Peter Fenwick's Studies of End-of-Life-Phenomena

Thanks, somehow that doesn't sound as significant as "EGO death"!

David

I think it partially became popular because the ego can panic and feel like its literally dying because our usual sense of self is being expanded, and that can be extremely scary ~ especially when the ego goes further towards full dissolution.

So "ego death" describes how it can feel to those not used to, at least.

[Laird]

It tells us one thing that he doesn't mean by a non-dual death in which one merges with the universe. Now to try to find out what he does mean.

I've finished reading Peter's book The Art of Dying. There's a relevant section in there in Chapter 11, The Last Frontier: The Unsolved Problem of Consciousness, that section being Transcendental philosophy. When I watched the relevant part of the video again (especially between 44:49 and 47:41) bearing that book section in mind, it all became clear. There's no need to ask him an explicit question.

By a "nondual" state in which one "merges" (with the universe or universal consciousness or whatever), he's simply referring to the state of enlightenment aka awakening, in the Eastern, especially Buddhist, sense. It's as simple as that. He doesn't mean a literal loss of individuality or consciousness.

This is even clearer in the video given his reference to Jeffery Martin, whose work is about exactly that: the awakened state, to which he (Jeffery) refers as "persistent non-symbolic experience" (PNSE).

It's also clear in the above-mentioned section of Peter's book, which gives a partial sense of why he refers to "merging" given that he describes (as is common) some enlightened folk as rejecting the subject-object distinction: such enlightened ones do not see themselves as distinct from that which they perceive, and in this sense they have "merged" with reality.

He even elaborates (which somehow I'd lost track of prior to my initial response in this thread) in the video on his comment that death is about "giving everything up and then becoming non-dual and merging", by explicitly asking and then answering his own question: "Now what do I mean by [non-dual]? This is in consciousness research, and it's one of the most interesting points of consciousness research, and that is that as you go on the awakening process, in other words, changing your level of consciousness and becoming more widely conscious, you in fact have one or two features." Those are that you: (1) Lose your narrative self. (2) Are always in the moment. (3) Are unbelievably happy. (4) Are tending to be transcendent - "you have become non-dual and are merging with reality."