Thursday, 22 April, 2021 UTC
Summary
Pixexid, photographer not named
If it’s all just an Attention Derby, I’d say Death is coming off a pretty good year.
The widespread desire to think about something else has many people convinced, for no good reason, that Death is ready to assume its more typical profile: High, but not right there in-your-face.
Death in enhanced-mode really challenges our denial mechanisms, subjects them to attacks they’re not prepared for. Today’s more extroverted Death led with a virus and followed with escalating outbreaks of random violence, coming soon to a grocery store near you.
Tom Nickel, Ryan Astheimer, Death Q&A Co-HostsCalling our event Death Q&A was just saying, ‘you can bring up Death stuff here.’
The virtual Tibetan Buddhist Temple where we hold it creates a different kind of mental state.
It’s a hybrid state — our physical bodies are not co-located, but out attention is. And not just in Time, like a Zoom call — but in Space. Our attention is in the same Time and Space as the other people there.
That’s why the term Spatial Media perfectly captures the distinctive quality of the whole spectrum of synthesized realities. We feel together in time and space, but with no collective relationship in the other world, where our bodies are.
That helps. Our relationships in the other world are complicated and they sometimes hold us back from saying what we feel, especially the most difficult stuff. Virtual spaces are a way to be social without worrying about what your friends or your partner will think. Or your Mom.
That’s also why people come into an event named Death Q&A without any real idea about what’s going on and find themselves talking about the time they almost died thirty years ago and what that meant to them.
I did not see that coming. I didn’t get how much Death Talk so many people have in them just ready to come out if it’s ever OK.
Someone at today’s event really did bring up his near-death experience from thirty years ago, a down-to-earth sounding guy from somewhere in the UK. Only he had an unusual spin I’d never heard before. He said:
I left my body and started floating up a little and when I looked down I saw doctors and nurses working on me.
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He was three weeks old at the time, except three week old babies don’t distinguish forms that way or record them to the hippocampus. All he knows is his observing self did distinguish and did record.
Near Death Experiences (NDEs) turn out to be a very polarizing phenomenon. Are they a glimpse of another realm or the record of a brain shutting down? Can they be both? Of course they can.
NDEs might be the most popular topic that has come up over the past year in Death Q&A. A couple dozen people have shared their personal stories. For some it was transformational. For others it was equivocal, or even meh.
As Hosts, we set an accepting tone and people don’t tend to proclaim universal truths or try converting others to their views. Everyone who speaks is heard. That’s it.
Or, that’s been it so far.
It’s not all NDEs. People talk about cyber immortality and their own fear of dying. They talk about being scared their parents are going to die because of how they’re behaving in the pandemic. They talk about rejecting what they were taught about Death and figuring out their own ways of looking at it. They talk about trying to explain Death to their kids and not knowing what to say.
We joke about the Q&A part and admit we have no As, but we always respond with something personal that connects us in that moment, and other people there do too.
What else are you going to do in a one-hour event in VR?
Or, what are the Next Steps, how can we bring experiential learning to Death?
Photo from Afterlife, by ShuShuBeing immersed in the wispy threads, gently passing through them in the endless darkness — the closest analogy might be lucid dreaming. Death-like experiences are also brought into life through drugs, ecstatic dance, specific mental exercises, and many other approaches.
VR makes it on-demand, an intense simulation that surrounds us as if Dorothy could portal back into Oz any time she wanted to — without getting bonked in the head first.
I can choose to put myself into ShuShu’s next-level Afterlife world any time I want, and I have, multiple times since I discovered it about a month ago. I’ve gone to the Afterlife alone. I’ve taken one other person a few times. I’ve taken a group of twenty people, twice — being there with a bunch of people was very powerful, seeing others in the mists trying to figure it out with me.
I’m learning about how to use the Afterlife world because I think it can help people feel better. I think it can help them move toward acceptance and even appreciation of mortality.
But not all by itself.
One great thing about Death is that it radiates out in every direction and has so many expressions. The ethereal Afterlife vision is compelling but so are funerals and cemeteries, ICUs and iconography. There will be multiple Death Worlds in the Death Universe.
It’ll be an open entry Universe but the capstone project is mandatory, no exceptions. Makes sense to check out some of the easier Worlds first, I’d think.
Our Next Steps in Death involve the selection and sequencing of learning experiences. People don’t tend to come up to us and say, ‘Hey Doc, I’ve got Death Anxiety. Can you help?’ They want someone to listen to what they want to say, not to apply their therapeutic modality.
Ryan and I have done a lot of listening. This is just Year One of our Death initiative. We feel like we’re plugged into a wall socket of humanity. We’ll see if we can direct that energy into experiences that help, micro doses of exposure.
When we get close with Death, carefully and with a little structure, over time we can build a relationship. We learn more about Death as it reveals itself and we learn more about ourselves, what our limits are.
Our Next Steps with Death will be open and appreciative, active as well as reflective, with room for many visions.
I also write an occasional e-newsletter on Sub-Stack: https://tnickel32.substack.com/
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https://medium.com/media/1e1f2ee7654748bb938735cbca6f0fd3/hrefNext Steps in Death was originally published in AR/VR Journey: Augmented & Virtual Reality Magazine on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.