Dr. Christof (Christoph) Koch

Every day I think about it, and what it taught me was two things.

So A, a student of consciousness, it taught me that mind doesn't depend on space, on time, and on self.

And this is really something that, you know, the German idealist philosopher Immanuel Kant taught us, transcendental idealism, that they're all categories.

They're all categories that we need to perceive.

We cannot but perceive.

put an object in a place.

We cannot but assign a time to an event.

And we cannot but have a sense of self.

But they're all optional.

They're there most of the time, but not always, not in this case.

And then the other gift I discovered four or six weeks later that

I never thought about death again.

You know, as you get older, this may happen with you, maybe in a slow way that you lie awake at night and you think about beyond death, you know, death being dead for a long time, for a very long time, for a very, very, very long time.

And it's a little bit like getting to this, stepping to the abyss and looking down into this abyss that's bottomless.

You get this existential vertigo.

Never had that again since then.

So I don't want to die, but I've lost the fear of that.

So both things are reported.

I mean, everyone has a slightly different experience.

In fact, there were two papers recently published about this, about what happens to the brain of these people.