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[music playing]

It's such a blessing to have a place like this to sit

and just smell the air and hear the creek.

I know that I'll fade into it at some point in my life.

I'm 53 years old and was told about five weeks ago

that I'm dying.

I've been given about six to eight months left to live,

and that's really what's happening in my life

at the moment.

Being OK with dying is a weird place to be.

It's very disconnected from most of the people I know.

They don't get it.

They think that I've given in.

It's definitely hard for me to talk about it.

I know that he's upset about dying and leaving

his loved ones.

But what's amazing is that he's so at peace with this journey

that he's going through and where it's

going to take him afterwards.

What keeps me not agitated about death

is appreciation for the life I've already had.

I've had a beautiful marriage, and my kids

are fabulous people.

And they hold, fortunately, some of the best parts of me.

[music playing]

Have you had any experiences yourself

that give you an insight into what happens when we die?

I've thought about death since the age

of six years when my grandfather passed away suddenly.

It's taken me almost a lifetime to fully comprehend

that death is an ongoing process that makes life possible.

What makes the universe fresh is that it's dying

and it's being reborn, and it's dying, being reborn.

And every time it's reborn, it actually

creates a better version of itself,

and we call it evolution.

In the United States of America, I'd

say most people pretend that death doesn't exist.

They call it a crime, or the mistake,

they don't want to do with it all.

And actually, death is our birthright.

So to think of it in any other way

is really just asking for misery and pain in your life.

Because everybody dies.

Every form of life dies-- what we call "dies."

We came today because one of the gibbons died recently,

and Nikko, the partner, is here and apparently he's

been in a kind of state of grief.

Nikko had a mate that he lived with, named Onyx,

and they've been together since 1986, which

is a very long time, 26 years.

Gibbons in the wild are monogamous,

so it's pretty common for them to have that pair bond.

They tend to stick together.

They're one of the very few primates that is monogamous.

Most are not.

Definitely that was hard for him.

His activity level decreased pretty significantly.

Gibbons in the wild will do this beautiful song every morning,

and it's a duet between the bonded pair,

and he stopped singing for several weeks.

We're at about eight or nine weeks out now,

and he's really starting to get back to normal, which is great.

We're really happy to see that.

We're sad when animals die, but birth and death

is all part of the same cycle.

And you know, when leaves fall and decompose,

it makes the soil richer.

So you really do have to have all aspects of life and death

to live on this beautiful planet that we live on.

[music playing]

Deep within us, for reasons that still strike me as quite

mysterious, I think every organism

knows how to die, whether it's a deer that finally just relaxes

in the mouth of the lion, or thinking, myself,

about a rock climbing story-- a fellow on El Capitan,

3,000 feet high, rappelled off the end of his rope.

He forgot to tie a knot in the end of his rope,

so he just came off the end of his rope and started falling.

And people watching him told me that he started screaming

and writhing in the air, trying to walk in the air,

which you just cannot do.

And then after a few seconds of that, just opened out.

He relaxed and opened out, as if he knew,

you know, I don't want to spend the last 10 seconds my life--

because that's about how long it takes to fall,

roughly-- I don't want to spend that panicking, and struggling,

and resisting.

There's something in us that knows how to open out.

[music playing]

We've been doing research on the idea

that consciousness may be something that

is more than just the brain.

It may involve the brain, but it may reach beyond the brain.

For example, we've done a series of experiments

that look at the possibility that one person's intention can

influence another person's biology, their physiology,

at a distance and with no sensory communication

between the two people.

This speaks to the idea that consciousness is more than just

our physical being, and that in fact, there

may be ways in which consciousness transcends

physicality.

The implications of that for what happens when we die

is that perhaps there's something more to our essence.

The event that changed my life was, I was on my way

to dinner one evening with my wife,

we'd been married for five months.

On our way to our favorite restaurant,

a van crossed the stop sign at between 70 and 80 miles

an hour.

It broadsided our car and bulldozed us

clear across Beverly Boulevard.

The car took off and flew through the air,

and hit that tree in mid-air and came

to rest in those bushes over there.

That night, the doctor saved my life.

I was at the deepest level of coma

that they measure, a Glasgow Coma Scale 3.

When I came out of the coma, pieces of memory

started to come back.

The memory from my coma came to me

of a protector who was traveling with me

through this inner space, through this journey

into infinity.

I was traveling through an ancient grove on a boat,

and I could hear the sounds of rain

pattering down on the cabin.

And there was a person who was up one deck,

who I knew I would be safe if I could only just go up

to be with her.

And very slowly, in the middle of the night,

it occurred to me who that protector was,

and I realized it was my wife.

And the following morning, my mother came to the hospital

to explain that I hadn't always been in this room,

and in this bed.

The reason I was in this room, and in this bed,

was because I'd been in an accident--

that before this room and this bed, I'd been a filmmaker,

and that yes, I was married to Marcy,

and that she died instantly in the crash.

And during my month in coma, she had been laid

to rest in Phoenix, Arizona.

So I'd lost everything, really, that mattered most to me,

and that started this journey through consciousness

to find what makes us who we are, could I recover who I was,

and also to find a reason to go forward.

[music playing]

Tony Redhouse is a Native American practitioner

from the Navajo tradition.

His work with hospice patients and people in life transition

connects him with the importance of living

with the reality of death.

When you're laying in a hospice bed,

you are going to look at your whole life, everything

that you've created, and whether you have lived true to yourself

or whether you have lived your whole life for the expectations

of everybody else.

My idea of life and death is focusing on the present.

And what I've learned in this is that if I

think about what it is right now that I really want to fulfill,

what dream do I want to fulfill in my life right now, that I

have the ability, the passion, to do these things,

the energy to do them.

I'm going to do them right now.

I first got interested in doing this work,

really when I was a undergraduate.

And I was at a small, very competitive university

that half the student body graduated first or second

in their high school classes.

It also turned out to be the school that

had the highest suicide rate in the country per capita, which

wasn't in their course catalog.

And the more I worried about doing well,

the harder it became to study, and the harder

it became to study, the harder it became to do well.

And I got into this vicious cycle

where I literally couldn't sleep for a week straight.

I remember sitting in physics class,

and I thought, you know, I'll just kill myself.

Why didn't I think of that earlier?

That'll put and end to all this pain.

Because I came so close to killing myself,

that was my doorway.

You know, I came about as close to doing that as you can

do without actually doing it.

So naturally, I started to ask questions.

What is death about?

Is death, you know, just you kind of close your eyes

and go to sleep, or is it something more than that?

We know that people have a lot of fear of death.

How do you see this idea of death?

When the autumn comes, the leaves are brown, and the fall.

And where do they go?

They go back into the soil.

That nutrition of those leaves, which becomes like compost,

goes into the roots, and they come back

and the new leaves are born again.

So the old leaves, if they were afraid of dying,

how the new leaves will come?

We are members of the life force,

and that life force continues.

It's a dynamic life force.

If we become static in one body and never die,

and we are afraid of dying, that means

we are blocking the dynamic force, which

is ever changing, ever evolving, ever transforming life force.

If we block that, world will be a boring place.

[music playing]

Now, and the real Robert Sheldon must answer your questions

truthfully, and he will answer-- and you will ask questions

until you [inaudible] your opinion is the real Robert

Sheldon.

And since you're so pretty there,

let's start with Betsy [inaudible].

Betsy?

[inaudible]

Number one, what's the name of your nightclub?

The South of the Line.

The South?

South of the Line.

South of the Line.

[coughing]

When that incident happened and I swallowed the lighter fluid

and got rushed to the hospital, what was the family thinking?

Oh, it as a terrible fear that we'd lose you.

When you have someone sick like that, especially a child,

there's a pallor over the whole house.

You live a life, you go through the motions,

but you don't enjoy things, because we were so concerned.

You could've died.

You were so lucky.

When my son was three or four, we were driving one night,

and it was a beautiful evening.

And I said to him, "Look at that full moon.

Isn't this a glorious night to be alive?"

And he said, "What do you mean, mommy?

Do you think dead people can't see the full moon?"

And I thought, I guess not.

I guess I think dead people can't see the full moon.

And he said, "Oh no, mommy," he said, "our friend Elizabeth,"

who had just died, "she's up there,

and she's looking at the full moon, and she's singing,

enjoy yourself, it's later than you think,"

And so it was such a great reminder to me,

out of the mouth of babes comes this kind of wisdom

that suggests that we are more than our physicality

and that there may be possibilities

beyond physical death.

Have you ever had anybody in your family or somebody

you knew who died?

My cat died, and he'd been with me my whole life,

so I was really sad.

What do you think happened to him when he died?

I believe he went to heaven and met other cats.

Uh-huh.

So is there a special cat heaven?

No, I think it's all the same, but they're just

with each other.

Have you ever wondered about it?

I have wondered about what happens after death,

but I've never figured out the answer.

Let's just stay with the topic right now about death.

Uh-huh.

So you for it, against it?

I'm against it, man.

The afterlife, I'm for it.

Aha.

I hope it's real.

But again, like the paranormal or the ESP or whatever,

I just would be very surprised if it turned out

there's some sort of afterlife.

If there's not some scientific natural way

to explain where the pattern of me gets stored in some medium

and carried on into the future, then the default position

is that when you die, nothing happens.

It's just-- you're just gone.

You're in the same place you were before you were born,

which is to say, nowhere.

We're faced with that sort of cold, hard reality,

and I think that produces something--

the anxiety for some people, anyway, it doesn't bother me.

But I don't worry about it, but I know apparently,

a lot of people do.

So when you said that when you're dead, you're dead,

you're gone, there's nothing--

Well, near as I can tell.

I don't know for sure, nobody knows.

But the evidence is pretty overwhelming

that that appears to be the case.

[music playing]

Dr. Rudy Tanzi is a neuroscientist

and does research on Alzheimer's disease at Harvard University.

His views on consciousness and what

happens after death are unconventional and provocative.

You know, a neuroscientist would tell you

that your identity is just within your neural network,

that everything you do and learn is just associated

with what you already know.

So then that leaves us with the question of when

you die, and the brain is gone, the electrical activity is

turned off, is everything gone?

The other side of the coin that most neuroscientists don't

want to talk about is, where is consciousness?

Where are memories when you think about the past?

Where were they stored?

I mean, we don't have an answer for that in neuroscience.

I ask students, I ask other professors this all the time.

They say-- it's always hand waving.

You know, it's in your neural network.

I'm like, well where, exactly?

Well, in the synapses.

No, the synapses fire, if fire is to be called a memory,

but where is the actual memory?

Where is my mother's face before I see it?

What's the thumb drive of the brain that stores

the JPEG of my mother's face?

We have no idea.

I've been doing anesthesia for 38 years,

and it's still amazing to me that we

give a medication like propofol, or have a patient breathe

the gas like sevoflurane and their consciousness goes away.

What's missing, primarily, is consciousness.

Other brain activities continue.

So anesthesia is fairly specific, erasing consciousness

and memory without affecting other brain activities.

Now, how that works is still unknown.

But the real question in anesthesia

isn't so much why they go to sleep,

but why they're awake in the first place.

The prevalent theory is that the brain

is a computer whose fundamental units, bits, are

neurons firing or not firing.

But neurons are far more complicated,

not to mention being alive, and we don't really

know what that is, yet.

If you consider single cell paramecium, it's one cell,

it swims around, it finds food, it finds a mate, it has sex,

it can learn.

If you suck it into a capillary tube,

it escapes, faster and faster each time.

And yet, it's only one cell, it doesn't have any synapses,

it's not part of a network.

So it, in and of itself, has at least cognition.

I'm not saying it's conscious.

But it performs intelligent activities.

So I think it's an insult to neurons

to say they're simple on-off states when a single cell

paramecium is so clever.

We're asking very ancient questions

that humans have been asking for hundreds, if not thousands

of years.

When we talk about death and dying,

what's the nature of reality, ultimately?

We discovered that there is a part of reality

that is beyond experience.

It doesn't consist of things, it consists of forms.

These forms are real, even though you

can't see them, because they can actualize

in the empirical world.

Everything that you see is an actualization

of a form in this background realm.

So the nature of it is that of a potentiality.

Potentiality is thought-like, [inaudible]

the mind [inaudible] their cosmic mind.

There are two views in consciousness

that come from science.

One is that consciousness is an emergent property of the brain,

and therefore also an emergent property of evolution.

That's the materialistic reductionist view of science.

There's another view that's creeping up now

in some postmodern scientists, and this

is the view is that consciousness is actually

not an emergent property of evolution.

In fact, evolution is driven by consciousness,

that consciousness is non-local, it is transcendent,

it's eternal, it's the grand state of the universe

from where everything emerges.

And being prior to time and transcendent,

it is not subject to birth or death.

When we think about the evidence for what happens when we die,

there is this idea that there's something

about our consciousness that may transcend our physical being.

We know that from a scientific point of view,

people have looked at near death,

out of body, reincarnation.

These kinds of experiences actually

can be documented and studied.

I'm trained as a hard scientist, my PhD

is in pharmacology and toxicology,

and when I was in graduate school,

my mother committed suicide.

And I had been a scientist for as long as I can remember,

and so I looked to science-- what does science

have to say to these questions.

What happens when we die?

Where is she?

Where she go?

Our main focus is the survival of consciousness.

This thing that I call me, what happens to it

when I'm no longer a physical body,

and not associated with a physical body anymore?

And so the primary way that we're looking at that

is with the studying mediums, people

who report regular communication with the deceased.

Many people believe that they can communicate with the dead,

they call them mediums.

So what we're doing in an experiment now

is to take a high density EEG recording of a medium

as a medium is doing her work.

We want to then study in the laboratory what

is happening in the brains of mediums

while they say they're in communication

with a departed person.

So we know from past experience that the mediums

will be roughly 70% correct, which is way beyond chance.

Where is the information coming from that a medium is

getting when it turns out to be veritically correct?

And we don't know the answer to that, yet.

And what we thought is that by using an EEG

and looking at brain activity of the medium,

that might give us a clue as to whether

or not it is something like telepathy

between the living or something else.

If it's telepathy with the dead, well that

would be quite new and interesting.

I lost my sister four years ago, and I wrote a song for her,

it's, "Do You Remember Who You Are?"

And I wrote it for her.

And I'm going to this psychic, and the first thing out

of her mouth, I didn't say a word

to her was, "Your sister, she loves her song."

And I started to sob.

You know, and this is that feeling, again, of connecting

to that which never dies.

People have all kinds of experiences

that kind of lie outside what we accept as truth,

or what is possible.

I think that the kind of science that we're doing,

which really looks at the powers and potentials of consciousness

helps to expand our sense of possibility.

And more important, it allows us to ask

questions that have been put down,

that have been considered taboo.

A medium that we work with, a woman contacted

her and her aunt had died.

And they lived in Peru, and they had told her,

"Your aunt died of stomach cancer."

She went to a medium and she wasn't getting stomach cancer.

She was getting that the woman had been murdered--

the aunt had been murdered.

And she provided a first name, and she had lots of like,

identifying information, and the personality came through

very strongly.

And the sitter took that information

to the Peruvian government and they exhumed the body,

and they did another autopsy.

And there was no evidence of cancer,

but there was evidence that her trachea had been crushed.

They found the name-- the name the medium had given

was the name of the person that had killed the aunt,

and that person is currently serving

in Peruvian jail for her murder.

When I was 15 years old, I was in a place

where I shouldn't have been, with someone I shouldn't have

been with, and we had a serious motorcycle accident involving

a drunk driver.

I remember watching my body tumbling through the air

and landing on the roadway with a crash.

Out of body experiences can't easily

be explained by materialist science.

And if it hadn't happened to me personally,

I might not believe something like this was possible.

Dr. Peter Fenwick is a distinguished neurophysiologist

and senior lecturer at King's College London.

His studies of death, near death, and out

of body experiences provide interesting insight

into what happens at the point of dying.

I was led to this work, really by chance.

I believed that there was nothing

in near death experiences.

They were experiences which happened in California,

they never crossed the sea to England.

And so I thought that they probably were more imagination.

Then, a case came into my consulting room.

He'd had a cardiac arrest, he'd had a near death experience.

And I knew that they were real.

I was sitting, holding the telephone.

Lightning came down the phone line.

It hit me in the side of the head,

it went down my spine, it welded the nails

of the heels of my shoes to the nails in the floor.

It threw me in the air, suspended me in the air,

and slammed me back down on the bed.

It melted the phone.

And I was burning and hurting so bad.

Then all of the sudden, I lift up.

And everything was cool, I looked down on the bed,

I saw me on the bed.

I saw Sandy come running down the hall.

My friend who was on the other end of the phone

heard the explosion, he came, he called the paramedics.

The greatest thing that I've discovered at that point

was that first, the place that I was

was between this world and the next,

but I knew it better than any place I had ever been

living in this physical life.

It looks as if when brain function is down,

there is a set of experiences in which you leave your body

and watch the resuscitation process.

Now what happens during this out of body process?

No brain function, you've got a cardiac arrest,

you're not breathing.

All the brain stem reflexes have gone,

so it is, in fact, a very good model for death itself.

I watched them load me in the ambulance.

I watched the things that went on.

I really didn't care, because where I was, floating above it,

was so much better than where I was when I was involved in it.

And I was in the ambulance, and the guy said, "He's gone.

He's gone."

And me?

I thought, gone where?

I'm here, the paramedic's here.

Where is anybody going?

And I heard these chimes, and I moved down this tunnel

and come into this place of light

and I sensed an absolute sense of safety.

If it's true, that you really do have experiences when

the brain is not working, then it

means that consciousness, or mind, if you like, are in fact

not the same as brain.

It's a fundamental step.

I'm thinking, actually, about how

this one moment changed my life, it ended my wife's life.

And that perhaps is because what I've come to feel

is that consciousness only knows one moment.

It's the one moment that we all share,

and the one moment in which we live our whole lives.

Our subconscious doesn't know the time of day,

our subconscious doesn't know the month.

All our subconscious knows is now.

And this one moment, this now, is what's still inside me,

will always be within me.

The most fully collected consciousness

I'd ever experienced was at that borderline

between life and death.

I'll never forget the river of time,

flowing from the horizon towards me.

From the future to the present.

And at a certain point in my coma, I felt it stop.

And the river of time ran still, I call it the moment

when everything is now.

And then I felt it flow in the other direction.

Time was traveling away from me, and I felt very alone,

because I realized at that moment

that when something passes us into the past

it doesn't return, and it would be gone.

And I remember how I felt at that moment in my coma.

I remember how I understood that in some ways, that

was a moment of death, and a moment of rebirth.

I'm frozen at that moment, emotionally.

The Pam Reynolds case is one more

dramatic near-death experience episodes.

Pam Reynolds had a brain aneurysm, which

was in a portion of the brain that was difficult to get to,

and the surgeons were concerned that if they tried to get to it

and they made an accident, that it could burst,

and she'd be dead before they'd be able to repair it.

So they used a radical surgical method

which would require draining all the blood out of her head.

When you do this, and the body has been cooled down

to 60 degrees Fahrenheit, eventually

goes into shock and then cardiac arrest.

So that's like one level of dead.

You drain the blood out of the body,

then the body's really dead, it's like double dead.

And then they check by putting very loud clicks in both ears.

You're wearing earphones that have a very loud click,

so it will make a brain stem response.

They monitor that, and the brain stem response goes away,

you're like, triple dead.

It's every form of dead that we know is dead.

So she had a full-blown near-death experience.

And I remember the top of my head tingling,

and I just sort of popped out of the top of my head.

And I was then looking down at the body.

I knew it was my body, but I didn't care.

She did say a couple of things that

were unusual about the nature of the saw that was used to open

her skull, and a certain sound that it made,

and music that was being played during the surgery,

and it turned out to be correct.

I had assumed that they were going

to open the skull with a saw, I had heard the term, saw,

but what I saw looked a lot more like a drill than a saw.

It even had little bits that were kept in this case.

One of the reasons to believe that her experience was

unusual, at least, is that when you

are going under general anesthetics,

or if you're getting hypoxia, or all

of the usual physiological shutdowns,

your ability to have a clear thought very rapidly

diminishes.

And your ability to remember what happened also goes away.

I felt a presence, and I sort of turned around to look at it.

And that's when I saw the very tiny pinpoint of light.

And I went toward the light.

The closer I got to the light, I began

to discern different figures, different people,

and I distinctly heard my grandmother call me,

and I immediately went to her.

It felt great.

I asked if God was the light, and the answer

was no, God is not the light.

The light is what happens wen God breathes.

And I distinctly remember thinking,

I'm standing in the breath of God.

So it's one of the more startling cases where

the evidence that she was really dead, dead, dead was very good.

In many of the traditions in the world,

their understanding is that when we die, that we go,

and some say we go to place of rest, a place of learning,

that is, not in the material sense.

And that then we come back again in another form,

or as a human being, or as another life form,

and we have other kinds of experiences.

What do I think might be next?

I think we get recycled.

I think we come back into life for

new and different experiences.

The purpose or the meaning of that,

I'm not going to pretend that I honestly know.

I think we do sort of progress over time

in our multiple lives.

We change, we learn, and we learn from these past lives,

and we become, let's say, better, deeper, shinier.

That's my belief structure.

I'll try to let you know when I get to the other side.

That's all I can say.

What happened before you were born?

I mean, that's an important question, too.

Where were you before you showed up?

In the end, we're all made of the same stuff-- earth, water,

and air, which recycles as our body.

Death affects the body, but not the spirit.

The spirit recycles itself to the physical body

For over 50 years, research has been

conducted at the University of Virginia

into cases of apparent reincarnation

and the possible implications of our consciousness

experiencing multiple lifetimes.

After 50 years of research now, we've

got 2,500 cases in our files of young children

who reported memories of previous lives.

Several hundred of the cases have

involved birth marks or birth defects

that match wounds on the body the previous person.

And some of them have also included written records where

we know precisely, exactly what the child said

about the previous life, and then we

can match that with the previous person that's been identified.

One is a little boy named Sam Taylor.

When he was about a year and a half old,

his dad was changing his diaper one day

and Sam looked up at him and said, "When I was your age,

I used to change your diapers."

But he kept saying this stuff, he kept saying,

"I was grandpa," and, "I used to be big."

And he came out with some pretty interesting details.

Like, he talked about the grandfather's sister being

murdered, and in fact, she had been

killed some 60 years before, and his parents felt certain

that he'd never heard about it.

He also talked about his wife, which was his grandmother,

but his wife from the past life, said some specific details.

And then when she died, she died when he was about 4

- 1/2, and his dad went out and collected

belongings and so forth, and came back

with some family photos.

So one night, Sam's mom had them spread out on the coffee table,

just looking at the various pictures.

Well, Sam walks over and starts pointing

to pictures of his grandfather and saying,

"That's me, that's me."

And also a picture of his-- it was his grandfather's

first car, and there's no one in the car,

but it's just a picture of the car.

And he got very excited and said, "Hey, that's my car."

So to test him, his mom showed him

picture of a class photo from elementary school and said.

"OK, well then show me where you are in the picture."

And he ran his finger along the different

faces and stopped at the one of his grandfather and said,

"That's me."

So that was one that has what we call recognition, where

he was able to pick out his grandfather

and, in a group photo.

It's what we call a same family case

where a child is seeming to remember the life of a family

member.

Some people criticize the work simply

by dismissing it out of hand by saying reincarnation

can't happen, so obviously there's no value to this work.

But that's really not a very scientific,

I mean, sort of scientism, perhaps,

but it's not a scientific view of letting your beliefs

prejudice your view of the evidence

when it should, of course, be the other way around.

So have you had people in your life that died?

Oh, absolutely.

All my parents are dead, all four of them.

I had two bio parents, two stepparents.

Yep, so I've been all through that.

So I drove around to doctor's offices,

I went through all that.

I'm sure my telomeres are much shorter from the stress

of being a caretaker.

Yeah, so that brings home the reality of death for sure.

But they're gone.

I mean, absolutely, I don't think they're anywhere else.

You know, occasionally afterwards,

I thought I heard my mom's voice, that sort of thing.

But we all have these auditory hallucinations a little bit.

But then it went away shortly after that.

So it's just-- it's just part of growing up

in the cycle of life, and I guess that's how I look at it.

I just don't--

So you had this experience--

- dwell on it.

- maybe that your mom did?

You heard her voice?

I just not-- I don't want to make a big thing about that, I

just remember a couple times in bed,

you know, sort of like, late at night,

you know how you're sort of falling asleep?

It's one of those transition things

where your mind is producing all sorts of things.

I don't think it's anything more than that.

I think more than the other hallucinations

I've had from sleep deprivation, from sensory deprivation

things.

I've done all that stuff.

So my father, when he died, he was a typical man

of his generation.

Loving guy, but at a distance, you know what I mean?

So he passed on, and around a week or two later,

and I was in this very room one morning,

and suddenly one day, there he was.

I was really almost overwhelmed with the unconditional love

that I was experiencing from him, directly from him.

I realized he was very close to me.

Very close in my space.

Too close.

I had to just say, "Dad, you know,

just give me a little space, here."

So he did.

The love was still there, none of that changed.

But he was happy.

He was kind of radiating happiness.

And once in awhile I would ask him, in my mind, a question.

What about this, what about that?

And just get a few words, a few impressions, a few senses

of what was going on for him.

And then after about two days, maybe three,

he just-- that was it-- just moved on.

I just said OK, you know?

Thanks, it's been good, you know?

Good luck, best wishes wherever you're heading.

And thank you, I-- thank you for the time,

and the-- particularly the-- just that unconditional love.

Oh, it's great, isn't it?

I mean, just life.

I mean, take a breath, let that body just extract

that oxygen. Oxygen is a gas.

Ha.

We're keenly aware of consciousness,

and we're aware of consciousness does not come from the body.

We're aware of consciousness independent of the body.

And so people are more aware that they

are consciousness having a body rather than a body

with consciousness.

Oftentimes, people are actually very

anxious about whether they're going to die,

and they make decisions about their life,

whether they're going to die.

And in fact, that's not where we should be making decisions

from.

Our decisions and choices need to be made from,

what gifts am I going to give before I leave here?

What talents am I going to cultivate?

How am I going to be a beneficial presence

on the planet?

And that's a much higher frequency than,

"I'm afraid I'm going to die."

I think the structure of our society right

now is a fear of death.

And, I mean, I hate to sound so blunt about this, but the whole

anti aging movement?

You're a loser if you die.

You're a loser if you get old.

And yet, somehow, we all do.

And our society has set it up that death and aging

are the enemy, whereas they're inevitable.

I truly know that I have no control when I live or die.

So the combination of accepting a lack of control

over my own death, and a very deep gratitude

for the life I've already had, is my real reason

for being at peace.

A lot of people have fear around them,

and yet here you were, fighting in Korea, and, you know,

piloting crafts that took off from aircraft carriers,

and then having to land again in the middle of the ocean.

You know, you've described it like a needle in a haystack.

And then getting on the Apollo 14 capsule after Apollo 13

almost was disastrous-- those actions imply a kind

of fearlessness about death.

I pondered my own immortality or mortality.

But I think the more important thing for we humans

is, learn to feel pleasurable, happy, successful

in what we do in this life and feel

that we're being productive, caring and helpful

to each other and to our families, that that's really

more important than whether we really

have all the answers to what happens after this life.

Living this life to its fullest, and properly

and happily, to me, is far more fundamental.

I got a call from my brother, I was living in Phoenix,

my dad was in Tucson.

He had taken a fall, and he was in ICU, and he was in a coma.

And so when I left the house in Phoenix,

I took two things with me.

I took my drum and I took two eagle feathers.

And I went upstairs to the ICU room where my dad was at,

and here I am, took my drum, two eagle feathers.

My dad was like this.

He was laying there with his eyes open,

and his hands like this.

And I took a eagle feather, and I put one

in each hand-- I placed one in each hand.

And I took my drum, and I wanted my dad to wake up.

I wanted him to live, because my mom and dad had been together

56 years.

That was my intention when I came down,

I want to see him wake up.

I want him back with my mom.

And so I put the eagle feathers in his hands

and I took the drum, and I simply--

[drumbeat]

- I created a heartbeat.

And I went from head to toe over his life,

and I prayed over him.

And I wanted him to be healed.

And on the last beat, my dad went into a convulsion,

and he closed his eyes, and he released.

When he did, he grabbed that eagle feather in his right

and he closed his hand.

And I knew what I had done was what he wanted to have done.

And he-- when he grabbed that eagle feather,

I knew that I had been sent to do what I was supposed to do.

[music playing]

We need to talk about death and the fear of death.

I personally have more fear of an unfulfilled

life than of death itself.

I know I'm afraid of death because I don't

want to think a different way.

I don't want to become a different person.

I just want to stay who I am.

If I change, I want to remember this form, or this person.

Contemplating death can really bring us peace.

Without impermanency, there's no change.

If there's no change, there is no life.

Can you imagine your life without any change?

Doesn't exist.

Death is a taboo to talk about.

Just is-- many people don't want to talk about death,

because it's something that it happens to somebody else.

But that doesn't know a culture, death doesn't know religion,

death doesn't know-- death doesn't discriminate.

That's the thing, is that in the end

it's going to happen to all of us,

and we have to be prepared for it in any time, in any moment.

It's hard to watch the people I love suffer.

And I have to say, it's harder for them than it is for me,

because I'm not suffering with this.

I suffer with physical discomfort.

The pain is not fun, pain sucks, but dying doesn't.

Dying is just what we do.

I want to thank everyone for coming,

for bringing your unique and special love for Lee here

today.

Lee was absolutely adamant that this

was supposed to be a celebration of life-- his and everyone

else's here.

And so with that in mind, we figured

we'd turn the beginning over to Lee.

I want you gently to close your eyes

and begin taking deep breaths, in and out.

Now start thinking of people you love, those that

bring meaning to your life.

Begin to feel the sense of appreciation in your body.

Do you feel it in your chest, your stomach, your back?

Continue to breathe deeply in and out.

Now think of a place that you'd love to be,

a place that brings you peace.

And image yourself in that place.

And now you're joined in that place by someone

you really love.

Allow them to sit with you.

Look at their face, and in your mind,

tell them how you feel about them.

Returning to the place we're born and raised

can be an emotional experience.

It is for me, because of family members who are now passed on.

I took my son Skyler on pilgrimage

to pay final respects to my mom and step

dad who died two years earlier.

My sisters arranged a memorial service and burial

of their ashes in the family plot,

a sweet good bye for these two beautiful people

who played such an important role in our lives.

And I'm watching the people that I love leave,

and I am being left behind by the people that I love.

And then I have to say the hardest

symptoms there is to say.

I have to say goodbye, I love you.

How can it possibly be goodbye, I love you,

in one sentence together?

[music playing]

This is my mother, I lost her 2004.

It's comforting to me that I can come and talk to her,

be with her, bring her flowers, and just practice the way,

culturally, we do in Mexico.

Clearly, the cross cultural evidence

suggests that people all over the world,

and throughout history, have thought

that consciousness is more than just our physical being.

Different religions, different cultural groups

have created practices to honor that transition.

Many times when you see your friends that

do get hit, that are sitting beside you--

I've had several pilots come out from under me-- and the fear

hits afterward-- that's when you feel it.

I was down twice, and you wonder why you make it and maybe

the pilot didn't.

I joined the service in 1966, and I trained as a medic.

And part of your training, they teach you not

to care about your patients.

It's a job, and that's all they want to do is to do your job.

But what happens is that when you have people, especially

the men who are coming in off the field

and have been mortally wounded and not expected to live,

your own personal feelings start coming in and they-- you

start caring.

And there isn't any other way.

It's-- for me, it was just really,

I just had to stop and just-- right now I'm having to do

this.

Just really brings a tear to your eyes.

We honor the memory of those who gave their lives

in the service of our country.

And of those others who have dropped their burdens

by the wayside of life.

[music playing]

When people use art at the end of life, or people in grief,

as a way of processing their emotions.

People have used art as a mode of expressing emotions, grief.

Art is a mode of inquiry into consciousness.

Now, the moment of death is known

to have this experience of life review.

But then when you are going through these,

in the passage in here, it says if you're

passing through all your experiences

before you totally release.

When I first saw footage of elephants

encountering the remains of another elephant,

I was deeply moved.

You could see that they were very interested, certainly

curious.

Where they grieving?

Each member of the herd explored the remains

using their sense of smell and touch,

as if looking for clues about what happened,

or in remembrance of events in the life

of their departed companion.

You know, grieving is an important part of the process,

and it's necessary.

That's how we look at it with the zoo-- an animal dies,

but there are still other animals that

are counting on us, and we need to continue to do our best take

care of those animals.

So if you have members of your congregation that are in grief,

what do you do?

If I really want to quiet and be present with my heart

and the grief in it, I walk the labyrinth.

The labyrinth is a pattern, actually.

It's usually about a 40 foot circle,

and it has one path that starts at the outer edge, and weaves

in a very circuitous way, eventually into center.

And what it is is a walking meditation where

you find your natural pace, and that's pretty rare.

By walking, the mind quiets much easier.

I know we are here to celebrate David's live,

but I would not be honest if I didn't

say that I'm grieving right now, and my heart is broken.

I grieved over David as a brother would.

Grief is something that you must go through.

You must feel it, embody it, experience it,

and it has a life cycle.

It, you know, it reaches a peak, and then it rains, and then

slowly dissipates as an energy.

And when it dissipates, then you revive the bond, the love,

that was always there.

OK, and then you have a relationship with that person.

And that person doesn't have to be perceptually right in front

of you, they're in your consciousness

and you have access to them anytime you want.

I think that everyone has their own way of getting through it,

but once you have an awareness that life is eternal,

you miss the person-- I miss my mom, you miss them--

but you have a different relationship,

because they're here.

You know, they're around, and it just

becomes a different relationship.

[music playing]

In the Christian tradition, you know,

we've had many versions over the century of death and dying,

but I think certainly the major tenant

is that there's a life beyond, after the body, or after death.

I do really truly understand that there's

consciousness beyond death, there's

consciousness beyond the body.

And I think that's what we mean by soul.

The soul really can awaken, we know that.

It's often asleep for many people.

And as we become more conscious of this part of ourselves,

we really, I think, want to guard that, protect that,

grow that, be in love with it.

This is a good subject, because it's universal.

Whether you're Christian, or Buddhist,

or Muslim, or Atheist, everybody meets in that point,

we call it death.

It says in the Surah that Prophet, peace be upon him,

was teaching, he said, "Blessed the one

who created death and life."

Usually, you think life and death, we call this life,

and we call, that the end, you know, this.

But in that teaching, he calls this whole life, death,

and he calls the after death, life.

Because this one has a limit.

You're born and you have an ending.

The other one doesn't have an ending.

[music playing]

I think one of the great advantages of most

traditional religions is that they make

people less afraid of death.

I mean, death's scary, especially if it's painful.

But they make people less afraid of death,

because this is the feeling that death is a transition.

If you're a materialist or an atheist,

and you believe that death is the end

and the mind just goes blank, you may be scared of that,

or scared of growing old.

I think that the main purpose of religion

is to make people feel that their lives are

part of something bigger than themselves,

that they're connected to something much larger

than themselves.

And that includes something larger

than themselves in relation to death.

If people choose a spiritual path,

you know, whatever path that is for them,

and only they know what's right for them, and stick with it,

you get these direct experiences of, on one level, I'm separate,

you're you, and I'm me, and another, I'm part of something

larger that connects us all.

I think that the universe is becoming

self conscious through the human nervous system.

The [inaudible] that knows is is an omnipresent, omniscient,

omnipotent being-- the cosmic mind.

And our mind is an aspect of that mind.

As the great poet Rumi says, "You're not just

a drop in the ocean, you're the mighty ocean in the drop."

The Indian sages had this allegory

of pots of water put in the sunlight.

You take a million pots and fill them with water,

and the sun is shining, the sun is in each one of them,

but there's only one sentence.

So, you know, you take a million people,

that all our conscious is only one consciousness.

What I know for sure about death,

it's just a passageway, a doorway into ever unfolding

of who and what we really are.

And it's nothing to be afraid of.

When the time comes, it's a common denominator

that we all pass through.

Know that one day, we're not going to have this body,

so while we're here, in a human incarnation, we can ask,

how can I serve?

How can I love?

How can I cultivate the gifts that are within me,

and express them?

Let me not leave without saying, and being, and giving all

that I can say, and be, and give, while I'm here.

I know unequivocally, without any question,

there is no such thing as death.

No one ever dies, you just shift from one frequency

into another frequency.

And more importantly, you go back to where you originally

came from.

So scientifically, we don't know if identity, self-awareness

can survive death.

That's more of a spiritual belief

right now than a scientific belief.

But I trust my intuition more than anything,

and my intuition says yes, this is probably the case.

Be aware that we are part of a continuum.

We were here at the time of the Big Bang.

I never died, from the time of Big Bang, I was here.

And I will never die, I'll be here for the eternity.

I only change form.

The moment you realize that, then you not afraid.

The dead are not under the earth, you know?

They're in the water, they're in the woods, they're in the fire,

they're in the air, they're in the breast of the woman,

they're in the child that is crying.

The dead are not dead.

The key to the conquest of death is to find out who you are.

As long as you confused with your body and your mind,

you're bamboozled by superstition, OK?

Because the body and the mind are dying anyway,

all the time, OK?

I don't have the same thoughts I had when I was a teenager.

I don't have the same personality.

I don't have the same emotions.

If you're the string of beads, there's

a thread that strings together the string of beads.

So when you think of the beads as the memories and the string

as what the memories are strung on,

that's you-- the string on which the memories are strung on.

And if you can go to the deeper level

and be grounded there now, you've conquered death.

Because you realize that death is an illusion.

It's actually the movement of space time events.

In coma, it's a different universe.

I had no sense of concern, no anxiety.

I just found myself exploring.

It was an area of complete curiosity.

It was boundless.

Vista, after vista, after vista.

Every environment was beautiful, one environment

leading seamlessly to the next.

The landscapes and places I visited,

I knew them well, although I had never been to them before.

The people I met, I felt I'd known them for as long

as I could remember, although I'd not met them before,

which is why I feel that we have one consciousness that we all

share, in complete connection with everything and everyone.

Very beautiful.

And whether we recover, whether we wake up or not,

there's no cause for fear when we change-- when we

move into some other existence.

On the day when death will knock at your door, what will

you give to him?

Oh, I will set before my guest the full vessel of my life.

I will never let him go with empty hands.

All the sweet vintage of all my autumn days and summer nights.

All the earnings and gleanings of my busy life

will I place before Him at the close of my days.

Now the day has dawned, and the lamp that lit my dark corner

is out.

A summons has come, and I'm ready for my journey.

[MUSIC - GARY MALKIN, "DO YOU REMEMBER WHO YOU ARE"]