Call it a calculated conspiracy of algorithms but over the last week I watched two 'recommended' TED videos, each dealing with with dimensions of life and death.
The first one was by Isabel Stenzel Byrnes titled the "The Art of Saying Goodbye", and the second one by Nancy Trivellato on Out-of-Body Experiences (OBE).
Isabel describes her own harrowing experiences with Cystic Fibrosis, numerous encounters with the death, end-of-life issues, and organ donation. She also talks about her realisation that there is no right or wrong way to say goodbye to a loved one, and that grief is an art, a deeply intellectual and spiritual process of making sense of loss.
I was particularly touched by this description of grief by Isabel's friend, Christine:
"If you were to ask me what stage of grief I'm in, I would say denial, anger, fear, profound sadness...sequentially, and then all at once, and sometimes not at all."
The second TED video by Nancy Trivellato, a researcher from Brazil, begins with a question that has long been familiar to ancient Indian philosophers - "Is the reality we live in the actual reality?". The point being made here was that the 'reality' being presented to us by our sense organs give us, at best, only a small fraction of the many realities that exist in parallel. Nancy makes this point by presenting a set of photographs of the cosmos, each showing how instruments that detect different parts of the electromagnetic spectrum see the same slice of the night sky so differently.
However Nancy's talk is not about the EM spectrum or the cosmos but something more subtle. She describes how as a child she had an out-of-body experience of 'seeing' a beloved uncle on a hospital bed in Sao Paolo. He and his wife had gone there for a gall bladder operation without informing anybody and were quite astounded to hear the little girl describe his hospital room.
The common thread that runs through both these videos is that there is more to life and death, and dimensions of consciousness that needs our attention with tools that are beyond the reach of existing scientific instruments and conceptual frameworks.
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* TED Video - "The Art of Saying Goodbye" (Isabel Byrnes) - https://youtu.be/Dkffpibi-Dc
* TED - Nancy Trivellato on OBE - https://youtu.be/NMBNZspmn7I
* The Power of Two - A Twin Triumph Over Cystic Fibrosis - https://www.amazon.com/Power-Two-Triumph-Cystic-Fibrosis/dp/0826217540
