Varieties of Transcending Experience at Death: A Videotape Based Study

Abstract

Using the idea of transcendence taken from the comparative study of religions, the paper is an attempt to find concepts that might help us understand the many ways people transform their relationship with death in the encounter with death. The method was to videotape interviews with dying and grieving people and view them repeatedly describing the process through which they were passing. Thirty tapes were made. Two sets of concepts were found useful to synthesize and differentiate the ways people transcend: the experience of ordinary and nonordinary reality, and the use of a mythic or interpretive mode in which change takes place. Together these concepts yield four kinds of transcending. An example and some bibliographic notes are given for each.