Past Events

Professor Bernard Carr

Bernard Carr is Emeritus Professor of Mathematics and Astronomy at Queen Mary University of London. For his PhD he studied the first second of the universe with Stephen Hawking at Cambridge University and Caltech. He then held Research Fellowships at Trinity College and the Institute of Astronomy in Cambridge before moving to Queen Mary in 1985. He has also held Visiting Professorships at various institutes in America, Canada and Japan. His professional area of research is cosmology and astrophysics and includes such topics as the early universe, black holes, dark matter and the anthropic principle. He is the author of around 300 papersand the books Universe or Multiverse? and Quantum Black Holes. He is also very interested in the role of consciousness, regarding mind as a fundamental rather than incidental feature of the Universe. He has a long-standing interest in the relationship between science and religion and views psychical research as forming a bridge between them. He is President of the Scientific and Medical Network and a former President of the Society for Psychical Research.  

Professor Carl Becker

Professor Carl Becker is currently a Specially Appointed Professor in the Policy Science Unit at School of Medicine at Kyoto University. He teaches medical ethics and policy, while leading a national survey on bereavement and psycho-social support for terminal patients, as well as for bereaved and suicidal survivors. He earned his PhD in Comparative East-West Philosophy from the University of Hawaii in 1981. Notably, he became the first American to achieve full tenure and promotion as a civil servant within Japan’s national university system.

In 1986, Professor Becker received the SIETAR Award for his contributions to cross-cultural understanding. More recently, in 2018, he was awarded an Honorary Doctorate in Psychology from the Graduate Institute of Psychoanalysis in Moscow for his work on counselling dying patients and bereaved clients. He also serves on the editorial boards of several respected journals, including Personalized Medicine Universe, Mortality, Journal of Near-Death Studies, and Journal for the Study of Spirituality. Though most of his work is written in Japanese, Professor Becker has recently edited and contributed to Spirituality as a Way: The Wisdom of Japan (Kyoto University Press) and authored the entry on “Spirituality” in the Encyclopaedia of Global Bioethics (edited by Henk Ten Have, Springer).

Professor Ewa Paśnik-Tułowiecka

Ewa Paśnik Tułowiecka, a graduate in sinology from University of Warsaw, since 2012 she has been an assistant professor in the Department of Sinology at the University of Warsaw. Her previous research interests have focused on death and dying in Chinese culture, the Chinese hereafter and early literary texts depicting them. More recently, she has been involved in research on the manuscripts of the Naxi people found in the Department of Oriental Studies, particularly in the context of the relationship between Naxi rituals and the Tibetan Bon religion. She is also interested in Chinese ethnobotany and ritual uses of plants in China.

Dr Pim van Lommel

Pim van Lommel, M.D., born in 1943, graduated in 1971 at the University of Utrecht, and finished his specialization in cardiology in 1976. He worked from 1977-2003 as a cardiologist in Hospital Rijnstate, a 800 beds Teaching Hospital in Arnhem, the Netherlands, and is now doing full-time research on the mind-brain relation. He published several articles on cardiology, but since he started his research on near-death experiences (NDE) in survivors of cardiac arrest in 1986 he is the author of over 20 articles, like the article in the Lancet in 2001, entitled ‘Near-death experience in survivors of cardiac arrest: a prospective study in the Netherlands’, one book and many chapters about NDE. He was co-founder of the Dutch IANDS in 1988. In 2005 he was granted with the Dr. Bruce Greyson Research Award of the International Association of Near-Death Studies (IANDS). In 2006, the President of India rewarded him the Life Time Achievement Award at the World Congress on Clinical and Preventive Cardiology in New Dehli.

His Dutch book ‘Endless Consciousness’ (in English ‘Consciousness beyond life’), was nominated for the ‘Book of the Year 2008’ in the Netherlands. It has now been translated into eleven languages, and worldwide more than 400.000 copies have been sold. In 2010 he received the 2010 Book Award van de Scientific and Medical Network, and in 2017 he received the Elisabeth Kübler-Ross Award by the Dutch Society of Volunteers in Palliative and Terminal Care (VPTZ). In 2020 the Spiritual Awakenings International (SAI) honored him for his ground-breaking work about Near-Death Experiences as Circle of Honor honoree. The Bigelow Institute for Consciousness Studies (BICS) started in 2021 an international essay contest for the best scientific evidence about the possible continuity of consciousness after death. With his article, entitled: ‘The Continuity of Consciousness’ he won the second Price. 

Professor Marieta Pehlivanova

Marieta Pehlivanova, PhD is a Research Assistant Professor of Psychiatry and Neurobehavioral Sciences within the Division of Perceptual Studies at the University of Virginia School of Medicine. Marieta holds a PhD in Experimental and Cognitive Psychology from the University of Pennsylvania and a Bachelor’s degree in Statistics from American University. Her research at the University of Virginia primarily focuses on near-death experiences and children’s reports of purported past-life memories. She is interested in various aspects of these experiences, including cognitive, personality, and genetic factors contributing to their occurrence, veridical perceptions reported by experiencers, their impact on individuals, cross-cultural comparisons, and the development of support resources within healthcare settings for those who undergo such experiences.

Dr Melvin Morse

Dr. Morse graduated from Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland, in 1975 with a Bachelor of Arts degree in Natural Science. He earned his medical degree from George Washington University in Washington, D.C., in 1980. He was voted one of the United States’ top pediatricians for five consecutive years. He published the first scientific study demonstrating that Reiki healers could alter the white blood cell count of neutropenic patients, a phenomenon that correlated with their ability to influence the electron flow of a true random number generator. He has also conducted several studies on spiritual healing, including research on the successful spiritual healing of tomato plants infected with the Tobacco Mosaic Virus.

Dr. Morse published a prospective study documenting that parents of infants who died from Sudden Infant Death Syndrome (SIDS) had genuine premonitions of their child’s death, as compared to control groups with healthy infants. He has authored numerous books, including Closer to the Light: Learning from the Near-Death Experiences of Children, Transformed by the Light, Parting Visions, and Where God Lives: Paranormal Science and How Our Brains Are Connected to the Universe—all of which were bestsellers in the United States. Dr. Morse has written extensively about spiritual experiences related to death and dying, including premonitions of death, shared dying experiences, and after-death communications. He has also appeared twice on The Oprah Winfrey Show and has been featured in numerous documentaries, including a series by Tom Harpur and another by the BBC.

UK-Korea Death Forum III [with Korean translation]

The Venerable Beopsang, Korea

When: 12.00 pm BST London (8.00 pm Seoul, Korea) Thursday, 29 June 2023
Topic: What is death in Buddhism, and how to go beyond it?

Following the talks by two medical doctors in the previous UK-Korea Death Forums, this time we invited an influential spiritual teacher from the same country, The Venerable Beopsang.

The Venerable Beopsang became a Buddhist monk under the spiritual guidance of the Most Venerable Bulshim Domun. His search for truth was not limited to the teachings in the Buddhist circle. The Venerable Bosang took a spiritual journey that also covered a wide range of non-Buddhist traditions in scholarship and meditation practices while having dialogues with great masters in the East and the West. After a long spiritual quest, he finally settled in the teachings of the early Buddhist and meditation school, which came to form the backbone of his interpretation of Buddhist scriptures.

The Venerable Bopsang founded Temple Daewonjong in Sangju, Korea, as well as a number of local sanghas in Seoul and Busan in the same country. In those sanghas, he has been running a series of weekly talks where he invites not only lay Buddhists but also people of other religions and beliefs. In Daewonjong he includes in his teaching, for example, Tao Te Ching of Lau Tzu and modern philosophy both of the East and the West from comparative perspectives. He challenges his followers to see through to the unity of truth, in spite of the different names given to it in various religions and philosophies.

The lively talk was followed by questions and comments from the audience as usual. The Venerable concluded the final forum of this season’s series with the insightful observation that people are now waking up to who we truly are as the embodiment of Buddhahood everywhere in the West and the East.  

Click here to watch the video.

UK-Japan Death Forum II

Professor Carl Becker, University of Kyoto, Japan
When: 12.00 pm BST London (8 pm Tokyo Japan), Saturday, 24 June 2023
Topic: Medical end-of-life and bereavement issues in Japan

After surveying Asian spiritualism on death and dying with special emphasis on Japanese Buddhism in Forum I, Prof Becker came back to the both audiences in the Trans-Atlantic and the Far East to discuss more practical and technical issues this time, Medical end-of-life and bereavement issues in Japan.

The talk was particularly interesting to those who wished to hear about comparative cultural perspectives on bereavement and grief as well as the way how the knowledge of the soul outliving the body could help both dying patients to overcome the fear of death and the doctors and nurses to ease burnout and the sense of defeat at the patients’ death.

Click here to watch the video.

Death Education at Schools

Mr John Adams, President NAFD UK

When: 5.00 pm BST London, Saturday, 15 April 2023
Topic: Why should we talk to school children about death?

For Mr John Adams, the President of National Association of Funeral Directors (NAFD) in the UK, the answer is a very strong Yes. Since he took over the Presidentship of the national organization in May 2022, Mr Adams has taken great efforts in promoting the inclusion of death education in the UK school curriculum. This required him to be involved in various social campaigns including media interviews and online petitions targeted at the UK Parliament. His efforts have recently led the Department for Education to announcing that it has decided to look at the matter in the next round consultation about the relevant curriculum contents.

During our forum, Mr Adams reported the background of his project and its progress together with the visions that we at Oxford have been sharing with him. Extensive discussions were made on various pros and cons about death education at schools including its potential impact on children in the rest of their life. During Q&A Mr Adams looked at some aspects of the funeral culture in the UK as an important background issue.

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Dr Pim van Lommel on Near-death Experiences

When: 5.00 pm GMT (London), Saturday, 25 February
Topic: What does the scientific research in survivors of cardiac arrest tell us about the mind-body relationship?

Whereas Prof Keith Ward presented a philosopher’s case for the eternity of consciousness in the previous forum, Dr Pim van Lommel, M.D. from the Netherlands, made the exactly same proposition but from a medical point of view. The cases of cardiac arrests that he had studied for the last 40 years convinced him that consciousness is indivisible and endless. Therefore to say that we survive death is a misstatement; rather, from the start death was not and never will be.

Dr van Lommel worked between 1977-2003 as a cardiologist at Hospital Rijnstate in Arnhem, the Netherlands, and is now doing full-time research on the mind-brain relationship. He published several articles on cardiology, but since he started investigating the survivors of cardiac arrest in 1986 that eventually led to the publication of the acclaimed article on NDEs in The Lancet in 2001, he is now the author of a book and 20 plus articles (most of them in Dutch) as well as a number of chapters about NDEs. In November 2007 his book Eindeloos Bewustzijn (Endless Consciousness) was published in the Netherlands, and it was translated in English by Harper Collins in 2010, entitled Consciousness beyond Life: The science of the near-death Experience. He strongly suggested that the audience read this book as a backup of his forum presentation.

Click here to watch the video.

Professor Keith Ward on the Problem of Self, Death and Eternity

When: 5.00 pm GMT (London), Friday, 3 February
Topic: Do we exist after physical death? And what does it mean for our life here and now?

Prof Ward was ordained as a priest in the Church of England in 1972, and was Regius Professor of Divinity at the University of Oxford from 1991 until he retired in 2004. In 1993–94, he delivered the prestigious Gifford Lectures at the University of Glasgow. Since he retired from teaching positions, he has been actively writing and widely lecturing about his core belief as an Idealist philosopher.

Prof Ward explained how his own belief that the material universe is an expression or creation of a Supreme Mind led to the discovery of fundamental spiritual truth as to the nature of death, while at the same time being guided to a learned interpretation of how ancient religious beliefs and the modern scientific world view have been in a constructive dialogue in search of the answer to the crucial questions of death and immortality.

Click here to watch the video.