Lisa Smartt, MA, is a linguist, educator, and poet. She founded The Final Words Project, an ongoing study devoted to collecting and interpreting the mysterious language at the end of lives. She is author of Words at the Threshold: What We Say When We’re Nearing Death.
Here she points out that much can be learned about the consciousness of dying individuals by paying attention to their language. One can develop an appreciation for speech that seems nonsensical by understanding that a dying person may be experiencing two different realities simultaneously. Similar patterns can often be found in individuals experiencing other altered states of awareness such as dementia or schizophrenia. Her work is largely predicated on Raymond Moody’s studies of near-death experience and the language of nonsense.
(Recorded on January 30, 2019)
To order Words at the Threshold by Lisa Smartt, click here: https://amzn.to/2CVIVAH.
Published on January 31, 2019
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