What Really Happens When You Die | Peter Fenwick's Studies of End-of-Life-Phenomena

the Ethics Committee said you can do a carer study but you can't ask the dying so he actually did a carer study we did three hospices in a nursing home in this country and we did three hospices in rotterdam to get a cross-cultural component it's not very cross-cultural but it's just slightly different little bit further away and we found the most fascinating things and so it's allowed us to put together a measure of the sorts of things that you can expect the first thing that you may get is a premonition [Music] dr. fennec you are a neuropsychiatrist and you are an expert in near-death experiences and end-of-life phenomena before I ask you about that what is a neuropsychiatrist I'm a neuropsychiatrist and that means as I'm trained in neurology and psychiatry and I've done that for many years but it's a perfect position to be because you're between brain and mind so you can see both sides of the field and understand them much better than if you were just a psychiatrist or a neurologist what does your daily work involve the day job that I had was dealing with people of brain damage and the psychological problems flow from that so I dealt with epilepsy and I had large numbers of patients who had seizures they had altered consciousness of various types so one can use epilepsy as a model of how the brain works and that was great but in my research they were very wide as interested in sleep as interested as the equipment came in to look at brain structure but first of all I was interested in the electrical activity of the brain EEG and in fact one of the first papers I wrote was on George Harrison to remember George Harrison the Beatle well he very kindly came along to our lab and I took his EEG when he was meditating because he had been to see the Maharishi and so on he was one of the first meditation records that I got so that then became an interest of mine so meditation and unusual experiences spiritual experiences I I studied and then I became interested in the near-death experience that led on to an interest in dying and how we die in broad terms what can we learn from these scans so how does nearest country help us understand people it's very good because you get both sides of the picture you can understand what's going on in their brain you can understand what's going on in their minds so you've got a really quite a close correlation between those two things but it also directs you straight to the fundamental question of our time and that is what is consciousness is it all brain is it outside a brain because William James way back the turn of the century said that consciousness was outside and the brain filtered it as many people have done since then whereas others and the main thrust of modern science is to ignore that and to say now it's all brain function my own view is that's too limited and I don't think it is for a minute yeah how did you get involved with near-death experiences and near-death experiences I thought was rubbish absolute rubbish it only happened in California and it would never ever cross the Atlantic I knew that and I said so but inland was that oh that was way back in the late 1970s just going into 1980 until there turned up in my consulting room somebody had had in their death experience he'd had the cardiac catheter in one of our hospitals in London which had gone wrong and during the process he left his body watched the resuscitation and then had the classical near-death experience and so with this as an example I was able to study them and I came to the conclusion that they really happened and they had a lot to teach us so I had to shift my position from rubbish to really interesting mm-hmm how did you go about studying these phenomena first of all I took individual cases when I came across them and looked at those from the point of view of what the people experienced and I set up a number of studies some of them I was allowed to do and others I wasn't for example in one of the hospitals I was in I wanted to study people in the intensive care unit and see if they had near-death experiences during their time and when I put it to that hospital's ethics committee the man who ran the intensive care unit said none of my patients will have experiences like that it's a waste of time and so I couldn't do that one then so I went the other route and that was to study the experiences that people have had and I was very lucky because in 87 I did a television documentary in this country and following it we got 2,000 letters remember letters those things you have from you know not an email so we've got to thousands of those and that gave us a huge database so I took the best ones best meaning that most like an NDE and sent questionnaires off to 500 of them and that became a sample and I learned a lot of very important things from that firstly this sample will never be repeated again because 98% had in fact not heard of NDEs when they had their NDE so that automatically rules out suggestion and things like that so it was very different the next thing I learned was that when you looked at what caused the NDE it was very very wide from cardiac arrests right through childbirth illnesses going even wider than that you come down at the end to people who would be sitting in front of their far one evening and they would have a near-death experience they got all the phenomena and if they filled in any of the rating scales they were rated as a near-death experience and so I learned that they are common in our society and the fact that they are associated only with things like cardiac arrest I think was not due to the work which ourselves and Bruce Grayson in America was doing and that was to say okay we want to study near-death experiences well then we want to know what the brain state is now how do you know what the brain state is when a woman is is having a baby you can't it's far too variable and you during an illness it's also too variable so I took what I thought was the most sensible when the brain was not working so I took the near-death experiences which occurred during cardiac arrest and so we spent a number of years looking at that so this was a large sample did you get the whole spectrum of near-death experiences I think it was pretty nearly the whole spectrum in our culture because you have to say that they are certain fundamentals which are culture specific for example tunnels and light tend to be seen a lot more in Western experiences than they do in some of the eastern experiences and if you take hunter-gatherers the experience itself is quite different for example there's some nice simple aegs sorry near-death experiences from hunter-gatherers and here's one example a man had a near-death experience he got into his canoe and he paddled for three days so he came to an island this is his near-death experience and they actually do this and in the island he then had the sort of experience of an ideal place like the near-death experiences do so his was quite different don't forget the Japanese when they go they don't actually go down a tunnel usually they're usually come to a dark River which they have to cross and they have to find a boatman to take them across that sort of thing so there are cultural differences and I think one has to realize that and accept it is that dependent on your worldview on your background yes the reason for there being cultural differences is very wide it's definitely worldview it's definitely religious upbringing and it's definitely the culture that you're in all these things impact on it what do you think is the value of NDE research I think that they have two important values one is that they have to be at the cutting edge of research into consciousness and one of the things that we're learning is that very powerful experiences change people who have them and so people who have near-death experiences or change because of them and so that's an interesting fact which we need to need to look at the phenomenology of them gives us some idea about the nature and structure of consciousness so from that point of view they're extremely good and because they've come to be associated love pointed out that this is just an association they're much wider than that with cardiac arrest and actual death experiences are they a good model of how we die so from all those reasons I think they're very important do you think that near-death experiences provide some kind of proof that consciousness can exist without a brain is consciousness independent of the brain that's a very wide question and I wouldn't look can consciousness exist without a brain yes well we'd have no way of knowing would we so the question is a good one I'd formulate it slightly differently I would say of the mechanist s'right is consciousness secreted by the brain as the brain as the liver secretes bile that sort of thing or the kidneys urine is it a product of brain function or is it in fact a filter in some way that there is in fact a transcendent reality out there that is filtered by the brain so we get a reduced picture of it and I think those are the two questions I mean I know what my answer is but it's not the usual answer why is that why do I believe that consciousness exists beyond the brain rather than that it's secreted like bile in the brain the answer to that is that why would you think it was only brain function and if you look at the arguments which you put forward there's got to be a very high correlation between brain damage and the changes in the mind and in the capabilities and so on of the person who's damaged there's got to be a very high correlation but that doesn't say anything about causation because causation and correlation are quite different and if you want a really good Authority for this statement you can think about Penfield Penfield was a very very well known neuro surgeon from Canada and Penfield put electrodes in the brain he's one of the first people to do it got a very good idea of what how the brain functions and Hyde was connected together and so on so he spent his life actually looking at the brain and at the end he wrote a walkabout what did he think what his mind he came to say there's absolutely no doubt that neurons communicate with each other in very complex ways and complex ways we don't understand yet but the energy of mind is different and so however much you study in Europe the neurons you will not in fact get to the energy of mind so it's a different dimension altogether now that's from somebody who spent his life studying the brain but on the other hand you can get philosophers like Dan Dennett who says it's all brain I was sitting next to Dan Dennett at a conference once and I said Dan you don't really believe that do you when you understand when we understand the neuro and we understand consciousness he said absolutely when we numb when we've understood the neurons then there will be nothing left maybe a little smidgen like that but that's all it's only the brain and that's so you've got the two camps and each camp will in fact put forward evidence as to why they're right but of course I sit in between the brain is enormous ly important has great functions but it can't explain consciousness with there is only one theory in this whole world of what consciousness is and this is Stuart Hameroff sand Roger Penrose ease theory and this is that the brain in the microtubules these are structures within the brain acts as a quantum mechanical computer and that it is within that collapse of the wavefunction in the tubules that consciousness undifferentiated unattached arises so think of the huge matrix of the brain and these little points of consciousness coming into the brain then of course consciousness is woven into the brain and into the circuits of the brain and then you build it up into self consciousness now that is about the only theory I know that actually allows consciousness to arise in any way at all so it's an important theory you've written a book about the art of dying and described a number of end-of-life phenomena can you tell us about them I have written a book called the art of dying and I wrote it because I asked a question he came right out of the near-death experience research the research said that you go down a tunnel in in our culture you meet a being of light you go into this transcendent reality where you meet dead relatives and spiritual beings you may have a life review then you'll come to a border which if you cross you know you're going to die so it's a perfectly valid question to ask is this near-death experience a model of what will happen when you die so we can actually do that so how do you validate that model what you do is you find out what the mental experiences are of the die now in 2000 when I started on this research you could go into PubMed one of the main medical databases and ask questions like how many people have published papers on deathbed visions during about five what about end-of-life experiences maybe one or two and so you could become a world expert you see very quickly you only had to look at seven papers and you knew the literature and so what I'm saying is that there wasn't anything there so we went along to our ethics committee and said could we please talk to the dying so we could get some of what the process of dying was like those who paid back in 2000 and they quite rightly said I think no because you may disturb the dying but why did they say that they said it because nobody had ever done that before and they actually didn't know so we had to change our tack we had to do a carer study now if you go into a hospice it's less so now but very strong then you find that it's divided into bands through the nurses who are in touch with the patients they see all the phenomena of dying and the doctors who armed and say it doesn't occur so there is really quite a significant difference between these two and I have some really interesting stories about this gap between medical and the nursing staff as I say it's less now I'll tell you why I did it then I'll tell you the stories afterwards because it makes more sense that way so the ethics committee said you can do a carer study but you can't ask the dying so he actually did a carer study we did three hospices in a nursing home in this country and we did three hospices in rotterdam to get a cross cultural component it's not very cross-cultural but it's just slightly different little bit further away and we found the most fascinating things and so it's allowed us to put together a measure of the sorts of things that you can expect the first thing that you may get is a premonition and that means that you know you're going to die so before you get the diagnosis you learn in a dream maybe or it suddenly comes to you that you're going to die soon this is the patients or the relatives know the patient's the Dalai Lama says all of us no two years before we're going to die that we're going to die so we're given that information if you look in his book to see how we know he says two things one of which I can understand slightly and that is the behavior changes and the other is that our breathing changes well I don't know what he means by that but I can see that one's behavior may change you may get the feeling that you're going to die and then of course your behavior will change but he says it's very common in fact it's everyone we didn't find that we felt it was not common but not so rare that we couldn't pick up occasional cases of it the next thing that happens is that a few weeks before you die you get death bed visitors now what's the death bed visitor they are relatives who come to you they do it in a specific way they may stand outside the room in which you're dying or they may come into the room and that's quite common you of course will talk to them and then a number of them will sit on the bed and talk to you why do they sit on the bed because it's enormous ly comforting to you to have somebody sitting on the bed I mean if you've ever had any old child you know you don't just stand up and talk to it you go and sit on the bed and hold his hand and so on well the the relatives can sit on the bed and we took a hundred deathbed visions and analyzed them for content and we found that the Communists spoke people who come a first degree but relatives mother and father are commonly seen dead spouses are quite common but we also in fact found that brothers and sisters come people you don't know occasionally occasionally animals not many sorry about that your cat or you dog is not going to come along so it's mainly first-degree relatives and we also found in our sample that spiritual beings were seen now the spiritual beings behave slightly differently from the relatives they tend to either wait outside the hostel hospice and they're seen through the window or they may come to the door and some of them come in now I must point out that this is there's a big cultural element because a paper published from the Bible relative of America showed that angels were seen very commonly now in our sample any three percent of people saw angels so it's much smaller over here so I think there is this cultural component to it so there are visitors and spiritual beings are there any other phenomena around this as you go closer to death you come into the next stage and in fact these needed to be changed now a bit but what we initially found was that you went into a different reality a spiritual world then you came back again so this was as if you were getting used to the spiritual world so he went into it and came back and went into it and came back and it was very important for the people who were dying and now that is changing and I want to talk about Monica rinses theory on this because it's absolutely vital Monica rents is a theologian in Switzerland and she has had a lot of contact with the dying and she's done published three studies now with a cancer patients who are dying and one study was I think with about 60 patients another one was 200 forty she's just recently done a dual hospice study now what she finds is that what we said was correct people do in fact go into this other reality but if we come now to the dying process itself which is enormous ly interesting and important and we all need to learn this in fact we should be taught it in in in school and the way that dying I think is it's like this deathbed visitors come find then at some moment you realize you're going to die and it hits you hard we're not coming back guys this isn't a getting well process it's a dying process and that then leaves you in a very difficult position because you never come across that before you've always had some control over something you now don't and so you have to start giving everything out this is absolutely fundamental you have to give up the fact that you're going to go on living you have to give up your wife have to give up your cat and your dog to give up your children your family have to give up your house and your job you've got to give up everything and if you don't you remain attached now attachment is the most difficult thing when you're dying if you could give everything up you'd have a very smooth transition you go from this pre transition where you're attached to transition which is a sort of intermediate one to post transition and in post transition you in fact have given everything up you go more and more into the spiritual domain which I've described to you and it's just like that until at the end you have lost your ego you've lost that part of yourself which is differentiating you and you become what's called non jewel that means that you do in fact merge with the universe you have already lost all your trappings of being a body in a person and you just got this non duality which is merging with the greatest greater cosmos behind so the idea that you're going to retain a lot of the things that you have in this life when you go there you know again see my mum and say hi probably not but you will probably you could see your mom I don't know but in fact you will become Universal so that's what the data shows and the data shows that if you don't give up all the things to which you're attached then you have a very difficult process in dying because you've got these two processes the one of fusion with the greater beyond the outer pulling back into the limited juicy and what happens then when the dying is more difficult yeah then you have what is called spiritual restlessness it's it's not a pleasant state to be in because you've got a lot of anxiety and all the time you're being pulled back you're being pulled back you're being pulled back it's not pleasant so you ought to know this so when you go into a hospice you should have a lecture on the fact that you're going to give up everything and so that's that takes you up to the dying process now before you die I just want to add one other set of phenomena and these are called terminal lucidity terminal lucidity is when the the Victorians used to call it late awakening essentially and what it was is that you suddenly sit up in bed say hi to the people around you actually you don't say how you say goodbye because you know you're dying and then you lie back and die now that's interesting enough but it's much more interesting than that because people who are paralyzed and haven't moved maybe for a year being a long term care home they can sit up and do it so for that those few moments the central nervous system seems to work again appropriately but more interesting that to me is the people who have Alzheimer's disease and have in fact lost their memories many years back and just been in a care home will sit up recognize their friends say goodbye sometimes meet their dead relatives and then lie back and die so that's a real question for science because how can you do these things if one just takes the argument that the brain secretes consciousness because it has to get its health secretion process going again do you see like that just before you die doesn't seem totally reasonable so that then you die now the shows not over it's over as far as you're concerned but it's not as far as your relatives are concerned because many people who have a a close relationship will then okay I can make a visit and this is important because as you come up to death you can actually put off your dying for a bit because sometimes some of the deathbed visits as you have say I'm going to come back on Tuesday and you'll die then but remember that we've got two sorts of narratives running one is where you have more control and you probably actually do so you can remember that you can negotiate with your relatives if you want to to live a little bit longer but when you actually die if you have a drive to go and see a daughter or a son who couldn't be there with you then you can visit and the visit is very specific we've got a lot of these and we've analysed them and they come at the time of death 99% always in half now most of the actual time of death and it depends on the mental state of the person who receives the visit if you receive the visit and you're awake then it would be a feeling that somebody you know is dying dying the feeling that they would like some help in some way or you feel some catastrophe is occurring there's the sorts of feelings you have if on the other hand you're asleep then it's quite different you get a narrative dream and here's an example of one a woman woke up I think she was actually in a narrative dream and she saw standing at the end of the bed her son and her son was dripping wet and her son came closer and closer to her and as he came closer he became he came into the light and became transfigured he gave her a message which many of them do and said it's okay please don't worry I'm all right and then the whole thing faded now the interesting point is that she's in Australia and he's in England and when she can when the time zones a joust she rings up and she finds that in fact he was drowned at that time in England and so there was a component of what was happening and he had wet clothes and then his transformation and and disappearance at the end so that's not an unusual story sometimes they just come and give their message which is always I'm okay please don't worry and then move on so those are called deathbed coincidences now in our series of these forty-five percent of the people who had them didn't know the person was dying so you can't in any way again blame expectation in very nearly half the cases and I don't think actually externally anticipation of somebody's death is a good explanation at all so--that's deathbed vision now that other phenomena which happened around the time of death and these are light in the room light in the room is fascinating it can be very strong and behave like a real light in other words the room can flood with light can flood out of the door perience by the relatives only by the relatives into the corridor and then people can pick it up and we had one occurred to the person woke up at night find the light shining to the wrong thoughts he must have left the corridor light on got up and saw it was streaming out of her aunt's bedroom her aunt was dying went in when you go into this light it's always got the spiritual quality to it and she reported that and she sat down quietly by her aunt who slowly died now she died the light faded the light fading with death is very common so the next thing we can happen at the time of death instantly when I say common in our series about thirty five percent of the nurses reported light in the rooms of the dying and in their conversations with the relatives but it's a little bit more complex than that because I've spoken to relatives where there's been a brother and a sister and one of them would have seen it in the other one may not so I think it's going to be an interaction between the person and what's going on in the dyeing process so that's light next thing is shapes leaving the body again really quite common lots of stories of that and they they describe it as first of all some people will describe a sort of Mirage type thing that they see coming up it's a sort of change in the atmosphere and the other thing is that it can look like smoke arising or it can have a definite form to it and they're all variations on the theme and it's very much how does its bettan Book of the Dead describes these last phases of dying they just describe the Mirage they describe smoke and then they go into orange sky and white sky which is something slightly different but it's a stage further down the line so shapes leaving the body quite common light and transformation then clock stopping do clocks really stop well the answer is yes how do we know because people say their clocks stopped at the time of death and show it but what interested me is okay so I I accept the pendulum clocks you know long case clocks stopped because you could see that sort of got a nice mechanical feel to it but do modern clocks which are LEDs do they stop what do they do they tend that the light out or walk and we got one of two accounts and this is a nice one and somebody came up to tell the person who's died brother that he had died when he went into the into his house his brother came to the door and said there's no need for me for you to tell me I know and when I asked him how he knew he said look at the clocks and they'd all stopped at the time of his death and were flashing his death time that's the story and you but you get a lot of these stories watches stopping and so on so clocks still seem to stop even in this modern era the other thing is cats and animals howl at the time of death that's quite common common enough for people to report it and birds fascinating if you talk to people in hospices they'll tell you quite often that birds appear on the windowsills with people that are dying I wish people would do simple experiments you just need one cat camera put it on window a person who's dying and compare that with the window somebody who's not dying I mean they're so easy such easy experiments to do and it's either true or it's not true so birds are commonly seen there was a village in Massachusetts that described a guy who was fond of owls and when he died a white owl came and sat in the village tree and well documented and they don't have scenarios there and the owl stayed there until his funeral and after his funeral it flew away what does that mean don't know okay others witnessed by others yeah so these are all all things that happen do you have a sense of frequently these things occur well we we did a in in our surveys we always asked what the frequency was you can do it in two ways you can see how common it is in the sense that if a lot of our carers saw it is probably a lot more common than if they didn't and so I can give you free frequencies very easily talking to Cara and deathbed visions were about 50% but since we published these papers other people have been doing it and they have done it two ways they have done it by looking at the charts in that other words doing a chart review so seeing how many times people have said they've seen deathbed distances and so on or seen any of these things the other way is to ask the dying if you're in that phase or ask the carers actually or the relatives and it goes way up into the 80s it's probably very common but people just don't report it and certainly we know that in Monica rensis study 90 percent 90 percent that's almost everyone will go through this phase of going into this alternate reality and back again and we'll have to give up everything and go towards non-duality so it's enormous Lee important how can we achieve a good death I I'm driven now with all the experience I've had by Monde occurrences work my work showed that you would go into this alternate reality you would have your deathbed visitors and then you would slowly come up to death and many people would in fact then trance and I've got two stories on this one is a great friend of mine Thetis blacker who was a religious planter and I had an agreement with that is when she died she would let me know if I died before her I'd let her know so that we could in fact discuss the dying process because we'd talked a lot about it and she died before I did because I'm still here and she's not and she described what it was like for her and she said as she was coming up to death this is just a week before she died she had a river of love golden love and light which flowed through her room and through the hospice and that sort of phenomena I can see probably occurs quite often but people aren't asked about it in other word and they also I don't know how to incorporate it into their worldview but that sort of thing and another one which is an amazing book he's written a book about it and this is Paul Robertson the leader of the medici quartet and he and i knew each other very well and paul had a near-death experience and in his near-death experience he catalogues the point of dying he says that he gave up his body to join with the universal consciousness joyfully happily and willingly do you see he was unattached and I think that's a very good description of the death process we have now joyfully lovingly and willingly and when he came back he was able to talk about his near-death experience and the way that had changed his life I had the same pact before but if I died before him he'd come be with me but in fact that I was lucky because I was there the day before he died and he was in and out of this sort of state but unfortunately I couldn't stay long enough but his wife was there the next day news sort of going down into consciousness unconsciousness and he said to his wife tell Peter fanuc it's exactly as we've discussed and then he died interesting I mean you can't get it much closer than that so I think the the the picture that we have of dying from the evidence of dying people is actually quite good and I think you have to think about giving everything up and then becoming non-dual and merging now one of the interesting points about near-death experiences near-death experiences is that a number of them become non-jew now what do I mean by that this is in consciousness research and it's one of the most interesting points of consciousness research and that is that as you go on the awakening process in other words changing your level of consciousness and becoming more widely conscious you in fact have one or two features you lose your narrative self you know this little bits of you that chats to yourself all the time that goes next you're always in the moment you're not in the past you're not in the future it doesn't mean anything to you if you ask them what is the world they say well it's here nah this is it what about what it was like it's not that doesn't exist I'm saying for the future what's to come so you're just in the moment and the other thing is you're unbelievably happy and you're also tending to be transcendent as well your persona is not in the narrative voice and here it's that you have become non Jareau and and are merging with reality and there's a man called Jeffrey Martin in the States and he's collected 1,500 cases of these these are ordinary people who've done it so we know the state exists and we know it how it exists and the link with near-death experiences is because of the non-dual features in the near-death experience and in dying the question is whether they're the same or not or whether people might become non-jew in the near-death experience and the answer is yes they do and how do I know that because I've spoken to who have had near-death experiences actually it's only two but I only need two who describe the non-dual state so you can get a shift in your level of consciousness when you come back from a near-death experience so the idea that the near-death experience may have something to do with dying and quite closely in terms of consciousness and the shifting consciousness he's beginning to come together in a really interesting way do you think there's any connection between the way we think and the way we live our lives and the way we experience our death and what comes after is the sort of life you lead does it influence and the way you die well yes it does but you have to be very careful here because we have accounts of people who've said it's all material I'm just going to go into blackness nothing and they say this beforehand beforehand that's that's their belief structure and what is quite clear is that as they come into the death process they've all given up that idea and they all start looking forward to what's going going to what's happening to them they don't say they don't believe in anything anymore the sort of things they say one woman who was absolutely sure that there was nothing there kept on waking up from a coma saying come on get on with it because I want to move on do you see and that was quite different from what her stance was so if you have a strong belief in angels will you see angels probably that's what the south of North America shows the Bible Belt they show that if you lead a good life will you will it be different from a bad life and I'm going to just reframe that if a good life means that you're not strongly centered in yourself in other words you're thinking about other people and doing things like that then when you come to this phase of giving up you can give up much more easily because you're not centered the other thing is guilt because guilt is something which holds up people find it very difficult to give up their guilt all those terrible things they didn't they feel guilty about they're very difficult to give up and so if you think of somebody who's committed a lot of crimes and they feel guilty about it then they'll have a lot of difficulty giving up and so my colleagues asked me what happens if you're a psychopath and have no guilt I don't know I've never seen a psychopath die but I assume they may do it very easily I don't know if they can give everything up so it's going to be related the quality of your life is going to be related to your capacity to give up this is going to be how self-centered you are the more self-centered you are the more difficult it's going to be to give it up the cliche we often find in movies and in literature that a good person has a good death and the bad guy has a bad death is this what you observed in in your research how I've described it is arguing from death in normal people and death in people who have spiritual anxiety before as they come up to death so the people are married to anxiety of those in fact who are attached and those who are free aren't and so you can argue from that statement to if you're loaded with guilt or unable to give up your persona or your possessions or anything those are the people again have a difficult death so it sort of fits in a bit with literature but not quite it's it's it just got this twist that you have to be able to give up so let's assume you're a billionaire you smile at your friends and say it's all yours now and give it up and sink into death fine no problem many of my colleagues many doctors would say these are just hallucinations what do you say about that so people say all these things that's I we were finding in the dying are hallucinations well this is terminology isn't it what is a hallucination a hallucination is an experience that you have and nobody else does so there are many hallucinations so the fact that they're hallucinations really is saying nothing but if you look at the data then people relatives in the same room quite often no not quite often rarely see deathbed visitors but they do see them there are quite good accounts children see them more than adults and occasionally the hospice nurses see them so on that ground they're not hallucinations in those cases so why are you going to say some of hallucinations and some aren't it doesn't make any sense calling them hallucinations mean that you just can't get rid of the topic now let's talk about something interesting but they're not it doesn't help yeah they're also so-called hellish near-death experiences what do you say about that so some people report hellish experiences I have a lot of difficulty with hellish experiences because in the ones that we took from our survey or from the letters which people wrote there was always a clear explanation of what a hellish experience was I'll give you an example this man had a near-death experience he suddenly realized that he had left his body and was in a hellish realm and there were loads of Devils there and there kept on pricking him and torturing him and he knew he was in a hellish realm because he could feel the flames of hell burning him now as he got better because he was in intensive care he realized that hellish experiences were in fact coming from the heating pad he was lying on and that led to misinterpretation of the heat sensory data and the devil so it's quite easy to see because he said these were the nurses that were coming in and giving him injections and doing things like that so that was his interpretation so this was an illusory experience it was getting very close to something which is called an intensive care psychosis because they are paranoid they are where people are doing things which are horrible to you and so it has a rational explanation that you don't have to postulate a hell but the question is is there a hell is there really a hellish realm of people going to or not it I've had no death experience no true death experience in which people have reported that there's a hell they just don't do it near-death experiences in our sample it was 4% now that may be lower because remember ours was a a letter-writing survey and are you really going to write into Sundy who's done a program on and E's and say I spent my my NDE being punished and pulled by devils across your not so we got probably an under-representation of that but the ones that we had in our sample I couldn't convince myself that they were of the same sort of order as near-death experiences now other people think that I'm wrong there so you can obviously interpret the data either way so what have you learned from all this is there a special message for our culture I think the experience that I have learned about near-death experiences and dying have a very strong message to our culture I'm absolutely with Dalai Lama in the first part he says any culture which can't which sweeps death under the carpet and can't acknowledge it is this is a society which is greedy because you're collecting things and you're going to have it you can be angry with people because it means it's fine to have enemies and they are very self-centered because they're going to live on to eternity if you look at our culture it's very it's got strong components of that so I think the way that we medicalised death sweep it away don't talk about it is producing a culture that is exactly one in which we deny our responsibility look every hundred years we're all going to be swept away like that but yet we won't talk about this point one the next point is that we ought to start with children telling them about what it's like to die in fact we're all going to die bring it out into the open and discuss it one of my grandson's came down and he found that a dog had got into the garden and bitten the head of two of his hamsters now he's confronted by death they're these things that he loved dearly have just been destroyed and so it raises questions do they all go to a guinea pig heaven or are we just all machines what does death means you see these very fundamental questions you get very early lessons but if you go round a class of kids and say how many of you have experienced to death many of them have had grandparents who have died they know about it so it ought to be on the school curriculum we ought to teach them the death is a normal part of living and in fact you accept death when you accept birth in fact death birth and dying are all part of the same continuum and that it's going to happen to us and it's nothing to be afraid of or fearful of what you have to do is like when you go into an exam you want to be prepared for it well when you go into the final exam of death you want to be prepared for it and then you can talk about the phenomena which occur and so on but it's so important that we stop this process of sweeping it under the carpet and you know why we sweep it under the carpet because we don't die like we used to if this was a Victorian family I would already have two or three siblings that had died when young we did no antibiotics looking keeping the place keen and stopping infections was very poorly done so people died and kids particularly so death was ever-present and so the Victorians were much better talking about him than we were have you ever seen us going along the road in our culture now what's it followed by cars at a distance behind it going slowly no they've all got their fingers on the horns come on move on get on it's not respected do you stand with your arms crossed and your head barred when the hearse goes by no of course you don't you've got many things which are much more important than that because you don't value death simple as that but it's very important nothing strange about it we're all going to do it so we might learn about it simple doctor fennec thank you very much for your time and your interesting insights and the wisdom from your research thank you very much well thank you very much for your questions [Music] you

Channel: Thanatos TV EN

Views: 77,439

Keywords: Life after Death, Near Death Experience, Peter Fenwick, Thanatology

Id: aiEYQyUjAQA

Length: 60min 27sec (3627 seconds)

Published: Thu May 14 2020