All language subtitles for Tukdam.Between.Worlds.2022

# (droning music)

I've probably seen several thousand
dead bodies,

but this was something
that I had never seen before.

I mean, to see a person being able
to sit upright

completely on its own without caving
into their own weight after being

dead for a day is something
that will never happen.

If I just came into the room and
sort

of casually looked at him, I would
have thought he's meditating.

He was sitting and his skin
looked extremely fresh.

I don't presume to understand it,

but I do know that this isn't
something

that makes sense from the physiology
of a human body that I was taught.

In what Tibetans call Tukdam,

advanced meditators die in
meditation.

Their bodies don't show the usual
signs of death

for days or even weeks.

According to Tibetan Buddhist
tradition,

consciousness is still present.

There are such cases.

That's a phenomena.

We must sort of investigate
how it happened.

An old monk has died ten days ago,

but his body is not putrefying as one

would expect in such warm summer
weather

in the hills above
Dharamshala.

By entering a deep meditative state

at the time of dying,

some Tibetan Buddhist practitioners
are

allegedly able to arrest the
physical processes of death.

The monk's body is checked daily

to see if he remains in the sacred
state of Tukdam.

(reciting)

With the support of the Dalai
Lama, a team of scientists has,

for the first time, been given
permission to study Tukdam.

Anthropologist Dylan Lott is the
manager

of the Tukdam project
in India.

He leads a cross cultural
multidisciplinary team working

in the Tibetan resettlement
communities of India.

This particular retreatant was
known

to one of the doctors on our
team while he was alive.

And so he was amazed how much
healthier he looked after his death.

And this was another instance where
there's no fan, there's no AC.

It's a mud floor, a few
robes and scarves to adorn the body.

But we were permitted to do
inspections

of the full body both morning and
evening

and to record the data that
we needed,

which was spaced around the rituals
that were being done in the room.

Mm-hmm.

Just still has such amazing
integrity.

That should not be.

# (music)

The Centre for Healthy Minds at the
University of Wisconsin Madison

has been at the forefront of
research into meditation,

mindfulness and healthy
emotions.

Its Tukdam project is the first

scientific investigation
into the phenomenon.

The project is headed by
neuroscientist

Richard Davidson some years ago named
by Time Magazine

as one of the hundred most
influential people in the world.

How important is the colour?

We don't really know the answer to
that.

No. That's an important question
to ask the forensic experts.

Okay.
Anything else?

He was suggesting that we begin to
look at the amount

of antibiotics that they've been
given

and whether or not they've had meals
within 8 hours of their dying

because that's going to affect
decomposition greatly.

So we need to start
gathering that information.

And how many Tukdam cases are
there?

We have a total of...

twelve that I think

where we have a good number of
days postmortem.

What would be ideal is before you
left for India if we had a file

that contained images of all the
twelve practitioners twice a day

with the indication of the number of
days

post mortem that the image was
taken,

the time of day and the ambient
temperature of the room.

Yeah that would certainly be ideal.

If we use the standard and I would
say relatively superficial

criteria of modern Western medicine

I think we can say they're
clinically dead.

We can say that their brain is
showing a flat line,

that there's no heart rate.

We confirm that with EKG
and there's no breathing.

That we can say.

But whether we can say that there's
no brain function,

no we cannot say that.

We don't know that yet.

One of the reasons why we're doing
the work

we're doing is to determine
if there may be

some more subtle kind
of brain activity

that is responsible for the signs of
Tukdam.

The fact that you see a flat line
does not

necessarily mean that the
entire brain is dead.

The Tukdam project traces its
origins

to conversations that I had
with the Dalai Lama concerning

the relationship between
the mind and the brain.

And of course in modern
Western neuroscience the mind

is regarded as, if you will, what
the brain does.

I don't think anybody would deny
that they are somehow

extremely importantly related,

but whether they should essentially
be regarded

as one and the same is a question.

In the phenomenon of Tukdam,
there is said to be the presence

of the most rudimentary form of
awareness

which still occurs after the point
at which

they would be considered dead by a
conventional western definition.

So if any of that is true,

it would raise serious questions
about

the mind and the brain and it would
begin

to introduce some problems
in that conception.

And so the Dalai Lama encouraged
me to start studying Tukdam.

(prayer)

That person was doing meditation
practice all their life.

And their meditation has to be
very deep and very profound.

It has to be mind meditation,

meditation to recognise the nature
of mind.

So meditation you become.

You are not meditating,
but you become the meditation.

And at that moment then your body
remains in very unusual state,

just like alive and mind goes into
perfect state of meditation.

(reciting)

Tenga Rinpoche was the abbot of
Benchen Monastery

with both legs amputated due to
diabetes.

Rinpoche was in such a bad state
before he died

that he could barely sit up.

In the end, he died sitting in Tukdam

and remained in the state
for more than three days.

This is a common duration for Tukdam

and matches the Tibetan idea that a
subtle aspect

of mind may stay in the body
for up to three days after death.

In rare cases, Tukdam can
even go on for weeks.

Vanessa Lopez is a mortician
from New York City.

At the time of Tenga Rinpoche's
death,

she was in Kathmandu helping to
preserve

remains of westerners who had
died in mountaineering accidents.

Rinpoche's followers invited her
to check the body in Tukdam.

When I initially walked into the
room,

I had no idea that there was a dead
person

in that room, because nothing
sort of told me that there was.

I looked around the room and there
was

some monks that were sitting and
they were praying,

and there was a man at the
end

of the room just sitting in a
meditative position.

And so I thought that he was just
another person that was there

who was doing their meditation and
their prayers

for the person who had died.

But then Tempa sort of pointed to me
and told me, this is Tenga Rinpoche.

This is our teacher who has just
recently died,

and we just want you to take a look
at him.

And I was very shocked because
to me it looked like

a person who was just sitting
in a meditative position

and just he looked pretty much
alive to me.

They told me, as soon as he comes
out of his Tukdam state,

then we will be contacting you so
that you

can perform some kind of an
embalming procedure on him.

There are signs for the ending of
Tukdam.

If the person was sitting,
the body will slump

and the normal physical phenomena of
death will appear as

if the postmortem process has
been stalled and is now released.

For Tibetans, these are signs that
the meditation has

concluded and consciousness
has left the body.

After Tenga Rinpoche's Tukdam
ended,

Vanessa was called
to embalm the old llama.

I was pretty surprised to be able to
see that his blood was flowing

as easily as it was, especially for
a person who

had already been dead for about
four days.

The color of it would definitely
change into a darker sort of colour,

and his was still reddish,
like the normal color of blood.

And the procedure went amazingly
well

compared to what I was expecting.

# (music)

Unlike Vanessa,

Tukdam project scientists
have not

been able to look inside a Tukdam
body so far.

Blood and tissue samples could shed
light

on cellular mechanisms
involved,

but Tibetan concerns over disturbing

the sacred state have so far
prevented collecting samples.

Instead, the project has focused
on recording EEG brainwave data

and documenting the body's physical
state.

This also requires great cultural
sensitivity,

which is something the project's
Tibetan collaborators bring on board.

The project has worked closely with
Dr. Tsetan,

the Dalai Lama's personal physician
and director of Delek Hospital,

as well as with staff from

the Tibetan Medicine Clinic
Men-Tsee-Khang.

When it first began, we did a few
Tukdam cases with my staff in

Udelek Hospital then I thought,
if there is a way to connect

medical science and Western
science,

Men-Tsee-Khang should be the
partner.

There is a very major cultural
factor in this, I think.

And also having to deal with Tukdam

subjects is a very sensitive
problem, issue.

So unless we have people who have
some

standing in a community as a medical
doctor or being of the same culture

Tibetan, it helps to relate much
better to people who,

at a time of loss, wouldn't want to
deal with any other person easily.

This one should last a long time.

You're only having it
on for a few minutes.

You don't have to leave
it on the whole session.

And do you have any kind of device
to read the false map, false map?

I'm glad you asked that question.

I have been doing some reading
lately on gas spectrometry

and trying to see what it
would be like to get something like

that for the field and I will
let you know as soon as I do.

Nitrogen level, whatever the gas.
Right. It's from the body.

Yeah.
How do we begin...

..interview with the students.

Okay.

We're gonna start this.

R for peri mortem, and P for
postmortem.

including those we think were in
Tukdam because part of that...

Basically, the core description that
we get is they meditate on

the clear light at the moment of
death,

and then they don't die all the
way.

And what you see from the outside
is that the heart stops

and the breathing stops, but the
body stays warm,

especially around the heart,
for a long period of time.

So for heartbeat, there's two
obvious ways

of measuring heartbeat. One of them
is you put electrodes on the chest,

and the other one is you use one of
those finger clip things.

So we have both of those. For
respiration,

there are two main ways
of measuring respiration.

One of them is you put a belt around

the rib cage, and the other one is
capnograph,

where you have a tube that
picks up the gas

and sees that you're
breathing.

And then we had two ways of
measuring warmth,

and one of them was a thermometer
probe

that you would tape on somewhere,
or you use this thermal camera,

which has to look at the exposed
skin.

So then we get to the really
complicated

part that we spent a lot
of time going in and out of it.

This is brain stuff.

When you're neuroscientist,
then you come in

and you put an EEG on it and then
you see what it looks like.

And then we have these other things
about the decomposition, which

at first we thought was an
unambiguously physical prediction.

But then after talking to the people
who are actually the experts

on the physiology of death, we
learned that under normal

circumstances, there's an enormous
amount

of variability in how bodies
decompose.

There are cases where the body has
remained without decomposing

for quite a long period of time, in
certain cases up to 16 or 17 days

in conditions where it's quite hot
in terms

of the ambient temperature,
tropical,

where you'd expect decomposition
to clearly occur at a faster rate.

So we consider that to be unusual.

Whether it's within this normal
range or not,

we really can't say at this point
in time.

# (music)

We have the questionnaire about his
mental clarity

and then a little bit about his
practice history

and then what brought him to this
life of retreat.

It this must be from a living
partition? Right.

This is from living retreatant we
were working with most recently.

And so this is what... we
still have to work on

getting the graphs here,
but we're getting.

This is the mismatch negativity.

Mismatch negativity.

What's the difference between these
two standards?

So the red would be the deviant,
the green is standard,

and the black is the difference,

and it's being plotted in the
negative here.

One strategy is to sample a very
large number

of people when they're
still alive.

Then we can classify them post op.

We'll have one group that went
into Tukdam,

another group which did
not.

We can go back to their predeath,

to their living signals and apply
machine

learning algorithms, for example,
and see if there are any patterns

which distinguish the individuals

who go on to Tukdam versus those
who do not.

And then we can interrogate those
patterns

and see what the differences are.

What is the difference in the brain
of a person who, when he

or she dies, goes into Tukdam
compared to when they do not?

When someone dies in Tukdam,

it's important to start recording
data as soon as possible.

However, the distances in India are
great,

and the deaths often occur in remote
areas,

so it can take days for the team to
reach the bodies.

There are also cultural
reasons for delays.

Within the Tibetan tradition,

it's customary to wait three days
after

someone has died before you begin
moving ahead with cremation.

But at that point, you would also
know

whether or not somebody is in
Tukdam.

And so oftentimes, people will not
reach

out to us until that third day.

when we collect EEG data,
we do two auditory protocols

to ascertain whether or not there's
some activity.

Increasingly, the two types of
auditory
stimuli

we're using are proving to be
diagnostic and assessment

tools across a range of minimally
conscious states,

coma vegetative states.

The contention is that at least for
a time after death,

there's some residual brain
activity in the brain stem

that's responsible for the
integration of the body.

In the absence of that,
then we have a different question.

It becomes another challenging
question.

Well, if there is no low level
residual activity

in the brain stem and those who are
observing in the state of Tukdam,

then how do we explain
this delay in decomposition?

So there's the warmth around the
heart.

And there were four cases during the
time that I was involved

and we only got clear thermal
imaging data one of the times,

and they were stone cold that you
could see

very clearly in the
thermal imaging

that there's the wall and then the
body

and everything is all the same
colour.

There was no variation whatsoever.

And every day a group of devotees
would

come in and would carefully inspect
the person,

and they would feel
carefully

with the back of their hand,
and they would be commenting on it,

and then they would agree
that the person was still in Tukdam.

The hardest to explain is if all

these people are... they're not
crazy at all,

they are, in fact legitimately
putting their hand there,

and they really sincerely are
experiencing

the feeling of it being warmer than
it should be,

and the camera
is not malfunctioning.

And it really is definitely showing

that from the point of view of
physics,

the thermal vibratory energy is
the same in the body and the wall.

When the Tibetan tradition talks
about Tukdam,

they don't have thermal imaging
cameras.

So when they say the body stays
warm, the specific statement

that the tradition is making is that
when you touch the body

around the heart, you experience
the feeling of warmth.

Everything that I've ever
experienced is

completely consistent with the idea
that people

experience Tukdam exactly
the way

the tradition says that people
experience Tukdam.

Nothing that I've observed
has contradicted that at all.

The more time that I spent on this
project, the more striking

was the contrast between, as long as
you weren't trying to do

a whole bunch of hard science with
equipment,

everything looked one
way.

And then as soon as you start
bringing

the equipment in and trying to nail
everything down and take a bunch

of physical measurements,
then it all falls apart.

Several medical doctors interviewed
for this documentary

reported feeling warmth around the
heart area

of deceased monks said to
be in Tukdam.

These included doctors who looked
after the 16th Karmapa,

one of the most important Tibetan
spiritual leaders

of the 20th century.

He died in Tukdam in a hospital in
Zion, Illinois, outside Chicago.

The area around his heart,

when you felt it put your hand on
his chest,

still felt warm for the first two
to three days after he died,

which obviously, from a western
point of view,

is not consistent with what we
would expect.

And then beyond that, he did begin
to look better after he died.

His colour was better, face almost
filled out in an odd way,

and his body was really strong
looking.

And vibrant in a way that was
very striking for me.

For me personally,

it's hard to explain except to say
that there must be some ability

of an individual or some unintended
ability of an individual's

capability of somehow delaying some
sort of a metabolic process

or a natural process that we
all undergo of degradation.

And how that's done in terms of its
mechanism,

I can't really figure out. But to
me, it seems

that there is some control by
something over the physical world,

basically. It kind of defies that.

But then it comes down to the issue
of whether one believes

in a consciousness or a mind that
travels from one state

to the next state,
leaving the physical body

some sort of a subtle state
that science has yet to discover,

basically, that is capable
of doing something like this.

There's definitely a mind
over matter control there.

That's what I'm trying to get at, I
think. You know?

# (music)
(birdsong)

The Tukdam project also includes
anthropological investigation

into the Tibetan Buddhist theories,

practices and ways of life that
produce Tukdam.

An expert meditator in his
high Himalayan retreat,

has agreed to an interview with
Dylan.

So mind become totally
empty.

Mind remains empty...

So when someone pronounces death,
if they're in Tukdam,

the heart is not active, but the
body is preserved in a way.

Why does the skin stay supple?

Why is the face radiant?

How is that connection, that little
mind. That subtle mind.

# (music)

After decades of studies in monastic
colleges,

this monk has spent over 20 years
in isolated meditation retreat.

He embodies a system of knowledge
arising

from a cultural and historical
background very different to ours.

Here, meditative experience also
informs

views about consciousness
and its subtler aspects

said to be separate from the brain.

This is what reincarnates,
continuing from one life to the next.

Tukdam makes sense within this
Tibetan system of knowledge,

but has proved challenging for
science

with its own cultural
assumptions.

It's probably pretty clear to
everyone now,

but only gradually became clear
to us that just all these questions

of the cultural differences and
the different views of

what is medicine and what is the
body

and how does the body relate to the
mind and things like that that

are really just very deeply
culturally different.

And a lot of the cultural
differences were

the ones that are actually the
foundation of Western science.

So it was a scientific project

that only made sense in the context
of being able to understand

the cultural construction
of science itself.

But part of the whole thing about
cultural constructions

is that you can't understand them
from inside of them

because when you're inside of them,
then you're just inhabiting them.

So it was very jarring to deal with
it all

because it was really more
an anthropology project

with a neuroscience component rather
than a neuroscience project, period.

Dr. Tumden. Dr. Tsetan,
Welcome.

Welcome, the rest of the team.

I know things have been busy,

so I'm just going to jump right in
to the research.

There's much more we can go over,

but I want to give the highlights of
what we have. Okay?

I'll skip this a little bit because
they're here.

So then what I decided to do was to
try and compare

the healthy subjects that we have
with the actual Tukdam data.

And so this is an example.

You can see there's not much that's
happening for the red line,

the Tukdam line,
but we're getting a

real clear signal for the
practitioner.

We cannot prove rebirth, we cannot
prove mind,

we cannot prove subtle
mind.

What we can do is look at the
effects of those practices

on the body that are unusual and
that western science

or medical science doesn't have a
good explanation for.

With the EEG approach,

it has to be within this first few
hours.

Even if we get informed of twelve
Tukdam in the next month,

if we're only knowing about it
day five,

it's not going to change anything.

# (music)

After a decade of research,

Richard Davidson's team published a
null finding.

They have not found brain activity
in Tukdam subjects so far.

The research effort continues.

A team associated with the Russian
Academy

of Sciences and Moscow State
University

have also started studying Tukdam

and are now collaborating with
Davidson.

So really at kind of the most
fundamental levels,

this work can begin to raise
questions about the ultimate nature

of consciousness and where
that might come from.

And these are some of the most
profound

and deepest questions
in philosophy and science today.

And in many ways this relates to
what

philosophers have called the hard
problem,

which is how is it that experience,
subjective experience,

can arise from the material matter
of the brain?

And I think that if we're honest
with ourselves,

really deeply honest, I don't think
that we've made much

progress on that question
in the last hundred years.

And this work relates to that issue
and begins to ask different kinds

of questions about it and raises the
question of perhaps there

might not be a complete identity
between the mind and the brain.

Clearly, they're intimately related.

Exactly how they're related,
nobody really knows,

if we're really honest,

I think with our observations.

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