What I've Been Reading

Words at the Threshold: What We Say as We're Nearing Death by Lisa Smartt.

Three major message I got from the book (and I more or less agree with those):

• How we live life translates into what we speak at end of life. 
• There is more to ours senses than language; we lose those senses as we grow out of our childhood and then we get back before death. 
• There is tons we don't know; we have our limitations as a species (which most don't agree and delude themselves). 

Another great lesson was on what to do and what not do when a person is in his death bed (nobody taught us this even though this is the most concentre and inevitable things in life).

• Language is sequential, but the near-death experience is often described as having no spatial or temporal sequence. This non-sequential quality of the near-death experience makes it necessary for people to reach not only for metaphorical but also for paradoxically descriptions. 
• The metaphor of death as a journey is deeply rooted in who and what we are. This is true not only for us as individuals but also of human beings collectively, since metaphor emerges in languages and cultures throughout the world. 
• Do we speak of dying as a journey because have no other means to make sense of the end of life? Or do we use the journey metaphor because there are no literal words to describe the passage we are making? Perhaps we are, indeed, boarding a train for a new destination, a place that can be described only in intensified and figurative language - a place so magnificent that it led Steve Jobs to exclaim, "Oh wow!, Oh wow! Oh, wow!"
• A distinguishing characteristic of nonsense is that the context is missing. For example, if one hundred years ago someone had said, "The astronauts are going to the moon," the sentence would have been unintelligible. What are astronauts? How can anyone get to moon? Many things that once would have seemed like nonsense are completely sensible today. Situational and linguistic nonsense are important in studying the language of the threshold because the language does not correspond to our current understanding and may hold hints of knowledge we don not yet have. As a matter of fact, a survey of many of the great discoveries in science is also a survey of concepts that we described at one time as complete nonsense. What looks like nonsense at any given point is often a harbinger of new frontiers. 
• I even cry with the guys in the hospice units in prison. I gave up on all I learned about not crying. I just think a life is worth crying over - most of them have not had their live cried over. 
• The American psychologist William James observed that self-contradictory expressions like "dazzling obscurity," "whispering silence,"  "teeming desert," and "the Soundless Sound" are common in the writing of mystics. Apparently, prosaic language is inadequate for describing the transcendent level of consciousness. Raymond Moody suggests, "We delight in nonsense because it short-circuits the brain by bypassing the rational mind."
• 2012 paper titled "Essence Theory", indicate that parents and infants communicate energetically and "telepathically" before spoken language is fully mastered. As infants gain spoken language, the ability to communicate in nonverbal ways diminishes. They explain that the same kind of communication that is documented in near-death experiences as "telepaths and nonlinguistic" can occur in the communication between babies and their caregivers.