Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: And we need that focus by our brain because we are biological creatures and we have to live.
And we would have difficulty getting food and getting rest and taking care of the normal chores of being a living human being each day if we were constantly in this expansive spiritual world. So we had to focus in the mundane world. And that's what the brain helps us do. But the brain focuses the mind. It doesn't generate the mind.
ID the Future, a podcast about evolution and intelligent design.
[00:00:37] Speaker B: Does the brain explain the mind completely? And what can phenomena like terminal lucidity and near death experiences reveal about the relationship between mind and brain? Welcome to I Do the Future. I'm your host, Andrew McDermott. Today I welcome back neurosurgeon Dr. Michael Egnor, co author with Denise O' Leary of the recent book the Immortal Mind, A Neurosurgeon's Case for the Existence of the Soul. And I also welcome Alexander Battiani, a leading researcher on terminal lucidity and author of the 2023 book, Terminal Lucidity and the Border between Life and Death. Michael. Alexander, welcome back.
[00:01:16] Speaker A: Thank you, Andrew.
[00:01:18] Speaker C: Thank you for having me.
[00:01:19] Speaker B: Well, in the first half of our conversation, we defined terminal lucidity and explored why it's so puzzling.
Today we'll look at how it relates to near death experiences and we'll ask a deeper question. What does this phenomenon suggest about the nature of the human mind?
Now, Mike, some have suggested that things like low oxygen or high carbon dioxide might explain episodes of clarity near death. As a neurosurgeon who's treated those conditions, how convincing is that?
[00:01:49] Speaker A: It's not convincing at all. I mean, we, we see. I mean, I've seen thousands of patients who had cerebral hypoxia, low oxygen in the brain, and hypercarbia, which is high CO2 in the blood. And these can all happen as one's heart and lungs and brain begin to fail.
And there can be a variety of effects of these, but what they never do is they never make you more clear, they never make you more coherent, they never make you better.
If you cut off a person's oxygen, they don't get better.
And so they cause confusion, they can cause panic, they can cause somnolence, all kinds of effects. But people are not made better by having their oxygen cut off. If you're studying for your math exam, the, the next day, you won't think more clearly if you get hypoxic.
So it's just not.
[00:02:51] Speaker B: Yeah. Now in your book the Immortal Mind, you quote pulmonologist Sam Parnia saying that the dying process gives you access to parts of your brain that you normally don't access and that these experiences differ from hallucinations or delusions. How do you understand what's happening in these cases?
[00:03:10] Speaker A: Well, I very much agree with Sam. And by the way, I've known Sam for years. He was a colleague of mine at Stony Brook for a while. He's now at nyu, but so he's a great guy, a great doctor and a great scientist.
I think there's no question that the process of dying or that dementia can under some circumstances, not always, but can give one access to experiences and thoughts and mental states that one does not ordinarily have access to. That's really what terminal lucidity and what near death experiences are.
I don't know that that necessarily means access to other parts of the brain. I think maybe it means that aspects of our souls can be expressed more easily and readily under certain circumstances.
There's a.
There's a theory about the relationship between the mind and the brain that goes back a long ways. It was particularly popular in the 19th century and was advocated by William James, who's a psychologist and really sort of the father of modern psychology.
James hypothesized that the relationship between the mind and the brain was not that the brain generated the mind, but rather that the brain focused the mind. That is that the mind was something that's much larger than brain function. There's much more out there. Which frankly, in near death experiences is what people consistently report. That is that in the near death experience, many of the cognitive experiences people have are of hyper acute perception and then deep conceptual insights.
Your mind works better under those circumstances.
And religious people, monks and nuns and people who do contemplative prayer have to suppress the activity of their brain to expand the activity of their mind.
So one of the analogies that James used was that the brain is like a magnifying glass.
And the actual mind or our soul really is like the sun.
And the mind that we use in everyday life is like a spot that the magnifying glass focuses down. Like on the sidewalk on a sunny day. You can focus a little spot of light.
And we need that focus by our brain because we are biological creatures and we have to live and we would have difficulty getting food and getting rest and taking care of the normal chores of being a living human being each day if we were constantly in this expansive spiritual world. So we have to focus in the mundane world. And that's what the brain helps us do.
But the Brain focuses the mind, it doesn't generate the mind. And I think terminal lucidity and near death experiences are very clear examples of the wisdom in that understanding of the mind brain relationship.
[00:06:23] Speaker B: Now, Alex, does that match what you see in terminal acidity or do you see differences?
[00:06:29] Speaker C: No, I mean, I utterly agree. We also, by the way, while we were waiting, because when we sent out our questionnaires to get more cases of tonal acidity and we didn't know whether we would get any, we started looking at the near death experience and namely not so much at what do people experience, but rather how they do experience it. Yeah.
And so we studied about 650, if I'm not wrong, reports for unprompted, unasked mentions of how clear their thinking was and also how good the vision was.
And surprisingly, I mean, there had been some studies before that by Bruce Grayson and Ian Stevenson and others which already did suggest that people usually say it's hyperreal. In my thinking, I was never as logical and astute and aware and clear than when I was dead. Yeah. And that's a quote, actually one of them said I was a genius. Now I'm no longer.
You can always claim that, of course, who knows? But in this case. So we found this.
There's one thing which I believe might be, or there's one thing which bothered me for a very long time, namely that we do have a strong contradiction here between two observations which seem to say very different things. Yeah.
During everyday life there's an immense dependence of mind on brain, obviously, otherwise dementia wouldn't be a problem. And certain types of depression and mentalism and so on and so forth. Yeah. So clearly. And our cultures, everywhere you go, we have coffee if you want to be.
So every normal state we can simulate or almost every by intoxication. Yeah. And humanity was clever enough to. So if you want to feel upbeat, like you've got a great project and you have coffee and cocaine and so on, I'm Fatima. And if you want, then the normal is ora et labora. There comes a point when you relax and you exhale to opiates and so on. Clearly there's a strong dependence and we all know this.
Yeah.
By everyday experience, when we are tired, have fever and so on. And yet at the extreme states close to death and dying, suddenly we have experiences such as the near death experience when the brain is hypofunctional or we have it internal lucidity once again when the substrate, the correlates don't seem to be there. At least they're not properly functioning. Yeah. And.
And Bruce Grayson had, who's a psychiatrist in studying also near death. He's a pioneer of near death studies. Yeah. He came up with something which I find very useful. Namely, and we observe it in physics and elsewhere. Yeah, namely very often in the history of science. We believe you be humanity believed. Yeah. Typically human, that now we found everything. The rest is only footnotes. And whenever there was a complete theory around the corner was the great break, relativity, quantum. So when it gets really small, when it gets really large, really fast, suddenly you know our everyday physics, which is beautiful, all of it is very beautiful, but no longer counts. Yeah. So if we lived in the quantum world, diving in the sea would be very dangerous because a wave could in any time turn into a cannonball party. And so. So it's not accommodating to us. Yeah.
But the important point is when we come to boundary conditions, suddenly what was set in stone no longer is valid.
We need new rules.
And now when we say that in everyday life there's a clear and strong dependency of mind on brain, then we come to death and dying and we see this no longer seems to apply. And what else is death and dying than the strongest bound condition of living?
So we observe something which is not that rare actually in nature you see this very often that there are certain areas in which it is valid.
And so in a funny way, materialism is not wrong. I'm not saying it's right, but it's not wrong in a very limited area, as a phenomenological finding. Yeah, of course not ontologically, because it's not that at death or soul arises or whatever. Yeah. It becomes visible, but you need the boundary conditions to make something visible which otherwise wouldn't be. And I think it's for good reason that wherever you look in history, in history of religion, for example, death and dying was the moment.
Yeah. It was either birth, which we seem to have forgotten, which is also not good for our culture. But death especially is the point when, when in principle, if there was more to us than mere brain function. Yeah. Then you'd say, now is the time, please show me. Yeah. That there is more than us to us than brain function. And what we do, we find TL and the nde. So we do find something. Yeah. Materialism would say, you wouldn't, you know, would have said and did say from being resuscitated, people will come back empty handed. It's nothing to experience when the brain is hyperfunctional or than when they're clinically deaf. Yeah. And yet they came back. And in the beginning, people didn't believe it. I recently did an overview on the. On the history of the NDEs, of the near death studies. Yeah. In very early, in the 70, in the early 70s, late 70s, people sometimes said they are only confabulating. They are, you know, they're attention grabbing, they want to tell stories. Nothing of it is true. Yeah. I mean, by now there are millions of people who have been successfully resuscitated and therefore there are millions of witnesses. Yeah.
And.
Yeah, so that's what that. What? That would be my footnote to what Mike said. Yeah.
[00:12:49] Speaker B: Hmm.
Well, let's drill into the relationship between the cousins here. Terminal lucidity and near death experiences. Alex, you know that they share something important. Neither has an obvious physiological trigger beyond imminent death.
So can you explain that connection a little more?
[00:13:07] Speaker C: Well, that's what I meant with the boundary condition we looked.
I mean, of course, if you, if you have a phenomenon, you want to find a cause. That's normal and very rational thinking. Yeah. So we asked our participants. By the way, many of our cases testified for more than one witness. So there might be the daughters and granddaughters, plus a nurse or medical doctor who was called. Yeah. So.
And we invited them and told, please tell us, what do you speculate? And you're utterly free. What do you think might have triggered the lucid episode?
And we believed perhaps it's relatives being present. And then we found out that maybe it's the other way around. Of course, if somebody's dying and the hospital says, come, say goodbye, people are there and you need bystanders if you want to have witnesses. And the TL is a third person phenomenon in the sense of we know it not because we have to believe the nd. Er, what he or she believed. He's the only eyewitness. But in our cases we even have videos. So it's a objective phenomenon, if you want. Yeah.
So. And we asked, and the only thing we received was, well, the patient died afterwards. Maybe that was the cause. So ritual, you know, reaching backwards.
Maybe that was the cause. He or she was in the dying process. Yeah. Or preparing to die. Yeah.
As an aside in brackets, without. I don't want to divert from the ontological question, which I think is very important. Who are we? What are we? Yeah. But it also tells us something about the dignity of dying. It's. Once again, it's not just a moment and it's gone, but it seems to be. If TL is a death phenomenon or a dying phenomenon.
I think it's fairly telling that it starts about 48 hours before the medical doctors will say, now it's time, we are losing him or her.
And I think that tells us a lot also about the dignity of this moment.
There's, of course, one question when it comes to the nde, when precisely does it take place?
[00:15:24] Speaker A: Right.
[00:15:26] Speaker C: And there are different ways of answering this, but I mean, of course we don't know. It might be in the waking room, if you want. Yeah. Now, I think Mike is better equipped to say what I'm going to, or to attest to what I'm going to say is even in the wake up room after being resuscitated or in the, in the room after being resuscitated, the brains still are highly hyperfunctional. Yeah. It's not that, you know, that we are back again. If you, if you study the cognitive state of people surviving cardiac arrest. Yeah.
It'll take a time until they are properly there again. Yeah.
[00:16:03] Speaker A: Yes.
[00:16:03] Speaker C: But I think what is more important is perhaps is how TL and the NDE complement each other. Yeah. So with the nde, you have the inside, so it's dying from the inside. This is how it feels like.
We don't know precisely when. With tl, we know precisely when because it's a life event and you observe it only when it takes place. And you know precisely that it does take place at a time when the brain, when the neural correlates don't offer the base, is usually believed to be needed for higher cognition.
So I think the two are somehow complementary phenomena.
[00:16:45] Speaker A: Yes.
[00:16:45] Speaker B: Mike, how do you see the two fitting together?
[00:16:49] Speaker A: It's a very interesting question. And I think that the science of near death experiences is a bit more advanced, I think, than the science thus far of terminal lucidity. And so there's so much work to be done on terminal lucidity with near death experiences.
First of all, I've discussed this a lot with materialists and people who don't accept these as real experiences or feel that there's a completely material explanation for why they happen.
And I think there are four characteristics of near death experiences that science has to explain and that our current state of the science is that the only reasonable explanation is that it's a genuine spiritual experience, it's not a function of the brain.
And the four characteristics of near death experiences, and not everybody has all of these, but they do occur, and they occur with some frequency is. Number one, the experiences are generally very clear, very coherent.
Hyper lucid experiences, which is certainly not characteristic of a dying brain.
People report, as Alex had mentioned, that what they see is much greater detail, much, much more beautiful colors, much, much greater perception. And their cognitive abilities are often almost superhuman.
I was a genius when I died, but I'm back to me now.
So that's the first thing, is that these are very, very good mental states.
The second aspect of near death experience is that any explanation has to account for is the veridical out of body experiences. That is that people have knowledge and perceptions during near death experiences, frequently, not always, but frequently that could not be obtained through physical means. They'll see things they couldn't have seen from where they were.
The famous case of Pam Reynolds, who's a woman who underwent brain surgery for an aneurysm, who deliberately was, was put in a cardiac arrest with brain death in order to fix the aneurysm and then was resuscitated.
She recounted conversations in the operating room when her brain was not functioning, when it was very well documented. So people with near death experiences have perceptions and knowledge that they could not have obtained through ordinary physical means.
The third characteristic of near death experiences, which I think is not often commented on, but it's a fascinating observation, I think, is that people with near death experiences virtually only encounter dead people at the other end of the tunnel. That is that people with near death experiences commonly will go down a tunnel. You go into a different world, you meet people who are deceased loved ones and friends.
And I'm not aware of any report in the medical literature of a near death experiencer encountering a living person at the other end of the tunnel.
Whereas, you know, you think, well, gee, well I run into my wife there, maybe she's still alive. I run into my kids, run into my next door neighbor, Joe, you know, but no, you only see dead people. And there are a number of experiences. Someone recently counted over 20 reports in the medical literature of people encountering dead people at the other end of the tunnel who they didn't know were dead.
For example, if there's a car accident and there are four or five people in a car and they're sent to different hospitals, near death experiencers have reported seeing some of the other people in the car at the other end of the tunnel. But those are only the ones who died and they died at other hospitals and they had no way of knowing that. But they didn't see the people who lived at the other end of the tunnel. So there's a reality to who you encounter that's very Important.
And the fourth characteristic is that these experiences are transformative. Near death experiences really change people. And they change people in ways that coming close to death or that having seizures or hallucinations or things like that don't typically change people, but they're powerful experiences that radically change the way people understand life and death.
So there's a lot of scientific reason to believe that at least some near death experiences represent genuine survival of the soul after death.
And now the relationship to terminal lucidity.
I don't know. I think part of it, again, is that the science is still emerging on that there's a lot to be learned.
One thing I do note is, and Alex had mentioned that he was perplexed by the borderline phenomenon that why are all these things happening at the border of life and death?
And Thomas Aquinas kind of addressed that a little bit.
And he addressed the question of in the intermediate state after death, but before the resurrection of the body. In Catholic theology, how is it that we see, how is it that we know? I mean, we don't have a brain or a body or anything. How can we see anything or know anything? And Aquinas commented, he said, we see by divine light.
That is, it's a divinely given power. It's God's light. And the analogy that he used, that I thought was an absolutely breathtaking analogy, it's a beautiful analogy. He said that it's analogous to as if your mortal life is inside a cathedral at night that's lit by candles.
So you've got these candles around the inside of the cathedral, but it's nighttime.
And the stained glass windows just look sort of gray with vague colors on them and so on. So you can see, but it's not that impressive.
And that as the morning gets closer and you get closer to sunrise, that's the time that you die.
And then as the sun rises, you have the light coming in from the outside that illuminates the interior of the cathedral.
And you see things so much better.
You see the beauty of the stained glass windows. You see the beautiful light coming in. It says, that's divine light.
So I suspect that what happens to people with terminal lucidity and with near death experiences is what some theologians have called thin spaces. They call them where eternity and our temporal existence touch.
And so I think that people who are more lucid as they get close to death and people who have these remarkable experiences right after death are really very close to God in those circumstances. And what we're seeing is divine wisdom and divine Light coming through us.
[00:23:59] Speaker B: Alex, thoughts?
[00:24:02] Speaker C: Well, I admire Mike for being able to say what he says, actually, because, I mean, I have a different approach. I'm a bit more cautious when it comes to what I think.
I can in good conscience say what I believe only what we found leads towards.
And yet at the beginning I said that I.
Out of. For a number of, I think, good reasons. It is not a good idea to divide the world into a metaphysical and the physical part. It's both, really. I mean, it's intertwined. Not the same, not identical, not reducible one to the other, but intertwined.
And that makes, I think, a good measure of our dignity. Also, vulnerability is embodiment and so on and so forth.
So I would, frankly, I don't. I don't go so far. Yeah. And sometimes my students. And when I give lectures, at least someone in the audience will say, no, come on, please be honest. What do you really believe?
And then. And then I can say, yes, okay, this is what I believe. Yeah. And in this sense, I fully agree. Yeah. With what Mike has said.
But there are more reasons than that. And if you. If you look at Thomas von. Thomas Aquinas and others, Hans Usun Baltazar, whom I regard as an important teacher and so on and so forth, you see that there's a lot of work which has been done in the sense of it's fairly convincing.
And then there comes another dimension to it, namely, that's experience.
We are able to experience the beauty of music, but also the beauty of metaphysical things and also in religion.
And that is as true as the experience of a silly TV show which somehow seems to be more real to many people, also philosophically speaking.
So what can I say? To cut a long story short, I agree with many things Mike said, maybe even most.
Where I'm a bit more cautious is when it comes to how much of it is based on the work we did or do.
Yeah. But what I would say is it's highly compatible. Yeah.
And to put this into perspective, if there was a fourth person sitting here being an arch materialist and he would give his materialist confession, I would as honestly say I wouldn't go so far. But not because I'm cautious, but because I believe it's very wrong.
Data don't fit the model. Yeah, sure.
Do you see what I'm saying?
[00:26:53] Speaker A: Yes.
[00:26:54] Speaker C: Yes.
[00:26:56] Speaker B: Yeah. And it does speak to.
I don't know how to avoid scientism, you know, the idea that science and scientific understanding is the only way to understand the world as a whole. And Life as a whole.
You know, one wants to be careful about that because science isn't the only answer. There are other disciplines that can inform us about life and the world.
And so in a way it's how to discipline oneself to avoid scientism, but to honor the scientific tradition.
Another way to look at it is you put different hats on. As a scientist, here's what I can say about terminal lucidity and other related phenomena. And then you take that hat off and you're more free to say as a theologian or as a philosopher, here's what I would say about the implications of it. You know, now you don't have to have physical hats, although it's a good analogy. But how do we, how do we, I don't know, get around the limits of science without diminishing the value of science?
It's hard, isn't it? I mean, nobody can expect that there's not going to be some tension there.
[00:28:11] Speaker A: Well, I don't think there needs to be tension there.
I don't see that. I mean, I think more radical than many people perhaps, as well as Alex, in allowing my theological beliefs or insights into my understanding of the natural world, that I don't think there's a conflict between religion and science at all.
I think it's an entirely fabricated concept, really. It's kind of a 19th century idea that doesn't.
First of all, it wasn't a part of the scientific enlightenment. The scientific enlightenment was a wildly Christian event. I mean, Kepler, if you've read Kepler's work on planetary motion, is essentially a sermon. He speaks of God continuously. Newton was a profoundly religious, religious man who wrote much more about the book of Daniel than he wrote about physics and mathematics.
All the great scientists and nearly all the great scientists were passionately devout people, much more so actually than the average person in that era.
So I don't see any problem with injecting religious viewpoints into science. The classical definition of science, which I think works really well going back to Plato and Aristotle, is that science is really natural philosophy. And that is science is the organized study of nature according to its causes.
So that you look for causes in nature, you try to understand what causes a certain state of affairs in nature. And if you do it in a systematic, organized way, you're doing natural philosophy, which is science, which we call science.
And if you note that the definition of science is not the study of effects, it's the study of causes in nature.
And if the causes in nature are divine, if the causes in nature are from a different realm than the earthly realm we live in, then to do good science you have to pay attention to those causes.
So if indeed near death, if the light people are seeing in near death experiences is divine light, if the lucidity and clarity of people's minds when they have terminal lucidity is divine light, divine understanding, then that's a scientific truth about terminal lucidity and about near death experience.
So a danger we run living in this material or materialistic framework that we've all been brought up in. And I fight it constantly myself, it's hard to get out of it. The danger we run is accepting that framework.
And over the years I've come to disregard that framework. That is, if I think God acts in nature, that's good science. And I say it out loud because it's the real cause.
[00:31:37] Speaker B: Alex, is there tension? And if so, how do you navigate that?
[00:31:43] Speaker C: Now, listening to Mike, I remember when I was a student, I wrote on Sir John C. Eccles, who was co author of Popper With Itself and Its Brain, which is a dualist manifesto, if you will.
Not as simple as Descartes, but more in the direction of.
And so I wrote my. I think Eccles was 91. Yeah. And I wrote my thesis and I had a number of questions and these were burning questions. After my thesis was done, I wanted to know, because now it got personal. Who am I? Yeah. Not what, but who. And so kindly enough, Lady Agatha's wife granted me a phone interview.
And Eggs was very old, very weak, but utterly, I mean, totally clear. Yeah. And so I asked my questions and at the end, and I quote this also in the book. Yeah. In the end he said. I said, thank you very much, Sir John. I think I release you. Thank you. And he kept on and says, there's a few things I would like to tell you. Yeah. And then he said something like, I don't have it verbal. But it was something like there's no other solution than that the self is a divine creation.
And would you expect that from a Nobel Prize laureate? I mean, I was very surprised.
And of course the whole drama of it, I mean, the setting was, if it was a theater play, you would say, well done. Because, you know, very weak voice. And the strength was not physical strength if you want. Yeah. It was much more than that. Yeah.
Yeah. So listening to this, I'm reminded one reason why I'm so cautious is also because I. And I don't know how, Mike, you view this. Yeah. But the near death experience has been kidnapped or hijacked by A New Age movement which comes up with titles such as There is no Death.
And you think, seriously, how. And how undignified. I mean, what. I mean, how much injustice do we do to us? And to the vulnerability of other. The suffering of other people? And so. And therefore, because they come forth with so easy solutions. And I know, Mike, don't get me wrong, what I'm saying is that. That.
That made me extra cautious. Sure, yeah.
Because I don't want to be just another voice in the choir. And while I'm saying this, there's of course a huge difference. I mean, Aquinas and Aristotle.
I think it's time that we rediscover them. I have the feeling that we do anyway.
And if you look at the last 20 years or so, when consciousness was merely a hard problem, which is strong enough, but now suddenly we have new offers on the table, which are really old. Panpsychism, idealism and so on, it's no longer this divided world between the dualists and the physicalists. Now it's getting more complicated and complexity and information and so on. I would like to add dignity because I think that's an undervalued.
It doesn't do as well. Right.
[00:35:02] Speaker A: Yeah, but you can see that the whole issue, for example, you bring up dignity, which I totally agree is a profoundly important pillar of who we are as human beings.
But if we're not created in God's image, then we have no claim to dignity at all.
If we're not created in God's image, then we're just complex dirt.
And so I think that regarding the interpretation of near death experiences, actually Denise and I are writing another book now on near death experiences. And what my dream has been, and I think we'll be able to do it, is to have half the book be a discussion of the science of near death experiences and half the book be a discussion of the theology of near death experiences. Is that what does all this mean? Because many people's experiences don't track with. Certainly with I'm Catholic. And it doesn't track. Track with Catholic theology or even general Christian theology or Western theology, because it's Eastern theology.
So I think we need more of theological efforts to understand near death experiences, not less. And if we as Christians and Catholics are not trying to plow that ground, then the New Age people will. That is that there's kind of a void there that will be filled. And we should be some of the people filling it.
And as I said, if God acts in the world and God acts in our Lives, which I think he does. I actually think that. I think that we are thoughts of God. I think the world is a thought of God, which is what Augustine believed, that we are thoughts in God's mind, then that's a basic fact about reality that ought to be showing up in science. So I have no problem saying, look, I bring God into it. Now, you may have a little trouble getting the paragraphs about God past the reviewers if you're trying to get a paper published in Nature or something. But I bring God into it in every way that I think is justified, in every way that is effective in the world, in getting the word out there.
So I'm a little more. A little more tolerant of that.
Right, yeah.
[00:37:40] Speaker B: Well, that's really good discussion.
Okay, well, as we wrap up, just maybe one or two more questions. This one's open to both of you. If someone listening or watching today has experienced something like this happen to a loved one, whether it's near death experience, terminal acidity, what would you want them to know? What would you tell them as a way to comfort them or help them understand or help them see the value of what's happening either scientifically or philosophically or beyond?
[00:38:16] Speaker A: Well, just from my perspective, I would let them know that such experiences are probably more common than they're aware of, that their experiences are worthy of respect and they shouldn't accept blithe dismissal of their experiences from a materialistic perspective.
And that I think that both of these experiences point to the fundamental dignity that we have as human beings and point to the existence of a spiritual soul.
And so.
[00:38:59] Speaker B: Alex.
[00:39:02] Speaker C: Well, these are very different phenomena when it comes to tl. I would try to comfort them by saying that they didn't give up the person too early. Maybe it was the time. Only at that time when it did happen, they did nothing. Likely. I don't know whether they did something wrong, but that of course certainly isn't the thing they did wrong because it just happened. Usually happens towards the end of life.
That would be the first thing.
When it comes to the near death experience, I would, a bit like Mike. I would, I would tell him or her, don't let anyone take it away from you by saying this is nothing but and then comes anything but. Yeah, maybe that's precisely what it is. Yeah. And. But what I found is that usually the near death experiences are so convinced.
[00:39:55] Speaker A: Yes.
[00:39:56] Speaker C: It's like telling me that I don't have children, which I know nobody will ever convince me of, that I don't have them, because I know with all the implications and similar to the nde, people who had these experiences are changed forever. What I would perhaps tell them is don't put pressure on yourself, nor let others put pressure on you.
In Munich and Germany, a colleague of mine, a Jesuit philosophy professor at Goedhard Bruntrup, he founded the self help group for near death experiences.
There are millions and even a city like Munich, you have about, let's say 80 of them. 50 to 80. Yeah.
And what I find.
These are not saints.
They observed something beautiful. They had a peak.
Yeah.
But they come back and they drink beer and eat hamburgers and they get angry and life. And that is good because we are. I mean, they should try to better themselves, like every one of us should. Yeah. But we shouldn't put all our projections when it comes. You know, in a doubting modern society, people who come back are sometimes treated like prophets, but they are not.
Yeah.
And I'm always a bit unhappy in the popular NDE movement that every other year a new bestseller arrives from somebody who had an experience and he or she claims to know about the nature of nature of God or whatever. Yeah.
It's just one voice and he or she had a near death experience, nothing more. It's not an Old Testament prophet who spoke for the whole tribe. Yeah. Or towards to the whole tribe. These are just witnesses. And we don't know how much ideology and marketing colors memory or the type of reporting. Yeah.
So I think the NDE is what the NDE is. It's one person's experience for this person.
It's not that the person of this bestseller author is my experience. No, it's not. It's not for me. Perhaps it's good that they share it and it's good to know that it's pointing towards something. But once again, these are not revelations, these are experiences.
And therefore I also welcome to come back to look at the Church Fathers, to look at Augustine and Thomas and so on.
I mean, there is a discipline of orderly dealing with things which are not easily shared.
And it's much more reliable because these people in this tradition knew when it can go wrong and they learned from it. So it's not only emotion, but it's not only cognition. It's not only. And so on. It's a balanced thing.
So our normal nature, our ideal nature is and will be orderly, not chaos.
And that means also the mental household. Yeah.
[00:43:03] Speaker A: Carol Zaleski is a literary scholar who wrote a wonderful book called Other World Journeys, which you may have read. Alex and I love the book and One of the points that she kind of emphasized in the book, which I kind of extrapolate on when I think about it, is that when people have these near death experiences or these other world journeys, out of body experiences and so on, they're really experiencing something that is beyond mortal understanding.
And when people come back from this very often and I give some talks on the mind brain stuff and near death experiences usually come up in that. And invariably at the end of the talk, there'll be several people in the audience who will come up to me and tell me about their near death experience. It's a common thing.
And what they generally will say was that what I'm telling you happened to me is not what happened to me. I don't have words for what happened to me. It's ineffable. It's something that I can't. There are no words for what I saw.
And I do the best I can with words, but words fail in this. And I think that if you think about it, if you take a human being whose only knowledge is of this mortal life, and you give them a glimpse into a spiritual world, a world outside of space and time, how could we even imagine that they would have words for it, that they'd be able to understand? It would be like taking a goldfish and putting them in a physics class learning relativity. I mean, there's no goldfish way to deal with relativity. It just doesn't work.
And we're the goldfish. And so I think what people report on the other side is a desperate groping to put words on something that they don't have words for.
And I think that's part of the reason why it comes up as so strange is different cultures have different ways of explaining it because those are the only words they have.
But what they experience there is not a mortal thing.
It's not a mortal thing, but it's a very real thing.
[00:45:32] Speaker B: Now, Alex, Michael has mentioned that he's going to be working on a book on near death experiences with his colleague. What's next for you as far as your research and things you'd like to focus on?
[00:45:45] Speaker C: Well, I currently want to look at what people are talking about during their lucid episodes, because that is so, I think, important.
Yeah. They've been gone or almost gone for a long time, for a year or more than that. They come back. And what is interesting is that many of not all, but many of them seem to know that this is going to be the last conversation they do have. Yeah. Now, in some ways it's obvious because if you're in the hospital bed and you don't remember what happened yesterday, you.
It doesn't take a very sharp mind to understand something is seriously wrong with you. And yet. And you know, all the family standing around you. But even in those cases where only a nurse was present and so on, they give a hint or maybe even very clearly say, prepare. I've got a few of them preparing, saying which songs they would like to have, you know, church songs at your funeral and so on. So they are very much aware of that. Yeah.
Which we usually. Or many people are not. Yeah. So therefore, I mean, there are many different layers on which in which this is interesting to see what I find so extremely remarkable.
And that maybe unifies philosophy and everyday life in a similar way as Mike did, but perhaps a bit more from a different angle.
Namely that during tl, also during the near death experience, people remember not only who they are, but what they did.
And nothing seems to be unimportant. And that I find very remarkable.
So with the 650 people with NDEs I talked to, they said my memory was so clear that my understanding is everything is worthwhile to be preserved. And then they tell you, I remember that on this and that day our teacher, and now they're 80 or 70 or 60, had red socks.
And you wonder, and I almost blurred out. So why would you remember this? Yeah. And then she said, because I was attentive to it and the attention was worthwhile to be preserved. Yeah. You see the difference between. So something might happen, but the way we encounter or the way we dedicate the intention, the I thou to the teacher and so on. And this is preserved. And I think this is a very rich field of study.
Perhaps not so much in the sense of studying like a scientific work, but we learn a lot from this and we learn a lot about what it means to be human and to be persons and to be. And to somehow rescue. I mean, there's a very harsh zeitgeist out there. Yeah. Where all of this is erased into algorithms and formula and so on. Yeah.
And yet we all know this is not quite right. And if you are a parent, you even know even better because you watch one of these growing up, or two of them or three, but when you look at death and dying, it's very similar.
Yeah. Something becomes visible which otherwise is hidden also because.
And that was my first experience, I did have a visiting professorship in Moscow, in Russia, before the war, a long time ago, a few years ago, before everything went wrong.
And I noted that if you know Moscow, it's a very rough and very tough city, but this hospice was the place, the most earthly peace you can imagine.
Like a monastery, like a church. Yeah. And one day I asked one of these people, how come when I come here, all pressure falls away. And she said precisely that. Because when we are dying, there's no, you know, image you don't think about. How am I dressed, my status symbols, how do they look like? You are finally, you are free to be yourself. Yeah. And you're taken care of, which is the best on both sides, both the patient and the caregiver.
And therefore, I believe this is one more reason why I believe it's worth by looking into this. Because we rediscover something which we all knew earlier, perhaps in history, what it means to be a person.
The value, the dignity, the unconditional dignity of personhood, which has become very insecure at the beginning, at the end of life, these two doors have become incredibly dangerous places. Yeah. And that tells us something. Something with our image of man seems to be a bit awkward. And to repair this by looking at one aspect of this, I hope to at least somehow change a little bit.
[00:50:36] Speaker A: Something that has always fascinated me and I think it has bearing on near death experiences and terminal lucidity. And this notion that when you're at the borderline, at the boundaries of life is a particularly sal time is the very odd fact that when contemplative monks and nuns are deepening their prayer and that what's necessary is a suppression of the brain, of the mind, rather than an augmentation, you'd think that, you know, if you didn't know better, you'd think that, well, if I want to be a contemplative monk, that I better get studying, you know, I gotta pull the textbooks out, try to memorize as much as I can. And that's not at all what they do. They clear their minds of things.
And the phenomenon of a dark night of their soul, which was described so beautifully by St John of the Cross and Teresa de Villa, fascinates me. The idea that in order to get contact with God and contact with eternity, and contact really with who we really are, we have to die to something.
We have to die to the mortal world in some sense.
And that the dark night of the soul is a belief, I think, or is a result of clearing out our mortal experience to see the deeper truth about who we are and about what reality is really all that about. And I in some sense think that maybe terminal lucidity and near death experiences are different manifestations of this dark night of the soul.
[00:52:37] Speaker B: Fascinating and deep thoughts, gentlemen. I really appreciate what you've brought to this discussion and I hope it's helped our audience better understand phenomena like terminal acidity and near death experiences. For some, these very real episodes strongly suggest that the mind is not simply produced by the brain, that human consciousness has a reality that outlasts the body. For others, the evidence calls for caution, a willingness to admit that our current scientific models are incomplete. But both perspectives share a refusal to dismiss these experiences as just illusion or error. Both views insist that real human experiences deserve careful attention even when they unsettle our assumptions. And in doing so, we can strip away what we often get involved in in life and cut to the chase, as it were. Cut to the essence, and some deep insights can come from that. Well, again, thank you gentlemen for your time. I appreciate it. We can continue this conversation some other point and we look forward to future research and diving more into your books.
[00:53:43] Speaker C: Thank you.
[00:53:44] Speaker A: Thank you Andrew and thank you Alex. It's a real privilege to meet you. So thank you.
[00:53:48] Speaker C: Thank you Michael. It was wonderful talking to you. And thank you Andrew for the.
[00:53:52] Speaker B: Yeah, absolutely. Well, audience, you can learn more about these topics by, as I said, picking up these books that have been mentioned. Get a copy of Michael's book the Immortal Mind and Alex's book anywhere good books are sold. And if you enjoyed this conversation, there's plenty more at our YouTube channel. You can watch these conversations as well as listen to them through the usual audio channels, but you can subscribe to our YouTube channel at YouTube.com d the future I'm Andrew McDermott. Thanks again for joining us.
[00:54:24] Speaker A: Visit us at idthefuture.com and intelligent design.org this program is copyright Discovery Institute and recorded by its center for Science and Culture.
