Banned TEDx Talk on Death & Dying

The Spiritual Alphabet Soup of NDE, NDA, SDE & ADC

Shane Roberts and Dorothy Burk, Nearing-Death Awareness, Mother’s Day 2016

I rehearsed my TEDxDuke 2022 talk for weeks, and the student TEDx organizers provided cautious coaching to use only peer-reviewed references which I followed to the letter. We waited for 2 months for the videos to be uploaded to YouTube, and my friend Seb Jalali finally notified me that his talk on fleeing from Afghanistan during the Taliban takeover had been posted. However, my YouTube video was further delayed and eventually censored, flagged for unspecified “content violation,” and banned from the TEDx website.

What was the content that the Technology Entertainment Design censors were so afraid of in my 12-minute talk rerecorded here? It was based on my January 2020 blog The Spiritual Alphabet Soup of Death and Dying. The content consisted of stories and scientific references related to four abbreviations for subjective phenomena that occur around the time of transition at the end of life, fitting the “Liminal” theme for the event. My first slide showed the Durham building that houses the Rhine Research Center and the International Association for Near-Death Studies.

The four liminal states were Near-Death Experience (NDE), Nearing-Death Awareness (NDA), Shared-Death Experience (SDE), and After-Death Communication (ADC). I polled the live 200+ audience by a show of hands as to how many people believed they had an NDE (about 4%) or an ADC (about 40%) which fits with the data from scientific surveys. My final slide referenced a paper that showed students who read books or heard stories about NDEs reported reduced fear of death and an increase in spirituality, so perhaps that is what triggered the technocratic censors.

It was not my first experience of TEDx censorship. My 2016 TEDxRaleigh talk Cancer Warning Dreams That Can Save Your Life was released successfully on YouTube after I followed my coaches advice to only reference the peer-reviewed literature and to not make any unsubstantiated claims. It was based on my 2015 paper Warning dreams preceding the diagnosis of breast cancer, and I made a concluding conservative recommendation with regard to conflicting screening mammography guidelines to keep a dream diary and start your mammograms early if you get a warning dream.

The talk rapidly got over 10,000 views until I applied for the TED Prize in hopes of obtaining funding for more dream research. A week later they pulled it off the TED website and added this disclaimer. “We've flagged this talk, which was filmed at an independent TEDx event, because it appears to fall outside TEDx's curatorial guidelines. A number of claims made in this talk about cancer revealing itself in dreams are not considered legitimate by most medical doctors and researchers. There is no viable research or evidence presented in the talk to support these claims.”

As a result of this censorship, the talk has only accumulated another 4000 views in the past six years, and its impact in potentially saving the lives of women who have breast cancer dreams has been significantly diminished. Despite this setback, I published the 2018 book Dreams that Can Save Your Life: Early Warning Signs of Cancer and Other Diseases with my breast cancer dreamer co-author Kathleen O’Keefe-Kanavos, and went on to publish another follow-up paper Dreams prior to biopsy for suspected breast cancer with my holistic mammography colleagues at Duke in 2020.

I guess this initial experience with the censors was just a warmup for the fact checkers of Facebook during the pandemic. My first trip to Facebook jail was in March 2020 when I posted this blog by EMF health hazard researcher Martin Pall, PhD, Role of 5G in the Coronavirus Epidemic in Wuhan China. I assumed it meant that he was “over the target,” and it inspired me to write 3 blogs on the harmful effects of 5G. Amazingly, two friends of mine managed to get a peer-reviewed paper published in 2021 on 5G and COVID after jumping through many editorial hoops.

Fast forward to the fall of 2021 when I got motivated to write 3 blogs on controversial COVID topics. For the first one Early Treatment vs Stay at Home Until You Can’t Breathe I skirted the censors by using the brand names for Ivermectin and HCQ and got over 32,000 views. The second one Heroes of 2021 Speak Out: This Has Gotta Stop! promoting RFK, Jr.’s book got banned on Medium after only 1 day, so I moved it to Substack for freedom of speech where I published the third one on mind control and propaganda Mass Hypnosis 2001-2021: Wake Up Now!

I promoted all 3 of these blogs on Twitter for the past year with no censorship. However, when I tweeted this letter in August 2022 on Adverse effects of COVID-19 vaccines and measures to prevent them from the peer-reviewed Virology Journal I was permanently banned from Twitter for 9 months until reinstated by Elon Musk’s new management team. Perhaps it was this provocative conclusion of the letter that offended the earlier censors the most, “As a safety measure, further booster vaccinations should be discontinued.”

To fully understand what has been going on in the liberal media and society for the past 3 years it is essential to read RFK, Jr.’s A Letter to Liberals and The Psychology of Totalitarianism by University of Ghent psychology professor Mattias Desmet, the world authority on the phenomenon of mass formation. His brilliant and insightful critique of scientism and technocracy explains why it happened and why it will fail as reinforced by this timely summary from The Corbett Report, Technocracy is Insane, Anti-Human and it WILL Fail. Stay tuned for coming attractions!

On Friday, 3/31/23, 7-9 PM ET, I gave an expanded hybrid version of the banned TEDx talk at the Rhine Center including additional stories, scientific references and related books. Other experiences of censorship of parapsychological topics in TEDx talks and Wikipedia were explored from the perspective of conflicting paradigms. Advice about effective responses was shared from pioneering scientists in the field of consciousness research. Audience members shared how they have dealt with skeptical family members, friends, colleagues and healthcare professionals.