 Welcome to Skeptico where we explore controversial science and spirituality with leading researchers, thinkers and their critics. Now most of us at this point accept that near-death experience science provides a unique way for serious researchers to look at some of these deep mysteries of the afterlife. But we also know that that road to discovery is filled with a lot of potholes. There are stuck in the mud academics who can't bear the thought of having been wrong for all those years. There are well-meaning Christians, New Agers and spiritual seekers, and I'd have to throw myself in that category, want to claim NDE's as their exclusive domain. The barriers to really understanding the deeper implications of NDE science are many. And that's what makes it so exciting when someone like today's guest Dr. Gregory Shoshan comes along. He's got a new book, Near-Death Experience in Indigenous Religions. And it looks to me to be one of those books that really delves so deeply into one of the questions that has really been central to the ongoing discussion about NDE science. It's a question that's interested both skeptics, they've picked it up as their cause, and proponents, they've picked it up as their cause. And that is, what are we to make of NDE accounts across cultures? And a follow-on question to that is, how might those experiences have impacted those religious traditions that we see and the spiritual beliefs, which we're going to have to deconstruct a little bit? So the basic question usually kind of falls into, you know, does the lack of consistency within the NDE accounts across cultures, do those mean that, as the skeptics would have us believe, and I don't, skeptics, you know, you know, I'm just using to fill in those people in one camp, who then use that to bolster their claim that maybe this is more of a delusional kind of thing that people are creating in their head, or another way of looking at it is, do the patterns, the deeper patterns within these accounts, suggest that maybe NDE's have an even more richer, deeper influence on these cultures, all the way to maybe even being the source of the religions we see. So this is an awesome interview we have coming up, a deep dive, anthropology, religious history, NDE science, world-class scholar, recognized expert in this field. It's really, really great to welcome you, Dr. Shushan to Skeptico. Thanks so much for joining me. Thanks, Alex, and thanks for that great introduction. There's a really good summary of some of the thorny problems that this kind of research has to deal with. Well, it's just the beginning, and I guess that's what I appreciated about reading your book. I just mentioned often that I feel like I missed the point in a lot of ways when we talked a few years ago, and I don't want to beat myself up too bad, because I got one point, but I kind of missed the larger point of your approach, your methodology as an academic, who is looking at this in a very serious way, and there's a lot of issues around that. So I'll tell you what, I've been playing this little game I call Skeptico jeopardy as a way of just kind of moving the conversation along and giving you a chance to kind of guide the conversation. But I think it's only fitting in this case that I picked the first one because it's where I think we have to start. And that's just the basics of cross cultural NDE, you know, who, who are you, and then who are the cultures that we're looking at? How are we looking at them? Why are we looking at them? Just give us the rundown of the basics of your work in cross cultural NDE stuff. Okay. Well, first, you shouldn't beat yourself up because the first book was really pretty different than this book. So I could see how it could, you know, throw someone for a loop. So basically my background, I started out doing archaeology and Egyptology, Eastern Mediterranean archaeology. And I was reading afterlife texts in ancient Egyptian afterlife texts like the coffin texts and pyramid texts which preceded the book of the dead. And I started noticing similarities between those descriptions of the afterlife and NDE's. And I had read Carol Zaleski's book, Other World Journeys, where she looked at medieval visions of the afterlife in the context of NDE's. So I kind of started thinking, you know, something interesting is going on here and, and is it possible that ancient Egyptian afterlife beliefs, you know, the origins of them can be found in NDE's. So I decided to do a comparative study. Egypt, Vedic, India, Mesopotamia, Mesoamerica, and ancient China. Choosing those because they were also diverse and culturally independent. They didn't have any influence on each other to speak of. There were almost no actual accounts of NDE's from these cultures. There were a couple from China, one or two from Mesoamerica, a few references in Indian cultures. But for the most part, it was really comparing afterlife texts. So it was, there was some speculation there was a little bit more speculative than the recent book, which we'll get to. But just for the background, that was essentially looking at similarities between afterlife beliefs across cultures and seeing how they corresponded to NDE phenomena, each element of the NDE. So for example, we take the Tibetan Book of the Dead and say, that's a text. Let's study the text rather than looking for accounts. However, you would get those accounts. The starting point for you, which makes a lot of sense, was the text. And now you've kind of shifted a little bit in this research. Yeah, because there almost are no texts from the ancient civilizations that I was looking at. So yeah, it's looking at description of the other world journey and a Sumerian myth compared to the same thing in a description of the afterlife and the Chinese texts or whatever. So it was finding that in these civilizations, there were this set of similar elements, not only cross cultures, but to NDE's. So my idea was that those similarities can best be accounted for by the idea that people are having NDE's in all these cultures and basing their afterlife beliefs on them. So moving forward to the recent stuff. By Indigenous Religions, titled in New Book, New Death Experience in Indigenous Religions, that refers to, and a lot of people don't really know some of the terminology, but it's basically what used to be called primitive or small scale society, religions, tribal sorts of religions in Africa, Native Americans and Oceania, which is the Pacific region in general. So the difference there is that with, you know, a couple hundred years of missionary activity, more than a couple hundred going back to sort of 16th century missionary activity, explorer reports, anthropology, we have accounts of actual NDE's from these different different societies. So in this case, I was able to look at the, not just the content of the NDE's, but how people interpreted them differently in each of these different kinds of regions. I guess I would, since you stopped, I would interject that, you know, one of the things I think that will come up in this conversation a lot is that the carefulness and the wisdom that you show as an academic, balanced with the curiosity that's driving you as someone who's fascinated with the NDE experience and how profound it is. And I want to make sure that we kind of, that I get that right, that I'm not misrepresenting you because I'm throwing out something there that I don't know if you kind of agree with, but I think, you know, this is just a profound phenomenon, you know, that people experience the afterlife, it gets at one of the fundamental questions that we've had through time, you know, does our consciousness exist. So there's kind of this coolheadedness and this methodical approach that comes through in your work that has to be there for you to answer some of these questions. But I think I want people to understand that I feel from reading the book and looking at your research, you are also just blown away at the implications at every turn of what this means. If it falls one way, I feel like you're kind of going, hey, I'm open to whatever it goes. But if it falls this way, the way it seems to be emerging, this is huge. Do you have any thoughts on that? Yeah, I think that's definitely the case. I mean, it's such an interesting and amazing topic with such huge implications that it's one of the few things that I can see sustaining my interest over all these years. You know, because I started doing this stuff in, I don't know, 15 years ago or something, maybe more now. So part of what's been able to sustain the interest is looking at the different cultures in all different areas of the world. That's been great. But also just that central core question, not just how do different cultures interpret and experience NDE's or religions based on NDE, but underlying all that is, you know, of course, the question of what are NDE's and what does this, what do these comparisons mean for the idea that NDE's could be actual evidence for life after death. And that's been a, you know, that's a thorny thing to tackle because as you said in the introduction, they can be used, cross-cultural NDE's can be used for people on either side of the debate. You know, people who want to say that it's all a hallucinatory dying brain experience or that it's just entirely culturally constructed or it can, you know, be used as evidence that, you know, this is a universal belief. Therefore, it's a genuine, metaphysical kind of experience. So I think even skeptics, even angry skeptics that we've all run across. Because this is like, you know, such a basic human question, survival after death. People have this vested interest in it often. They either want to believe really deeply or they really want to disbelieve. And I actually am kind of in the middle still. I mean, that might sound disingenuous because I put so much time and effort and energy and thought into this stuff. But I do have one foot in either camp. And I'm not, I'm totally convinced of the things I wrote in the book. But as far as like the NDE science or whatever, I still kind of keep a little bit of objectivity. And I think keeping a little bit of skepticism actually helps my research because often I think when scholars do put their foot in one camper and other than their research becomes a little bit less objective. Great. Well, that's something we may or may not explore. But I want you to direct us where we should go next because there's this book is opens up a ton of questions as you read it if you're really interested in this field. So I have some categories, methodology, shamans and entheogens versus other NDE research as meaning, you know, how does your research compare pros and cons of doing it? The way that you approached it versus other ways. Religion, which is kind of your bailiwick is to look not just at the experience, but what it means in terms of creating new religions, forming new religions, informing religions, changing religions, very interesting aspects to the methodology come up there. Metaphysical neutrality. That's where I'm going to get into kind of really, I don't know that the silliness it seems to me to even entertain that other position, but we have to go there. And then of course the accounts, the ghost dance and then finally my pet topic is, you know, are we still as much as we're being open minded and fair minded? Are we broadly looking at all the data we can in terms of extended consciousness? So for the benefit of those who haven't seen aren't watching this video, I wanted to give you give them an overview of the categories we might cover. Do you have any one that you see there that interests you? Maybe it's best to get the methodology out of the way because that's kind of the most boring. I would say it's a necessary evil, but in academic writing you have to discuss methodology to an extent that's not really that interesting to most people. I don't think it's boring at all and I certainly don't think it's boring to our listeners. I posted in the Skeptical Forum questions that people could post in advance and a lot of the questions were methodology questions, which I was really excited about because if you think about this field at all methodology to me is what immediately springs to mind. Well, how did he do that? You just said he took the accounts of missionaries and explorers. Well, we can discount those right off the bat, right? They're second hand accounts and then we have this indigenous things. So the way that you do that and a lot of it is good kind of blocking and tacking anthropology that you know is really fascinating. The other aspect that I hope you touch on here is you lean on a lot of prior research and you're really generous in acknowledging the work that other people have done. But you also point out where you think some of that research might have taken us in the wrong direction and how we might look at it anew with a different kind of perspective. So please lay into it a lot to talk about methodology. Okay. Yeah, I mean with the, I mentioned with the first book that methodology of trying to find cultural independence and there was a little bit of that with this one. You know, African traditional religions, religions of the Pacific and North America are pretty much entirely independent of each other. So if we have similarities of NDE's in each of those regions, we can't say that it's because, you know, the myth traveled from one to the other. So that's a non-starter right there. That gets one whole argument out of the way, one whole reductionist explanation for what's going on. But you're right, the missionary explorer and even the early anthropology accounts, you know, we have to look at them with a skeptical eye. We can't just accept everything they say as a neutral statement of what really was said. But at the same time that doesn't mean that they're all entirely made up by the missionaries and explorers and early anthropologists. And what I've found a lot of times is an account will be more or less neutrally recorded, but with a lot of interjections on the part of the missionary. Like, you know, they'll say this person claims to have died and traveled to the underworld and met this one of their gods and blah, blah, blah. And then at the end they say, of course, this is the work of Satan and these people need to be converted or whatever. Explorers are a little bit more neutral than missionaries. But of course, you know, they had their agenda of wanting to report what kind of resources there were and how to manage or exploit the local population. So everyone had their agenda, but that doesn't necessarily mean that all these accounts are just being made up by these people. Well, and that's what comes through in the book because you start reading these accounts and you can see exactly what you're saying. You can see an account that clearly could only come from the experiencer, couldn't have been added to in any way. When I said, you know, I was taken by this coyote and we sailed across a creek, you know, and then I met, you know, no one's making that up. That's just what the guy said. So it is kind of interesting that how you can do this. And that as you mentioned, there's other ways that you look at it in terms of, well, does it conform automatically to their prior beliefs? Does it change the beliefs of the group or the religion? This is some of the deeper stuff you get into, but it's fascinating, fascinating stuff. Thanks. Yeah, and there's also the, there's a few NDE's that were repeated over time. So one missionary would report it and 20 years later, an anthropologist and then another anthropologist, another 20, 40 years later after that. So it shows that there's consistency of these accounts over time that, you know, they're not just being made up. And it's also the case that you can check some of these beliefs with later anthropological reports. And it's also important to remember that a lot of these traditions go back, you know, hundreds and hundreds of years. It's not like suddenly the missionary or the anthropologist appeared and they're getting these stories that they're, you know, randomly reporting to the West. It's, they were already there. So for a long time. And also a lot of the accounts were supposed to have preceded the arrival of these, these foreigners and go back, you know, dozens or hundreds of years. And they've, these NDE's have become integrated into local mythology. So that's another, you know, methodological conceptual difference with the first book is with these accounts and the indigenous religions. We have actual, you know, verbatim in some cases examples of people saying describing NDE's that they had or that somebody in their culture had and saying outright. And this is how we know about the afterlife. So this is no longer speculation that, you know, these similarities to NDE's suggest that the beliefs were based on an NDE. This is people actually saying our beliefs were based on NDE. You know, that might lead into another category. So rather than you pick, let me bring this up because I wanted to talk about it. And I think people are going to clue into this right away too. And it's kind of an important topic to discuss. And that's in these accounts, you're open that you can't always separate the shamanic experience or the drug induced afterlife experience from the, I don't know if you want to call it pure NDE experience. So you're really open about that, but hey, this is a problem we don't know. And you go one step further and say from the accounts that we have, we can clearly see that these are intertwined and intermixed and we don't even understand exactly what that means. So what are some of the challenges that we face in terms of understanding this from a shamanic perspective? The way I tried to pick it apart was, and this is another methodological issue too, is my definition of near-death experiences or rather not my definition of but what I considered to be NDE's in the book. And rather than having a set of phenomenological elements to NDE's that are commonly cited in the West as this is a typical NDE. You know, I didn't say this is an NDE because it ticks all these boxes. I said, this is an NDE if the person within the culture considers it an NDE. And obviously they didn't have the term NDE, but if the account says this person died, had this particular experience and came back to life, then that counted as an NDE to me. And even that, I think, with all the controversy that's going on around near-death experience and near-death experience science, even those terms are highly, highly charged, right? What does death mean? You know, you can get to the mat with people about, you know, they're not really dead because they had an NDE. It means that they came back and you can get into all that kind of definitional stuff. But that's even more the case here because here now you're getting into shamanic induced NDE's where we really can't even imagine that they really ever were clinically dead in a lot of these cases. But if you just had some kind of extended consciousness experience, but for very good reason, like you just mentioned, you had to throw those in or you chose to throw those in and say, you know, let's understand it from this kind of, if they say it's a walk on the side, walk on the side of death, good enough for me. Let's see where that takes me. Is that a fair assessment? Yeah. I mean, they don't necessarily have to have said, died and came back to life. But the person was in a physically compromised situation, you know, technically near-death rather than, you know, a claim of actual death, grave illness or some kind of serious accident or near-drowning. Those kind of things I counted. If they didn't have any context at all like that, I considered it a vision, self induced shamanic vision. But what you're talking about where the gray area lies is when there are shamanic practices that compromise the physical body and lead to an NDE. So there's somewhere they, you know, literally would club themselves to death in order to bring about an NDE. Beyond even clubbing themselves. Maybe I'm wrong, so correct me here, but I read that, you know, there's people that, and again, it plays right into, I think, one of the conclusions, if I can say that of your book, is that the near-death experiences that are really profound and significant in terms of a culture would a lot of times make the shaman then want to experience it and try anything they could to go on that death journey. So, yeah, clubbing is one aspect of it, but however I can get there, whether it's not sleeping, drumming, and the agents, there's a journey there, you took it, I want to take it. Yeah, yeah, clubbing is an extreme example. There's, there's also one where they claim to have lit themselves on fire and, you know, some of these I think have to be taken in the kind of context of these things are all mythologized. Oftentimes, so I don't think people probably really did light themselves on fire to have an NDE, but yeah, the more usual ways are, you know, drumming and dancing and singing to the point of exhaustion and collapse, drug use and things like that. So, and yeah, in a lot of cases it overtly is intended to replicate an NDE that somebody else within their society had. And that's what the ghost dance really was all about. And, and the, you know, all these other ghost dance type of religions, which also occur in the Pacific region as well with kind of similar dynamics behind them about, you know, responses to cultural domination and either, you know, a resistance against, you know, Western influence, resistance against Christianity, or alternatively embracing it. Well, you mentioned ghost dance, so I thought we might go there and I think the way that you brought it up is is really important because it does get back to this methodology kind of thing in that. First, you ought to describe what the ghost dance is, but I want to emphasize that point that you just made is that it's hard not to see the ghost dance as being a direct result of the NDE experience and then that just leads to a whole bunch of questions. Well, what does that mean about how these religions really were formed, maintained and energized and enlivened? You know, what was it all about in the E? I think some of these ghost dance type of religions really were. I mean, they, it's interesting because these things have been studied since the 19th century, when, you know, when they were actually happening. And most of the focus has been on the social and political dimensions about, you know, response to Christianity and response to threat. And that's, that's how they've been studied in various parts of the world. And it's true that that's how, that is one of the main reasons they come into being as a new religion that's revitalized, they're called religious revitalization movements. And basically it's the appear during times of threat from other kind of cultural dominance or, or some other kind of external threat, usually in the Pacific, there's one called the currary movement and that was in response to a disease epidemic. So it's whenever there's some kind of threat. And what's interesting about it is because most of the time, more often than not, they're grounded in an NDE, or at least in a claim of an NDE. So somebody has or claims to have had a near death experience comes back and says, I was told by, you know, this entity in the afterlife that we need to change our ways that we need to, you know, stop beating our wives or we need to stop using western weapons and farming equipment or whatever. Or, conversely, we need to convert to Christianity Christianity, and these problems will be resolved. And what's interesting thematically is like an NDE is its death and rebirth. And one of the main themes of when somebody comes back from an NDE they're renewed, they have this whole, you know, spiritual renaissance. Sometimes they claim that new abilities and it really changes their lives. So what's happening in these new religious movements is that is then being kind of outwardly focused upon the whole society at large. So the whole society is then benefiting in theory from this one person's NDE, you know, wanting the whole society to become reborn and renewed and revitalized in that way. And that's tricky and thorny as you just mentioned. What comes through in the book and in your research is that sorting and sifting through that and looking at the anomalies isn't quite the right word, but the cases where people come back with beliefs that are directly contradictory to what the current religious beliefs are, and yet are so influential, so powerful that they cause the culture to change or they definitely cause that person to change and then the way that that person changes causes other people to change. So there's always going to be these cultural overlays and then even the social engineering, you know, we just had a wonderful gentleman on a few episodes ago, an anthropologist, Brian Hayden, who did this work on the self-aggrandizement, right? So it's like, hey, I went to the other side too. And you know what he said? I should be able to sleep with your wife and all the other women that I choose to. That's what they said. Hey, that is always in play. There's always going to be people that are going to do that. So what interests me more are these cases where we can't give those kind of explanations we can't provide. That doesn't really fill in the gap. So any thoughts on that? Yeah, there's a good Native American example of that. I can't remember the person's name, but you know, there was this big explosion of ghost dance religion starting with Wolvoka, who was a Paiudi shaman in the late 19th century. Then there was Bianchi, who's on the, his NDE vision that he drew was on the cover of the new book. And he went to see Wolvoka and he, you know, he had his own NDE vision. It was not clearly in a near-death context, but he had a vision after praying and fasting. And then he went to see Wolvoka and he didn't believe where he said. He was completely disappointed and he said, you know, this guy is a sham or whatever. But then there's another guy, the one whose name I can't recall at the moment, who claimed to have had an NDE and then just basically exploited people around him. You know, it was things like, you know, sleep with your wife. You have to give me some money, whatever it was. And it turned out, you know, later he did, he was arrested and I think he later confessed that it was all a scam anyway. But that isn't always the case. They don't always say no. No, definitely not. And, you know, and I think it's, that's one of the main, you know, another problem with this kind of research is disentangling what accounts are real. The represent actual NDE's and which ones are either opportunistic or just seeing the success of a different person who started their religion and wanting to emulate that. You know, maybe not for opportunistic reasons, but just as a genuine way to, you know, improve your society. I think that's a very thorny thing to try to unpack and I don't think there's any way to really completely say whether somebody's NDE account was an actual historic thing or not. Great. Where do you think we might want to go next? Wow. Maybe I should say something. I don't know if this counts under the account section, but I should say one of the main things about this research has been, and you touched on it at the beginning in your introduction is the differences between NDE accounts. So it's not just a difference between different religions and different ideas about the afterlife, but it's the actual NDE's themselves can be vastly different. And that's one of the key things that skeptics use to say, you know, well, how can NDE's be evidence of an afterlife if they're all different, right? To which I would reply, why do all NDE's why would everyone's afterlife have to be the same for there to be an afterlife? And I take that one so further. I'd say, you know, the book just without even kind of addressing that, which I think is, it's an important question. But when you dig into a little bit, it's kind of a silly question. And the silliness is the accounts themselves, you know, and I have a few up there that I put on the screen. And I don't know if you can recall those off the top of your head because I'm sure hundreds floating in your head. You read these accounts and let me pull up one of them if I can. Well, I'll just say while you're doing that, you know, the idea that kind of in the background of a lot of this for me is that, you know, the way to explain these cross-cultural differences is not to ignore the similarities, but to look at them side by side. So what I mean by that is what the way I see it is that an NDE is essentially like a triggering event, which has these, you know, I don't know the neurophysiological or metaphysical structure or system bind. But what seems to be going on is there's this event which has this set of very similar thematic experiences that it causes. And because each of us, you know, as a particular individual in a particular culture, we experience those events in ways that are relevant and specific to our culture. Let me read one such account, and I think it builds on what you're saying. So this is from the North American Sunni. These are the Southwest people, right? That you you drive through Arizona and you see Arizona in New Mexico. In 1928, a woman died of measles and saw a quote unquote bright light in the room and left her body. She traveled westward to meet her deceased grandfather and aunts quote unquote still living the way we do. The experience not only resulted in a change in the woman's own beliefs. I never believed that it could happen, but it really did. But she was thereafter made a healer and a member of the Medicine Society. Furthermore, her experience was inconsistent with Sunni afterlife conceptions in which the dead remain with their body for four days, change shape, become the wind or enter the lake of what is it? Cachinas. Oh, yeah. Cachinas, of course, the little dolls or into the lake of Cachinas. This suggests that the experience was largely independent of its cultural context. So this kind of pulls together a lot of the things that we're talking about. But maybe you want to expound on that. But I think anyone listening to that can go, hey, you know what? I really feel like I could pull something out of that that I didn't know before. That's such a great example. It's concise. It's a concise one. It has so, you know, it's so many of the, you know, ideas that are behind what's going on here. So she changed her beliefs. She became a religious leader. They were inconsistent with Sunni beliefs preexisting, which shows that this is an experience which is not generated just by culture. So it's, yeah, it's a really good example. And it's, it shows exactly the kind of thing that I'm talking about. But, you know, it's also there are still people out there who are fighting tooth and nail to say these are entirely culturally, linguistically generated experiences. Well, yeah, that's not good. That's not going to change. It's the, it changes by funeral by funeral kind of thing. Yeah. And the thing is, I mean, I'm not, again, it's, it's not a case of, are these experiences evidence of the afterlife? You know, we can talk about, about that later, but it's a separate question of, are they an experience to begin with? I mean, some people just completely deny that it's kind of a postmodernist constructivist approach. They deny that it, that the accounts actually refer to an actual experience, which, you know, is basically just saying all of our sources are lying. They're making stuff up because they're part of their culture, which is not, you know, why, why even be an anthropologist or a scholar of religion if you're not going to believe what your sources say. Well, you know, that's the other thing that's really cool about what falls out of this really broad approach that you take of indigenous cultures. You go from North America, then you jump over to Africa. And what I was kind of, kind of blown away with is, so you turn the page and you get to Africa. And now, as you say, things are a lot different. Yeah. When we have the problem that Africa is a big continent, you know, we can't make a lot of generalizations. But we can start to make some generalizations and we see that it's a different game. For one thing, the fluidity isn't there. You know, the North American indigenous people are a pretty open lot. You know, stuff comes along and they go, oh, okay, we have to change. Or like the one Shaman says, which I thought was quite beautifully goes, you know, I guess it really shows that we don't know, you know, we just have to listen to these people that have been there because I haven't been there. He's been there. I take his word for it. And what I read into the African, and it's not across the board because you do a great job of teasing out some important accounts from these different African traditions. But it's a little bit harder because it's more kind of an entrenched religiosity, yet some of the patterns still come through, which is what's so enormously valuable about your research. Yeah, thanks. Yeah, that's definitely the case. So it's, it's not a case that, you know, in Africa, they didn't have NDE's and Native Americans did have them. It's a case of not just that the experiences themselves are different, but how they're interpreted by the societies by the cultures, very really widely. You know, it's easier to generalize about Native Americans than it is about Africans. There are a few examples with Native Americans, like some people say, well, we don't have any afterlife beliefs because nobody's ever been there. So how should we know? Kind of the reverse of the guy you were mentioning. Some of them, you know, just actively disbelief, but those are really rare. And African societies, they, let me just find, I have the figures here somewhere, just to kind of put a general context of the whole thing. For Native Americans, I found 70 NDE's or references to NDE's, you know, in a historical context. And that's specifically accounts where somebody died or came near death. So that's not even counting the shamanic experiences. Out of those, there were 20 where they said our afterlife beliefs were based on these experiences. In Africa, there were 10 NDE's altogether and two saying that they based their experiences on them. And there are a few reasons for that. And, you know, that's kind of like an all day discussion. But just to kind of put it in a nutshell, burial practices are a factor because African burial practices, by and large, didn't really allow for somebody to come back to life. They were very concerned with preventing angry ancestor spirits from coming in, taking possession of the body. So if a body rose after being dead, they didn't think, oh, my relatives come back. Let's go shower them with praise and welcome them. They thought, oh, that person is possessed, essentially a zombie. You know, this is like a danger to society. So first of all, they would take, you know, preemptive preemptive steps towards that happening. So binding the corpse. Sometimes they would just throw them out to animals to be eaten. They didn't go through as many efforts to bring somebody back from from dying as Native Americans might or or in the Pacific. So already there's a sort of a physical factor and fewer African NDEs being reported. And then on top of that, they're rather than like, you know, with Native Americans, they had this whole shamanic vision quest culture going back. So it's, you know, part of built into the culture to have experiences like NDEs or whatever other kind of, you know, visionary experiences. African religions were often more concerned with sorcery. They believe that the ancestors were living nearby in the village or in the forest. Some of them were benevolent. Some of them were malevolent. So a lot of it was managing these kinds of possibly malevolent forces on the society. Witchcraft and sorcery were all kind of preoccupations. A lot of it was more, you know, this worldly what's what's going to happen to us right now right here and not really much speculation about what's going to happen in the beyond. It just wasn't really that relevant to, you know, their life experience. So they were just kind of negotiating these things in a very different way. See, that's that's so awesome and fascinating. And I guess I want people to appreciate how our entire perspective changes when you look at it through the lens that you've looked at it through. So you're standing on the shoulders of a lot of awesome people who've done awesome work, but you can see how they would totally. I have to say misinterpret all that if they weren't considering the reality or if you want to say potential reality of a real afterlife that came with it, a certain set of experiences that are are real. You know, I did an interview with this woman, Jan Van Esselstein, who wrote this amazing book and studied the shamanic people of Siberia for the longest time. And just to highlight the differences, you know, I asked her some of these questions and she says, oh no, they never try and contact the spirit world or the deceased. Everybody does that. No, their religious belief is that you're not supposed to disturb them. We can't say whether that's true or not. But as you're just saying, how wouldn't that then inform the experiences that you would have. But independent of whether people then have those experiences, they come back that might be less likely to talk about those experiences. So it's only when we take the step that you've taken that we can begin to kind of understand this stuff again. Yeah, yeah. And I mean, there's examples from Africa that somebody coming back from the dead, reviving from an NDE and, you know, having stones thrown at them and things like that. So, yeah, if you have an NDE, you're going to keep quiet about it for the most part in cultures like that. I guess I should just say a little about the Pacific while we're here. And that's what's interesting there is Polynesians and Melanesians followed more along the Native American lines. There were, you know, 36 Polynesian and Melanesian NDE's and 19 statements that they based their afterlife beliefs on those NDE's. Melanesia, especially they were open to all kinds of, you know, different kinds of practices like mediumship, they believed in soul travel possession just kind of like open to all of it. Polynesians, you know, for the most part, very focused on an NDE's total casual acceptance of them is like of course their fact of course we base our religion on it. And what's interesting there is Micronesia and Australia, no NDE's, no examples of people saying they base their beliefs on NDE's. And that's because in Australia, basically shamanic soul travel to other worlds took the place and it's almost like the concepts of NDE's and shamanism there were so intertwined there was no difference between them. So, so there's no real context of saying somebody died and came back it's just like, you know, these are people who do this. And then in Micronesia, it was just a lot more similar to African example with the similar kinds of burial beliefs and beliefs about, you know, souls coming back and things like that. But it's just so, to me, so totally clear when you have zero examples. And, and then in other cultures, you know, Polynesia and Melanesia 36 and 20 of them almost saying we based our NDE's on this. You know, that's to me it's scientific proof, you know, you don't have to go beyond a speculation of our people basing their beliefs on these experiences. Okay, where might we want to go next. You choose this time. Okay, I was hoping you might say that. Let's talk about the cross cultural kind of work that you've done and the methodology that we keep talking about versus, you know, other NDE research. I was just rewatching a video by the very excellent Dr. Peter Fennig. He's in a TED talk. So he's talking to a very general kind of science audience. But he's talking about the importance of the cardiac arrest research. And I think a lot of people when they first get into near death experience research, they don't necessarily pick up on that. You know, that, hey, people are having all sorts of NDE's under all sorts of different circumstances, right? Jumping off the Golden Gate Bridge, drowning in a pool, just being really afraid or not being afraid and just having it. So the same kind of mix that you're talking about, there's contemporary accounts of the same thing. But the near death experience research slash science that we hear about so much is based on a group of really smart scientists saying, you know what, to get to the bottom of this, we have to try and control some of these variables. It's almost the opposite of your research. You had to open up the valve a little bit and let in a lot of accounts in order to understand this. They're doing the opposite. They're saying, you know what, tell you what, let's restrict this to cardiac arrest in a hospital. Because now I think I have a pretty good idea of the physiology that's going on. And the conclusion for that, more than overwhelming, unanimous, is that consciousness is surviving death in a way we don't understand. Because the neurological model is completely outside, out of the window. It just is. Because whether you want to call it death or not death or whatever, we're seeing consciousness at a time when the brain, based on our current neurological model, shouldn't be able to produce consciousness. And yet consciousness is there. It's showing up. So I guess I've kind of laid enough of the groundwork. I'm just wondering what your thoughts are of that on that in terms of, you know, Bravo to you for seeing that you needed to kind of open up the gates and let in these accounts. But then, you know, any thoughts on the contrast of how that compares with modern NDE research? Yeah. Well, I think this kind of research that I've done has to be taken into account in any theory of NDE is really, I mean, not necessarily how it's integrated into cultures and religion, but just the cross cultural differences in NDE accounts. So, and I talk about this in the book, there's a section towards the end on, you know, what are the implications of all this cross cultural differences for the idea that NDE's are genuine evidence of an afterlife? Because if, you know, if it is, if NDE's are evidence for an afterlife, then that means it's a universal phenomena, presumably, and that it's evidence of an afterlife for everybody who has one. And if that's the case, why aren't, for example, most people in small scale societies having life reviews? Why, why is it, you know, a tunnel, not a common experience and things like that. So, and that's why I kind of go back to the explanation of the thematic thing. So there might not be tunnels everywhere. You might not have a, you know, an Australian person saying, I went through a tunnel, but he probably will say I went through darkness and emerged into light. You might not have a panoramic life review, you know, described in the kind of contemporary western sense in, in, you know, a small scale society somewhere, but they will say there was a deity there and he had all of the history of my life written in a book. You know, it's thematically the same thing. Or even if it's not that thematically close, there's always some evaluation of the person's life, almost always. You know, what did, what kind of person were you, do you have to go back and if you have to go back, why? So, to me, seems like there's two entirely different set of questions there that have to be approached, you know, completely differently. And I think the methodology that you've applied is super important. I'm not so sure that I would be totally aligned with you in terms of those then raised questions that NDE science has to address kind of in a different way. It's almost to me like the parapsychology example. I remember interviewing Dean Raiden very early on when he's kind of pounding away at like a real good scientist at these pre-sentiment experiments that he did. And he replicates them two times and four times and five times and then 50 times. And then it's like, well, yeah, but you're showing a small effect size. People are able to see or sense the future, you know, 55% versus 45%. Show us the really extreme examples. And he was like, you know what, I think that's been shown already. That's already been demonstrated. What I'm trying to see is whether this is something that is an innate property of human nature, if it appears across the board. And I will see the same thing kind of going on here. I don't think anybody needs to repeat at this point. Dr. Fenwick's work or Sam Parnia's work or Penn Von Lommel or Jeff Long, anyone who's fair and open-minded has to look at that research and say, case closed for whatever reason that we don't understand consciousness seems to survive bodily death. These people are clinically dead and they're having a conscious experience. Our existing neurological models don't explain that. Where I see your research coming in is really to go to that next level of understanding. The really important implications are, okay, before we jump the gun and say, okay, that means that Jesus really is mediating all these. It's like, wait, hold on. Yeah, I didn't mean to say that it's a challenge to, you know, ideas that NDEs are evidence of in afterlife. I just think that it's something that needs to be explained and addressed along with a kind of comprehensive theory of what an NDE is. And I think, you know, I feel like I've kind of, I've done that component and they can integrate it. I've shown that NDEs are different across cultures. I've shown that they're also the same across cultures at the same time. And I think given a pretty good reason why. Fair enough. So you're the not-so-fast guy. They're like, hey, okay, I'm with you, but not so fast. There are some questions over here that are... Yeah, and it's exactly what you said. You can't have... And this is why my research seems to kind of piss off both sides of the camp. You have people who are, you know, almost sort of religious about NDEs and firm believers in it. And their model of what an NDE is like is the model. And if it's not that in other cultures, they don't consider it an NDE. So they're taking the exact opposite approach that I did. And I'm saying if they say it's an NDE, I'm going to consider it an NDE and let's see what it says. That's the phenomenological approach, you know, basically just reading what is in the text. Whereas, you know, to say, no, he didn't have an NDE or she didn't have an NDE because she didn't see a being of light. She didn't go through a tunnel described specifically as a tunnel, didn't have a life, whatever it is. I guess what I'm saying is I think we need to move beyond almost all the other cross-cultural comparisons before the stuff I've done have been just obsessed really with what exactly is the common core of the NDE. And if there's no life review, then it's not, you know, that whole kind of argument. I just think like we need to look at, you know, the grace and scale or whatever as this is a list of possible elements that can be included in an NDE. If somebody dies and comes back to life or almost dies and comes back, let's see what they have to say. We can compare it to the scale. But if it doesn't hit that scale, does that mean it's not an NDE? That's where I, you know, I don't think so. And that's where I think over-generalizing is a little bit of a problem. Just as denying similarity is equally a problem. So it's really just, you know, my only argument really is scientists or whoever is speculating making theories about NDEs has to take the similarities and the differences and explain both of them in order to, you know, not be subject to the kind of criticism that theories have been subject to. That's such a great point. And if I'm going to pick, maybe I'm going to pick another one then, because I think it leads into this, which I don't know, I guess I'm really accepting of what you are saying, and I'm blown away by what you've done. And I have to mention to people, this book is an expensive book to just kind of pick up casually. We all get that. It's Oxford University Press. It's like 70 bucks. If you can afford it, if you're really into this kind of research, do it because it's really worthwhile and it's kind of a cornerstone kind of book to have. But for a lot of people, they're just going to have to pass on the book and maybe do the look inside or watch this interview. But don't let it dissuade you from fully taking in what Dr. Shoshana is saying, because I think it is this part of this maturing of NDEs science. It's going beyond the spinning our wheels trying to respond to the just silliness that's been thrown in the face of these researchers for the most part. But I guess that's where I still see in your book, I still see someone who is inside of an academic culture that really to me for the most part seems completely ignorant of the real science that's going on in near death experience. I mean, it just is they're not they're not hitting on any of the real stuff. They're just repeating, you know, well, this couldn't possibly be true last gasp of the dying grain or whatever when all these things have been addressed and they have problems with it. You know, there are problems with some of the conclusions and over generalizations that in the researchers and proponents more proponents than the researchers because I think most of the researchers pretty level headed. But when I read this, you know, this is from your book, whether the prompting is biological, psychological and or metaphysical in nature, set that aside. I get that you have to do that. I get that you're in an academic where that's the belief that 90% of the folks that you speak to have. But I'd almost say if we have to set it aside, then that's not what your book is about. Your book really isn't about that. You sidestep that and say, okay, let's set that aside. But now let me assume that there is a reality to it. And I also don't like the kind of forced equality here. You know that the biological and physiological are really on the evidence is really on par with the metaphysical. No, frickin way. It just is. No, I agree with you there. And I think somewhere I do say that no theory has been, you know, comprehensively able to explain a way in the ease, which is, you know, that's a big step for an academic book. So, so I mean, I think, but at the same time, yeah, it is an academic book and it's not a theology book, it's, you know, history of religions anthropology. So, so there is, there does have to be that neutrality. And, you know, when somebody comes along and reviews it and says, I'm a crypto theologian, I have a religious agenda, right? Which, you know, they say, then I can say, well, look at that sense, you know, I don't and actually don't because, you know, I wasn't, I don't really have a metaphysical stake in it, one way or another. And I think I do tend, you know, to, I mean, I definitely believe that that Indies have not been explained away. And I think that, you know, a lot of the evidence is amazing. The peak and Darien type experiences, you know, where people see people that they didn't know had died and come back and find out that they did die. I mean, that's how do you explain things like that? The share of death experience is always one that doesn't get enough attention where other people in the room and they share the experience that you can't even pin a biological explanation on that, you know. Yeah, yeah. You know, and another place I went out on a limb in that book is there's a section on which is basically given all these things about religious diversity, diversity of Indies, etc, etc. If there is a real afterlife, what could it possibly be like so so what are the implications of all this diversity for for an afterlife. And I think that's, you know, that's not something that you're going to come across in the traditional work of anthropology or history of religions. That's where it's kind of going into, you know, philosophical speculation, but, but I think it's to me that was treating the metaphysical interpretation seriously, and it's giving it its due. It's such an awesome point. I want to emphasize that because you know, I almost missed that. And when you just repeated it, it kind of stirred up in me again. So I want you to expound on that a little bit. It's like you're taking the leap and saying, Okay, let me play the metaphysical game for a minute. Well, let me try and speculate as to what the implications might be. And then your book is like, Hey, doesn't this look like this could be the implications. Yeah, there's a section on cross cultural Indies and the survival hypothesis where it kind of addresses exactly that. Yeah, I mean, so, so it's kind of back to the question of, you know, certain, certain scholars, there was a big debate in Journal of Near Death Studies a couple years ago about how if NDEs are different across cultures, there can't possibly be an afterlife. So I kind of, I delve into that. And because it's true, if NDEs are evidence of an afterlife across cultures, no single religion is true. We have to face that, you know, the Christian model of an afterlife, not true. You know, Islamic model Jewish Hindu, whatever. And when you say not true, we, it's just not exclusively true because we don't know. I mean, again, what your research comes through is that there's all these overlays. Yeah, yeah, but none of these dogmas, let's say, have hit it 100% correctly. I would say each one of them has elements that are, you know, getting towards the truth, whatever the truth might be. And to me that that truth is where there is convergences and similarities across cultures. There are all these similar things that people are arriving at independently are probably the things that are closest to the truth. So, so my, you know, the idea is, so, if everyone's different, how can they all be right? You know, if, if all these NDEs are different, even between individuals, you know, that was recognized by, by Moody way back, he said, there are no two NDEs that are going to hit all of these criteria. So, even there, how do we explain it, let alone bringing in kachinas and ancestor spirits and whatever else. So, you know, that's another thing that, you know, as I said, NDEs science researchers have to confront these things, but so do philosophers and theologians about the afterlife. But you bring that around full circle and say, you could also look at it and turn the question around and say, Well, isn't that really evidence that there is something deeper going on, right? Yeah, yeah, you could definitely look at it that way. And yeah, that's where I kind of come to an impasse the, the issue of similarity to me, it demonstrates NDEs, it demonstrates their influence on religion. But it doesn't necessarily, you know, just to be perfectly objective about it, it doesn't necessarily demonstrate that NDEs are actually evidence of an afterlife, but Fair enough, fair enough. I guess what struck me because I am at this point, pretty solidly convinced just by the evidence. Because I've talked to all those people multiple times and I just can't shoot holes in there. Yeah, yeah, I understand. But one of the things that I liked about what you did and where you brought me to is speculating, imagining how these experiences may have informed these religions, may have influenced these religions. You know, and someone who posted on the forum, made the connection between life review and confessional in the Roman Catholic Church, you know. Right. And it's a loose association. But can't you just see it. There's more clear cut examples that maybe you can think of where you can almost see how these consistent themes of the near death experience. Do seem to be organically emerging in these religions and it's not organic really it's it's coming directly from the NDE. And a lot of times it's, it's co opted and maybe not used in a way that we all think is so great but isn't that just the history of religion to so. Yeah, yeah, I think that's, that's definitely the case. Yeah, I mean I, it's just a case of. Again it goes back to the, you know, balancing the similarities and the differences. And if, if there really is an afterlife, how do we explain it in light of the diversity and, and I think for me the model that best explains it is. I don't know if you're familiar with HH price who's a British philosopher. He talks about a inter subjective afterlife where it's basically like a lucid dream that you're sharing with other people. And to me that accounts for the cross cultural similarities of an NDE. It also accounts for the cultural and individual particularities of an NDE because if you're creating it as you're, you're going along. It also accounts for the thematic similarities but also the cultural differences. I think it really addresses a lot and it also, it doesn't mean that NDE's are just a dream or that the afterlife is just a dream it's another state of reality where you have this different level of creation and control involved in it. You know what so many of the great spiritual masters have been telling us throughout time, and it's also a very popular topic among people who are interested in studying the paranormal and present time is that a better way of looking at it is that our time space continuum that we experience is a small part of consciousness that we are embedded in and that would explain it. Yeah, it's a dream. This is the frickin dream. This is and that's what the spiritual masters have told us all along. So we put it in this nice little box of time space reality but when we step outside of that either through and Theogens or any number of other experiences that get us outside of that. It all looks different. We get these downloads of information that tell us, Oh, okay, I get it now. And then we have to come back and live our little humble little lives here and I guess there's really only one topic left. I appreciate how open you are generous yard playing our little game here but it's been absolutely delightful. Yeah, but here's a tough one. Oh, so I just, I just remember I didn't quite answer your previous question about Christianity and confessional stuff. I was just going to add that when we have the kind and this is what like kind of wider implications of this book is when we have all these examples of people in different religions saying our religions are based on NDE's or our afterlife beliefs are based on NDE's. There's no reason to think that Christianity would be any different or any other religion would be any different. So, and I think it probably is the case because there are plenty of, you know, NDE's and Christian traditions and going back to medieval times and some people think St. Paul's vision was an NDE so it definitely has some similarities to it. Yeah, that's a great point. I'm glad you brought that up because we kind of just jumped right in the middle of it assuming that people understand that this is like the next chapter in this in this book. It's not assuming that we have to go look at indigenous people because they are the only ones who are who's, you know, little puny religions have been, you know, manipulated by these NDE's it's like, No, it's the opposite. Right. You can get that, like you said at the beginning, because you can get that cross cultural wide, the myth can't travel during these periods kind of thing. So yeah. You know, Pure Land Buddhism, for example, is, you know, very clearly, NDE's are very central to that religion. So it's not, it's, you know, there are examples that are not just, you know, small scale societies. Sorry, go ahead. No, very good as with all your other ones great point. So here's my last topic and this is going to be way outside of your swing zone but hey that's part of the fun of pushing, pushing to other things. I've been doing a lot of research and investigation lately and it's got to be research, because the claim that human beings are contacting non human intelligence is reaching the point of something that we can actually talk about without being kind of laughed out of the room. I reference Ray Hernandez who's along with Harvard social scientist Rudy Shields has published the first academic survey of non human intelligence contact with people. It parallels some of the work of Dr. Jeff Long radiation oncologist who's done the similar largest database for NDE research. And then with the disclosure, you know, a lot of people I always have to say this because people forget. We have the New York Times coming out and saying, okay, UFOs are real. Here's the video released by the Department of Defense. For whatever reason, we're in this mode where we can now put this stuff on the table. I wonder what we might think 20 years from now, how we might consider almost in parallel with the near death experience, the role of contact with non human intelligence. So, and this does have more of a direct connection to your book because if we accept the shamanic experience as being not just a near death experience, but somehow possibly some connection with these extended consciousness realms. And then we're right in the soup with ET and all the rest of it because he showed up all the time there, you know, even from Dr. Rick Strassman in New Mexico who gives his subjects DMT and I said, Oh, there it is. There's ET over there, you know, so any thoughts, I know this is really a stretch. But the reason I titled this slide silos is in the same way that your work moves us forward by kind of breaking down some of these barriers and talking about the stuff that really we have to address. I think this is another one of those things where we have to try and understand what's going on in these extended consciousness realms in a broader way rather than immediately pigeonholing it and stifling down saying, Oh, it can only be this or it can only be that. Yeah, I mean, that's, that's where, you know, I was talking about the HH price model of, you know, the lucid dreaming afterlife collective lucid dreaming. You know, it always, I kind of get tripped up when I think, Okay, well, but what about these, you know, divine beings and kachinas and whatever other kind of, you know, deity or whatever is encountered or those be souls of the dead who have reached a certain stage of transformation or development or whatever. What does that let me interject right there because that's people slide over that. What does that even mean if it's a stage of development or transformation. Now we're automatically suggesting that there is a hierarchy to those extended realms. If there's a hierarchy. Is there a top of that hierarchy is there God for lack of a better term that we're not comfortable saying but that is the accounts come through just consistently over and over again but please keep going with your flow. Don't bother. Yeah, or if not a hierarchy, at least a, I mean, I think there can be this kind of transformation without there being necessarily, you know, like a system or bureaucracy and it's when I start hearing things like that that make me really skeptical about afterlife. But I have to then let me interject there. That is directly what Dr. Jeff Long and again, people who aren't familiar with his research. This is not a guy who has a religious agenda. It's a radiation oncologist who just starts collecting these cases. And in his latest book, God in the afterlife, which has a provocative title that throws everyone off. I interviewed him. Anyone can watch it. It's an extremely popular interview. And he says, Hey, I didn't go looking for this. This is just what the data says. And as a matter of fact, what he says is interesting from a social science standpoint, like you said, he said, I don't know why this is so under reported. This is more just go look at my database that's online. This is much more widely reported than the tunnel than, you know, all the travel, all these other things is an experience of God, an experience of hierarchy that being was higher than me in a way that has been explained to me as God throughout my life. So I'm calling God. So that's the kind of stuff that I think I'm not saying I'm going there. I don't have I'm not a Christian. I'm not religious. I don't have that agenda. I'm just saying I'm not, I don't think we should immediately put that aside if that's where the data takes us. Yeah, I mean, I guess I would. Yeah, I mean, I don't know if those kind of entities would be like I said some kind of transformed human soul, or something totally different, you know, from an alien or different type of deity entity or whatever. I don't know how that could even be addressed. But I guess the, you know, the read the my skepticism arises, not just with hierarchies but systems. And when I when people say there's a library and there's columns and Greek ropes, it's just like that, you know, I shut down. Not, not, not that I disbelieve the person experienced that, but I just believe that that is the objective reality that everyone's been experienced. So, you know, some peasant farmer in Siberia is not going to probably experience something like that, whatever, you know. So I just think if they're if if there is an afterlife if these things are true. It's just a lot more chaotic than we think I mean think about reincarnation as well. Maybe it's just the case that it's true that most so many of the reincarnation accounts in Stevenson and other researchers come from India where they happen to believe in reincarnation and drew people who believe in reincarnation. And, you know, pop very famous ones in in the West, but their exceptions. So, you know, maybe it's the case that people steer their afterlife experience, whether consciously or unconsciously. When they die, you know, I don't know. I just think it's, hey, I think it's great that you went there and that's a super important contribution your books we got to keep emphasizing that is the differences you know you're this anthropology guy he keeps saying hey explain you know how there's this huge difference in this person saw it this way and that way, but it is interesting I have to point out that that's the example you bring, which is Ian Stevenson and they were all from India and Sri Lanka because the people I talked to about reincarnation focus on the three year old boy who was in a fighter jet in Missouri who was walking past the toy store and said to his mom when he's three hey that's the plane I was in and then describes in detail the plane who's flying with all this harasses his parents to death where they finally go do the research and find the pilot. Yeah, or the other guy that, you know, University of Virginia where they've studied this more than anyone and Jim Tucker, who has, you know, you're familiar with all this stuff but I checked it in just to get into the show. The kid from Hollywood similar, you know, very young boy who sees a picture of this 1950s movie and said, Hey, I know that guy and then they go through this extensive research and they have 54 points of contact where this guy has memories of this past life. So again, you're going to explain it away as this, you know, I love what you said about that. Oh, it's all in the Akashic records and anyone can go to, okay, but that's not what he's, that's not what the experiencer says. The experiencer says, I lived in that body. And as a matter of fact, Ian Stevenson, here's the scar on my back where I got shot. So, hey, I'm open to the shared dream kind of thing. But it is fun to talk about this with someone like yourself who's really done the work. So we can kind of get to that next level because that's what this work is really all about is getting us into a dialogue about the deeper questions. Yeah. And I think I would, you know, the ultimate, you know, summary would have about as far as afterlife goes. You know, nature is pretty chaotic. Life is chaotic. Life is really diverse. Human populations are incredibly diverse animal pop, you know, it's a chaotic, crazy universe that we live in and there are some rules and there is a lot of random chaos. So I just think that if there isn't afterlife, it's part of nature. I don't believe in like, that it would be supernatural because if it exists, it's going to be part of nature, right? It's part of the human experience. So if that's the case, then there's no reason why we should suddenly experience order and similarity and structure, you know, all these things are basically inventions of humans anyway. Awesome, awesome stuff. So Dr. Shoshan, how can people follow your work? I mentioned this is an awesome book. If you can fork over the 70 bucks or whatever to Oxford Press, you'll enjoy it. You'll get a lot out of it. If you can't and people want to follow what's going on, you do some, you have some great presentations out there on YouTube. I've seen a couple and other places. How do people stay connected with this important work that you're doing? And I guess I should preface that with asking, are you going to continue or have you kind of had it with this? I thought I had, but I'm going to put together an anthology of historical and cross-cultural NDE so people can read, you know, the full accounts for themselves because these things are just scattered all over the place. Like I said, in this book alone, hundreds and hundreds of sources that I look through, anthropological reports, missionary reports, really obscure stuff hunted down. And in a book like that, you can't provide all of them verbatim, so it's just a lot of brief summaries. So I'd like to provide, you know, have a nice good anthology of those accounts, medieval European accounts, Asian accounts from around the world and stuff like that. And that's going to be the next project. I'm also going to do a book on NDE's and the afterlife in Greece and Rome. That's kind of a little bit further down the pike. This book should be out in paperback, by the way, within, you know, probably less than a year. So that will, the current book on Indigenous religions. So that will be more affordable at a certain stage. I've kind of been, you know, pushing Oxford University Press to make it sooner than later, but hopefully it'll be, you know, early next year or something like that. And I also have a website, Gregory Shushan.com, and you can find different articles there. The one on African NDE's, I think, is where the Native American one is up there. So a lot of kind of stuff that came from this book and also a lot of the theoretical and methodological stuff. If any listeners are interested in these kinds of debates where, you know, certain scholars are saying everything is entirely culturally constructed and linguistically constructed. I kind of attack that stuff head on in a couple of articles. There's one on Vedic afterlife beliefs. So, you know, I try to keep this book, keep that stuff to a minimum in this book that are really heavy theory and method stuff to make it more accessible. So hopefully when it does come out in paperback, people will enjoy it. Well, it's an absolutely great contribution. And I really appreciate you joining us today and talking about it. So best of all that. And thanks again. Thanks. Anytime. Thanks again to Dr. Gregory Shushan for joining me today on Skeptico. The one question I guess I tee up from this interview is the question that Dr. Shushan is still wrestling with. And that is, do the differences we see in near death accounts across cultures make it more or less likely that near death experiences are genuine encounters with the afterlife with extended consciousness as I like to say. So I think you know my position on that, but I'd like to hear what you think and your understanding of pulling that apart in any way you see fit. So comment here if you're watching on YouTube or on the Skeptico forum or wherever you are. Let me know your thoughts. Do stay tuned. I have some more excellent, I think interviews coming up because there are just some extraordinary guests who are coming up and be sure to check out the Skeptico website where you can find all these interviews available for free. Thanks so much for watching and being a part of this project. I really do appreciate it. Until next time. Take care and bye for now.