Dr Angela Puca AP: Hello everyone. I’m Dr Angela Puca and this is the Live Symposium. As you know I am a PhD and a university lecturer and a university researcher and I’m so glad to be here with Dr Gregory Shushan. Am I pronouncing your surname right?

Dr Gregory Shushan GS: Yeah, close enough. Shushan.

AP: Shushan, OK. Yeah, happy Halloween or Samhain to all of you celebrating. I’m really glad to be having these conversations with you, Gregory. So would you mind introducing yourself to my audience?

GS: Yeah, I’m Gregory Shushan and I’m a researcher on cross-cultural afterlife beliefs and particularly their relationships to near-death experiences. And I then research mostly in comparing ancient civilisations and then also indigenous societies in the Pacific and North America and Africa. And trying, really, to focus on the areas and societies that don’t have much or any, first of all, Christian influence or any external religious influence and also very little interaction between them. So I can get kind of discrete samples as much as possible.

AP: Oh wow, that’s fantastic. Yeah, I’ve been familiar with your research for quite some time now. Also, I think this conversation is a bit overdue. But yeah, I’m really glad to have you here.

GS: Thanks for having me on.

AP: And before we dive deeper into the conversation I would just like to remind everybody that if you have any questions you can SuperChat them and so I will just highlight them on screen and Dr Shushan can answer that. And obviously by the end and in the infobox or the show notes you will find the links to Dr Shushan’s website and his new book that we will definitely talk about during this conversation and to his Patreon. I highly recommend you guys to check everything out and yeah, if you want to support my work, of course, I will also appreciate your support on Patreon and with all the usual ways of supporting the channel that discuss with you guys.

Hello, Andrew and Dave in the chat.

So let’s move on to our conversation. So I’d like to ask you first, how did you get into this kind of research? What was your academic journey in studying these matters?

GS: Sure, yeah, I did my first degree which was a BA in Egyptian Archaeology in UCL, University College London and we were reading about afterlife texts, Books of the Dead and Coffin Texts and Pyramid Texts and things like that and I was just kind of noticing that a lot of the descriptions of the afterlife journey were consistent with some of the phenomena related to near-death experiences in a very broad, general way and obviously filtered through Egyptian culture and symbolism. But for example, they would describe, obviously, the soul leaves the body in the form of the ba bird and then there is the experience of travelling through the darkness, through tunnels, through gates and things like that. Emerging into light, encountering a being of light in the form of the sun god Ra. And there are deceased relatives in the other world that the person meets. There’s a kind of transformation and association with divinity and all the different deities. So the person sort of explicitly becomes the Sun God even though they are travelling around the circuit of the afterlife with the Sun God and they become the Sky God and all these other deities. Most importantly they become the god of death, Osiris and there is a very interesting and kind of explicit association between the corpse of Osiris and the individual seeing that corpse because the individual is Osiris is seeing, effectively, his own corpse. And I took that as a symbolic manifestation of the out-of-body experience – leaving the body and seeing the body below. And what’s really interesting about it is in the text, I think it is the Coffin Text, they say that that experience of encountering the body of Osiris in the other world is the thing that enables the person to realise that they’re dead and to move on to the next phase of the afterlife. And in NDEs, this is what happens when people see their body then they realise, wow I’m dead, I am outside that thing that used to be me.

So yeah, after kind of making those connections, I remember I knew about near-death experiences already and there was a book by Carol Zaleski called “Otherworld Journeys” and she compared mediaeval otherworld journeys of European monks and nuns with near-death experiences and she came to a very different conclusion that I would have. We can get into it later, it’s a real complex book but she basically concluded that they were all products of the religious imagination of the era. But to my way of thinking, because of all the similarities with NDEs, not only contextually but phenomenologically, you know, leaving the body and seeing the body and all those sorts of things, they probably were NDEs that were elaborated over time and sort of conformed the religious strictures and turned them into didactic sort of texts. So, anyway I’m waffling too much. But the point is that I am sort of thinking that if NDEs are so similar to Egyptian afterlife beliefs and then there seem to be these mediaeval accounts, what’s going on in the world or afterlife beliefs around the world that are based on near-death experiences and that people all over the place have these kinds of experiences.

AP: And so how did your research proceed after that?

GS: So then for my MA I compared Egyptian afterlife beliefs and Vedic Indian afterlife beliefs.

AP: Oh.

GS: So starting with the Rigveda up to the Upanishads. And to be clear about that, there are no actual examples of near-death experiences in Egypt at all because the uses to which writing was put were very limited. So it was all either documentary text or official texts or laundry lists and different kinds of accounting texts and religious texts. But there was no personal narrative, no context for a person to sit down and write this weird thing that happened to me, I died yesterday and came back to life, it just doesn’t exist. In India, there are references to near-death experiences in some of the religious texts and there are also in religious ritual and medical texts actually. And there is also a sort of stream of apparently mythological return from death accounts and beginning with the Rigveda and going up to the Upanishads and later with a little boy named Nachikitas whose father gets annoyed at him basically asking him too many questions all the time and he says, basically, I’m going to send you to the underworld – effectively killing him. So he kills his son in order to allow his son to learn all this stuff he is asking him because he can’t be bothered to answer him. So this boy goes to the afterlife and he meets Yama, the Lord of the Dead and he learns all these things from Yama about the nature of the soul and the nature of the afterlife and things like that.

So again they had these kinds of very similar parallels to NDEs and yeah, so then I expanded that and added in ancient China, and Mesopotamia, focusing on Sumerian and old Babylonian because again, the areas that have the least amount of interaction with other cultures around them. And then also Aztec and Maya. So I had five geographically diverse worlds, cultures…

AP: Was it in a specific time frame?

GS: No, because the Aztecs and Maya are much later but they had no contact with any of the old-world sorts of civilisations. So effectively they are all considered early civilisations, technically because they are the earliest form of the civilisation in that particular part of the world. So the relative chronology didn’t really matter too much, the main thing is that they were culturally distinct. I mean there was obviously there was some trade between Mesopotamia and Egypt or whatever but for the most part, I wanted to keep them as culturally distinct as possible.

GS: Right, right and in that case not affected by even each other. So there was a time even before Buddhism so India and China didn’t have a lot of cross-fertilisation in these earlier eras. And so this is long, long before Christianity. That wasn’t an issue for this stuff except for the Mayan and Aztecs. Because texts that survive from the Mayan and Aztec world, there are some actual written texts that they produced, the Popol Vuh is a famous Mayan one. But a lot of material that we have is from early missionaries, so those have to be taken with a little bit of a grain of salt. But there is an Aztec or a Mexica, I think, some Nahuatl tribe, people from Mesoamerican, from Mexico there is an example of a princess, as the guy translated it, who had an NDE – she died and came back to life and told about going to see this being of light in the other world and meeting her ancestors and all these other things. And in China, there are quite a few overt ancient NDEs that are, you know, there is no speculation involved like there was in Egypt for example.

AP: Have you also addressed the Tibetan Book of the Dead? There is somebody in the chat asking whether you have.

GS: I haven’t, no. I’ve used the Tibetan Book of the Dead at least, kind of, philosophically to interpret, you know, what an afterlife might be like. Cause I think- this is kind of jumping the gun – but essentially, given all the diversity around the world with afterlife beliefs and with NDEs, I was trying to figure out what kind of coherent model there could be for an actual afterlife and it seemed to me that some of the Tibetan ideas probably help explain it best.

AP: Yeah, we will definitely get into that. And what was your PhD about?

GS: That’s what it was. It was this cross-cultural study. Yeah, for my MA it was the Vedic Indian and Egyptian and then for the PhD, I added the other three. And that was published…

AP: By Routledge, I think.

GS: Ah no, Bloomsbury.

AP: Oh, Bloomsbury, I thought that I saw a book by you that was published by Routledge.

GS: I think I’m in a couple of Routledge books but I don’t have one of my own. But yeah, that was called “Conceptions of the Afterlife in Early Civilisations.” It’s going to be reissued next year as “Near Death Experience in Ancient Civilisations” but you know traditions. But that is going to be somewhat of a reworking and updating of a lot of the stuff in it. Like, for example, there was no complete translation of the Rigveda when I did the book and now there is, so that would be useful.

AP: Yeah, and have you also compared what you have found, which we will be talking about shortly, with more recent outputs in terms of near-death experiences? Or have you solely focused on more ancient traditions?

GS: Ah, recent in the sense of…

AP: Contemporary.

GS: No, not really in the contemporary. Only in the sense that I’ve used them in a sort of Western conceptual model for what a near-death experience is. So I’ve used the kind of, the foundation of near-death studies research as a sort of comparative framework, really. I haven’t done any work with actual contemporary NDEs or whatever. But even with that there’s in near-death studies there’s a thing called the Grayson Scale developed by Bruce Grayson and that’s probably the most useful schema for what a near-death experience is and it lists a number of different sub-experiences that kind of makeup what a near-death experience is. But the difficult thing about them and also the interesting thing about them is that no two near-death experiences will have all the components and in fact, not even one will have every single one of the components, cause there is maybe a couple of dozen of them or something. Some people hear music or hear buzzing sounds or some people have a life review where their whole life flashes before their eyes. So that’s one of the interesting things is trying to figure out the degree to which they are similar across cultures and then the degree to which they are different. And then the degree to which they have influenced beliefs in an afterlife around the world.

AP: So yeah, let’s dive deeper into that. So what are the commonalities and differences between the near-death experiences that you have studied? And then we can talk about the conception of afterlives that emerges out of them.

GS: Yeah, well, one kind of major difference is in a lot of Asian societies, in India and Japan, for example, China. When somebody dies and meets the being of light or whatever kind of deity in the other world and they’re sent back to their body in the kind of Western accounts that we’re mostly familiar with that you hear about on, you know, contemporary near-death studies or in popular media or whatever, people are told by the being of light or Jesus or however, they interpret this being of light. They’re told they need to go back to care for their children or look after their sick relative or maybe there’s some kind of thing that you didn’t fulfil in your life that you need to, kind of, finally fulfil and bring your life around to a place where you’ve had a full life and you’re then able to die, that kind of thing. So it’s a kind of self-development and caring thing combined, whereas, in these Eastern cultures it’s often a case of mistaken identity. So the soul would go to the other world and they’d be told, you know, what we got the wrong Gregory Shushan, we meant to get the one who lives in this little village in Persia or whatever. So they would send me back to my body and then they would get this other one who would then die for good.

AP: So yeah, let’s dive deeper into that. So what are the commonalities and differences between the near-death experiences that you have studied? And then we can talk about the conception of afterlife that emerges out of them.

GS: Yeah, well, one kind of major difference is in a lot of Asian societies, in India and Japan, for example, China. When somebody dies and meets the being of light or whatever kind of deity in the other world and they’re sent back to their body in the kind of Western accounts that we’re mostly familiar with that you hear about on, you know, contemporary near-death studies or in popular media or whatever, people are told by the being of light or Jesus or however, they interpret this being of light. They’re told they need to go back to care for their children or look after their sick relative or maybe there’s some kind of thing that you didn’t fulfil in your life that you need to, kind of, finally fulfil and bring your life around to a place where you’ve had a full life and you’re then able to die, that kind of thing. So it’s a kind of self-development and caring thing combined, whereas, in these Eastern cultures it’s often a case of mistaken identity. So the soul would go to the other world and they’d be told, you know, what we got the wrong Gregory Shushan, we meant to get the one who lives in this little village in Persia or whatever. So they would send me back to my body and then they would get this other one who would then die for good.

AP: So there is no explanation just the fact that the person was not the one that they wanted.

GS: They just mixed it up. He had the same name, maybe even lived in the same village – who knows. But, and you know we can, whether either one of those is more believable, being sent back for a particular purpose or being sent back because they mixed you up with someone else. Even that is, I think, a cultural thing. To us, it might sound a little like yeah, really they got the wrong guy but to, you know, people in Asian countries, they might think the same way about Western NDEs. But the weird, you know, the puzzling and kind of continuously intriguing thing about that is, so we have the death context, the dying context, the going to the other world, the meeting of being of light and being sent back and then returning from the dead. But then why is it different? Why the reason that they’re sent back?

Another example is, you know, this idea of a tunnel. The popular idea of an NDE is that you go through a tunnel and emerge into brightness in the other world. For one thing, that tunnel is a little exaggerated, it’s usually just entering darkness and then the person kind of describes it as a tunnel. There was a kind of famous debate about this maybe 10 years ago or something about India because in Indian NDEs they didn’t describe a tunnel they describe moving through darkness. So the famous NDE sceptic Susan Blackmore said here’s an example of NDEs not being the same across cultures – that means that they’re just hallucinatory. But totally overlooking the fact that they’re travelling through darkness and going into this kind of another realm.

But then in a lot of small-scale societies specifically, which is interesting, they walk along a road to the other world. So, you know, in tribal societies in North America or the Pacific or Africa they don’t rush through a tunnel at all, they walk along the road to get to the afterlife. That’s challenging because you could even, you know, the debate sort of said one of the compelling explanations for the lack of tunnels in India was they’re rushing through darkness and only Westerners interpret it as as a tunnel but then in small-scale societies just walking along a road, that’s not even rushing through darkness but it’s still, you know, temporarily dead travelling to the afterlife and then being sent back and all the other broadly thematic similarities.

AP: And how prevalent these common denominators are?

They seem to be, mostly associated with when people think they’re going to die from some sudden accident but they don’t but they never really were in danger of death, to begin with. So for example, if somebody – there was a study about this in the 19th century of people who fell from heights, mountain climbers who would fall off mountains and things like that and they’d have a full-blown life review and other NDE features on the way down and then they would land softly and maybe have a broken arm and like not even near death at all. So there was no temporary clinical death and then return to life. And it’s the same with people who almost drown, almost drowning victims will often have life reviews even if they weren’t actually temporarily dead.

AP: Yeah, I was wondering why the life review and you know, how those moments are chosen. I mean are they, you know, the moments that the person sees are they the most significant ones or are they just random moments in their lives?

GS: Yeah that’s a good point. I mean the way they describe it there’s none that are chosen or not chosen, it’s just all of it. It’s basically reliving every moment at once which is, when you think about it like it’s so difficult to accept that or to get your head around it because, you know, you brush your teeth a couple of times a day or you’re gonna…

AP: Yeah, am I gonna see myself brushing my teeth?

GS: Yeah you know, every time that you ate something, or whatever mundane act you did, is that also going to be alongside a time when you had some, you know, important occurrence in your life.

AP: And also you briefly mentioned, you know, a lesson to learn before going into another life. So does that imply reincarnation, the belief in reincarnation, at least in the societies that you’ve studied?

GS: In some of them, yeah. There’s, in India and China obviously, in a lot of the small-scale societies there’s quite a lot of reincarnation belief in Native American societies and in Africa but I also looked into more contemporary stuff a little bit. Children who remember past lives. Not so much, you might be familiar with the work of Ian Stevenson and Jim Tucker and people at the University of Virginia who have investigated these cases of children, the James Lenninger case is the most famous one.

It’s been a subject of a lot of debate recently. Children who suddenly start talking about a past life and they say I miss my other Mum and I want to go back and see my family in whatever other village, you know, they might get obsessed with military aircraft and some particular battle of World War II that they shouldn’t really know about and they might know all these, you know, quite detailed things about this battle and remember dying in a plane crash or whatever. Remember, you know, I have to put everything in kind of air quotes really so I didn’t really investigate them as far as whether they’re true or not or whether these children are making up stories or whatever. The ones I was interested in the ones who remembered the intermediate state before this rebirth. So essentially the afterlife, what would have been a near-death experience of their previous personality.

AP: But then it was a full-death experience.

GS: Exactly, yeah. So the previous personality died but the child remembers leaving the body, often seeing their own funeral or seeing the body, going to the other world, meeting whatever deity and relatives and ancestors and then often choosing the body or choosing the new personality or their village or their family or whatever. So yeah, I wanted to compare the degree to which those kinds of accounts correspond to near-death experiences and it was interesting and somewhat surprising that they correspond amazingly well. And especially the cases where the children, well they were more compelling cases the more evidential the case the more they seem to correspond to near-death experiences.

And this is in contrast to past life regression cases where people are allegedly hypnotized into their past life. I say allegedly because the scientific rigour of those cases has been pretty poor, they haven’t really monitored to see whether they were actually hypnotized or whether it’s just some kind of visualization exercise. And when you read about them they really sound like just a visualization. But then when they get regressed to the between life state, the intermediate state, their memories are much more elaborate and detailed and full of things like you know Greek temples and people wearing robes and going to libraries and this kind of bureaucratic infrastructure. A lot of it sometimes sounds like what I would imagine a cruise ship to be like. Like this kind of – some activities – a person who goes and tries to get people to, you know, let’s have a of class kids and let’s play games and it’s very sort of organized thing that I think probably a lot of, you know, people would, it would appeal to them because it would give them a sense of security and some way to envision the afterlife that’s not threatening. So yeah and those really don’t reflect near-death experiences very much at all. I mean obviously, there are the NDE features in them, there’s meeting the relatives in the light and all that stuff but because past life regression didn’t really become popular until after near-death experiences were known, I think it’s likely that they picked up on that. It’s all part of this whole kind of New Age bubble of ideas, drawing on NDEs and all these other kinds of…

AP: I want to ask a bit more about past life regressions. But first, there’s an interesting question from Dave who’s asking; are the life review instances related to belief systems that have judgment?

GS: Well, that’s a good question. Yeah, they probably are in fact there’s a scholar, Allan Kellehear, you might have heard of. He did a book called Experiences Near Death, I think, in 1996. He was one of the first people to start looking at cross-cultural NDEs and he looked at them in small-scale societies and he was the first to notice that there were no life reviews in these types of societies and he speculated that it was because there wasn’t as much focus or emphasis on the individual.

AP: Oh, that’s interesting.

GS: Yeah, it wasn’t like an individual-based society where a person would feel like they needed to go account for themselves in a judgment process in another world, it was more like everything was about the community. So it’s not like one person’s gonna go represent the community before some divine judge so. Yeah, that’s probably, you know, that’s a really good point.

AP: I really like that. And it also emphasises how a judgement-based belief system is somewhat related to an individualistic belief system and an individualistic culture.

GS: Yeah, yeah.

AP: Because in cultures that tend to be more community based you don’t really have… I’ve done research with Shamanism and shamanic cultures and even in that case that I’d say that they are not as individual-focused as we are in Western societies and you don’t have as much of that concept of judgment that we have, I think.

GS: Right. Yeah, yeah. So if you’re dying thinking this is all about me then you’re probably gonna more likely to have a life review whereas, if you’re dying and thinking, I don’t know how I feel such sorrow for leaving the world in a state of despair and climate change or whatever and then you might not, you know.

AP: But when they report a life review, to have a life review is not really about judgment it’s more about seeing all these instances of your life.

GS: Yeah, it’s a form of self-judgment I would say.

AP: Oh, okay.

GS: Yeah because you feel, as I said you feel the effects of your actions on other people. So it’s kind of like instant karma, you know. But yeah and I think that does correspond to a lot of religious beliefs in the afterlife around the world where there is this, you know, like in the Egyptian example, if you’re all these gods if you become all these gods in the other world and you’re being judged that effectively means that you, in your divine state, is doing the judging of yourself. So and in India and you know, lots of places there’s this self-judgment sort of idea. And yeah, none of those are – well they’re all judgment cultures, I guess, but they’re not all monotheistic, at least. So there seems to be some kind of human tendency towards wanting to feel like you’ve accounted for yourself or that or that you’ve led a good life at least.

AP: Yeah, that’s very interesting. And I was thinking back at the past life regressions. So you seemed to believe that there aren’t really good studies on, you know, whether past life regressions have – it is difficult to say, you know, in terms of the validity of those experiences, how can you verify a past life. Well, there are some cases where people have tried to actually, you know, find the place of the person – especially, I think, children as you mentioned as well, they tend to remember perhaps where they have been. So why do you think that those studies that have researched this kind of matter and tried to, what’s the term, not really verify, verify maybe, those experiences or at least what the person was recalling from an alleged, past life? What do you think? That those are not sound studies?

GS: I think the spontaneous cases with the children are sounder, sounder and then the regression cases because in those cases a lot sometimes the children don’t even know about reincarnation, it’s not even part of the culture. It is true that the majority of them come from India or the Jews in Lebanon they mostly come from cultures that have reincarnation. But a lot of them don’t, as well. So they have been able to verify the actual past personality in a lot of these cases. But it’s the regression ones that are more troubling to me and they think it’s partly just the methodological thing. Because like I said there’s no – they don’t hook them up to EEGs or whatever to determine if they’re really hypnotized and to my knowledge, there hasn’t really been a good case where they’ve tracked down the actual past life personality and verified all the things that the regressed person has said. There is an interesting study by Helen Wambach in the late 70s and she did quite a large-scale study. She didn’t try to track down individual personalities but what she did is put together the facts and the cases the descriptions that people had of the eras in which they lived and then she compared that to actual historical data. That was pretty interesting and she found that a lot of them actually did correspond to what was known of history at the time. So certain events or even certain, you know, clothes or cultural factors or whatever. I’m not totally convinced but I thought it was a novel approach and it was, you know, intriguing.

AP: So it’s more about those who intentionally try to recall the past lives as opposed to children or people that spontaneously have some kind of memory or alleged memory from a past life.

GS: Yeah, yeah. I think there’s a big distinction there for sure.

AP: And what about the afterlife then? What kind of picture and conceptualisation of the afterlife emerges from all the research that you have done? What are the common denominators but also the differences? We’re also interested in the differences if there are the patterns, yeah, that have emerged.

GS: Yeah, I think, I guess the way I looked at it was going from what I found in NDEs, to then speculate, given all that diversity and all the similarity, how could we understand NDEs as being real. And once we accept that, you know, just for the sake of argument, once we accept that, then what kind of afterlife could there possibly be? So the way I would envision NDEs, the way I would kind of explain to them if I were to argue that they were real experiences of an afterlife, which I’m not necessarily prepared to do. But I think what’s going on – it or would be something like, you know, rather than calling it an experience, there’s like an event, that’s the kind of background of what the near-death experience form is.

So there’s some particular, you know, being temporarily dead, having these experiences and coming back to life and then kind of grafted onto that is the cultural and symbolic ways that we experience the world. And I don’t mean that in the way that, you know, there’s some objective thing and we’re then describing it later once we wake up and putting a form on it. What I mean is while we’re experiencing it I think we’re actually enculturating the experience in process, if you know what I mean. So there might be some being of light that’s formless or personality-less or whatever but when we’re in the other world we see that being of light as Jesus or Krishna or Muhammad or whoever. We’re going to see whatever relatives or deceased people in the other world that are, well I guess that’s a question. We’re either going to see the ones that choose to come to us if they’re real or we’re going to see the ones that for some reason our mind went to and it’s gonna create them.

So I think it’s this matter of kind of clothing, the experience with our own culture and our own expectations and our own beliefs. I don’t mean expectations in the sense of people you necessarily had to have heard about in NDE or know about this type of experience but just your general feeling of what might happen to you when you die. I think it probably helps to guide the NDE but doesn’t create it. So I’d say that emphatically there’s no creating the experience it’s just I just keep thinking of clothing, it is the best kind of analogy I can think of.

So then if you expand from that and think, okay then what’s the next step because the NDE only tells us what it’s like to die and reach a certain point it doesn’t tell us you know what’s beyond that barrier once you’re sent back from the other world, what would have happened to you if you weren’t sent back. So to speculate on what that could be like if we kind of take these ideas from NDEs and extrapolate from there I think it’s probably very much like a lucid dream where you’re kind of – there’s this background reality that you’re not consciously manipulating or creating, you’re just having a dream. But then you happen to be awake inside that reality and in that kind of lucidity you can change the dream or you can change your position in the dream, you can interact with people telepathically or create people or whatever. But the background’s already there and unless you’re like a super advanced lucid dreamer you’re not going to just create an entirely new world, for the most part anyway.

So there’s an Oxford philosopher from the 50s H.H. Price and he had this idea of an inter-subjective afterlife and they didn’t really know much about lucid dreaming back then. I don’t think the term had even been invented but he describes it very much like a lucid dream but he also says that the dream will be co-created with group souls with a group of like-minded people so it’s not just like the solipsistic world that you’re creating on your own, it’s an objectively real place even though it’s being created by the imagination. But you’re doing it in combination with all these other souls of the dead. So they help to kind of maintain that background reality that I was talking about. But you also can’t totally, you know, create or destroy other souls or make them come to you and do your bidding or whatever, it’s not that kind of self-created place. It’s again just clothing, what is already an objectively real sort of place and putting your own experience and symbolism onto it. And I think even people would possibly experience and see it in a different way. So, you know, if we ended up in the same afterlife if you died in the UK and I died in Santa Fe, New Mexico I might be seeing Pueblo architecture and you might be seeing, you know, thatched cottages or whatever.

But they could be in the same building, you know.

AP: That reminds me of something that’s very Kantian and it’s, you know, the fact that sometimes, you know, whether it is an NDE experience or even our daily experience, to use your term, everything I think it’s kind of clouded because when we, you know, we do not perceive reality immediately, we have filters, we have filters of our eyes and we have filters in our mind and in a way we understand the world and the way we, you know, we expect the world to be. So every time that we experience everything at every moment during the experience itself, we are always interpreting, there is never a direct connection with the experience.

GS: Yeah.

AP: So I think that that is true of our daily and mundane life as well and so it doesn’t really surprise me that it also shows in near-death experiences.

GS: Yeah, exactly. That’s one of my main arguments too, that given how differently we experience this life, by culture and individual and everything else, there’s no reason I can think of, a valid reason why it all has to be the same in the next life for everybody. So in that sense, you know, some of us might reincarnate and some might not for whatever reasons. Whether that’s determined by the self or by actions or whatever is kind of irrelevant but just the fact that the differences, to me, don’t negate the idea that there could be an actual afterlife. That’s something that’s been argued by some philosophers. Keith Augustine is one and Richard Harris, maybe. There’s this idea that because NDEs are different around the world then there can’t possibly be an afterlife because an afterlife of course would be the same for everyone. And it’s like that’s not…

AP: Wow, yeah, it’s not a good argument.

GS: It’s really not and…

AP: You could equally say there is a different afterlife for everybody.

GS: Yeah, yeah, and you know to me that kind of thinking comes from probably a subconscious, you know, western Christian sort of mindset that it’s got to be this and there’s this kind of monolithic, monotheistic system that applies to everybody in the world, which is, you know, that’s really based in monotheisms I think.

AP: I think there’s also an underlying concept of the truth and the fact that in order for something to be true it has to be objectively true and it also underlies the fact that objectivity is a thing and actually exists. So I think that underlies a lot of elements that are part of the Western culture. Some of them are linked to Christianity others, I think, perhaps linked to the Western culture and even the rationalism. I think in Cartesian dualism, you know the difference between the metaphysical world and the physical world and the fact that in order for something to be real it needs to be universalisable, it needs to be standardisable, it needs to be repeatable otherwise it’s not real. But we all have experiences that are extremely unique and unrepeatable but that doesn’t make them unreal.

GS: Right.

AP: It doesn’t you know it makes them non-objective but it’s not necessarily the case that in order for something to be real or to be true it has to be objective if there is any such thing as objectivity. That also depends on one’s philosophical and religious stance.

GS: Right, right and if you talk about you know a mind-dependent afterlife where people are co-creating this afterlife then the subjective is the objective. There’s no distinction between them in a way so, yeah, for some person, one person to come along and say there can’t be an afterlife because this particular model of an afterlife is what it would look like if there was, you know, it doesn’t make any sense.

AP: So yeah and I get that you have a more phenomenological approach.

GS: Yeah, yeah for sure.

AP: So what is the idea that you have of the afterlife, as a result of all of your research?

GS: I keep an open mind. I kind of feel like, you know, if my attitude towards all this stuff is either I know something or I don’t know it. So I don’t really have a concept, personal concept of belief, you know, unless I experience something first-hand or unless I feel like I can learn it in a, I don’t know, in a real sort of way. It’s just kind of speculation to me. There’s good speculation and there’s bad speculation. So I think if I were, you know, to enter this kind of lucid dreaming type state when I die, I wouldn’t be surprised. I’d probably think, yeah, that did make sense, you know or if I’m reincarnated – I won’t be happy if I’m reincarnated – but you know, I might understand it for a while and kind of be aware of, you know, what’s going on – especially in that in-between state. But yeah, I can’t say it’s changed my actual beliefs. It’s refined the things I don’t know more and I guess we find what seems to me most likely. That’s probably the best way to put it.

AP: And for those who do not get reincarnated, what does the afterlife look like?

GS: Yeah that’s a good question. I mean, maybe they just stay in that, you know, lucid dream type state maybe the state of being, pure consciousness, pure spirit is the ultimate or maybe there’s then, you know, kind of bardos that you go through as in the Tibetan Book of the Dead. Maybe there’s eventually some kind of, you know, release and liberation from the whole thing. That all sort of makes sense to me. It doesn’t conflict with, you know, a lot of the NDE testimony or a lot of the cross-cultural material and I like how, you know, some Western scientists have come to similar kinds of conclusions as ancient Tibetan Scholars. Carl Becker’s another one, he’s a Buddhism scholar in Japan and he’s done NDEs and Mahayana Buddhism and he kind of came to the same conclusion that he thinks that, you know, these forms of Buddhism pretty much has it nailed, the interpretation of NDEs and the afterlife and sort of what’s ultimately to come.

AP: And is there…

GS: I’m just sorry to just say I don’t think and I don’t see any evidence for, you know, a Christian, Judaeo-Christian type afterlife where there’s…

AP: There was my next question. You know, how does the afterlife in those cultures, that have not been affected by Christianity, how does the afterlife relate to an idea of, you know, Karma or Heaven and Hell? You know, the idea that you will get punished or rewarded, depending on your actions?

GS: But well, those are yeah, those are independent from Christianity. So they, you know, they had those kinds of ideas of judgment anyway but yeah, I mean especially in the small-scale societies there really isn’t a lot of judgment. There is some and there’s often in a lot of the NDEs – Native American ones – they’ll be sent back in order to teach people a better way of living. So, strangely enough, what came up a couple of times was wife-beating. Like they would send the person back and say tell your people that wife beating is not good, you know, it’s not an acceptable thing to do. And they would also tell them things like stop wasting all these offerings on funerary rituals, like don’t take all of your subsistence and burn it to give to the dead because we don’t want it, we don’t care, just use it for yourself.

So these kinds of things. There are also quite a few examples of NDEs that conflicted with Christianity and therefore caused a reaction to missionaries that the missionaries didn’t expect. So the missionaries would come and say, you know, you need to convert to Christianity and accept Jesus and this is the afterlife you’re going to have and you’re going to suffer. The Native Americans would say no, that’s not true because his person in our tribe died and he went there and came back and told us what it was like, so wherever you’re getting your information from it’s not true. It gave them a way to actually, you know, culturally combat the kind of colonising religion, which was interesting. And in a lot of cases, they were even told in the other world to, you know, stand up against the oppressive invaders and not to convert to Christianity and revitalize the indigenous culture. And then, on the other hand, sometimes they were told you need to accept the culture and religion of the colonisers that’s the only way to survive you need to just adapt and accept Jesus and whatever.

But this is where religions like the Ghost Dance came from. There’s also one called the Dreamer Religion, the Indian Shaker Church – they were all based on the near-death experiences of their founders. They died, came back to life and told people what to find in the next world and then made this attempt to democratise it, to say, you know, everybody can reach the state. All you have to do is take loads of peyote or you know, dance and drum for hours and hours and hours until you collapse and then if you do that with this in your mind you’re gonna go to the other world – then you will. So it was, kind of, yeah, universalizing Shamanism to the whole culture to get those, you know, the benefits of NDEs when people come back.

I don’t know if I mentioned this but one of the main benefits is when people return to life they’re transformed in this new sort of positive way. Like they’re often, people say that they’re much kinder, they’re more altruistic, they’re less greedy, less judgmental, whatever – more sort of equality-minded. So in these Native American examples, the idea was that if all these people die and come back they’re kind of bringing all those positive things from the afterlife into the whole community. It’s not just like one person having this happen to them, it’s almost like a community NDE.

AP: Hmm and that’s really interesting, yeah. There’s a question from Audly Normyl and they say have you encountered anyone describing an NDE as being in another version of their own life in another dimension or version of their current reality but skewed?

GS: No, you might want to ask Anthony Peake about that, that’s kind of a pizzelle. I don’t know if you know him but he has this idea that you know, that we basically relive our lives over and over – a ground-hog day kind of idea. So I wonder if that would fit in with that kind of…

AP: And does it happen during a near-death experience?

GS: No, not during the NDE, I don’t think, I think it would just be, yeah, you’d have the whatever death state and then come back and do it all over again. But there is a case that I heard of that, you know, it’s anecdotal and it was, you know, told to me by somebody who it was told to them of a guy who had an NDE and he was, I don’t know there, he was dead for minutes or hours or whatever and he came back just shocked and disappointed and horrified because he had been in this other world living an entire life for 30 years or something and he had a wife and a child and just a completely new separate life that he had gotten used to after dying and then suddenly he’s back in his own life and in our reality, you know only 20 minutes or whatever went by. But to his reality his consciousness he just, you know, left 30 years of his life. Yeah but that’s, you know, there’s only one I’ve heard of. It sounds like a great idea for a novel or something or a movie. I don’t know if there are any others.

AP: There is a person in my family who’s had a near-death experience and what she told me is that the only thing that she saw was a light, not even like a person or an entity of light, just light and that she felt like it was first dark and then there was light and then she was called back. So it was very, very basic but you know that there are the elements that you find in near-death experiences usually but to a very basic level, I’d say.

GS: Yeah, was she actually called back by a person or an entity or something or sent back or she just woke up again?

AP: Well, she was being reanimated in the hospital. But what she told me is that she felt like a pullback. So it could be either because the, you know, doctors and nurses were trying to reanimate her. Yeah, probably that’s the physical reason. I would imagine would be that one, right?

GS: Yeah, there must be some physical sensation of being pulled back into your body.

AP: Yeah but I think the fact that you feel pulled back in your body kind of underlies the sense that there is a part of you that was away from your body.

GS: Yeah, yeah. That’s another interesting cultural thing. There’s from the Pacific, I can’t remember which cultures, but some Pacific Island cultures have this idea that the soul would be pushed back in the body through the big toe, you know, for some reason.

AP: What is that?

GS: The soul when it would go back into the body, it would be pushed through your toe.

AP: Oh okay, yeah your big toe, yeah, interesting.

GS: Yeah and then there’s a medieval one that said that the soul went back through the least dignified orifice or something like that. So I mean there’s this idea that – it’s almost like people need to explain in a physical way how the soul gets back in because it’s too weird to think of otherwise. Like because like with your relative, you know, how did she get back in if there’s, you know.

AP: Speaking of souls I was having a very interesting discussion with my Patrons the other day and the matter of the soul actually came up and we were discussing, you know, the what soul is and the concept of whether – because it was a conversation about AI and whether they can have a soul or develop a soul – and I was saying that the perception that they were talking about, when it comes to the soul, appeared to me to be very Christian in nature. And so I started thinking, you know, what could be another perception of the soul or maybe no perception of the soul from other cultural and religious points of view. Of course, I’m familiar with a few like the Buddhist one and, you know, in other cultures as well where you don’t even have the idea that there is a soul or rather there is no independent, solid and permanent soul to be more accurate in describing that. Whereas in Indian cultures you have the Ātman and so there is the concept of the soul. But yeah, I guess what I was getting at is; what is the concept and the idea of the soul that emerges from the from those accounts that you have studied from these cultures that are, you know, non-Christian and have not even influenced each other.

AP: Speaking of souls I was having a very interesting discussion with my Patrons the other day and the matter of the soul actually came up and we were discussing, you know, the what soul is and the concept of whether – because it was a conversation about AI and whether they can have a soul or develop a soul – and I was saying that the perception that they were talking about, when it comes to the soul, appeared to me to be very Christian in nature. And so I started thinking, you know, what could be another perception of the soul or maybe no perception of the soul from other cultural and religious points of view. Of course, I’m familiar with a few like the Buddhist one and, you know, in other cultures as well where you don’t even have the idea that there is a soul or rather there is no independent, solid and permanent soul to be more accurate in describing that. Whereas in Indian cultures you have the Ātman and so there is the concept of the soul. But yeah, I guess what I was getting at is; what is the concept and the idea of the soul that emerges from the from those accounts that you have studied from these cultures that are, you know, non-Christian and have not even influenced each other.

GS: Yeah that’s a good question. I don’t know if there’s a particular concept of the soul that would correspond to a particular religious belief. In fact, I would just say consciousness should be used rather than the soul. We’re talking about NDEs and the afterlife because of that very reason because, you know, we’ve got even in India there’s Ātman but then there’s the Vasu soul, the free soul and then in Egypt, there’s, you know, the Ba and the Ka and the Name and the Shadow. But only one of them is seen as the actual conscious soul. One of them, you know, gives you the life force and whatever and there’s similar in a lot of African societies, there’s all these soul components but it seems that for the most part, they’re all, you know, one of them is the animating thing, one of them is maybe an identity thing but there’s always one, a particular one, it seems to me, that’s the consciousness – so that’s probably the better way to conceptualise it.

AP: So is there always a perception that there is part of us that leaves the body when we die or well during the near-death experiences? So there’s always the perception in all the accounts that you’ve studied that there is some part of us, however, we want to conceptualize it or define it, that leaves the body and then returns into the body?

GS: Yeah, in every NDE case I know of – I mean I don’t know if any that I can think of where the person came back and said that didn’t really happen it was just a dream. You know, there’s a really clear distinction between dreams and NDEs. But, you know, Susan Blackmore will claim that but when you read what actually happened is she smoked some weed and had what she thought was an out-of-body experience and then thought no that can’t be, you know. So there’s the account of AJ Ayer who’s a materialist philosopher who’s a pretty famous atheist who had an NDE and he came back and said, you know I saw a being of light or whatever I saw a divine being, I’m gonna have to change all my books and opinions and then he later thought better of it and kind of recanted and said well maybe not.

But for the most part people, you know, believe that they are what they actually appear to be, which is, you know, dying and coming back to life. So I mean not, I guess to clarify that, not everybody in the world believes in that these things are even possible but the majority do. There was a study in the 70s, Jean Shiels I think his name was, and he surveyed massive amounts of small-scale indigenous societies around the world and he found that 95 per cent of them believed in out-of-body experiences and most of them believed it because they knew of it happening within their culture. So that’s pretty amazing that only five per cent of these cultures didn’t believe that out-of-body experiences were possible. And it makes you think that must be because maybe nobody ever had one in their society and it would be good if we could follow up over the years and see if they changed that belief.

AP: and if in most cases during the near-death experience there’s the experience of, in a way, part of you that leaves the body and then returns to it. Is there any connection or relation that you can find between out-of-body experiences and near-death experiences?

GS: Yeah, I think near-death experience incorporates an out-of-body experience really and it’s in a specific death context. So yeah, if somebody has an out-of-body experience and it’s while they’re temporarily dead then I would count that as an NDE, really. But yeah, people say they can be, you know, deliberately generated or it can be experienced through different practices and techniques but I guess I should also clarify too that even, you know, I mentioned these accounts where people walk down a road to the other world rather than going through a tunnel and soaring into the light. There are a lot of accounts that don’t actually tell us that they left their body, they just say I died and I went to another world or I died and I found myself walking along the path of souls or whatever. But I think just because we don’t have a clear description of an out-of-body experience I don’t think it means that they thought that they went there in bodily form, especially because everybody else in their culture would have seen them laying there dead, so they wouldn’t have thought that they went there in physical form either. I think there’s a tendency in a lot of anthropological studies and in religious studies, a lot actually, of denigrating the accounts from the very people that you know give us our material to study and kind of negatively evaluating them. So there’s a real kind of, as you probably know, sort of anti-religious experience of post-modernist influenced sort of perspective that…

AP: Do you mean in terms of discounting them?

GS: Yeah, yeah and seeing them in terms of, you know, all experiences are culturally generated so therefore, there can be no such thing as an experience type that people can base beliefs on, you know, so there can’t be such a thing as an NDE because of course they’re culturally generated. But they’re not because they’re spontaneous so, yeah I think there’s a lot of, even the religious studies are supposed to be this, you know, sort of neutral, anthropological, non-evaluative approach you know or take those types of approaches. It’s not supposed to say your beliefs aren’t true that’s exactly what it says when it comes to religious experience. I’m talking about people like Robert Scharf and…

AP: My experience in the UK with religious Scholars has been quite positive actually in terms of them being very open, you know, to the experiences of our informants basically but yeah, I know that really, it’s probably a recent development. I only have experience with scholars in the UK and other scholars in Europe.

GS: Yeah, it’s a kind of faction. It seems it started with Stephen Katzen, was it, Stephen Katzen? Well in 1978 something like that, he wrote this first paper about the basically non-existence of objective religious experience and there’s a whole debate about whether there’s such a thing as content-less experience and then it all kind of intersects with the anti-comparison thing that was going on for a long time. The active comparison is a colonialist endeavour and you can’t compare because it denies the individuality of each culture, which I don’t think that’s going on as much anymore. It was kind of the 90s and 2000s that seemed to have a real stranglehold on Religious Studies but yeah, hopefully, it’s not as bad. And it seems like Anthropology has been more open-minded about this kind of thing.

AP: Yeah, my experience is that Anthropology, you know, it’s quite open-minded and there are still things that, you know, you’re not supposed to include. So for instance, if you are an Anthropologist and you do participant observation with people, because I work with the contemporary world and with people. And there are some so-called extraordinary experiences that happen on the field, those are just data that you know it’s excluded from the picture. So I know that there are some scholars that have also argued in favour of including these ones as well, like what’s his name? It escapes me now… Jack?

AP: Yeah, Jack Hunter. Jack Hunter and Fiona Bowie and also Edith Turner also wrote about it.

GS: Yeah and there were actually two anthologies of articles about Anthropologists being changed in the field by their extraordinary experiences. Goulet, I think, is the editor’s name. So yeah, I mean that seems to be something that, you know, at least in sort of, I don’t know, AAR-type mainstream religious studies doesn’t seem to have impacted them much. I think there’s a real chip on the shoulder of Religious Studies. A lot of times they’re so concerned with distinguishing themselves from Theology that anything that seems…

AP: Theology and Religious Studies are like two cousins that like to fight with each other.

GS: Right so there’s this, you know, if you start talking about these experiences might be real or whatever then you’ve smuggled Theology into Religious Studies and you’re a crypto-Theologian and all these sorts of, you know, you’ve somehow crossed the line for being a good scholar and an objective scholar to being, you know, a New Age guru, kook or something.

AP: Yeah, there is also the idea of the religionist approach, which means that you have a kind of attitude or that you are using the perspective from your religious belief point of view as opposed to using an academic methodology. So I always think when it comes to these kinds of matters, I think that the matter is in my mind, at least, it’s very simple. I mean everybody has beliefs everybody has a religious belief, you know, including Anthropologists that are studying religions, whether it’s their religion or a religion that they don’t espouse. I think that it doesn’t matter because as long as you use proper academic methodology, a proper data analysis then, you know, in a way, if you are also a practitioner it can give you an advantage in terms of, it might be easier to network with people and get the right contact so that you can get into the community and participate, as a researcher, clarifying that you are a researcher, collect data and then analyse the data.

So I think the fact that you are or are not a practitioner doesn’t really matter as long as the academic methodology, analysis and everything is in place. Because everybody is going to have… then you could also argue that if somebody is Christian and is studying Pagans then there will be a bias. But I think that you know, I think that it really doesn’t matter what the belief of the person is because if you are studying those communities properly you know you will just report what they are doing.

GS: Yeah and I think being clear about your beliefs and your philosophical commitments or whatever is a good thing to do.

AP: Yeah, I hear that more from US scholars and much less from European scholars. So I think that it’s interesting, there’s a difference there. Many European scholars tend to be at least now a bit more open in terms of, you know, they don’t discount, at least in my experience, they don’t discount informants’ experiences but at the same time they tend to be very private and encourage you if you’re an early career, young scholar they would encourage you to not share whether you are a practitioner or not. Whereas in the US it’s the opposite.

GS: Right, I’m just thinking again of Susan Blackmore, the near-death experience psychologist in the UK, researcher, she’s a Buddhist and so she very clearly has a commitment to the doctrine of Anata – no self – and her interpretation of NDEs is basically totally Buddhist in that way. Totally different from Carl Becker’s Buddhist interpretation of NDEs. To her it’s like, you know, the self is a construct so, therefore, there is no self to be able to have an NDE, there’s no possibility for this, you know, consciousness to survive and all that. And she doesn’t say that in the book so much, she doesn’t make that connection. But reading it through that lens it’s pretty clear. So in that sense, I think scholars should be open about their prior commitments. Because I mean, if I were to be open about my prior commitments it would be, you know, that I have none, pretty much. I mean I lean towards, you know, maybe perennial philosophy sort of thing or something. But I think even that is important in knowing to know where I’m coming from because…

AP: I’m not surprised you’re a fan of perennial philosophy since you’ve done so much comparative research.

GS: Yeah, I mean I’m super critical of it but there’s a part of me that kind of, you know, that was attractive to me when I first started studying Jungian stuff and whatever. I think there are a lot of problems with it but yeah, it is just, you know, knowing where the person’s coming from I think is important. It just reminds me of when I was at Lampeter and I taught a course on Pagans and Christians in the ancient world. And one of the internal reviewers, one of the people there who reviewed the module, it was a distance learning module, she said it was apologetics – it had an apologetics flavour to it. And I thought am I on the side of the Pagans or on the side of the Christians? Because I totally did not get it. I don’t have any Christian upbringing or anything and to me, it was the exact opposite. So I just thought it was interesting and I thought if she knew that I wasn’t a Theologian or not a Christian or whatever, would she have read it in a different way?

AP: Yeah that’s also another thing, I think that what if the bias is created by the person reading it having in mind what are your beliefs?

GS: That is a good point, yeah.

AP: So it’s like if you’re upfront about what your beliefs are so that you can sort of put up front your biases then you are creating biases in the reader as well.

GS: So that’s a good point. I guess there are no easy answers to any of this stuff.

AP: Yeah, whatever you do is always going to be complicated but that’s why I think one of the things that I always say on my channel to my viewers is that the general public tends to see science and research as, you know, aiming at discovering the truth. And so once there is a study on something that it means okay, we’ve got it, we have the truth on that specific matter. But that’s not how science works, you know, neither Social Science nor Natural Science nor Humanities. It’s not about finding the truth, it’s about discovering more knowledge and since knowledge is a moving target you will always have that new studies will, perhaps, contradict other studies, previous studies or there will be a new theoretical lens whereby to look at that specific thing and so even the result of the study will change or the kind of knowledge that you will acquire will be different because you’re using a different lens. So, for instance, when you talk about NDE understood by a Buddhist that believes in the no-self I would say that she is perhaps using a theoretical framework to interpret data which is something that every scholar also does.

GS: Right, yeah.

AP: So I haven’t read that book specifically but I would imagine that she also talks about the kind of theories that she is working with when she is interpreting the data. So, for instance, I use a Foucauldian methodology but that’s not a religion it is still a theoretical framework and a methodology that I’m employing and if I were to use another one you would get different results. And it is fine to use another one, I am not saying that’s necessarily the only one but it is the one that I think is most useful to get the most accurate knowledge possible when you are dealing with something that is as elusive as contemporary Paganism or trans-cultural Shamanism. I think that there are some, but I understand that there are people that really challenge the Foucauldian methodology as not leading to accurate knowledge when it comes to other matters. But I would argue that when it comes to something that is loose and difficult to grasp you cannot really make it into a structured, neat and tidy belief system just because, you know, it would make your research easier. You have to acknowledge the fact that it is much more fluid and varied and you have to find a methodology that mirrors that.

GS: Yeah, you know there’s a parallel with my work where, you know, the question, I’ll talk about all this stuff in cross-cultural NDEs and the history of them and afterlife beliefs and the question everyone wants to know; but is there an afterlife? You know.

AP: Yeah, I didn’t ask that because I didn’t want to be a crypto-Theologian.

GS: Yeah but it’s funny you know because – and I just want to say like but wait, isn’t this interesting? Isn’t the origin of beliefs in an afterlife, being rooted in a near-death experience – isn’t that in itself an interesting thing? And why are they different? And why are they similar? But no, the only thing people want to know is; are they true? You know.

AP: And what do you answer to that? Cough, cough.

GS: I say I think that there are reasonable grounds for such a belief if one wanted to have them. So I think given that, you know, I don’t really go much into the science of NDEs and the kind of evaluation of veridical cases or the veridicality in cases. So but I know enough about it to think that there are things that haven’t been explained away by materialist science. Every few months there’s a new article in some online journals saying, you know, we’ve now explained away near-death experiences, we now know it’s the dying brain because of this is this and this and not one of them talks about cross-cultural NDEs or historical NDEs. They all base their models on this, you know, a popularised Western conception of what an NDE is. So that’s obviously not going to work as a human, pan-human kind of theory. If, for example, people in small-scale societies are not having life reviews but Western science is telling us there’s a burst of activity at death – that’s the life review. And you know, it’s just totally speculative. So anyway, I just think that it hasn’t been explained away and I think some of the seemingly veridical cases are intriguing and because of the cross-cultural evidence and everything else, I think it’s not irrational to have a belief in an afterlife and also with reincarnation.

AP: Interesting. I think this is a good note to end our conversation with. So how can people find you if they want to find you, and support your work?

GS: They can go to my website which is just gregoryshuhan.com I also have a Patreon site which is Patreon slash Gregory Shushan, I think. And my book is on Amazon, this is the new one is “The Next World: extraordinary experiences of the Afterlife.” This is the kind of least academic one I’ve written. It puts together various stray writings that I’ve done here and there including the only one that has this stuff on mediumship and which we didn’t talk about but there’s a lot about mediumship in there and reincarnation and just a kind of overview of NDEs and other problems with NDES like revelations, for example. You know you get these revelations in NDEs and then they don’t come true so, you know, what does that mean? It’s another interesting issue. And then my second book, which is “Near-Death Experience in Indigenous Religions,” that will be out next year in paperback, as well. At the moment it’s like 85 dollars from Oxford University Press but it’ll be affordable next year.

AP: Yeah, everybody – you will find all the links in the info box or show notes depending on what platform you’re on at the moment and I will also have a pinned comment after the show ends. So please check out Dr Shushan’s links and the books and the website and everything. So thank you so much for being here on the show, on Angela’s Symposium, Gregory. It was really a really interesting conversation and I hope to have you back at some point.

GS: Great, any time.

AP: And to do some collaborations. And let me first acknowledge Jeanette says “Trick or Treat” Thank you so much and thank you Vocatus, you’re always very generous and he’s a Patron of mine and yeah, I’m really fond of our conversations. Every time we have very deep conversations about psychology and the sacred and the occult.

So thank you, everybody, for being here. Thank you, again Gregory. And for all of you guys who are watching this now or afterwards, if you liked this video don’t forget to SMASH the like button, subscribe to the channel and activate the notification bell because otherwise, YouTube will not tell you when I upload a new video or when I’m doing a live stream with an interesting guest, like today. And yeah, and you will find all the ways of supporting my work, if you want to keep this project alive, in the info box you have links to Patreon, PayPal, you can super chat or super thank me – there are lots of ways of supporting this channel and I really hope to see you next in the next video or live stream and I hope that you stay tuned for all your Academic Fun.

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Streamed 1 Nov 2022