Skip to main content

Is There Life After Death?: John Cleese and a Panel of Scientists Discuss That Eternal Question

“I am sixty-five years old,” said John Cleese as he began one year’s convocation address at my university, “which is nearly dead.” It got enough of a laugh that I’m not surprised to find, looking it up all these years later, that he seem to have deployed the line many times since. “I’m now incredibly old,” he said last year in a video urging compliance with coronavirus rules. “I’m nearly dead. I am 81 years of age.” Nevertheless, he remains decidedly non-dead (and indeed active on Twitter) today, though no doubt reality-based enough to accept that he’s no less mortal than his fellow Pythons Graham Chapman and Terry Jones, who’ve preceded him into the afterlife — if indeed there is an afterlife.

That very question animates the 80-minute conversation above. Put on by the University of Virginia’s Division of Perceptual Studies at the 2018 Tom Tom Festival, it places Cleese at the head of a panel of scientists charged with probing one question: is there life after death?

Many will find the evidence discussed here fairly persuasive, especially the documented “near-death experiences.” In these cases “we have heightened mental thoughts when your brain isn’t functioning; we have accurate perceptions from outside the body; we have meetings with deceased loved ones who you didn’t know had died; we have meetings with deceased loved ones whom you didn’t know, period; and we don’t have a good physical explanation for this.”

So says Bruce Greyson, Professor Emeritus of Psychiatry and Neurobehavioral Sciences at the University of Virginia, one of the panel’s five distinguished non-Pythons. The others are Jim B. Tucker, the Division of Perceptual Studies director; Edward Kelly, one of its Professors of Research; Emily Williams Kelly, one of its Assistant Professors of Research; and UVA Professor of Psychiatry and Neurobehavioral Sciences Kim Penberthy. Their work suggests to them that, while near-death experiences may not reflect the detachment of soul from body, neither do they seem to be straightforward hallucinations. The trouble with mounting a rigorous investigation into such a rare phenomenon is the necessarily small number of cases. These researchers might thus consider taking on Cleese himself as a subject; after all, the man’s self-professed state of near-death has lasted more than fifteen years now.

Related Content:

Is There an Afterlife? Christopher Hitchens Speculates in an Animated Video

Elie Wiesel (RIP) Talks About What Happens When We Die

Hear Kurt Vonnegut Visit the Afterlife & Interview Dead Historical Figures: Isaac Newton, Adolf Hitler, Eugene Debs & More (Audio, 1998)

Carl Sagan Answers the Ultimate Question: Is There a God? (1994)

John Cleese Plays the Devil, Makes a Special Appeal for Hell, 1966

Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities and culture. His projects include the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.

Is There Life After Death?: John Cleese and a Panel of Scientists Discuss That Eternal Question is a post from: Open Culture. Follow us on Facebook and Twitter, or get our Daily Email. And don't miss our big collections of Free Online Courses, Free Online Movies, Free eBooks, Free Audio Books, Free Foreign Language Lessons, and MOOCs.



from Open Culture https://ift.tt/3mAdhAi
via Ilumina

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

When Albert Einstein & Charlie Chaplin Met and Became Fast Famous Friends (1930)

Photo via Wikimedia Commons “You do not really understand something unless you can explain it to your grandmother,” goes a well-known quote attributed variously to Albert Einstein, Richard Feynman, and Ernest Rutherford. No matter who said it, “the sentiment… rings true,” writes Michelle Lavery , “for researchers in all disciplines from particle physics to ecopsychology.” As Feynman discovered during his many years of teaching , it could be “the motto of all professional communicators,” The Guardian ’s Russell Grossman writes , “and especially those who earn a living communicating the tricky business of science.” Einstein became one of the world’s great science communicators by choice, not necessity, and found ways to explain his complex theories to children and the elderly alike. But perhaps, if he’d had his way, he would rather have avoided words altogether, and preferred acrobatic feats of silent daring to get his message across. We might at least conclude so from his reverence f...
Post a Comment
Read more

1,100 Delicate Drawings of Root Systems Reveals the Hidden World of Plants

We know that plants can inspire art. If you, personally, still require convincing on that point, just have a look at Elizabeth Twining’s Illustrations of the Natural Orders of Plants , the drawings of Ernst Heinrich Haeckel , Elizabeth Blackwell’s  A Curious Herbal , and Nancy Anne Kingsbury Wollstonecraft’s Specimens of the Plants and Fruits of the Island of Cuba — not to mention the paintings of Georgia O’ Keeffe — all previously featured here on Open Culture. But those works concern themselves only with plant life as it exists above ground. What goes on down below, underneath the soil? That you can see for yourself — and without having to pull up one of our fine flowering (or non-flowering) friends to do so — at Wageningen University’s online archive of root system drawings . “The outcome of 40 years of  root system excavations in Europe,” says that site, the collection contains 1,180 diagrams of species from  Abies alba (best known today as a kind of Christmas t...
Post a Comment
Read more

Zamrock: An Introduction to Zambia’s 1970s Rich & Psychedelic Rock Scene

The story of popular music in the late 20th century is never complete without an account of the explosive psychedelic rock, funk, Afrobeat, and other hybrid styles that proliferated on the African continent and across Latin American and the Caribbean in the 1960s and 70s. It’s only lately, however, that large audiences are discovering how much pioneering music came out of Kenya, Ghana, Nigeria, and other postcolonial countries, thanks to UK labels like Strut and Soundway (named by The Guardian as “one of the 10 British Labels defining the sound of 2014” and named “Label of the Year” in 2017). Germany’s Analogue Africa , a label that reissues classic albums from the era, puts it this way: “the future of music happened decades ago.” Only most Western audiences weren’t paying attention—with notable exceptions, of course: superstar drummer Ginger Baker apprenticed himself to Fela Kuti and became an evangelist for African drumming; Brian Eno and Talking Heads’ David Byrne ( who ...
Post a Comment
Read more