Fearing death keeps us from living. 3 experts explain.

Dying is not just a medical event. It's way bigger than that. It's where

everything comes to account. Our psychology, our philosophy, our

spirituality, our social world, our intrapersonal lives. It is

all-encompassing.

[Music] Without death, there's no evolution.

Evolution, as it works now, operates by dying. and the next generations carry

on. The body through the evolutionary process has tuned interconnectivity of

the cells and the brain. You can get a design happening out of evolution over

time where you can get adaptations occurring that did not exist. At one

point there were no large creatures such as us walking around on land. The only

way that could happen would be many generations dying. So death has really

been an essential ingredient to the evolutionary process.

[Music] I started being confronted by patients

reports of things that I couldn't explain. Near-death experiences are

profound subjective experiences that many people have when they come close to

death or sometimes when they are in fact pronounced dead. And they include such

difficult to explain phenomena as a sense of leaving the physical body. And

we have hundreds and hundreds of experiences that occur during a cardiac

arrest or deep anesthesia when we know the brain is not capable of functioning

well enough to create complex thoughts and feelings and memories. And they

often report hearing sounds they'd never heard on Earth and seeing colors they

had never seen before. Some of the lessons that near-death experiences

bring back from this event is this sense of being interconnected with other

people about how to make this life more meaningful, more purposeful, more

fulfilling. But I think the important part of a new death experience is what

they tell us about this life we're in now.

The domain of death is more or less ruled these days by healthcare. In times

past, it's been the church or the family was the center of all this. The medical

piece is a little itty bitty piece. It just gets too much attention. We people,

we humans, we patients, loved ones, we need to take back the subject on some

level. One of the things I see that happens a lot around this subject. One

can be made to feel ashamed to be sick, ashamed to be dying, like we're failing

somehow. We end up accidentally making life even harder for each other by

keeping the truth of the situation at bay. We die before we have to die.

Ideally, we come to our death without piles and piles of regret. When I'm

working with patients, especially upstream of their death, I'm always

encouraging them to feel things, enjoy the body they have while they have it,

cuz it's someday going to go and you're going to miss it. As long as I can feel

something, I'm interested in being alive.

[Music]