What If Death Removes the Filter on Consciousness? – Transcript

00:00North America, I'm coming for you. We're doing a small tour, just six shows at some really cool venues. We're going to talk about philosophy, we're going to talk about God, about consciousness. We're going to talk about whatever you want to talk about, because there will be an extensive Q&A at every show. The dates are on screen, the ticket link is in the description. Be there.

00:20>> Oh, uh there's a book um called The Philosophy of Death, which you might find very interesting. It's very interesting essays on there. And the opening essay is the one I'm fascinated by the most was was by a man who had a near-death experience. He He was literally declared dead.

00:40And um and so he describes all of these sensations that are kind of similar to a drug-like sensation. And I mean I I I I can't remember all of them, but it's like you feel yourself becoming one with everything around you. The discriminating mind, you know, to use the the Buddhist concept >> Yeah.

01:02>> of appearing. And everything appears one. It's an oceanic exper- sensation. Okay? That is universal in these near-death experiences. Now, you can say that that's like religious and hokey, but you know, screw that kind of thinking. It's real. It's very real. You have a thousands of people have reported that.

01:25It's real and the I have a story in the book from this woman. Have you ever heard of Jill Bolte Taylor? >> I don't think so. >> Okay. She's a neuroscientist who in the '90s, she was in her late 30s, had a very powerful stroke, much worse than mine. She had what's called a hemorrhagic stroke. Mine was ischemic.

01:48Mine was a blood clot. Hers was blood flowing into her brain, right? Very serious. And as the blood is flowing into her brain, all of those filtering mechanisms are shutting down.

02:03And so, people don't realize that vision, looking, is a creation of the brain. The brain filters what we see, right? So, the initial the material comes in, and scientists call that V1. That's the initial sensation. It's just patterns and dots of light, right? That's all we actually really see in V1.

02:28And the brain takes all those dots, I'm giving a a silly interpretation of it, but that's sort of how it's explained, and it creates a picture, right? But it's a picture that we're familiar with cuz the brain doesn't want to give us things that are going to overload us.

02:44She saw V1. She Her brain was dissolving. She saw what it was like the world without it being put into a picture. She saw the dots. She saw the haziness. She felt as she was taking a shower as it was coming onto her that she was literally melting into the shower itself and and dissolving away.

03:05This is happening to her, a scientist, right? As she's having a near-death experience, okay? It's the brain she's literally seeing what happens when the brain is shutting off one part after another after another after another.

03:22I mean, that that's real. That's not That's not really That's not hokum. There's something And she's a scientist, and she wrote about it. >> Mhm. And I I talk about this all the time that these cliches of near-death experiences, psychedelic experiences, intense meditation experiences are cliches for a reason. I mean, you might think it's a bit sort of

03:46uh hippie and and funky to say, you know, "Oh, I'm one with everything. But the fact that an idea like that comes up so often everywhere and in such a way that famously can't quite be explained must mean something. And I often tell people that when it comes to drugs in particular, I think like all of the clichés are true.

04:09You know, you take like a sort of low dose of a psychedelic drug and you stare at the sky and you start seeing essentially kaleidoscopic uh you know, patterns and you go like, oh man, like it it really is like that. You know, that's what actually happens.

04:22You you take a a higher dose and you start sort of feeling as though your own sense of self is beginning to dissipate and you're like, oh, man, like yeah, that they weren't kidding when they talked about the the ego death. Like these clichés are true and universal and it's the fact that they are independently experienced by different people all reporting the same thing that makes it so scientifically interesting.

04:47>> Yes, well, I mean, I don't know if it's related, but Huxley himself, I believe, talked about what he called the Axial Revolution. I think it's the right word or the Axial period. And basically, he was looking at the world like around 4 or 500 BC.

05:06And all of these ideas in countries that had no communication with each other were occurring at the same time. Like with Buddhism, Buddha is I don't know what what century he actually was, the fourth century BC.

05:21You know, and >> yeah. >> something, you know, concepts of the oneness of the sort of enlightenment. But then you had ancient Greek writers, the pre-Socratics, who were talking about that, like Heraclitus and Empedocles.

05:35And then you had Chinese writers talking about the same thing. I could go on and on and on. And I mean, this isn't at the same time, but um I'm for this book, I've been researching um I'm fascinated with ancient cultures and the fact that they disappeared and that they had ways of thinking that are alien to us, and I love alien ways of thinking.

06:02>> Mhm. >> And so, I've been reading a lot about I focused mostly on Aztec culture cuz I here in Los Angeles, I'm just sort uh you know, immersed in Mexican culture. And I've always been fascinated by the Aztecs. They had these same concepts actually in a very strange way and very poetic and beautiful um expressions of it.

06:24So, these are happening all around the world in different cultures that are not contacted with each other. There's something about the universality of it that connects to the human brain, and we could connect drug experience near-death experiences these kind of initiation rituals or some of those um those saunas that people would take, you know, with the heat. I forget what they're called.

06:51Um you know, uh they all lead to the same kind of or meditation, right? So, there's something very real there, and it can't be dismissed as just hokum or or hallucinations.