 On this episode of Skeptico, a show about finding truth in science. There actually were a lot of accounts overtly saying this particular person died, went to the other world, and came back, and that's how we know what the afterlife was like. And I found, you know, 40, 50, 60 of them from different parts of the world. So that's not in dispute. The idea that for all these thousands of years and pretty much every cultural region of the planet, people have just been making things up and let's instead look at the world through our own sort of mechanistic, materialistic, scientific viewpoint, and say that no, it's all culture and it's all in the brain. To me, that's a pretty limited way of looking at the world and that to me seems completely illogical and unreasonable. And it's faith rather than science. It's people sticking to their predetermined philosophical paradigms rather than looking at the actual evidence and extrapolating from it. And a show about spotting scientists who are full of baloney. You don't have any answer in the Bible what to do when humans are no longer useful to the economy. You need completely new ideologies, completely new religions, and they are likely to emerge from Silicon Valley. Everything that the old religions promised, happiness and justice and even eternal life, but here on earth with the help of technology and not after death with the help of some supernatural being. What are humans for? As far as we know for nothing, I mean there is no great cosmic drama, some great cosmic plan that we have a role to play in it. This has been the story of all religions and ideologies and so forth, but as a scientist the best I can say this is not true. The first clip you heard was from today's guest Dr. Gregory Shushan who seemed to be a little bit embarrassed when I said he's doing some of the most important work in science period full stop. So in this introduction I had to pair his quote with one from a science darling right now, Dr. Yuval Harari who is named dropped by Barack Obama and Bill Gates and Zuckerberg and has sold 30 million books and is on 60 minutes and is all over the place. And of course is one of the key members in the world economic form great reset. That's just the way it is. But as that quote reveals, he's really not too well informed on science. Is he at least on the science we've explored here on Skeptico. He's certainly not up to date on why we're not biological robots in a meaningless universe. But we shall leave all that behind and turn our attention towards some great work done by a terrific scientist and researcher. Here's my chat with Dr. Gregory Shushan. Welcome to Skeptico where we explore controversial science and spirituality with leading researchers, thinkers and their critics. I'm your host Alex Cares and today we welcome Dr. Gregory Shushan back to Skeptico. He's here to talk about his terrific new book, The Next World, Extraordinary Experiences of the Afterlife. Now, in case you don't remember, no other way to put it, he's the world's leading scholar, leading authority on NDEs across culture and across time, across history. That's his specialty. And let me kind of backtrack a second and break down why that's so important. So in my estimation, I think a lot of people would have to agree with this. The near-death experience and the science associated with it is just about the most direct challenge slash contradiction to the dominant scientific paradigm in our culture, which is materialism. And nothing confronts that as directly as near-death experience does. And that's not hype. That's just the way that it is. I mean, if consciousness is shown to be real and extend beyond bodily death, then it's kind of a whole new ballgame for science. So here's Dr. Gregory Shushan. He comes along and he says, Gee, guys, I see that you have a lot of these near-death experience reports, but you still seem to be having a hard time figuring out if this phenomenon is real. Tell you what, I'm a distinguished scholar, Oxford College of London, post-doctorate fellowships, all that good stuff. And I know how to do this because I'm going to use the tried and true method of examining whether or not this phenomenon shows up across culture and across time. And if it does, then that'd be a go a long way towards kind of establishing the reality of this near-death experience. And if it doesn't, then it would suggest that maybe it's not what we think it is. So that's what he's done. He's done it better than anyone else. He's published a number of books, will pull up his website in a minute, many articles, many scholarly articles. And for anyone who's really paying attention to his work, he's kind of changed the world. This is phenomenally important research. I couldn't be more serious about it. This is the cutting edge, really, of scientific thought, which is what does it mean to have a near-death experience? What does that tell us about who we are, about as human beings? So I'm not hyping that one bit. I am super excited to have this guy on. You know I reference him all the time. I reference his work. I think it's super important. And Gregory, I'm just delighted to have you here. Thanks so much. Thank you, Alex. That's quite a buildup. And I hope I can live up to it. Well, you know, you don't even have to live up to it. Your book lives up to it. And that's where I think we should start. So this new book is The Next World, Extraordinary Experiences of the Afterlife. It's a very serious scholarly book written in a very accessible way. It's not going to overwhelm people. You can get it. But it's really important. So there's a lot of topics to talk about. Tell us what you think the book's most important kind of takeaways might be for people who are picking it up. I think for one thing is just the, I guess, negotiating the similarities and the differences in near-death experiences around the world. I guess the takeaway really is that whatever you think, it's not that simple, basically. So whether you're completely convinced that, you know, near-death experiences are just all in the brain and it's a dying brain and there's no such thing as this kind of phenomenon, it's hallucination. Or if you think that near-death experiences are, you know, absolutely evidence for an afterlife and that it's the same around the world and all humans have the same experience and we all go to the same afterlife. Then either of those positions, the book is probably going to make you think again because all of the other books about near-death experiences, very few of them really have taken into account the cross-cultural and historical stuff in formulating their theories about, you know, what a near-death experience is and what the phenomenon means for the debate about whether there's an afterlife or not. Right. It does all of that. And then this is kind of an extension. This book comes out of this ongoing research that you're doing, you know. So tell people about when that research started, how you've gone about it. We talked a little bit about this last time, but I think it's important for people to know your process. Sure. Yeah, I started off doing Egyptian archaeology and that was at University College London. And I, you know, you read things like the books, Books of the Dead and Pyramid Texts and Coffin Texts. And I just started noticing that in a very general way, the descriptions of the afterlife and these ancient texts echoed near-death experiences. So, for example, the soul leaves the body, travels through darkness, comes out into another realm, meets a being of light in the form of a sun god, has this evaluation of their earthly life. There's a sort of symbolic way of encountering the person's own corpse, which echoes the out-of-body experience. And that's where I say symbolic. It means they encounter the god of the underworld Osiris in the form of a corpse and the text state that that actually is the corpse of the person. So the person's being identified with all these deities and afterlife beings. And the idea behind it is that the realization that you're dead, but still conscious and still alive, enables you to proceed spiritually through the next world. So that was interesting to me. And I remembered a book by Carol Zaleski, Other World Journeys, where she compared near-death experiences with medieval afterlife, other world journey texts from medieval Europe. She concluded that, you know, it was all this kind of a product of the imagination, which to me was, you know, she kind of fell flat because she went through all this effort to show, look how similar they are. And then she said, but they're imaginary. So to me, that was not satisfying. And I thought just the opposite if their descriptions of the afterlife are similar to these visions of the afterlife, then, you know, what came first, basically. So if they're happening in ancient Egypt as well, that kind of starts you thinking that it wasn't just a cultural creation. So to test that, I compared the Egyptian afterlife texts with ancient India, ancient China, Aztec, and Maya, and ancient Sumer. And that was my first book, Conceptions of the Afterlife in Early Civilizations. That book's going to be revised and reprinted, by the way, next year under the title Near-Death Experience in Ancient Civilizations. So that will be accessible to people. The first edition of that book was like, as you know, 150 bucks or something. So nobody outside of academia was able to read it, 15 or 20 people within academia read it. Yeah, the dissemination, I'm sure, might have been disappointing. But I don't think the impact was disappointing. I mean, I'm pretty tuned to this community, Near-Death Experience Science Community, and they all have the highest regard for your work. And they all immediately understand the importance of it because the approach you've taken. The other thing I wanted to kind of add or have you talk more about it seems like every time I talk to you, you're like, buried in this process of digging up these accounts. You're gonna go, oh, yeah, you know, I found this other account. And oh, I just ran across this, which I just imagined you doing that. So tell people where you get these accounts and what that process is like. And is it as exciting as it sounds like you're having so much fun finding these? Or what is it like? Yeah, I mean, it is for me, I don't know if it would be for most people. If you enjoy, you know, long, long, long hours in libraries and on the internet and on, you know, websites like Internet Archive where they have tons and tons of, you know, public domain anthropology and religious studies and, you know, the stuff is out there. It's just a matter of finding it. So for example, for the Native American stuff, which I did in my second book. It's, I saw some scholar refer to it as leapfrogging. So you look in, you know, one of my main sources with it was this book, The North American Indian Orpheus tradition by a Swedish scholar, Akeholt Kruntz. And he was, that book is about journeys to the afterlife in order to rescue the soul of somebody who's in danger of dying. And then a shamanic sort of thing, and then how that was mythologized, you know, this process of shamanic experiences and NDEs turning into myths, which of course is a sort of central theme of my own work. So in that book, you know, he's 1957, and he's writing about near death experiences, you know, a couple of decades before any that word was even that this is even invented. So, you know, I went through that book, which is a fairly substantial book with a fine tooth comb and going back to the original reference from, you know, 1859 or 1689 or whatever was for each of these accounts and you know, are they really an NDE? Did they happen to, you know, allegedly an actual historical individual? Or is it a myth? Or is it a shamanic account or what? And then kind of, you know, categorizing them and analyzing them according to which of those categories they fall into. And then oftentimes, you know, I would follow, I'd get back to the original source, and then there'd be one or two other NDEs in there. And there'd be another one referencing, you know, see this other NDE that happened in 1767 for this particular book. So it's really an endless kind of process. And it's just a lot of a lot of leg of work if you can use that term. So I can only imagine. And then for the end result is for people to pick up this book, you have a good sense of this as a writer, I have to say, because you open up this book, and you boom, you hit us with story after story after story accounts, if you know, and the book opens up in the mid third century BC. In China, a man after several days of dying is revived and said he had witnessed all sorts of things related to demons and deities and heaven and earth and the sensation of being in a dreaming state and by no means dead. And then on each one of these paragraphs, I won't go through them all, but I maybe might highlight them. The last sentence is the real kicker to your point. This is just one of over 100 similar narratives from ancient and medieval China. So then you go to the next year, next paragraph is 700 years later, 5000 miles away in Greece. And then you tell this story from Greece, and then you say, again, you know, dozens and dozens of other story, then you go to all these different cultures. And it's super impressive as a reader, you're like, Whoa, there is something to this that is undeniable in a way. Yeah, yeah, I wanted to open it like that deliberately because, you know, I still keep reading things in the popular media or skeptically critics, saying things like, if near death experiences were real, they'd be happening all over the world and they don't, we don't see any evidence of that. So I wanted to put paid to that because it's ridiculous that people keep saying that the only reason they're saying that is because they haven't done the research because, you know, there are books out there, not just my, my three books, but, you know, Jim McClendon and Alan Kelly are people like this, Jenny Wade did a Native American one. So I wanted to highlight that, you know, the occurrence of these experiences and the existence of these events is just fact, you know, it's not in, it's not a matter for debate at all. And I want and in doing opening the book that way I wanted to show, you know, just the really wide diversity of where they happen all around the world and throughout history. The other thing that's really impressive to me is you marry that with a deep knowledge of near death experience science and you directly address that in the book in a way that I don't think some of your colleagues are really capable of handling. So I mean, you talk Samparnia, you talk, you know, Dr. Penny Sartori, you know, all those people, and you are able to kind of handle the evidence of that. So there's kind of this other moving part to your research, which is near death experience science, which has kind of come out of nowhere in the last 20 years, but has now advanced to the point that really no one directly challenges the reality of the phenomenon. They want to nibble around at the edges and stuff like that. But that's a sea change that plays right into what you're doing, but you fully embrace it. So what has been that process for you in terms of understanding near death experience science and what have been some of the highs and lows of that for you? Yeah, I mean, it's difficult because I'm not trained as a scientist. I mean, other than, you know, archaeology anthropology, kind of social sciences, a little bit of, you know, empirical stuff in archaeology, but certainly not anything like, you know, cardiology or with these actual indie scientists are. So it's, yeah, it's definitely a learning curve, trying to figure out what evidence actually is compelling, what is, you know, just anecdotal, but nevertheless compelling, and, you know, trying to just negotiate and get my head around it. But then really the purpose of that is to look at that work in light of my own work, in other words. So the kind of central question is really, you know, given all the cross-cultural similarities and cross-cultural existence of NDEs, what kind of afterlife could be possible if we accept all the evidence of NDEs from these, you know, mainstream scientists. And the other question being, how does the diversity and inconsistencies between NDE accounts correspond with, you know, the survival hypothesis for NDEs? Absolutely. And that's what really is going to propel all of us forward, because you've now raised the bar in terms of the level three kind of questions that we all have to ask. But I would return to, you know, like, your work looks one way if there's no there there. If you are constantly having to prove, no, really, this is real, there really is this phenomenon and look, you know, then you're one way. Or if you just are able to lean on that, which you can and should, it's appropriate and say, well, these people have kind of established this to this point. Now, exactly what you said, it jumps us to the next level question, which is, how is this different than the shamanic experience? What about these angels and demons and purgatory in hell? What about pre-cognitive experiences or advanced information that you couldn't have gained otherwise in these realms? All that stuff now comes on the table. And now we're again, turning to you and going, Oh, I wonder, how does that look through this worldwide cultural filter rather than our narrow cultural filter? And how does it sync with ours and doesn't sync with ours? So there's just a number of jumping off points. They're kind of laid out in the chapters of your book. What interests you as one to jump into? Yeah, the, the non scientific yet nevertheless, evidential stuff I think is really interesting. So for example, the peak and Darien experience, which is when a near death experience or it goes to the other world and meets somebody that they don't know had actually died on earth or unaware of that person's death. And then they come back and they find out that that person had died after all. So, you know, they'll meet, you know, their Uncle Joe or whatever and come back. And everyone's excited that they've come back to life. But, you know, by the way, Uncle Joe died while you were dead. And so that, you know, is basically confirmation that the vision that they had in the other world of Uncle Joe was was vertical. And then there are also other things like there's a really interesting Mormon example, which seems to, you know, indicate some kind of predestiny. There was a guy named Mr. Monson. I don't think they give us his first name from 1923. And he dies and has an NDE. That's a very brief one. And he's met by his daughter. His daughter died 23 years before he did. And she told him to go back to earth. And the reason he had to go back is because his six year old son has to die first, then his mother has to die. And then his wife has to die. And then it will be his turn. So he returns to life and within a few months, his mother dies and his son dies. And then his wife dies a few years later in the exact order that he was told they would die. So, you know, that brings up all kinds of weird things. For one thing, it's, you know, it seems to be an evidential confirmation of his visiting his daughter who died 23 years earlier. But for another thing, it raises all kinds of, to me, uncomfortable questions about predestiny and, you know, whether what happened if he hadn't come back, what if his body had been totally mangled and was uninhabitable? And he interrupted that flow or what if his, you know, one of his people who were supposed to die in this particular order, what if one of them died in an accident out of order? So it's just, it kind of reaches my boggle threshold at that point. But I would also say that it's equally interesting and you know me, I'm always like straddling going back and forth between these things. Equally interesting is these cases from the late 80s, Kenneth Ring in the US and Margot Gray in the UK independently started finding these cases of NDES coming back and saying, you know, we had this apocalyptic vision. The world is going to end within a certain number of years. It's going to be, you know, a nuclear war or environmental catastrophe or whatever, very, very similar in both the UK and US totally unrelated studies, unknown to each other. And even mentioning the same years, 1988 apparently came up the most often, but it was either late 80s, early 90s. And of course, none of this came to pass. We didn't have a global catastrophe. And we're certainly not now in a golden age, which is what they also predicted that, you know, the catastrophe would be followed by a golden age. So how do we understand the false divine revelations that people get in NDES? Apparently false, whatever that means. And there's like a ton to pull apart there. And I didn't go back to the very first part, what you said is, what does it say about death? Like, even the part that's kind of, you know, the I see people that I didn't know or deceased. And now I find out that they are deceased. That is saying something that we can't really pin down in terms of what death and life means, right? Because which perspective are we on, you know, the ND years always tell, we're returning home and this is really where we're from. And we have these soul groups and we decided, well, how does that, how does death and life? Is that what it looks like? And then as you mentioned, the whole time thing is just crazy. And it gets into all sorts of issues like parapsychology, pre cognitive, pre cognitive dreams. Andy Paquette, Dr. Andy Paquette's been on the show has recorded thousands of pre cognitive dreams and has gone to great lengths to document the accuracy of them and highly accurate. What does that mean about this space time continuum that we're in? And then we have plenty of accounts where it, I don't know, the trickster isn't we're they're directly trying to mess with us, right? They're directly trying to tell us stuff that maybe isn't true. And we don't know why and why would they screw with us and what they do all this stuff. But but through all that, and this is what I want you to also kind of touch on. And this is the strength of your book is you're able to kind of get to that next level and say, this is really messy. And it gets really messy all over the place, whichever way you look at the same time. There's these consistent themes. There's these consistent truths that seem to be profound. In terms of the way that we've tried to answer these questions up to now, which has been, as you point out in the book, just unbelievably absurdly inadequate. What do you think about the patterns that do seem to emerge from your work? I wanted to test that further beyond NDEs. And so there's a chapter on mediumship and not just, you know, again, I'm not looking at the evidence for and against mediumship. But what I did is I wanted to find, you know, the most highly rated mediums in the history of research and then see what descriptions of the afterlife were transmitted through those mediums allegedly by souls in the afterlife. And, you know, compare that with NDEs because like you said at the beginning, I sort of see NDEs as the baseline for evidence for an afterlife. It's the most compelling of any of the different kinds of psychical research phenomena from my perspective. And I wanted to see to what degree the mediumship, mediumistic descriptions of the afterlife correspond with what people who have had NDEs tell us about what the afterlife is like. And that's a really interesting and in a way it reflects the cross-cultural and historical differences and similarities of NDEs. Because what I found was that there are all these typical elements of NDEs, you know, leading the body and going to another realm and deceased relatives and spiritual beings and evaluation of your life and all this kind of stuff. But then there are very highly culturally specific descriptions of what that other world is like. And keeping in mind that most of this stuff comes from Victorian and Edwardian England. It's no surprise that the afterlife is basically an idealized version of Victorian and Edwardian England. And certainly not enlightened in the sense that people who have had NDEs come back and tell us, you know, I experienced oneness with the universe. There's no difference between me and any of my fellow human beings were all of this collective consciousness. I have universal understanding in the, you know, summerland, which is what they called it in the Victorian Edwardian mediumship, it's, you know, hierarchies are maintained between classes, between religions, between races. And it's very much just a duplicate where nothing's bad. It's basically England where everything was perfect. So to me, that's not very convincing. Then there's also really wacky stuff like, you know, Sir Walter Scott says that there's salamander flame beings living in the sun. And, you know, there's mermaids and giants and all this kind of obviously dreamlike or hallucinatory descriptions. So again, how do you square that with the similarities with, with NDEs? Well, it's hard because every, every where we turn, we're kind of shackled with this language, you know, when we say it's obviously hallucinatory. We don't know, right? Because what some people conclude is that you are being presented with what you need at that time. So what it, you know, and that we can't say that that's, that's just a theory, but it could fit in this too. To some of your other points, I think are super interesting to me is this question of they're being a moral imperative, they're being good or bad, they're being individual souls versus collective souls. And you kind of have to hash that out, especially in light of what some of your colleagues have said, because we do have this kind of academia, wokeness overlay on it that says that, and you just directly confront this. But, you know, there, there is no experience other than that can be separated from the culture. There's nothing, you know, and as you point out that, that can have a very racist, unknowingly, it can have a very racist or certainly cultural superiority kind of vibe to it. And so we, that's, that's an equally a problem of this whole thing, right? So on one hand, yeah, these people do seem to be layering on their cultural thing. And then when we say, oh, yeah, it's all cultural, well, that doesn't really make any sense either any thoughts on that. That's a really good point because a lot of, you know, especially in religious studies, they see mysticism, and, you know, any kind of religious experience, including in the ease as totally generated by the cultural tradition that they're a part of, but they neglect the fact that these experiences are spontaneous, that there is no tradition associated with, you know, having an NDE being hit by a bus or having a heart attack and leaving your body and coming back, you know, that's not a tradition. There's not a practice that people, you know, engage in. It's not like, here's how to have, well, there is, you know, in shamanism, there's sort of like how to have an NDE, but for the most part. Hold on. So let's talk about that because that's next. But every one of these has a contradiction to it. It's kind of interesting. But back to what you were saying of that they're not spontaneous. Well, the other thing I remember from your previous book that I think is just really, really amazing. And what I was kind of hold up to people is you found that the many of the near death experiences from these cultures are directly connected to the reason why they have the afterlife belief system that they do. And that is extremely powerful. And you also offer kind of the supporting evidence of that of like when, you know, they say, oh, yeah, we used to believe this. And then Joe had his NDE and we started believing this. And then it was confirmed by this. So I think that's really powerful. Do you want to kind of recap that? And then, and then, because I think that also then ties into the, or could be an explanation for some of the shamanic things. Oh, you got to drink this poison. I'll hit you at the club. So you'll die, you know, because it fits in with what you're saying. It's like this is a tremendous gift to have this knowledge. Let's get more of it no matter even if I have to kill you to do it. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, that was my second book, which is near death experience and indigenous religions. That's I think the one you're referring to that. Yeah, it kind of delves deeply into it's very different from the first book because the first book was looking at, you know, afterlife beliefs and trying to match them up with new death experience to see if, you know, were these beliefs influenced by NDE's. But there wasn't a lot of evidence or actual accounts for NDE's in those ancient civilizations, with the exception of China, as you mentioned, and one or two and Miss America and India. But I'm looking at the, you know, small scale indigenous societies, which used to be called tribal in, you know, the Native Americans, Pacific areas and Africa. There actually were a lot of accounts overtly saying, you know, this particular person historical person, like grandfather whoever died went to the other world and came back. And that's how we know what the afterlife was like. So just overtly totally stating, you know, we are afterlife knowledge comes from near death experiences. So to determine D that's what they would have been saying. And I found, you know, 4050 60 of them from different parts of the world. So, so that's not in dispute. So, so these scholars you were mentioning earlier who say, No, these are all culturally generated. That is basically, you know, indisputable proof that these experiences preceded their beliefs and the only way to argue that they weren't is to say, all of those people were lying. And, and which is a totally ethnocentric, you know, pretty racist thing to say. Yeah, you really come out in the appendix, the first appendix, I think very appropriately call to task, what's going on here with exactly what you just described and how it is absurd. It's not reasonable. It isn't logical. It isn't very convincing. So I'll read a quote from that appendix. The humanities have limited our knowledge of the origins and development of religious and ritual systems and therefore of human cultural development. Hmm. I want to go the next step with that. But the first thing we have to do is make sure we're getting that. How is that limiting our cultural development? I would say, how is it directing our cultural development in a certain way? I would say it's denying that there's any value or importance to these experiences, or even the next stage of denying that they even happen is turning a blind eye to a whole category of human phenomena that's been, you know, attested for pretty much as long as humans have been recording their experiences. I think the earliest, you know, Andy is probably in the precursor to the Epic of Gilgamesh. Epic of Gilgamesh is old enough, but the actual earlier Sumerian version. So there's, you know, the idea that, you know, for all these thousands of years and pretty much every cultural region of the planet, people have just been making things up and let's instead look at the world through our own sort of mechanistic, materialistic, scientific viewpoint and say that, no, it's all culture and it's all in the brain. To me, that's a pretty limited way of looking at the world and it's also ignoring, I mean, even just as an anthropological way, it's ignoring the most key experience type that could explain afterlife beliefs and I just, and that to me seems completely illogical and unreasonable. And it's faith rather than science. It's people sticking to their predetermined philosophical paradigms rather than looking at the actual evidence and extrapolating from it. And I'd go one step further and say there might be a purpose behind it. And the purpose may be that to promote the idea that you are a biological robot in a meaningless universe makes you easier to control. I mean, we're going through that right now with whatever you think about the pandemic and the great reset and the economic form. That is exactly what they've cited now is that science proves that we are meaningless in terms of the larger universe. We do and it just falls right out of that. There's no such thing as a soul. There's no such thing as God, all of that. And I connect that to just then the decisions we would make about how to organize and run our society slash culture and how to do that moving forward and whether we should all be in a hive mind as Dr. Dean Raiden recently said in an interview with him, all those questions, the philosophical underpinning to those is exactly this point. Are you essentially a biological robot in a meaningless universe or is there evidence that you are more? Whatever that more is, you know, we don't have to throw Jesus in their boot in there. Just is there more or is there not more? And I think you're rightfully calling out these folks and saying, Hey, the evidence overwhelmingly is more. Now we just have to figure out what that more is. And here are some clues that are being kind of laid at our feet to try and put together. What do you think about that? Yeah, I think I think that is a good extrapolation of it all. And, you know, one thing that, you know, despite all the divisions and chaos going on in the world, one thing that we all share in common is that we're going to die, essentially. And the other thing that we all share in common is that we really don't know, you know, we might believe, but we don't know what's going to happen to us when we die. So that's something that really should, in a sense, bring us together. And it's a commonality that, you know, it's the great leveler, the death. Throughout history, it has brought us together, right? I mean, isn't that part of history is that that is the humanity that we share even when we see that we're not sharing it and we veer away from it. Ultimately, people come together and they go, I realize your loss because something happened that, you know what I mean? Yeah. I realize your, for some reason can't do that about the other, you know, about people that we perceive as different from us. And the, you know, the, I don't want to get political, but the war in Ukraine is a good example you've got, you know, and it's a horrible thing. I'm not going to, you know, belittle that or diminish that in any sense, but there have also been at the same time, you know, equal suffering and equally horrible wars going on in countries where people are of darker skin. People who are not like us and, you know, when the war first started happening, the media was a lot of the reflections in the media was like, Oh, but they look just like us. These are people just like us. These aren't people in the Middle East, you know, wearing rags on their heads or whatever, you know, horrible term they would use. So, so you're right, you know, people will be brought together with death and suffering and mourning if they're within their own community. But why can't they also say, you know, that person's death is equally as tragic as mine, or as my family members. I'm with you 100%. But we don't even have a shot of it. If we buy into biological robot meaningless universe, then there's no reason to even contemplate the injustice, the inequality, the all the rest of it, which I know you're down with. You know, my thought might be interesting is to kind of get your take on where you think we stand based on your research about some of the biggest questions that people have about the near-death experience. So one is hell. I mean, there's no two ways about it. You know, people suppress asking that question. But that really is number one for a lot of people. Is there a chance I'm going to go to hell? Is that whole thing real? So from what you've learned, how do you sort that out? I mean, there are negative distressing or hellish or whatever you want to call them, NDEs. They're not very common. And I think there's some argument that they're, you know, more disorganized than a more positive, more typical NDE than maybe they're more hallucinatory. Can you think of some cases? Can you think of some stories? You have a bunch of them here. I can pull them up. Yeah, go ahead. I remember this. I remember this last time that you probably got like a million of these things in your head. Spanish monk named Peter died and was a steward of life. He described seeing men he knew suffering torments in hell and being rescued by the same fate by an angel. And you have a bunch of other medieval accounts. This is in the 15th, 16th century. Yeah, a lot of there's a lot of hellish medieval accounts. And there's also a lot of hellish Buddhist accounts. And I think that very much reflects those religions, you know, a medieval Christianity. But Gregory, you got some hellish Native American accounts in there too, right? There's a couple, but I think overall there's a there's not a pattern, I think of hellish Native American ones. And it's not that, you know, the medieval and Buddhist medieval ones as well have a monopoly on hellish NDEs. But I think there is an overall concern with them. And that I think reflects the overall concern within the religions for going to hell and for suffering. And a lot of them, especially the medieval ones, a lot of them are really long. They're obviously, you know, elaborated. I would say even I would even go so far as to say they're either totally literary based on some earlier NDE, or they have a kernel of an NDE in there but it's been turned into this, you know, didactic, educating teaching to warn people about the dangers of hell and to behave better so they'll go to heaven. Which is not to say, you know, that these monks didn't have a negative or distressing NDE, especially if they're sitting around all day drawing pictures of demons and they've got these ideas in their head. So, so I think they're, and I guess that brings us all the way back to the whole question of how much are they creating their own experience because they're expecting a hellish NDE. And how much would they have had in any way, if they weren't constantly, you know, delving into that that kind of imagery and ideas. A bunch of thoughts popped in my but one is that the shamanic accounts certainly are have plenty of accounts of those places that you don't want to go. Right. And you got to believe, you know, just based on the natural conclusion from your work is that there's a relationship there between the near death experience accounts and the shamanic journey knowledge and they're interplaying with each other. What advice do you have in terms of how we go about the counting process, you know, which we're all into 84% of NDEers experienced this and 22% of women in, you know, I see the I see both sides that I mean we want that we need that into a certain extent. And in other ways, we don't know what we're looking at. We're looking at still a relatively few number of accounts. We don't know the process by which those are being filtered just from a physiological standpoint. Why are some people remembering some people aren't in and what distress states of dying or, you know, others just, we could be totally looking at distorted data. How do we be careful about counting? Yeah, that's a great question. I don't know. I mean, I think with the historical and cross cultural stuff that's impossible because there just aren't enough records out there. But as far as, yeah, how many people, you know, in the United States, for example, have NDE's who have been temporarily dead clinically temporarily dead and come back to life. So what percentage of those see a tunnel what percentage is, you know, see a being of light. Every time I start kind of trying to, you know, get to some conclusion about that it just starts seeming like, like chaos to me. And it's almost like with with mediumship or with like trickster stuff that you mentioned. It's almost like the closer you get or the closer you feel like you're getting to some, you know, scientific objective understanding of this stuff. Further back, you know, it's it's like a receding landscape as as you're trying to get closer to it. And that's kind of reminds me to like, you know, the grace and scale of NDE's, which, and even Moody trying to find, you know, these 15 elements and then Moody himself saying, these are the elements of an NDE, however, not everybody has each of those experiences. Subsequent researchers like Grayson and whoever else coming along and saying, you know, okay, let's try to narrow this down let's try to figure out what all these elements actually are and actually they get expanded far beyond what Grayson said, but these are the particular ones that all NDE years and it's just impossible, you know, there's it's proven. I mean they're great tools and they're necessary for us to identify this repertoire from which NDE's pull of sub experiences. But yeah, I don't think we're ever going to get to all NDE years have this experience. And that's, to me reflects the possibility that maybe we just don't all have the same kind of afterlife. Absolutely. That's a great point. And I think Grayson himself is has tried to kind of pump the brakes a little bit and say hey, yeah, you know, great. Glad it's useful as a tool but realize the limitations here, you know, yeah, that's great. And I guess that relates to kind of another one that I'd like you to kind of process is the big one is this hierarchical nature of consciousness and, you know, is there it's commonly reported in the Western things, you know, I saw Jesus, I saw God, I saw even just I saw angels, I saw beings that knew more than I could ever know, I saw people beings that assisted me, I saw light, you know, all the rest that suggest and they suggested that there was more beyond it and that there was this hierarchical nature of it. And then you hear other accounts that are more kind of not so much, you know, just kind of moved into the light I moved into the love it was a kind of the unity consciousness thing. How are you processing that question from the accounts you've looked at. I tend to think that it's kind of along the Tibetan Buddhist belief or theory really that it's sort of a case of overlaying our own perceptions and symbols and cultural consciousness onto these experiences that exist in any case so I'm not saying we're creating the experience but we're, you know, projecting our own symbols onto the experience. So, some person might see a being of light as, you know, Uncle Joe again, or a grandparent or parent or whatever. And some people might think it's Jesus. And some people might think it's the Buddha or Mohammed or whatever. To me that's the most logical way of making sense of all of it, because you know, otherwise it brings up too many questions of, well, why isn't this person seeing Jesus. And it's like, well, okay, because they're a Muslim. You know, why would they see Jesus. But, you know, of course evangelical Christians aren't going to like that answer because Jesus has to be the objective son of God for the entire world, not just for them. And it would be the same with Muslims or anyone else. And I think your work goes way beyond the kind of usual religious stuff. Again, and that's the advantage of, you know, going cross culture. But what do you think about kind of the love positive feeling, you know, all that kind of stuff is also suggestive in a way of the same thing, you know. Yeah. So there's different ways you slice it. So you can slice it and dice it and say there's this overlay. Yeah, we get it. But is there a there there, you know, I mean, I think whenever I hear people talk about the Buddhist stuff, and they talk about it from this atheistic perspective, and I want to go time out that's purely a way you want to talk about a Western overlay. There's no Buddhist in history that would even connect with the idea of being a I mean, that was assumed that of course there is, you know, this ultimate consciousness and it's good and it's loving and it's all the rest of that so And I think that's that comes through in the work and in the accounts that you have of this goodness, which is the most widely reported experience among the near death experience is love is this indescribable love it's not the tunnel it's not their life review. It's that I just felt home I felt love I felt connection. And I see that all over the place in the accounts you're talking about. Yeah, yeah, it's maybe not always put in those terms exactly but it is almost always, you know, the negative distressing accounts, leaving them aside for now, but it is almost always a place of something positive, a place where the person brings back some kind of positive knowledge or some kind of new religious tradition or cultural tradition. There's an example I always think of from Native American accounts, where the guy was told. You need to go back and tell your people that wife beating is not acceptable. And for another thing, the dead don't need your offerings. We don't need you to keep, you know, basically wasting your resources by slaughtering buffalo or, you know, burning grain or whatever because, you know, the belief was that they would burn these offerings and that they would ascend to the other world and feed the the ancestors, and they said we don't need them. So that's obviously a positive thing for the community. So they have, you know, better resources and they don't have to be wasteful and I have to hunt as much or whatever So that's not necessarily necessarily love explicitly but these are all things that are beneficial to to society. And that's that is really a cross cultural consistency that there's, you know, nobody is told in the other world, you know, you need to go back to your Because you have to go, I don't know, do a school shooting. That's that's that's the, you know, your destiny that you need to fulfill once you've done that you can come back, you know, that that doesn't happen. I think that you know what, full stop right there. It's really interesting that that never happens. And you can go search Jeff Long's in the RF database, and you can Google search for thousands and thousands of accounts. It's never there. So kind of interesting on that thing. And related point to that, I guess, is the moral imperative question that again, you know, the accounts that I remember and I want to make sure I'm not just kind of cherry picking, but so many accounts from so many different traditions, including kind of more of these non Western cultures, where they say, you know, do good, go back and change your wicked ways and be better and be a better man, you know, kind of thing thoughts on on the moral imperative and do good. Yeah. Yeah, there was a famous one that I like by AJ air who was a materialist philosopher. And after he had his ND and came back, his wife said, you know, he's much better since he died, he's a much nicer person. So, but yeah, that's that is a pretty universal common thing too and it's again, you know, bringing back new strictures new ideas and new recommendations for better behavior, things like that. But it's also a pretty common. And, and this is interesting in light of light of that question, pretty commonly are told to go back and tell people about your experience and that there is another world, and that, you know, teach them about the afterlife essentially. So that's almost seen as, you know, a moral imperative thing to do that people need to learn about these kinds of experiences and maybe, you know, going back to what I was saying earlier that, you know, the one thing we have in common is we're all going to die. Maybe that's the kind of thing that people need to hear that there is this something beyond this, this current world that, you know, we're all going to, I don't know, think about what you're doing now because we're going to be going to another metamorphosis at a later date. So, Gregory, what do you think about the technology angle to this? Because as a lot of people have pointed out, it seems to us that we have more indie ears around than ever before because we've had this advanced medical technology that allows us to I think that's kind of undeniable. You can't really get around that. How are you processing that in this whole thing? You know, I mean, is there some limitation to the message coming through that, you know, is being helped along by technology? I'm just, I can't get comfortable with that, but that seems to be somewhere some of the data is leading. What do you think? We mean that the people brought back from with technology are having more limited experiences? Not more limited, just there's more of them. So we say, what does it mean that there's more near-death experiences now than there were 50 years ago? And one, do we think that's true? And then two, what would possibly, you know, back to what you're saying about, you know, go tell the people, you know, is there a way of go tell the people? You know, we give them those paddles and then they'll come back and more people tell people. Yeah, that is a good point. And, you know, when I say like I found 70 examples of Native American Indies, 70 might seem like a lot because before that, people only knew about five or 10 of them were acknowledged. But that's over a period of, you know, from 1589 to 1940s or something. So 70 over that amount of time, it really isn't that many when you have probably hundreds a day happening now. So, yeah, conceivably, you know, it would be nice if this culture were open enough for people who have Indies to be able to come back and feel safe talking about them. But I think there's still a stigma about that. So I think any of those figures are probably skewed by the idea that a lot of people are just too afraid to talk about them because they're going to be seen as crazy. And, you know, given psych drugs or whatever, ostracized by the community. And even, you know, that's also a factor cross-culturally because in some of the Micronesian and Australian and African tribal accounts, there was a sort of a hostility to people seeming to come back to life. So, you know, in our, in Western cultures, generally speaking, if one of our loved ones died and came back, we'd be rushing to their side and everyone would be, you know, crying tears of joy and saying this is a miracle. But in some other cultures, they would be seen as like, you know, oh, yeah. Yeah, a zombie has come back to life where this person must be possessed by sorcery and they're a threat to the community. And yeah, we need to put a stop to that. And another interesting thing about that is one of the reasons there are so few Indies in those cultures, aside from the fact that they might be killed if they come back, is that they would actually go to quite, you know, extreme measures to prevent people from coming back. So if somebody, you know, during a burial, they would bind their hands and feet, they'd put stones on top of the grave. So it's just the opposite of, you know, the modern medical advances that bring about more resuscitations. So it would be interesting if, you know, different cultures around the world are starting to get access to this kind of technology. And we get more and more Indies from, you know, smaller cultures and, you know, Thailand and Tibet and Arab countries and whatever. You know, there are very few Muslim Indies known, for example. So hopefully that will, you know, that will be one of the positive effects of this technology. And just returning to that one second. But you don't make anything of the fact that that technology has advanced. I mean, back to this thing, there's this moving target, right? There's this new death experience science, there's this increased awareness, there's this cultural change. And now, boom, at the same time, this technology emerges that is suddenly, you know, making this much more prevalent. So there's a lot of people that jump to some kind of metaphysical conclusions about that. I don't necessarily want to go there, but I don't want to limit the possibility. Is there a reason why the technology has advanced at this time? I see what you mean. Yeah. Wow, I don't know. Yeah, I mean, I wouldn't even know how to go about addressing a question like that. Because to me, it opens up too many cans of worms because who's who would be responsible for introducing that technology to us, you know, who is determining that there's a reason and all that kind of stuff. Yeah, there's too many things to accept before they'd be willing to go there. Fair enough. And I think, as anyone who reads the book will see, you were really, you know, rolling your sleeves up and digging into these tough issues surrounding that, but you're not going to be kind of pushed into wild speculation that ventures beyond where your data is taking you. And that's what we're looking for from your excellent work here. Thanks. Yeah, I loved the last interview we did, how your headline for it was something like, you know, Gregory Shoshan rankles skeptics and believers. I'm deliberately trying to wrinkle, but I am, you know, I will pretty much come up with, you know, the opposite argument for whatever, or not our opposite argument, but I can, I'm willing to see both sides of kind of any argument. So, which in a way, you know, it does frustrate people because people want to say, Oh, the cross cultural similarity doesn't that just mean it's a dying brain. And no, it's not really the case. And other people say, Well, doesn't that mean that, you know, there's a universal afterlife and it's all the same spirituality? No, it's not that either. Well, Gregory, the underlying ethos of this show is inquiry to perpetuate doubt. So you're right at home here, buddy. Let me tell you. Thanks, Alex. Yeah. But at the same time, because I always like jumping over on the other side too. I appreciate the intellectual agnostic openness, you know, like what I always say from a spiritual perspective, none of us are agnostic. We wake up every day and that little voice inside our head is yammering away and we're going to decide what our relationship is with that consciousness. And that is our spirituality. So any insights into how you are processing that from a personal spiritual perspective? Yeah, that's a great question because they like the Mormon example I gave earlier, with the whole predestiny thing, it's just like, I don't even want to go there. I don't like the idea of predestiny, or, or these kind of, you know, quantum physics type explanations for an afterlife or for a soul. It's just, you know, it's, it takes me outside of the, you know, historical humanities cross cultural stuff. And it's interesting. But yeah, it's difficult. I just know I come with my own biases. Another one is, you know, you probably know Anthony Peak and his, his idea that we're reliving our own lives over and over at the Groundhog Day kind of thing. And I, you know, it's really interesting his work is, is interesting. But I just don't want to, you know, my mind just thinks, no, don't want to do it. So I don't know if it's just that I don't like the idea or that, you know, it doesn't correspond with, you know, the other stuff that I'm finding, but we all have our limits of where we want to go with this stuff. Aliens and UFOs is another one for me. I don't like going to the relationship between there being an afterlife and aliens or ayahuasca deities being aliens and that that's all the same realm as an afterlife. It takes me a little beyond my, my comfort zone. But I think you do it in a, in a smart way because you don't, you know, shy away from like hallucinogenic kind of experiences, at least in terms of mentioning that they have to be part of this discussion of transformative, non-ordinary experiences. And we don't know what that means. So that has to be on the table as well. You know, the other thing I was going to throw in there that is kind of interesting, you know, when you do start at the NDE, even the predestiny stuff, that all kind of falls away. It's like, right, because there's plenty of counts of people that you can choose, you can go back or you can not go back. Wait, I thought it was all tested. You know, I thought, back to your point of like, do you have to go back? Do you have to die in that order? Or, you know what I mean? It's like, it's very... Same with reincarnation. You know, you've got, in the Indian traditions of Hinduism and Buddhism, you don't have this idea where you choose your next life and, you know, you get to have a preview of it basically. Whereas in the Western examples, you know, they often will say that. And to me, that's another place where my, you know, it hits my agnostic threshold to where I feel like I can accept the randomness of it in Hinduism and Buddhism, or the sort of general karmic progression that, you know, you're going to get a slightly better life if you did a bit better in this life. But I can't accept everyone choosing their own lives because then, you know, who chooses to be, you know, a victim of violence or in the middle of the war and who chooses to be the perpetrator of that violence. So, you know, it could be that that happens and it just really is a totally morally a neutral system and universe. But I sort of choose to think like if any of this is real and true, then that kind of thing doesn't really make sense to me. The choice of, you know, participating in moral and violent acts as a means to spiritual progression. You know, it's like a complete, it's a twisted kind of thing to my mind. I agree. And as soon as you say that, people want to jump in and give you all sorts of explanations and particularly people who claim to be, and I'm not denying, you know, people have abilities to connect and you're saying the mediumship. But then when they come in and all the pad answers that, you know, I'm like you, I'm like, pause all that stuff. So Dr. Shushan, where next, where do you go next with this important work? I'm putting together a historical anthology of new death experiences, which is going to be just that like a lot of the accounts that I talk about in my books. You know, just for reasons of space by necessity, I've had to give, you know, short descriptions of them or, you know, a little extract from them. But I thought putting together a book of, you know, full verbatim accounts from across time would be a fun thing to do. So that's, that's a long project. But it's, it's kind of making a little progress. And then eventually I'm going to do one on kind of sighing because it's such a daunting project. And I've been thinking about it a long time, but I want to do your death experiences and classical antiquity and kind of looking at all the verbatim accounts that we have from from Greece and Rome, but also at how they interact with the ritual side of things. So ancient mystery cults, for example, in mystery cults, you know, people would enter into these cave like temples and I kind of see them as reenactments of NDE is a kind of shamanic reenactment. So it will be partly that and then also how ancient early Christian NDE is kind of fit into that world as well. But that's, that's a long way off. But I've also, I don't know if you know about this, but I started a new imprint of white crow books called After World's Press. And that's an exciting venture because I get to pretty much publish any books that I want in this area of research. So the first one is when I mentioned at the beginning, the Archive Holds, France, one about Native American NDE's and shamanism and afterlife beliefs. The second one is by a German scholar, you might have run across this book to die is gain. And it was a came out the same year as Moody's book in this country, but it was a couple years before in Germany. And he's basically he, you know, independently discovered NDE's at the same time as Moody and he has a totally different take on it. He comes at it from the perspective of spirituality and theology and philosophy, and kind of delving deeply into those questions about, you know, what do these beliefs mean for our life on earth and what do they mean for the future and, you know, the intertwining of NDE's with philosophy and the afterlife. So, so that's an exciting project and a whole kind of different term I can take. Absolutely. So we will look for that through an imprint of white crow. And what is your imprint name? It's called After World's Press. After World's Press. Great. Well, we'll definitely keep an eye out for that. Yeah, thanks. It's been absolutely terrific having you on. I wish you the best of luck with this latest book and with, of course, just your research in general. It's terrific. The name of the book again is The Next World Extraordinary Experiences of the Afterlife. And our guest has been Dr. Gregory Shushan. Thank you, Alex. Thanks again to Dr. Gregory Shushan for joining me today on Skeptico. One question to tip from this interview. What is the importance of the near-death experience accounts across culture and history that Shushan has documented? How do those fit into the larger and most pressing scientific issues we face, like those featured by Yuval Harari, who we played the clip from at the beginning? Let me hear your thoughts. Love to hear from you. There's only really one place to do it if you want to talk to me, Skeptico Forum. I've tried kind of going in other places, but it kind of never really works out, so not on Facebook, not on Twitter, not on YouTube really. But I am on Skeptico Forum if you ever want to chat. So once again, thanks for joining me. Glad you're here. Until next time, take care, and bye for now.