two three four swing two three four down two three four this one i just received last week from a phd student at uga i can't go there isn't a drummer his daughter heaven sending their best drummer papa i hear him i hear him i can go now pretty remarkable language to me it's just it's amazing to me that these stories haven't been told yet or they have of the famous but not of just the ordinary poets my father said i see interim spaces of poems back jack spicer my vocabulary did this to me [Laughter] nonsense right one of the things that i've found so far is that the image of foursomes in poker and golf there's a lot of golf going on as people are in their final days um talking about they're going to make a fourth you know where they're these three golfers and usually they might be predecess predecess friends or relatives and then they're like if they're calling for me to be the fourth next slide please they're telling me i need to come and sit down beside them and smoke and drink and i just think i'd rather stay here in my chair right like this but they tell me now i have no choice i gotta play in the big poker game guess i'm just gonna have to join them one very common theme too is the big dance or the big dinner my mother asked me to bring her best dress and shoes to the hospital because she was attending a grand ball that night and would be so happy to see me there another person similar she woke up in the middle of the night and started getting dressed in a long gown that was in the back of her closet she was sitting at her dressing table putting on jewelry and makeup nana said i'm getting ready for the big dance she then lay down and died next please very common so far again very early part of the of the research here but reference to the weather and changes the tide is turning the reservoirs are filling the storm is coming do you think the rain is coming next please very common to see metaphors of leaving as i mentioned with my dad in the oxygen tank going off to las vegas euphemism of death as a journey is almost universal in languages around the world the suitcase is packed i have to go the car is packed where are the keys jetta i need to get my jetta you hear that plane going over is that coming okay that is the coming of day the trolley is near and one of the things i've noticed so far and again it's very early is that so far i haven't heard anyone say get my sneakers i'm traveling over um no but everyone seems to have outside agency that a trolley comes a car however in the stories of near-death experiencers of course they have their own agency as they're moving uh but in that transitional state people seem to talk about outside agency and then when people have near-death experiences suddenly they seem to have their agency back they're actually walking down the tunnel and moving through the tunnel again a lot of language about goodbye well then goodbye i'm ready to leave now i think i will go now they are coming for me now next slide please this is a term i learned from raymond episodes which is repetition and it's much more common in the speech of the dying than in that should be healthy living speech it also appears as in incantations meditation and the language of mystics it's all in one piece it's all in one piece it's all in one piece what you see in different pieces it's all in one piece oh more more worlds and worlds so profound and powerful oh wow oh wow oh wow steve jobs that's a well-known one it's time to get up get up get up so why would there be more repetition in those final days we don't know yet but it looks to us that definitely that's the case next so different types of nonsense let's just go to them next slide please one of the nurses i interviewed who is from trinidad said that in his country the nurses describe the nonsense that people speak before they die traveling which i thought was interesting next please prepositional nonsense as you saw in my father's language things about moving in space i want to pull those down to earth somewhere i don't really know no more earth binding help me down the rabbit hole hurry up get me down please i've got to get down to earth help me no wait a minute you are one stop from real hope which means one stop from real hope i am living between two places would like to make my place mark the other place remarkable next slide please paradoxical nonsense which we mentioned before i mentioned before could you persuade the staff to grant me half a full measure introductory offer store is closing you saw that earlier i don't think there is progress in winning and losing again okay next non-referential again we mentioned that before where we don't know what or whom to whom the person is referring it's very interesting alice it's very beautiful over there too bad i cannot tell you all of all of this it's all a hoax it's not what you think it's all an illusion next please and again what we see people referring to people that we do not see with our five senses there are so many people in here don't you see him there there he is here's mom i have to go my father died on a friday morning he spent the entire wednesday before that talking sometimes out loud and sometimes muttering under his breath to a whole variety of people he had known throughout his life it was the most amazing thing i'd ever seen next please hybrid for now i'm calling them hybrids but what's so interesting is there'll be one part that's grounded in this world and then another part that seems to be grounded somewhere else get me my checkbook since i have to pay at the gate truly i'm truly i need my pearls for the dance tonight help me down the rabbit hole please massage my feet so i can get down the rabbit hole okay one foot in this world one foot in the other get my camera i need to take a picture of this they left the ladders but the ladders are too short to go up there someone had ladders outside the window and the person was referring to that where are my glasses and computer i have to get to work next please finally categorical just mentioned before raymond mentioned these sentences are grammatical but they don't always quote make sense right my modality is broken there's so much so and sorrow a boy has never wept nor dashed a thousand kiln that's from dutch schultz um anyway let's pass let's go to the next slide let's take a time so nonsense is an important part of the language of ndes and end of life and from early findings there appear to be clear patterns in the types of nonsense across medications and diagnoses next eighty percent um in and kenneth ring who is a researcher in his research with blind with blind participants who had ndes they claimed to be able to see during their ndes or obes if his book mind sight is a remarkable book these findings from researcher kenneth ring are complete nonsense in relationship to what we know about literal five senses reality and language the blind man saw right next one please a quote from one of those participants i know i could see and i was supposed to be blind i know i could see everything it was very clear when i was out i could see details in everything so one of my questions is are we talking about nonsense or a new sense one more side please nonsense is neither true or false but new truths emerge from it from raymond moody the study of nonsense at end of life may offer us a pathway to understand a new maybe transcendental sense that exists after death and my final slide we're in the very infancy of this inquiry and i feel incredibly honored to be part of it and i will be working with dr erica goldblatt hyatt i hope to do research into the communications of dying with the loving guidance and wise guidance of dr raymond moody um thank you all so much for sharing this really amazing my mother whispered at the very end oh more more more worlds and worlds so profound so powerful [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] everyone to this presentation well raymond and lisa have provided some theoretical and philosophical underpinnings as well as personal motivation for our research study i'm going to provide you with an overview of this incredible groundbreaking research today i'm going to tell you a bit about why i've chosen to get involved in this research and bring it right here to bernathan college what we are intending to do with it exactly how methodologically we are going to do it and what our next steps will be i'd like to begin with a personal note and tell a tale i've often told since assuming my position at bernathan college i was only eight years old when i developed an awareness of the fact that we don't live at least not in our bodies forever and from that first appreciation of the limitations of our physical lives i became fascinated terrified and enchanted by the idea of death as an eight-year-old i didn't have many tools under my belt except for the power of language so i spent much of my time penning disaster novels with intriguing names like black plague tornado and earthquake creating lovable and intriguing characters who all died in the end i was grappling you see with the concept of personality and trying to understand how could people so full of life vanish i knew that i wanted to study death and be close to it for my life's work and took that step professionally first as a social worker in pediatric and adult oncology units abiding with the dying but later working with survivors of post-traumatic stress disorder helping veterans gang members and women and children who experienced domestic abuse tell their stories later in my career i transitioned into administration and became director of admissions for a psychiatric unit in a large hospital in washington dc i was drawn to help people who experienced death in other ways death of healthy fully functioning minds death of family support and death of the dream of who they might have become had mental illness not intervened when i met my husband and told him of my morbid fascination with mortality he immediately introduced me to the writings of emmanuel swedenborg who wrote extensively on the afterlife for me after those early years in pediatric oncology it was the tender depictions of what happens to children in heaven that caused me to explore this unique perspective more fully and ultimately apply for a job here at bernathan college where the great dr sonja werner had just established a psychology major i was grateful she saw potential in me and today i follow in her immense footsteps working on a curriculum to integrate psychology and spirituality i'm proud to say that with the help of my colleagues not only do we now have a review board through the holy redeemer health system that has agreed to examine our research proposals with human subjects but i also chair a committee here that helps faculty determine when such a review board might be necessary so that they too can pursue human subjects research i've also authored a book that just came out september 1st a self-help guide for teens who have lost a brother or sister this work is the result of my dissertation from the university of pennsylvania where i'm a three-time graduate and is available for you here tonight so i've been busy i mentioned that dr werner and i have endeavored to create a curriculum here at bernathan college that integrates psychology and spirituality more and more academics in my field are beginning to appreciate the value that spirituality has to offer we humans as we attempt to live happier healthier lives and make meaning from our experiences psychology and spirituality appreciates that feeling connected to specific religious doctrines as well as broader spiritual approaches or practices can help people live healthier longer and more connected lives this area of study includes an exploration of things like near-death experiences and how they affect people's world views but also conversion glossolalia or speaking in tongues meditation the effect of prayer and more it's a huge and fascinating area of research and it's a perfect one for bernathan college positioned in a swedenborgian community where followers of the writers of swedenborg welcome all religious perspectives and are open to different beliefs about the afterlife swedenborg was himself a scientist and very much believed in the empirical exploration of processes seen and unseen our spiritual psychology program honors that perspective that living a spiritual life and feeling connected to other people and forces outside oneself as well as pursuing a life of charity truly does lead to well-being we therefore support and promote research with outcomes that help people live fuller more meaningful lives i was looking for a unique research project to help enhance our mission as well as continue to explore and better understand the process of dying when i heard about the final words project and through the amazing medium of facebook that also introduced me to my husband i became acquainted with the great lisa smart i was intrigued by her proposition that the words of the dying might mean more than the living can appreciate as a clinician working at the end of life i witnessed unintelligibility in many ways and not always in the realm of spoken language for example i frequently reflected upon the death of a young girl under my supervision now many years ago the process of her death while devastatingly sad was fairly common to those familiar with hospital bedsides she was no longer conscious and she was hooked up to machines that breathed for her and kept her heart moving but as her body failed the machines recorded in various beeps and alarms that she was dying as i silently wordlessly watched the process i was struck by the unintelligibility of the noise before me i suppose i was struck by the sounds in the room that were there and all that was before me in the dying process that was wordless and yet full of speech at the same time i could pinpoint the moment the patient left her body despite her body looking the same as it had for many days unresponsive and surrounded by the music of the intensive care unit her transition was silent but i understood in wordless language it makes no sense when i tried to capture it so it was unintelligible but she was there and then she was gone but not gone going elsewhere and if i thought too much about it with the words i use in my daily life i missed the whole thing unintelligible still later when i worked with dissociative patients people who split off from this reality when their triggers of their trauma became too overwhelming there was a sense of them being both here and not here and sometimes patients who are fully oriented to time date and place would enter alternate realities where they were children or visiting other universes and speaking of these experiences to me out of context but if i allowed myself to travel with them again it made a sort of sense and finally working with deeply psychotic individuals i would be told of demons standing over my shoulder urging my companions to do awful things despite not seeing these so-called hallucinations myself i chose to enter into the realities my patients had and had you ever walked by my office when a patient was in crisis you might have seen the two of us yelling at nothing at all at a wall telling that spirit or vision or brain induced hallucination to get lost perhaps therapist and patient appeared mad but it connected us conquering a foe that was unseen for me seen for them and all too real other patients spoke in metaphor of a day at the beach for example when they were feeling safe if i joined in the metaphor that was always out of context and decoded seemingly nonsensical language there was always always a connection to be made for me working with people nonsense made sense in a strange but familiar way when lisa suggested the creation of research into the communications of the dying or ricty she was blazing a new path i've listed here callanan and kelly whose book final gifts explores from a narrative but not controlled perspective what people say as they die osis and haroldson did research from an empirical perspective on medical providers experiences with the dying as have others and lisa has been collecting and analyzing words captured by loved ones at the bedsides of the dying but no one i repeat no one has done what we are about to do i also want to add that the definition of research from an academic point of view and as articulated by the university of maine is a systematic investigation designed to develop or contribute to generalizable knowledge while it may be true that discussion of death bed language is common in hospice and hospital hallways there has been no formal study of these processes to truly suggest correlations between a few key variables and the words of the dying as i teach my students in research methods we are endeavoring to avoid journalistic folk or common anecdotal assumptions and move toward exploring this phenomenon in a controlled environment as controlled as we can create right now to begin to formulate an evidence base what we are looking at here is beginning a process a process of exploring the words of the dying in a very limited environment by examining just a few variables at first in hopes of creating more expansive studies that will eventually allow us to create generalizable knowledge we must acknowledge our limitations and as good researchers we will but this is a study that needs to be done which is recording categorizing and analyzing the speech of the dying to better understand linguistic patterns and psychological themes at the end of life also known as you want to do what we get that a lot and lisa got that a lot and people shied away from her project out of fear of death and she couldn't find a home for her research project until bernathan college came along just under a year ago i traveled to athens georgia to meet a woman who was formerly a stranger and is now a co-investigator and cherished friend we spent three days intensively creating an initial protocol that scientifically analyzed the words of the dying and oh yeah i got to meet one of my biggest heroes there i am getting my first photo off with raymond i can't believe i get to use his first name our protocol is revolutionary and methodologically very detailed because of the sensitive subject nature but it's the first of its kind uniting linguistics philosophy medicine psychology and spirituality more importantly and with great feedback from our review board we have endeavored to include family members and loved ones at almost every step of the way acknowledging that dying is still very much an intimate process that includes significant others who need to be informed and advised here are some of our hmm interesting our research questions here we go here are some of our research questions note that we are not seeking here to measure the transition into the afterlife though raymond hopes we might see in the evolution of language a way of charting what happens to consciousness as the physical body shuts down as a researcher i need to be open to the fact that we might find none of this means very much but we might discover some very interesting things too we are not doing parapsychological research here we are classifying and categorizing the utterances of the dying hoping to answer the above questions i also want you to understand we're not looking at many details here because our team as our school is small but we're beginning an exploration and investigation in the hopes of one day looking at any and all variables that contribute to our understanding of what people say at the end of life and why is it important and to whom what are the benefits because people are still so afraid of death in so many contexts we hope to train care providers to help accompany patients and loved ones on their journeys as educators and deaf midwives helping to make what can be a jarring and frightening experience less so we hope families will be able to engage in metaphor and enter into the reality of the dying person if that person doesn't appear to be on the same plane as the rest of us helping to broker bonds across the lifespan and for academics we're not just contributing to but really pioneering an entirely new area of research in end-of-life studies too so how are we going to do it this is just a very brief overview of a study that while low-tech is actually more complex than you might think we will work within our community to identify potential participants who might be interested in helping for now we're only authorized to record language that happens in private home environments so if our participants are transferred to a hospital environment we'll have to suspend recording until and if they return home there are so many moving pieces of staff at the hospital that we want to pilot the study in a smaller controlled environment where everybody at the bedside can also agree to be recorded and even though this is very important we're only analyzing what the dying say we need to respect that the presence of a recording device can be confusing in that those deathbed words often sacred sometimes scary may not always contain information a listener wants to hear so for those reasons and more in our pilot study anyone whose voice is recorded must sign in and let us know they agree to be recorded once potential participants show interest in the study we'll arrange to meet with them as well as key family members to discuss it through a very detailed informed consent process we will explain our methods and answer any questions that arise and we will ensure that our participants know being in the study is entirely voluntary they can drop out at any time without consequence our protocol discusses informed consent at great extent once enrolled our participants who have agreed will be visited and spoken with as well as their loved ones on a weekly basis to check in we'll also be looking at medical records to document diagnoses and medications and we'll collect other types of information like age and other types of diagnoses and medications that will help us understand we believe during the analysis process if any of these variables are correlated with certain types of language at the end of life once the participants health care provider informs us that he or she has entered the pre-active or active dying phase which is an estimate that death is likely to happen anywhere from weeks to days we will turn on our recording devices it's important we start recording as early as possible in the dying process to establish a baseline for when language begins to change we'll orient as many loved ones as we have previously identified to the position of the device and the participant will have designated a recorder and this is the person in charge of the device and they can also turn it off or on again provided they tell us why and there is of course an option to not tell us why as well again this will create limitations in our analysis process but protecting and respecting loved ones here is so important too signage and information explaining the study will be at the bedside and this is really cool devices are voice activated meaning they will begin to record automatically in the presence of speech and turn off when there is silence we'll check in every day with recorders until the participant passes away we will have interns deployed to help with device management and we will document everything scrupulously once our participants die we will collect the device and begin the transcription and analysis process according to a qualitative research approach called grounded theory this approach emphasizes inductive as opposed to deductive reasoning is holistic immersive and flexible and we hope to create new theories by analyzing data creating knowledge as it arises we'll look for commonalities between themes often called a hermeneutic approach and create categories we will want to see if there are any consistent elements of language and psychological themes that arise and we'll have a team coding the data independently and then convening to discuss to ensure reliability we hope to have initial findings or at least some interesting follow-up information after the death of our first participant we expecting that this process will take about a year from data collection to analysis to submission to peer-reviewed journals but we will be providing updates throughout this time here's who will be involved we'll need a small army to do this research and we hope the core of it will be comprised of bernathan college students and graduates our academic program has already prepared future interns for this type of rigorous approach i've been asked by so many what we need in order for this project to begin i'd like to ask for your help tonight with donations as while the project is small there will be expenses we would love for community members to take ownership of rich d2 and we would love for anybody willing to bring participant flyers available in the lobby to potentially interested participants or facilities and of course of course join our conversation by talking about language at the end of life talk to us and please stay to ask questions we've already been so wonderfully supported here by our president mr brian blair who has believed in the potential of this research our chief financial officer mr daniel allen for helping to arrange a smooth process for donations our masterful marketers serena sudden and holly adams and so many who have helped make tonight happen publicist and cookie biggs event planner ali smetanic childs videographer and tech director stuart farmer the awesome swedenborg foundation matt childs and host curtis childs and our family and friends this pilot study could lead to larger sample sizes and a number of methodological variations namely by stratifying according to for example spiritual approach diagnosis gender and so on i was recently even contacted by a scientist sarah bailey in north carolina who suggested we record blood oxygen levels and see if language and changes in language are related to these i would love to see this i'd love to see cross-cultural samples and to even explore final words of different languages but for now we'll be happy if we get even five participants thank you so very much for being here i would be happy delighted honored and privileged to answer your questions later on thank you [Applause] my great-grandfather stretched out his arms and said wait for me daddy i'm coming home [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] since we've been going a little over time i suggest since we just have two short presentations left of about six minutes a piece why don't we just take a stretch break for about 15 seconds sound good then then we'll then we'll close it off with just my presentation and jonathan rose's then we'll have the intermission so yeah people online can stretch too [Music] yeah that's good oh yeah work out the kinks there we go okay we're almost there so i'm going to speak about intelligibility assumptions intentions literalism and hermeneutic background intelligibility and unintelligibility are dependent on our assumptions and intentions as well as the assumptions and intentions of others here is an illustrative example one sunday morning a preacher told his congregation everyone who wants to go to heaven come on down to the front of the church and the whole congregation came forward except for one man at the thinking the man did not hurt him the preacher repeated his invitation still the man remained seated finally the preacher went back and asked the parishioner don't you want to go to heaven after you die the man replied oh when i die i thought you were getting a group ready to go right now so in the case of the afterlife we can assume that only biology or physics makes something intelligible we can assume that events occur only within natural time and natural space but i encourage us to recognize that these are assumptions that we can choose to make or not make most people make the transition between understanding something literally and figuratively so easily that they're usually unaware of its occurrence or how often it occurs normally we intend to connect with other people and so are eager to make sense of what they say and write for example here is a magazine article that is designed to help people discover hidden health problems by noticing seemingly innocent bodily functions this is perfectly normal interpretation of the title however when we take it literally we find a contradiction for two of the potentially deadly symptoms are snoring and coughing and of course these are anything but silent but there is a use in being literal we want our pharmacists and our electrical engineers to be very literal minded on the job and philosophers and other academics are sometimes trained to be literal-minded so it has its place in the vast global organism that is intellectual inquiry yet liberal-mindedness can be taken too far or misapplied imagine if every time you said love is in the air tonight someone rejected your observation by stating no nitrogen oxygen and carbon dioxide are in the air tonight this brings me to two quotations from emmanuel swedenborg in contrast to literalism this first quotation from arcana celestia or heavenly secrets asserts that a person who directs his attention to the sense of the words a speaker uses does indeed hear his words but in a way he doesn't hear them instead it is normal for us to grasp only the sense of them in the second quotation swedenborg explains how our minds have both an exterior that links us to the natural world and an interior that links us to the spiritual world note that it is not only through analytical things that the natural part of the mind communicates with the rational part of the mind and thus the spiritual world but also through analogical things and this is a form of non-literalism now hermeneutics is the science of interpretation and what is in our background affects our ability to make sense of something for example if you watch the bollywood film amritsar to l.a you might understandably conclude that it was just another typical rom-com travel story that takes place in one city in india and another in america however if you watch the same film knowing that it is also sold with the title bride and prejudice and moreover knowing that this is based on the book by jane austen entitled pride and prejudice why then you would interpret the dialogue specific scenes characters and indeed the entire film in a different light and thus derive a much different and richer meaning from it speaking of hermeneutic background in the book 100 names for love diane ackerman explains and examines the aftermath of her husband paul west's stroke as the writer worked with a series of speech therapists he would utter words such as smurd grap luch when asked to name the object pictured in front of him a broom the therapist would tell paul that his words were nonsense and then give him the correct word however when asked to name a telephone that was pictured he said tesseract his wife having a highly literate background knew that this was not nonsense instead it was a very clever application of a word that means a three-dimensional object unfolding into a fourth dimension [Music] paul said that due to his strokes quote words come like tardigrades for him which again is not nonsense for tardigrades is a real word yet if we don't have this biological term in our background or if we lack the concept of simile then we interpret his communication as unintelligible okay audience you ready let's see if your speech is intelligible or unintelligible next slide please there we go so this is a picture of okay this is interesting response so if you said angels then your answer was correct according to the speech therapist paul west said it was a picture of cherubim but that word was not part of the speech therapist's hermeneutical background and was therefore incorrect and unintelligible my hope is that this new project will help people become aware of these kinds of assumptions that they bring to communication with the living as well as the dying thank you very much [Applause] a few days before my grandmother died she said to my aunts and uncles can i go home now [Music] [Applause] so here are a few thoughts friends on the mechanism that underlies the perspective of the bible and swedenborg's spiritual experiences emanuel swedenborg was born in 1688 died in 1772 at 84 years old when he was in his mid 50s he reports that he had an intense spiritual awakening that led to a more or less permanent dual consciousness of this life and the life after death from his perspective on both sides of the veil he was able to use his highly scientific mind to explore and describe in great detail the nature of the interaction between spirit and flesh now people who think from a materialist perspective may find it difficult to believe in the near-death experience or out-of-body experiences because if the physical senses have shut down or are elsewhere where else could the signals be coming from and how might that perspective view people saying strange things as they approach death that's probably just babbling as the brain is breaking down the bible expresses a different perspective it says that we each have two bodies in first corinthians 15 paul speaks of our resurrection at death and what what kind of body we have after we pass on and his teaching culminates in this statement there is a natural body and there is a spiritual body scripture is so obscure isn't it putting this together with swedenborg's experience what i believe this is saying is that we have a physical body with physical senses and organs and we also have a spiritual body with spiritual senses and organs and we've had both since birth although most of us are aware of only one of our bodies the bible also suggests that our spiritual body lives in a higher world a world that contains wisdom that cannot be expressed intelligibly in the words of any earthly language again paul writes of someone and everything everyone thinks it was him who was quote unquote caught up to the third heaven he was caught up into paradise and heard inexpressible words and seventeen centuries later swedenborg's experience confirmed what paul said swedenborg declares that there are two complete worlds a physical world of matter and a spiritual world made not a physical matter but of what swedenborg calls spiritual substance meaning that it stands behind or under matter i recommend his book heaven and hell to you if you'd like to explore this some more these two worlds are completely separate but each of us bridges and inhabits them both through these two bodies of ours although many of us are not aware of that second world can i have the next slide please there we go and i think the one after that right with the two people in it thank you there we go our physical senses pick up physical signals from the physical world and our spiritual senses when they become active pick up spiritual signals from the spiritual world the world of the afterlife as long as our physical senses are operative they tend to command our attention they are by nature louder and closer to us than the realm of the spirit just the way the light from the sun during the day being closer to us overpowers the quieter light of distant stars even though there are billions of stars many of which are actually brighter and more powerful than our little sun when we die our physical body dies and our physical sense is with it of course but our consciousness comes into awareness of our spiritual body and its senses and this provides a seamless transition of our consciousness when we die the transition that people speak about in their accounts of near-death experiences there are some people though like swedenborg who get an extensive sneak preview for him the veil between this world and the other one became thinned and non-existent and many people are clairvoyant or have other spiritual abilities and all of us at times have vivid lucid dreams or experiences that cannot be explained as merely physical as people approach death what i believe is happening is the signals from their spiritual bodies which have long been drowned out by their physical senses start to leak through does that make sense the great division between spirit and flesh begins to break down for them and as their physical bodies fail their awareness of their spiritual body and spiritual senses begins to awaken just the way the stars start to peek out as the sun goes down now i've been trying to think though of a way to demonstrate this experientially for you hold two hold two i've been wondering how you could hold two experiences hold two worlds in the in in in your mind at this excuse me for a minute okay next slide go oh okay ready camera three and cut three okay i think i know what that is that that's the person up in the booth who's calling the show uh it's interesting when i think about it it was very fortunate that that happened because it's a good analogy for what i'm talking about there's someone up in the booth there who's been running the show the whole evening and even though we've been here paying attention to this and seeing slides and so on we've been unaware of a second conversation going on in the same room unseen helpers working behind the scenes camera people lighting people sound people have been getting a communication from a director in the booth and none of us are aware of it there's a second communication going on and what i think happened there was that apparently the boundary between the two communications broke down for a minute and that second conversation became audible and the first in fact i started mindlessly saying hold two hold two because i was uh that's what i was hearing i was echoing what i was hearing from the director up in the booth so that's somewhat akin i think friends to what i think is going on with people who are approaching death they're starting to become conscious of a second conversation in another world a conversation in an unseen world with unseen helpers working behind the scenes to get ready for the passing that is about to occur and that conversation and many other things from that realm sometimes cross over into this reality through the mouths of those whose bodies are gradually failing and their conversation might sound like nonsense to us the language used behind the scenes is somewhat different than our language for instance none of us up here on stage tonight found occasion to say ready camera three but that doesn't mean it's not a language and doesn't have a purpose maybe we haven't heard such inexpressible wisdom before and we're not sure what it means so in conclusion perhaps the next time you hear someone on their deathbed saying strange and wonderful things you could think of it as offering you a glimpse of what they are experiencing behind the scenes thank you friends [Applause] [Music] i think back to my father when i was a baby and my dad was delegated with the responsibility of singing lullabies to me at night and you know when i was an infant i couldn't tell you what my father was saying exactly and precisely and oh goodness he couldn't tell me what i was saying right i was gurgling and bubbling and all those things but the language the rhythm of it the way that we connected formed a bridge between souls three years ago my father passed away and during the last three weeks of his life i heard a language and i heard a voice that often goes unheard by many of us sometimes in some cases the voices of those who are dying actually frighten the people who care most about them after my father passed and his final words were thank you i love you to my mother i went to the library at uc berkeley i'm a graduate of berkeley and linguistics to look up what i thought would be obviously there would be tons of research on this amazing language of end of life and i looked through all the databases i looked everywhere and i found nothing when i was a kid i was fascinated by dr seuss and lewis carroll and other nonsense writers when i went to medical school some years later i quickly realized that terminally ill patients tend to talk nonsense in the last few days or hours of their lives and that the family members who are left behind are very touched by this and puzzled i felt therefore that it would be a great thing to do to study the dying words the enigmatic nonsense that people speak in the last few days and hours of their lives and that with the typology of nonsense that i had developed we're actually able to see the patterns of nonsensical communications people share in the last few days of their lives so i am very happily working on this project with my friends at lisa smart and company because i do think that this is a very interesting and important piece of work that has never been done so interestingly enough the final words project is an amazing idea that involves collecting people's final words and analyzing what they say is they're dying but lisa smart didn't have an academic home for the project and these days it's so important to have institutional review boards to oversee your research and bernathan college happens to have an affiliation with a review board that would do that research into the communications of the dying or rich d as we call it is a project that falls under the umbrella of the final words project we're going to record those utterances and analyze from a linguistic and a psychological perspective what the words of the dying might mean and this is groundbreaking work there has never been work done like this anywhere before this i think can give us a sort of backhanded way into the human mind and i believe that this work will be able to track the mind of people as as we go through the dying process i really hope that the final words projects does many things i hope it strengthens families i hope it helps healthcare providers offer more compassionate care to people that they're with and i really hope that people are not so afraid of language that is different we are asking for your help in funding research into the communications of the dying we want you to be a part of the process and to own a piece of our project and the money is going to practical things like recording devices like signs at the bedside that help loved ones understand what the project is about so that they don't have to be afraid or confused when they see a recording device at the bedside it's going towards data analysis my time as a professor so that i can properly analyze and train interns psychology interns and even english majors who are looking at the elements of language so that we can train student volunteers to be a part of this research project and ultimately this might lead to publications that they can have their names on too so i think that this is a very important project and that it's going to bring an entirely new kind of insight into the dying mind you can't be human and living without at some point experiencing the death of a loved one and so this project applies to every human being in the world and what i really hope through the final words project is as we understand the language of those final days and we understand it more deeply that we can create almost like lullabies but goodbyes in those final days [Music] [Music] so there's been a note made of it before we've gone a little long i see that as you get more value for the price of admission uh there's scheduled an intermission now of course anyone's free to go as they please but in 10 minutes we'll be back here and our panel is going to be answering the questions that you've written down that we've gotten online so if you want to see that be back here in 10. thanks thanks for coming back everybody all right thanks to our panelists for all that great wisdom so we're gonna get into a few of the questions that you all had um beginning with uh oh there was one i really wanted to start with yeah this because i feel like it sort of sums it up what was the most amazing nonsense you have heard and raymond do you want to open on this one i absolutely do is this working i have two wonderful grown sons 44 and 41 and a wonderful son and also my wife um and i have adopted two wonderful kids at birth carter who's now 17 and carol ann who is 14 and carter is mexican-american by heritage and we adopted him from kerrville texas and carol ann is native american blackfeet from montana she's 14 now and we adopted her at birth as well well when we adopted carter the way we did it i had we'd made contact with a mexican-american family in kerrville texas just wonderful people and their daughter carolina was pregnant and um we we made a contact with them we went down there before carter's birth and we made good relationship with the family which we still have and then we went back for carter's birth and we were there when he was born on july 20th um 1998 and um my the obstetrician delivered him and handed him to my wife so he has been hours from the very beginning and we've also maintained this relationship with his wonderful birth family and of course there's the uh the routine three-day stay in the hospital after a baby is born right so on the day that when he was three days old and we could take him out of the hospital my wife and i and carter went to a restaurant there in kerrville texas along with carter's birth mother and her um wonderful father and her mother and we were all sitting around in this restaurant having lunch and i was sitting there my wife was sitting there carter was in his little carry-on seat and the gist of the conversation was that carter will always know about his birth family and that um and the passage of time we'll all get back together and so on and in the midst of this conversation i looked up on the wall of this restaurant and there was a placard there that was some place there for humor and i'm sure you've probably seen the placard yourself and this is what the placard said closed i have gone out to find myself if i should arrive before i return please hold me till i come back now to me that was carter's thoughts and four years ago april of four years ago it came to pass justice carter that just as this sign had said the carter's birth family came his mother and his biological father subsequently they've gotten married and the her parents were there and there was that reunion and um i just you know that shows to me that sometimes at least nonsense can convey a transcendent meaning because that was exactly carter's message at that point does anybody else want to speak to that you try to top that okay this is a question for lisa smart people near death often spend time asleep or nearly asleep do you think it would be useful to collect the other instances of healthy people when they talk in their sleep this could be used to identify what is unique in the speech of those who are dying yes that's a wonderful suggestion does anybody want to elaborate on that this thing is on okay i think it's interesting when you speak with people about their experiences people that have had spiritually transformative experiences often discuss the modality of sleep taking them to different dimensions or that sleep was the gateway by which they were able to have experiences with deceased loved ones and after death communication so if you speak with someone that's had this type of experience they'll say you know i fell asleep but when i was with my loved one i wasn't asleep i was very much awakened in their presence and i think you know again what we're doing with this methodology is describing and analyzing so i think it would probably be an interesting extension of the research to see if there's any language when someone's in that hypnagogic state when they're kind of waking up and a little bit groggy and see if the language yields anything interesting it's a great idea yeah as a matter of fact it's very common in the hypnagogic state for people to hear little pieces of nonsense and this is the standard book on um hypnagogic state is by andreas mavro mattis and it's called um hypnagogia and it's a very uh you know it's a huge book about and this is what they talk about in there that is very common for people in the um entry into sleep processes but the state between wakefulness and sleep to hear nonsense going through their head and it's also when people talk in their sleep very often they talk nonsense and it's indicator and how many of you for example in your hypnagogic state in that sort of twilight zone going into sleep have that experience if you've heard nonsensical things and again if you look around the room you see this is just very common and in nonsense this also signifies transitions as you would say it's um for example in shaman songs as you can learn from eliada's sort of classic on shamanism by princeton university press 64. if you want to look it up but he talks about shaman songs which in the shamanic tradition it was a way of the certain group of the siberian shamans said we cross over to the other side by the power of our songs but what this meant was that they felt that by uttering shaman songs that they could pass over to the other side and the the the structure of a shaman song is a blending of elements of meaningless nonsense specifically nonsense syllables and meaningless refrains together with elements of intelligible language so that the combination is more powerful than either alone which sounds so abstract until you listen to this hickory dickory dock the mouse ran up the clock the clock struck one and down it ran hickory dickory dock okay now all of us know this we passed along for hundreds of years to our kids what happens if you take out the nonsense the mouse ran up the clock the clock struck one and down he ran would you tell that to your kids no it's the power of the meaningless and the meaningful elements brought together that creates the mind-altering property of nonsense and that was the mechanism mechanism of the shaman song i used to um it dewop has the same um feature and back in 1969 to 72 i was a professor of philosophy at east carolina university and to show my students in my logic courses this the way that nonsense and meaningful utterances can get combined i would take a little i had a portable record player and i would bring do what songs to my students and play them and since i was at the front of the room i could get i could watch the students faces and expressions as these different kinds of um doo-wop songs were played and the first thing i said is very dramatic and any of you could do this i mean it's just an easy thing to do um i quickly realized that the effect of the song depends on the specific arrangement of the intelligible versus the unintelligible parts and there was one in particular that really i could see it all it would quickly put students into a trance and it was it's called little star if you want and it's a very particular arrangement of nonsensical and meaningful parts and i would just watch this when i play this the students should just go right down into a trance it's very quickly so it's a very powerful modality that we have forgotten about although our ancestors in prehistoric times knew all about it but once the literal domain was you know distinguished and and contrasted with the figurative and so on and because of the historical things i was talking about we we've just sort of shuttled that aside largely due to one of my heroes aristotle but it's easy to bring it back into our awareness all right anybody else okay so um we heard some accounts of these already lisa you mentioned what your father had said before he died so we may not have anything on this but somebody asked what have been some dramatic personal changes you have seen in people's last moments does anyone on the panel have any stories uh being around somebody one of the one of the research questions we're looking at is do people die as they lived psychologically and so i don't know in the transitions i've seen of of patients that to me anecdotally has been confirmed i actually haven't seen all that much drama i haven't seen these kind of death bed repentances or people running screaming from the room and it's been a very natural transition many times when i've been in the presence of both children and adults in fact children more so as difficult as it is to discuss children are innocent and authentic and abiding with that was a very powerful experience because it was so non-dramatic and often very peaceful and so i don't know if lisa would feel any or if you saw on your dad but this despite the words being different and despite him accounting for angels and things like that he still was who he was it was still his voice and his personality coming through so i'm i might argue and this again all it is is theories to be validated i might argue that we might not see anything very dramatic at the bedside i will say there are accounts of people having some fairly frightening ndes and communications but in my personal experience i i haven't seen that yet all right thanks now um i'm sort of maybe thinking of you two guys at the end but but anybody who wants to answer this go ahead how do you think these conversations with a dying can help people resolve their fear of death and if anyone else has thoughts on it yeah i was talking with someone um a few months ago who was who was dying he had almost gone a couple of times and then come back and and i remember him talking about um it was a february morning when i went over there it was very um icy and i was not in a great mood and and uh i had just planned on sitting in the sort of anti-chamber he was in this hospital bed but we walked through the door and we were just right in his presence there and so there was no okay all right we will it was somebody i knew fairly well but it wasn't a member of the family or anything and um he was so full of life and so much happier than i was in that exchange it was really interesting dying of congestive heart failure i think and and um one of the things that he said was uh i used to think i was living to die but now i think i'm dying to live and um he talked about how what a happy time it was he really somehow conveyed with his language to me uh that it's a transition uh and and that actually care is taken about this trans you know like you you start you already got one foot as as as other speakers said tonight in that other realm uh which i think is very gentle and he seemed so happy about it he was thrilled and i felt the same quality in some of the things that lisa quoted tonight of sort of being thrilled or excited and moving forward you know so i think it does uh help to remove that fear uh which is pretty profound i mean we're all going to face it we have no idea what it's going to be like but but i think it does take some of the edge off it it certainly took some of the edge off it for me to see this person in such a radiantly happy state having almost died a couple of times yeah it i think it's on if you just try it okay um that may comment um the example you used there is another example of how rep the incidence of repetition figures of speech increases as people get closer to death and the specific one there that he used is called chiasmus and it it involves repetition in reverse like when you say as kikura or tully as we call him cicero said eat to live not live to eat and and many others and it's um it's a very complex figure of speech and it's interesting that that would be the one he would choose as yeah yeah if i could just add a little bit to that um was having a discussion with my brother-in-law and both getting older and we noticed that we we had something of a fear of how we might die would it be a painful exit or a sudden one that would you know cause bring unexpected grief to our loved ones but we but we felt that the more we um read about people and their experiences and contemplated it that the idea of dying actually became less fearsome and particularly as we have relatives who pass away we have an aunt that passed away fairly recently and she was an international traveler and before some months before she passed away she she was declining and she made the comment to us she said well i have one foot in the departure lounge right now and she was looking forward to to going she missed her husband who had passed away some years before and something that raymond and and our researchers are doing here is that it goes back to raymond has a strong affection for ancient philosophy and and philosophy is the love of wisdom and one of the things that philosophy and psychology the logos of the psyche or the soul is supposed to do it's supposed to help us reflect on how our life will end so that we can better live our life now it's it's like that exercise that maybe sometimes you have your students do about you know what do you want people to say about you at your memorial service and and so thinking about your own demise actually helps you live a wiser life now before that time and and i think maybe some of the some of the things that we might hear people say in their their final words um some of it will might give us some wisdom in that regard um in you know particularly if it does turn out that people tend to die or make a transition as they lived and so we might see um you know how important habits are for example in our in our lives i think we're gonna have two more questions uh one this is this is one of several questions um somebody talking about an experience that they had my father would call my name when i would leave the hospital room did he need me back and so i'm assuming this is the father's near death and you know not necessarily lucid but would call the name so i maybe you don't know definitively but does anyone have thoughts on that or did i stump you well i know that a proper name is incidentally it's i happen to have written my doctoral dissertation on the problem of proper names and that sounds so bizarre until you realize it's a very difficult um part of speech for logicians and the reason is that we know about the distinction between denotation and connotation um the denotation of a term is the class of all objects to which it can be truly asserted like the definition i mean the denotation of dog would be fido and rover and on and on and on but the connotation of a term are the characteristics that are conveyed when you assert the word of the object and the difficulty with proper names why they have been so of such great interest to logicians is that they apparently have denotation without connotation it's like if i say bill you may be able to infer because of um the conventions that the person is probably a male but you can't really i know of bill who's a woman and so it's interesting and it's a very powerful mode of expression and so to me if i were in that situation and then i heard that somebody that i loved was calling my name i would take that very seriously yeah absolutely yeah i also wanted to suggest though that as lisa has mentioned there are lots of metaphors that arise at the end of life so perhaps the symbolism of that name is important it's if if a father is calling a child's name there most rationally yes there would be a yearning for that child but also what that child what that son represents and perhaps the connection the mental mapping of memories and sweet things and hard things and perhaps that child plays a role in transition so i would hate for that person to feel guilty and not feel they could leave this is the kind of this is why we're doing this research right we want to comfort people we want to also provide an evidence base for this kind of stuff and i would i would hope that that person wouldn't feel guilt or that they had missed something because it's quite possible that in saying the name and the repetition of the name that brought that child closer to that parent and so even without the child having to be there there was a sense of just calling them and summoning them forth in that dying state and i would hope that they might be comforted by that leads well into the the last question because you said this is what we're trying to do with the research um so this this can be for anyone but so in what ways can or do near-death studies and what you're doing influence end of life policy making so looking down the road i mean in the hypothetical but what what could we possibly get out of this uh once we learn things so does anybody want to start that okay we'll go back to you i think it's really interesting you know having gotten one of my degrees is his bioethics degree from penn and as technology has allowed us to extend our lives and keep us our natural lives sustained shall we say it has created a host of questions or issues regarding well when does that when does the person actually leave their bodies and how do we how do we get wishes from loved ones expressed and one of the things that i'm thinking about a little a little bit is this idea of advanced directives how many people come into the hospital and they don't have their wishes written down and so often times when there is the discussion of life support you have to kind of have your best guess as to what that person would have wanted but of course if you ask a significant other what would your loved one have wanted oftentimes that significant other speaks for him or herself what they would want or what they would want for that loved one and that's understandable that's human nature but if we can start seeing where language deteriorates or starts being more unintelligible if there are questions we can ask in a critical period if there is i almost think of chomsky's critical period for learning language is there a critical period where we start to unlearn and start to kind of go into nonsensical and if that's the case we can still try to have these conversations maybe later than we expected i imagine a person who might be rambling and whose decisions might seem like they're not making sense but if we can start categorizing and classifying saying there's still some of that person in there and they can be involved in this end of life conversation and tell us what they want i think that's valuable i think it's a really hard thing to do right now i don't think we're anywhere close to it but we have these abilities to really add or remove interventions that affect how we die and so we're going to be having more of these conversations my other hope would be that we make this more of a family discussion that when we have death happening in medicalized environments as now is the case we are not quite as communal as we used to be where people died at home although it still does happen that we could bring families more together around the bedside and in the healthcare environment and appreciate the value that having a social aspect to dying brings that's very nebulous with regards to policy but i think we would have to start somewhere around there yeah absolutely now i've got an opinion too um shoot which i just think this is a good opportunity maybe i know there's probably a lot of people here interested in near-death experiences so what i see in the medical community having um been the son of a medical doctor who i was there at my dad's graduation from medical school i've known all of his colleagues throughout their career i've been a physician myself for almost 40 years um and what i see having what having my interest in this subject awakened in philosophy because of its relevance to the study of ancient greek philosophy but i've seen the whole process of its gradual integration into medicine and so it might be interesting for you to know that missouri medicine is a very highly ranked medical journal i think there's a hundred plus in the u.s and the most you know the most respected of course is the new england journal of medicine but at i think the ranking of number five is missouri medicine which is a very reputable and respected medical journal and they have just finished an 18-month series of articles on near-death experiences by physicians who have either investigated it or who have had near-death experiences themselves and clinically the relevance of this doesn't have anything to do with the question of an afterlife in the sense that the the way this presents itself in medicine is that we know from many studies that this is a fairly common concomitant of the process of revival and resuscitation and so on and it's getting more common because the uh resuscitation techniques are rapidly getting better so we're getting more and more of these cases of people who are brought back from closer and closer states to states of death and we see the the experiences are getting correspondingly more complex as the closer they get to death so this is a very important question clinically because the ques the clinical question is what do we do for these patients you know what do you do when a patient has a profound life-changing spiritual experience when they are in the medical situation and so i think the answer to that is pretty clear and that is that number one uh you need to listen to them because it does it helps people just to be able to narrate their story and to listen to them kind of non-committally um and to number one and to reassure them that they're not alone that you've heard this many times and that this is very well studied now so it very much has a clinical relevance and plus another thing is that there are all kinds of other experiences that people have in the prospect of death that clinicians just need to know about when i was 18 year old i remember at uva reading plato's fatal which is still i mean oh my god what a work and those of you who've read the fate of remember that when his friends go into the prison that day that he's to be executed first question they ask him is socrates what's this that you've been that you've been writing songs while you're in prison and the implication is here maybe he's slipping under the stress right because then the other works of plato socrates is always portrayed as you know poets are liars and we're not going to have them in the ideal society and so on why this change there the last few days and so socrates says well i'm responding to dreams and visions that need to pursue music so he goes and he's been writing these songs and then he goes on to make an analogy he's or a metaphor he says um that the swans there's a greek folk belief that just before swans died they sing the most beautiful songs at all and plato kind of speculates that well this is their way of attuning themselves to the other side and that so anyway i knew that as an 18 year old undergraduate that was 1962. flash forward to 1974 i was doing my surgery rotation and um so i i and two attendings walked into this woman's room in her early 70s who has had heart difficulties and as we walked in we saw her have the cardiac arrest and so i was the first one there so i started the resuscitation okay and as this woman was passing away she was reciting poetry okay i couldn't i mean i didn't have the presence of mind was what was that again and write it down but i could tell it was poetry because of the meter and the rhyme subsequent to that i have heard from hundreds of people who tell me that in the last few days or hours before their loved one died that as far as they knew this person never had any interest whatsoever in poetry or song but the last few days they started writing poetry and sometimes as they are dying sing now these are not nearly as common say as near-death experiences or shared death death experiences and in a group this size probably one or two but how many of you it's probably not a big number but how many of you have experienced that with your own life experience or anything let's see if there's anybody here one two that's how many i i don't i see two hands is that all and three okay and you see these are things that anybody can observe if and if they just start asking but are not generally known and it's very mystery why in the last few days or hours to people who've never had an interest in poetry or song start singing or writing or reciting poems let's end on that note everybody thanks for hanging out for the extra hour thank you to our panel have a good night [Music] you

Channel: Off The Left Eye

Views: 77,387

Keywords: Raymond Moody (Author), Afterlife (Media Genre), Religion (TV Genre), Emanuel Swedenborg (Author)

Id: jU4AKwhwxgI

Length: 163min 59sec (9839 seconds)

Published: Tue Sep 22 2015