(gentle music) - Childhood, it was, we lived outside of Budapest.

I can't talk when you talk.

(gentle music) I don't know why or how or where it came from but I grew up with a great love of animals.

I had rabbits.

I had a goat, Julie, the goat.

This was almost an idyllic childhood up to the point when the bombings began.

By 1943 allied bombing came to Budapest.

I was only about 11 years old.

Didn't exactly understand what was involved but saw a lot of dying.

- [Narrator] A sense of wonder can help people cope with life's stresses and even perilous times.

Wonder is an innate mechanism in children.

They're born with it.

Babies wonder when they first see the face of their mother when they first touch the grass see a shadow, experience gravity.

There is an internal motor that drives children to want to discover things on their own.

There are four levels of wonder.

The two most important are inquisitive wonder and pure deep wonder, inquisitive wonder leads to imagining, learning and creativity.

It originates in infancy and early childhood and functions to help youngsters figure out what the world is all about.

Pure, deep wonder encompasses the realization and acceptance that what exists before birth and after death, indeed, before and after all existence is beyond knowing, comprehending, defining, naming, or imagining.

(gentle music) - My later childhood was genuinely worrisome bothersome, threatening, potentially disastrous.

How did I handle it?

It's remarkable how human beings are able to handle things that they can't handle.

There were times when the bombs fell in the wrong place.

I should have been dead because one of the shells came through the wall and didn't explode.

Pretty soon I was playing with it.

(upbeat music) Children at play may be the best example of self forgetful love of life.

Children are of course perfectly aware that nothing lasts forever.

Even the longest day of play ends when it's time for supper.

(upbeat music) - [Narrator] Babies and young children are like the research and development division of the human species.

So in some ways we think that this baby's thinking is like the thinking of the most brilliant scientists.

- [Jonathan] Children are engaged in statistical learning from early infancy.

- [Narrator] Babies are actually making complicated calculations with conditional probabilities that they're revising to figure out how the world works.

- Certainly by about three years or so, these categories of real life and the imagination, they start to emerge.

Halloween's a really interesting case because we see that some young children actually get really upset when they put on the costume mask.

They get the sense like they have changed they have fundamentally changed.

This isn't something that we see among four or five, six year olds.

Things that children are imagining are things that they are familiar with.

So it's very common, for example at least in western industrialized nations for children to pretend to go to the doctor or to go to the grocery store.

These are things that they've experienced by at least three or four years of age.

They appreciate that things can happen in dreams that cannot happen in real life.

They appreciate that you can have a thought of a dog or the dream about a dog but that's something that is special to you.

It's not an experience that's shared by other people.

So being able to distinguish between the psychological phenomena and physical phenomena is one thing that contributes to children's appreciation of what is real and what is not real.

So I think the nature of imagination changes form across development.

I don't think that it's something that disappears entirely.

We see this proliferation a lot of expression of sociodramatic play with other people acting out roles and stories that really seems to peak probably somewhere between six and eight years or so.

And then we slowly start to see this overt expression of imagination taper off.

This doesn't mean that the imagination is gone.

It might have just gone underground.

In other words, it might have just become internalized and now might manifest in other ways.

So it might manifest in children's writing, children's drawing, children might engage in other sorts of creative activities as outlets.

For example, we see there's an increased interest in science fiction during the preteen and teen years.

We continue to engage in these activities as adults.

(upbeat music) It's not as if imagination goes away and certainly people make their careers out of it.

- For my me and my brothers it's like we were just all love music, man.

There was something wonderful there was wonder about it.

I got it.

So with that love we wanted to do it however we could do it.

Every once in a while we go to the hamburger place, and bring something home.

We take the straws and bite down on them and make horns out 'em (upbeat music) they make and then we come home and cut holes and you can make music.

(upbeat music) You know what I mean?

And just simple stuff like that.

It's just something about music man that just called us to be involved with it.

When Vic was five years old we're opening for Curtis Mayfield on the Superfly tour.

Man, I was in third grade, right?

And I asked the teacher a question and then she answered me.

She said, son, you don't have a history.

Your history is slavery.

And a lot of times people are getting hit by a critic and you lay down, but you're supposed to get up.

Here's my next play.

Everybody has that pilot light.

You're just trying not to let that light go out.

And sometimes that light goes out and a mentor has to come in and relight it.

See what I mean?

You're just like a gas stove and the light's been blown out.

You've been beat down so much that you didn't think you were supposed to be nothing, right?

But there's a pilot light.

We can light that pilot light.

And I think for me it's like I realize that your imagination is so valuable, your imagination, because your imagination can touch your inspiration.

And once you feel your inspiration, you lit a fire.

Like imagination is fueling people to dive into what is possible.

So the imagination is taking you on a journey.

(upbeat music) I'm in the spirit of invention.

I'm seeing how all the dominoes kind of went together.

But especially the older I get, there's a humility if you just know that you don't know.

That's the main way I do everything.

I know I don't know anything.

(upbeat music) - [Dr. John] I wanted to find out about death, wanted to find out about God, wanted to find out about how God relates to one's death.

The problem is that we don't know.

Aristotle said that philosophy begins in wonder.

I think philosophy ends in wonder also.

(upbeat music) - Mystery's at the heart of the universe, mystery and spirituality really gets to the heart of the matter.

Mystery has meant something that is in principle, unknowable.

So it's not just something that we don't know and will eventually find out.

Rather, it's something that we don't know and we cannot find out.

- [Narrator] For 6,000 years, writings from every religion have professed the importance of not knowing.

These include the Hindu (speaks foreign language) of 4,000 BC, the Jewish Cabala 1200 AD, the Christian writings of St. Thomas Aquinas 1200 AD, Meister Eckhart 1300 AD and Thomas Merton 1960 AD.

The not knowing professed in such writings concludes that it is not possible to comprehend or describe God, Brahman, Allah, the divine or the absolute.

Such statements about not knowing are however inconsistent when applied to the question of whether each religion's favorite deity truly exists.

Pure, deep wonder goes beyond the 6,000 year tradition of not knowing.

Pure, deep wonder holds to the idea of not knowing without exception.

Tom Robbins, one of the 100 best writers of the 20th century, according to Writer's Digest presents a wise perspective on not knowing and the mystery of existence.

"It pays to be aware of the mystery, to honor and respect it and tingle when we feel some unbidden interface with it.

But it totally defies analysis and attempting to understand it in any concrete way is akin to trying to open seven heavy padlocks on a treasure chest when your only key is a popsicle stick."

- What is the best way to to see death?

When we approach death we should let go of the imagining and the pretending.

And I think for me it's to recognize that all of life is change.

That there is an impermanence that's at the heart of reality, and this is part of its mystery that all things pass, including ourselves and to recognize that with a degree of realism.

So I think the great benefit here of doing away with those distractions and looking at death as a certainty is to provide us with some sense of comfort, some sense of courage, and even that sense of wonder because we're not really certain about what lies beyond death.

- [Narrator] "I think nobody should be certain of anything.

If you're certain, you're certainly wrong."

Bertrand Russell philosopher.

"For my part, I know nothing with any certainty but the sight of the stars makes me dream."

Vincent Van Gogh impressionist painter.

"The quality of your life is in direct proportion to the amount of uncertainty you can comfortably deal with."

Tony Robbins, American author and philanthropist.

"I wanted a perfect ending.

Now I've learned the hard way that some poems don't rhyme and some stories don't have a clear beginning, middle and end.

Life is about not knowing and making the best of it."

Gilda Radner, Saturday Night Live comedian who died of cancer.

(gentle music) - But I think when we talk about death it really means talking about our life.

We are going to approach our death in the exact way we approach our life, if we're fearful, if uncertainty scares us, probably when we approach death we're going to approach it with fear.

But if we see the universe as this wondrous phenomenon if we approach life with courage and compassion and when we get to our death those are the values that are coming to the fore.

How about if I approach my life as a whole, my life and death as kind of an adventure to embrace the amazement, the wonder of having existence.

That means I have to be fairly uncertain about my destiny.

(upbeat music) - [Narrator] "There is no certainty, there is only adventure."

Roberto Assagioli, psychiatrist.

"Life is either a daring adventure or nothing."

Helen Keller, author and disability rights activist.

"It's not the mountain we conquer but ourselves."

Sir Edmund Hillary, explorer.

"The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes."

Marcel Proust, novelist and essayist.

"Adventure is not outside man.

It is within."

George Elliot, pin name for Maryanne Evans, Victorian novelist.

(upbeat music) - I think a more mature spirituality is to do away with those imaginings about what might be and simply embrace what is.

(upbeat music) - [Narrator] We know from research what's most important to people who are close to death, comfort, feeling unburdened and unburdening to those they love.

Existential peace and a sense of wonderment and spirituality.

I believe wonderment and pure deep wonder point in the same direction, my words they hearken to that wonderment that can't be known.

- Maybe most obvious benefit of facing end of life with a sense of wonder is that it can decrease fear about something that is so very unknown.

It can allow you to open yourself up to experience things in that time when it might feel like you cannot experience new things.

- [Dr. John] Perhaps we could learn from our children.

They spend the day at the beach building things that will not survive the next tide.

They take pride in what they've built and then leave it all without regrets.

Adults, by contrast, want everything to last.

We seem to forget that playing for keeps is not playing at all.

- And I think for all my patients it's such an honor to be a part of their life and to be able to help them achieve things that they were hoping to achieve even in the end of life.

Emotions at end of life definitely vary from patient to patient.

Always sadness, but sometimes even peace and joy for patients that I know were able to do the things that were important to them.

I would say their story at end of life does change with age.

But you would be surprised how often even younger patients can find peace and feel like they have achieved what they needed to achieve to have peace about the meaning of why they were here.

When you sort of have to reframe your own personhood because of an illness, that's a life changing moment.

Recently, actually had a patient say to us, I've lived this and I'm excited to see what's next.

'Cause I've never lived that, which I think is an example of sort of embracing the wonder of the unknown.

I've actually taken care of even older patients that embrace the idea of wonder, even in the wonderment of just, I can't wait to see what's next.

(upbeat music) - [Narrator] What's next is to embrace the final adventure with openness, inquisitive wonder, imagining and wishful thinking need to be let go because they cannot predict what's next.

Pure deep wonder is the response to what's next that goes beyond our normal way of being to help us meet the ultimate challenge.

(upbeat music)