Speaker 1: You see, something's going to happen.
Speaker 2: What What's going to happen?
Speaker 3: What? Help?
Speaker 2: Welcome to the Occult Rejects. Very very exciting episode today.
Speaker 2: We couldn't be happier enough to have Doctor Gregory show.
Speaker 2: Oh actually, I'm not even sure if I'm gonna say
Speaker 2: this correctly. I meant to ask you, is that correct?
Speaker 3: All right?
Speaker 2: Close enough? I meant to ask you probly. I always
Speaker 2: want to make sure I get you guys names right,
Speaker 2: you know, uh on today for near death experiences. I'm
Speaker 2: sure for regular listeners of the show you have heard
Speaker 2: me bring this up plenty of times. I think most
Speaker 2: of the Occult Rejects are actually very intrigued by this
Speaker 2: whole situation. And I have mentioned before it's my opinion.
Speaker 2: I do think and I do wonder for other people's
Speaker 2: experiences if an NDE may doesn't necessarily have to be,
Speaker 2: But maybe it is a part of magic for some people,
Speaker 2: you know, maybe that is just a part of the
Speaker 2: journey in the whole cycle of having a magical experience.
Speaker 2: So we got Lisa, we got Ethan Indigo, and we
Speaker 2: got Jin the Ninja with us as well. Their links
Speaker 2: will be in the bottom and we got doctor Gregory again,
Speaker 2: thank you so much for coming on for the people
Speaker 2: who don't know who you are, and they should find
Speaker 2: out who you are. Please let everybody know what your
Speaker 2: deal is and everything.
Speaker 4: Okay, Yeah, thanks for having me on, Nick, of course. Yeah.
Speaker 5: So my name's Gregory Shoujan. I'm a historian of religions.
Speaker 5: So a lot of people, most of the people who
Speaker 5: are near death studies, researchers, professionals, come from, you know,
Speaker 5: the medical sciences. People like Bruce Grayson, Kennethry and Jen
Speaker 5: Holden know either psychiatrists or cardiologists. Sam Parnia van Lomo
Speaker 5: I came from the humanities. Where I come from the humanities.
Speaker 5: I'm kind of still situated.
Speaker 4: In that world.
Speaker 5: I actually started out in Egyptian archaeology and Eastern Mediterranean
Speaker 5: archaeology and then kind of defected to the study of religions,
Speaker 5: historical study of religions across culturally and kind of carved
Speaker 5: out a niche that didn't really exist basically within the humanities.
Speaker 4: Combining all these.
Speaker 5: These different various sorts of interests, so I'm practically a
Speaker 5: field unto myself, with a few other a few exceptions.
Speaker 2: That's great, though, yeah, you know what he did, totally
Speaker 2: forget to mention, but just real quick, yeah, I was
Speaker 2: going to read off some of the stuff about you.
Speaker 2: You are an award winning author affiliated with Birmingham Newman University,
Speaker 2: University of Winchester and Marian University and the Paris Psychology Foundation,
Speaker 2: and you are on the show to promote your book
Speaker 2: The Near Death Experience in Ancient Civilizations, The Origins of
Speaker 2: the world's after life beliefs. Did forget to mention that
Speaker 2: was the whole reason you were coming on too. You
Speaker 2: have read a book on that and that's been some
Speaker 2: even studying for a while. Like you said, so I
Speaker 2: guess to get into it. What was it that you
Speaker 2: were what got you into looking into NDEs?
Speaker 4: Uh?
Speaker 5: Yeah, I was actually, strangely enough, came from my Egyptian
Speaker 5: archaeology studies as an undergraduate. You know, you're learning about
Speaker 5: higher glyphs and reading things like the Books of the
Speaker 5: Dead and the predecessors to the Books of the with
Speaker 5: the pyramid texts and the Coffin texts. These are the
Speaker 5: kind of the some of the world's earliest expressions of
Speaker 5: you know, religious beliefs, and they included guide books about
Speaker 5: you know, telling the soul how to negotiate the different
Speaker 5: obstacles in the other world, and you know, kind of
Speaker 5: union with the different deities and the kinds of experiences
Speaker 5: that you should expect when you get there. And as
Speaker 5: I was reading these texts, I started thinking, like, if
Speaker 5: you strip back some of the Egyptian cultural obvious layers,
Speaker 5: you're kind of left with something that looks a lot
Speaker 5: like in your death experience. So the soul leaves the body.
Speaker 5: In this case it's the mummy, It travels through darkness.
Speaker 5: In the Egyptian case, it's like different caves and caverns
Speaker 5: and gates, emerges into a realm of light, which is,
Speaker 5: you know, this heavenly cosmic sort of realm meets a
Speaker 5: being of light who in Egypt is the sun god Ray,
Speaker 5: you know, emanating light. There is a evaluation of your
Speaker 5: earthly life. You meet your deceased relatives, you have a
Speaker 5: kind of transformative unification experience with the divine, and you
Speaker 5: also encounter your own corpse in a sense, because you're
Speaker 5: associated with all of these deities and at one point
Speaker 5: you're associated with Osiris very very clearly, like this real
Speaker 5: emphasis that the soul of the dead is Osiris. Osiris
Speaker 5: is the god of the dead and also the judge
Speaker 5: of the dead. And there's a point in this text
Speaker 5: where the soul the dead encounters the corpse of Osiris
Speaker 5: in the other world and it basically says, you are
Speaker 5: this god, you are this corpse. So it's this realization,
Speaker 5: just like near to experiencers have that when you see
Speaker 5: your body from a vantage point outside of it, your
Speaker 5: mind is like, wait, hang on a second, I've survived
Speaker 5: the death of my body.
Speaker 4: There's my corpse, and yet I'm still alive.
Speaker 5: So it's that realization that kind of leads to the
Speaker 5: transformation experience in the afterlife that allows you to kind
Speaker 5: of keep going essentially. So yeah, I started thinking, you know,
Speaker 5: if there's all these this kind of set of like
Speaker 5: nine elements that are so similar to near death experiences,
Speaker 5: maybe these afterlife beliefs and this idea of the afterlife
Speaker 5: journey was actually you know, grounded in some ancient near
Speaker 5: death experience.
Speaker 2: Nice and in your new book, I do know you
Speaker 2: also do focus on like five major places Egypt, Sumor Mesopotamia,
Speaker 2: India and India, China, and may An Aztec right.
Speaker 4: Right, yes, Yeah, So to test that idea.
Speaker 5: I basically thought, I'm going to do a cross cultural
Speaker 5: comparison of the afterlife journey beliefs in all of these
Speaker 5: ancient civilizations, and I found like, essentially those same nine elements,
Speaker 5: almost as if they're like superimposed onto these different societies.
Speaker 5: But what I didn't expect to find at first was,
Speaker 5: you know, I thought I was just going to look
Speaker 5: at their beliefs, their religious texts, And as I was
Speaker 5: doing the research, I realized that there were actual accounts
Speaker 5: of near death experiences in all of these ancient civilizations
Speaker 5: except for Egypt. Egypt didn't have like a context for
Speaker 5: reporting about these kinds of things, like writing was limited
Speaker 5: to either bureaucracy or accounting or you know, decrees by
Speaker 5: the pharaoh look at how great I am, like how
Speaker 5: I'm the son of the Sun God and worship me
Speaker 5: and all this kind of stuff, so ritual priestly text.
Speaker 5: They didn't have like personal narratives of like or reporting,
Speaker 5: you know, like this person died in this province and
Speaker 5: this is what happened to them. But in all of
Speaker 5: the other societies, we have actual accounts of you know,
Speaker 5: historical near death experiences. From India, there's like medical magical
Speaker 5: texts that describe how to go save the soul of
Speaker 5: somebody who is in danger of dying and basically bring
Speaker 5: their soul back to their body. So again, you know,
Speaker 5: that shows medical medical magical kind of awareness of near
Speaker 5: death experience. A medical magical border is kind of, you know,
Speaker 5: something to parse.
Speaker 4: We would see it as magical, they'd see it as medical.
Speaker 2: I think that is interesting. I don't think you mentioned
Speaker 2: it before since since we've been recording. What are like
Speaker 2: the nine things that you're that you look for?
Speaker 5: Yeah, so well, actually I should say, first of off,
Speaker 5: First of all, the way I approached it was not
Speaker 5: like I'm going to determine if this is a near
Speaker 5: death experience if it has these elements. So I decided
Speaker 5: I'm going to look at whatever that society thinks of
Speaker 5: as as an example of somebody who died and came
Speaker 5: back to life and talked about the experience. So if
Speaker 5: they if they came back and said, you know, I
Speaker 5: went to Mars and I saw three headed beings, I'd say, okay, that's.
Speaker 4: A near death experience. It's just an unusual one.
Speaker 5: So it was the context that I let kind of
Speaker 5: steer my whole approach to the subject. But having said that,
Speaker 5: you know, these nine elements emerged out of all of
Speaker 5: these different societies, and that's leaving the body entering darkness,
Speaker 5: coming out into some kind of other realm, which is
Speaker 5: a realm of light, meeting a being of light, having
Speaker 5: some kind of transformative experience that's related to that being,
Speaker 5: or some kind of union with a divine or divinization
Speaker 5: of the soul. Decease relatives. I don't know if I
Speaker 5: said that yet, some kind of moral evaluation of the
Speaker 5: life that you just left on earth, some kind of
Speaker 5: not necessarily like a big panoramic life review as we
Speaker 5: associate with ndase, but some kind of evaluation of your life.
Speaker 5: And then, because I wasn't dealing with near death experiences
Speaker 5: in those religious texts, there's not a return to the body,
Speaker 5: because it wasn't an nd whose texts were basically, you know,
Speaker 5: instructing the soul how to negotiate the other world. But
Speaker 5: you know, the kind of implication is that somebody had
Speaker 5: been there and came back, and that's how they know
Speaker 5: how to describe this process of you know, dying and
Speaker 5: proceeding in the next world.
Speaker 2: This is very interesting. That's just what I was going
Speaker 2: to ask, And I think maybe what you just said
Speaker 2: pretty much answers the question I was assuming. Maybe the
Speaker 2: way you're looking at it now, as you're saying that
Speaker 2: you found non commonalities between in all these different places,
Speaker 2: is it like something that you've noticed that, like, all
Speaker 2: of them all have this, regardless how their story is
Speaker 2: a little different.
Speaker 5: Yeah, exactly, pretty much, And it's almost like they're embedded
Speaker 5: within the wider afterlife beliefs, but they're definitely identifiably there.
Speaker 5: But what I also tried to do with the book is,
Speaker 5: you know, I don't want to just cherry pick the
Speaker 5: evidence because that's not a scientific approach. So I also
Speaker 5: described all of the differences cross culturally and then showed
Speaker 5: like how some of those differences match up to the
Speaker 5: near death experience, and then how some of them seem
Speaker 5: to just be like completely cultural things. For example, like
Speaker 5: in China, there's descriptions of people leaving the body and
Speaker 5: ascending to heaven on the back of a dragon. So
Speaker 5: the idea of leaving the body and ascending is obviously
Speaker 5: a cross cultural.
Speaker 4: Thing with new death experience.
Speaker 5: But you know, people in Egypt aren't writing dragons to
Speaker 5: the other world, and people in contemporary America or Europe
Speaker 5: aren't writing dragons.
Speaker 4: To the other world.
Speaker 5: So there's these you know, cultural expressions of these experiences.
Speaker 4: Basically, that is interesting.
Speaker 2: Did anybody have any questions before.
Speaker 6: I actually have one, Doctor Shoshan, I'm a little I
Speaker 6: guess that I'm a little ignorant of the Egyptian cosmology
Speaker 6: and theology.
Speaker 3: More broadly.
Speaker 6: I just was wondering some of the things that you
Speaker 6: mentioned a few minutes ago sounded very much like they
Speaker 6: were experimenting with ideas of like duality non duality, and
Speaker 6: I would wondering if you could sort of like locate
Speaker 6: that for me in a kind of I guess modern
Speaker 6: epistem or whatever. And then also, is reincarnation or rebirth
Speaker 6: a factor in some of these like andes, especially for
Speaker 6: Egyptian cosmology, simply because I'm so ignorant of it?
Speaker 3: Thank you?
Speaker 5: Okay, Yeah, the first question is easy, and that's that's
Speaker 5: a no. There's there's not really any evidence for reincarnation
Speaker 5: beliefs in Egypt as far as their cosmology goes, especially
Speaker 5: in relation to the afterlife. It's both complex and also
Speaker 5: not entirely properly understood by Egyptologists even after like two
Speaker 5: hundred years of research, and just to give one example
Speaker 5: of that, the soul of the dead goes to the
Speaker 5: other world and as I mentioned, joins the Sun god
Speaker 5: the being of light Osyrus, and it's portrayed is like
Speaker 5: a kind of infinite universal cosmic circuit.
Speaker 4: So they go.
Speaker 5: He joins the Sun god on the on the celestial
Speaker 5: which sails into the cosmos and then sails down into
Speaker 5: the underworld. And during this process, the soul of the
Speaker 5: dead is not just with the god Ray. He becomes
Speaker 5: the god Ray and then traveling in the underworld, becomes
Speaker 5: the god Osiris and travels with Osiris. And there's even
Speaker 5: a deity called Osiris Ray, which is this kind of
Speaker 5: as you said, it's like a reconciliation of the duality.
Speaker 5: So it's almost like this omnipresence. The soul of the
Speaker 5: dead becomes one with both of these gods. Both of
Speaker 5: these gods are also one with each other. And then
Speaker 5: there are descriptions of they call it in the archaeological
Speaker 5: literature member of patheosis, and it's basically each part of
Speaker 5: the soul of the dead's body, you know, their subtle
Speaker 5: body or whatever is associated with a particular deity. So
Speaker 5: you know, this arm is atom, and this part of
Speaker 5: the arm is raw, and this part is isis, and
Speaker 5: this part is Osiris and whatever. So it's this you know,
Speaker 5: symbolic expression of how you are basically transcendental everything. You
Speaker 5: are all of these these deities, and it's in all
Speaker 5: of the properties of these cities, so knowledge, fertility, creation, wisdom,
Speaker 5: and so on. So as if that's not complicated enough,
Speaker 5: there's also descriptions in these texts of the soul of
Speaker 5: the dead dwelling forever in the field of offerings, which
Speaker 5: are the offerings that people on earth, you know, burn
Speaker 5: and send to the souls of the dead, so they
Speaker 5: would be living off and benefiting from from the offerings
Speaker 5: that the people on earth are making to them, or
Speaker 5: the soul of or the field of marshes. You know,
Speaker 5: it's this kind of like happy hunting grounds kind of place.
Speaker 5: So it's portrayed as if, like, you know, you're going
Speaker 5: to have this wonderful, heavenly eternity, but at the same
Speaker 5: time it's portrayed as this eternal cosmic circuit. So and
Speaker 5: that's the kind of thing that has puzzled Egyptologists for
Speaker 5: a long time, and I wonder if it's just another
Speaker 5: expression of that transcendent kind of space that you enter
Speaker 5: into that you're actually you are everything at once, you're
Speaker 5: doing everything at once, and it's really impossible for us
Speaker 5: in our earthly forms to even comprehend what's going on.
Speaker 5: I kind of wonder if that's the message. But other
Speaker 5: Egyptologists have said things like, you know, it was the
Speaker 5: South they believed in this particular form of afterlife. The
Speaker 5: North they believe this, and when the scribes put it together,
Speaker 5: they didn't try to reconcile it, so they just kind
Speaker 5: of threw everything together. They didn't really understand what they
Speaker 5: were portraying. I don't agree with that. I kind of
Speaker 5: think like we have to trust the sources and trust
Speaker 5: that the ancient Egyptian people and scribes really did know
Speaker 5: what they were talking about, and it's up to us
Speaker 5: to find a way to understand it rather than to
Speaker 5: you know, accuse them of ignorance essentially. So I hope
Speaker 5: that answers the question. I mean, it's pretty as I said,
Speaker 5: even after all these this time of formal egyptological studies,
Speaker 5: there's still stuff that's not quite fully understood about their
Speaker 5: religious leaves.
Speaker 7: I wanted to add on that, or ask for you
Speaker 7: to add on that. I understand, I believe, I gather
Speaker 7: that you're finding these nine elements were not necessarily sought
Speaker 7: after at first, but you kind of found them being
Speaker 7: intricate in each one of these systems. I wonder as
Speaker 7: you described the elements too, it made me even want
Speaker 7: to ask more about this because they some of them
Speaker 7: had a correspondence to the eight slash nine parts of
Speaker 7: the Egyptian Soul and Body, and Lisa was had a
Speaker 7: corresponding idea with the nine elements that she was thinking
Speaker 7: of too that were I don't I don't know as well,
Speaker 7: but Lisa, maybe you want to mention those.
Speaker 1: Yeah, when you mentioned how the soul was going through
Speaker 1: these levels, these journeys, and then the nine, it reminded
Speaker 1: me of the Aztec Mayan belief system where they journey
Speaker 1: through nine different levels for the purpose of purification and
Speaker 1: like washing away or like you said, like there's a
Speaker 1: whole event like you're you're being processed. If it's not
Speaker 1: hr the DMV, but you're being processed through these nine
Speaker 1: levels that the going through and it's and it's not
Speaker 1: only just you know, weighing out everything. It's the trials
Speaker 1: and tribulations, at least that's what I've read. And and
Speaker 1: then the end result is eternal rest or you know,
Speaker 1: returning back to source or or something like.
Speaker 5: That, right, Yeah, And that's symbolized in some of the
Speaker 5: like the ancient maintext, the Popolo, it's about these set
Speaker 5: of twins who descend to the other world and they're
Speaker 5: first is their fathers who go and they they're outwitted
Speaker 5: by all these gods of the dead in the other
Speaker 5: world and they fail all these tests and they get
Speaker 5: beheaded and annihilated essentially. And then their their children, who
Speaker 5: are also twins, also go to the other world, but
Speaker 5: now they have the knowledge of their fathers and so
Speaker 5: they're able to kind of overcome all of these different trials.
Speaker 7: Uh.
Speaker 5: And at the end of the text it says and
Speaker 5: they ascend it into the light. So it's it's a
Speaker 5: very similar kind of thematic thing, and that happens. There's
Speaker 5: text like that all around the world. There's in ancient Mesopotamia,
Speaker 5: there's the descent of Inana to the underworld.
Speaker 4: She's a goddess.
Speaker 5: Associated with love and the planet Venus, and she she
Speaker 5: goes to the underworld in order to like overthrow the
Speaker 5: reigning queen of the dead there. But what's interesting about
Speaker 5: it is as she she goes there, she she has
Speaker 5: to shed seven garments at seven different stages, and each
Speaker 5: of those garments are like symbolic of some earthly sort
Speaker 5: of attribute, so it's almost like she's she's shedding these
Speaker 5: you know, this this accretions of that her had on Earth.
Speaker 5: And then as she when she gets there, she's in
Speaker 5: a more kind of purified state. So you know, whether
Speaker 5: that's happening in Egypt, it's really hard to say because
Speaker 5: again this you know, different things are portrayed as as
Speaker 5: the ultimate state. And then when you get to somewhere
Speaker 5: like India where they have reincarnation beliefs, are some of
Speaker 5: the Native American accounts as well, you know, trying to
Speaker 5: reconcile what this this afterlife state is in relation to reincarnation,
Speaker 5: it usually seems like it's it's a you know, intermediate
Speaker 5: state before rebirth. And in India there's an interesting correspondence
Speaker 5: because we have quite a few texts describing a journey
Speaker 5: of a young boy to the afterlife and then a return,
Speaker 5: and it's very much it's basically a near death experienced
Speaker 5: myth that's repeated over the centuries. But then once since
Speaker 5: reincarnation is introduced as a as a new doctrine, those
Speaker 5: kind of myths kind of fall away and there's more
Speaker 5: focus on the kind of cosmic elements of the afterlife
Speaker 5: realm and how to negotiate them, and in the Indian case,
Speaker 5: basically recognizing that the self, like the inner unchanging self,
Speaker 5: which they call the Atman, is one and the same
Speaker 5: as Brahman, which is the cosmic universality of everything, which
Speaker 5: you know, is paralleled in the in some of the
Speaker 5: Egyptian cases. So so yeah, a lot of these themes,
Speaker 5: even that aren't necessarily like identifiable near death experience themes,
Speaker 5: are still kind of thematically found in a lot of
Speaker 5: these different cultures around the world, these ideas of transcendence
Speaker 5: and things like that.
Speaker 2: One thing I did want to also ask. I'm trying
Speaker 2: to ask this in the best way possible too, because
Speaker 2: there's different ways I guess it could be done when
Speaker 2: it comes to art, and I guess that would even
Speaker 2: be like physical like something drawn on a wall or
Speaker 2: on a canvas or in written text. Did you notice
Speaker 2: like ways of symbolism being done in like an art
Speaker 2: that was common amongst all these different areas that you
Speaker 2: looked at when they talked about NDEs, No.
Speaker 4: That was that's a bit more difficult.
Speaker 5: Actually, there's the first thing that comes to mind is
Speaker 5: there's a hand period Chinese like funerary banner they call it,
Speaker 5: and it's a kind of T shaped thing, and it
Speaker 5: shows the different stages of death and the afterlife, and
Speaker 5: it's like dragons and different people in different positions. And
Speaker 5: the only way to really understand that is if you
Speaker 5: have a description of it by you know, a Chinese
Speaker 5: scholar somebody's who's who knows how to read that particular banner.
Speaker 5: Once you know that, there are a lot of things
Speaker 5: about it that correspond to your death experience because it's
Speaker 5: the sole traveling to the other world and meeting the
Speaker 5: deceased relatives and meeting the emperor of Heaven and all
Speaker 5: this stuff. But as far as like the iconography itself,
Speaker 5: it's it's not really evident what it all means. And
Speaker 5: it's definitely the same with some of the Aztec stuff.
Speaker 5: There's the Codex Borgia, which is, you know, super esoteric
Speaker 5: kind of stuff, and there's no there's no text accompanying
Speaker 5: it that describes what these images are, so some of
Speaker 5: it is pretty speculative, but still it's it's clear that
Speaker 5: it's still representing like a journey to the other world.
Speaker 2: Yeah, the reason why I was asking is because I
Speaker 2: do wonder about like I guess what I was trying
Speaker 2: to get at, like symbology, Like just my opinion. I
Speaker 2: do think sometimes the eclipse, which is why I use
Speaker 2: it in a lot of my artwork or even behind
Speaker 2: this now, I do think sometimes that might be a
Speaker 2: symbolism that's used. I think that's more of a newer thing.
Speaker 2: Maybe that's used a lot for maybe showing an NDE.
Speaker 2: So that's why I was like wondering if maybe there's
Speaker 2: like something common that you've seen that might show up
Speaker 2: that you've noticed like, oh, that's weird. I saw something
Speaker 2: like that in art that was depicting an NDE before.
Speaker 5: Yeah, there's not well in art actually, in the Mayan
Speaker 5: case there, the soul of the dead is also associated
Speaker 5: with the phases of Venus and in the sense of
Speaker 5: like it's dying and being reborn, and then also with
Speaker 5: a jaguar which is like starts out as a baby
Speaker 5: and then grows, and the jaguar is also associated with venus,
Speaker 5: and so yeah, as far as like there's a lot
Speaker 5: of parallels with the cycles of nature and celestial bodies
Speaker 5: and how they die and come back to life basically.
Speaker 5: So yeah, the soul is almost seen as part of
Speaker 5: the natural world, which is interesting because in you know,
Speaker 5: contemporary ideas about the paranormal or supernatural or whatever, it's
Speaker 5: often like seen as a distinction from the natural world,
Speaker 5: like this is something paranormal, supernatural that doesn't conform to science,
Speaker 5: rather than just like it's all part of the same universe.
Speaker 4: That we inhabit. So so, I mean.
Speaker 5: I think if there really isn't afterlife, it's just it's
Speaker 5: just a natural cycle.
Speaker 4: There doesn't have to be some kind of.
Speaker 5: God or you know, supernatural divine system that's organizing it.
Speaker 5: It's just like the same way you know, a catercillor
Speaker 5: becomes a butterfly. Our souls survive death and have some
Speaker 5: other kind of experience. It's not necessarily it's mysterious because
Speaker 5: we can't measure it. But I don't know if it's
Speaker 5: if it's helpful to see it is divine or supernatural.
Speaker 2: Yes, it's interesting that you did say a jaguar because
Speaker 2: you know, I saw the movie Apocalypto, and the jaguar
Speaker 2: does play a role in that movie, and one of
Speaker 2: the main things going on in that movie is they
Speaker 2: stop killing people once in a clip shows up. So, like,
Speaker 2: I even do think that movie, believe it or not.
Speaker 2: I'm not saying anything bad about it. I think it's
Speaker 2: deeply embedded with some deep occult ideas. So it's just
Speaker 2: funny you mentioned a jaguar that was very heavily involved
Speaker 2: in a movie that was also based on an eclipse.
Speaker 2: It's just coincidental. It was funny. Yeah, that's why I
Speaker 2: just wanted to get an idea that I one thing
Speaker 2: I did. I also want to ask you because I
Speaker 2: know you studied it, like the shamanism, what is kind
Speaker 2: of like maybe talk to us a little bit about
Speaker 2: that in the NDEs that you looked into.
Speaker 5: Sure, yeah, from the ancient civilizations, there's evidence for shamanism
Speaker 5: in Mesopotamia, accounts in meso America and China and India
Speaker 5: basically everywhere but Egypt. Once again, that doesn't mean that
Speaker 5: Egypt didn't have shamans. It just means there's not we
Speaker 5: don't really have good evidence for it. But in all
Speaker 5: of these civilizations it was you know, associated with traveling
Speaker 5: to other realms, to realms of the dead, and often
Speaker 5: in the sense of for the purpose of soul retrieval,
Speaker 5: you know, bringing back souls of the dead who are
Speaker 5: in danger of dying. So the shaman kind of develops
Speaker 5: this you know technology for lack of a better word,
Speaker 5: for accessing the other world, leaving the body going to
Speaker 5: this other world without dying, without risking death, in order
Speaker 5: to rescue somebody who really is dying.
Speaker 4: And so when they.
Speaker 5: Bring that person back, that person will have had an
Speaker 5: NDE because they'll wake up, and then the shaman will
Speaker 5: just you know, return the body and reintegrate essentially, and
Speaker 5: that's it.
Speaker 2: Really.
Speaker 5: I don't want to generalize too much about shamanism because
Speaker 5: there's lots of forms of shamanism that don't involve travel
Speaker 5: to the other world, you know, all kinds of healing
Speaker 5: procedures and whatever else. But so I just want to
Speaker 5: make because I'm talking specifically about like the other world
Speaker 5: journey form of shamanism, and that's also found in you know,
Speaker 5: small scale indigenous societies.
Speaker 4: Around the world.
Speaker 5: One of my other books is Near Death Experience in
Speaker 5: Indigenous Religions, and I look in this book quite a
Speaker 5: lot at that interface between shamanic experience and near death experience.
Speaker 5: And interestingly, in the Native American cases and a lot
Speaker 5: of Native American cultures, they made a distinction between shamanic
Speaker 5: other world journeys, dreams of the other world, and near
Speaker 5: death experiences, and they held up near death experience as
Speaker 5: the kind of most profound and most reliable of all
Speaker 5: of those experiences, like the best way of gaining the knowledge,
Speaker 5: the most trustworthy knowledge. And then shamanism was kind of
Speaker 5: in the middle of those other world journeys, and then
Speaker 5: dreams were at the bottom. They still valued all of
Speaker 5: them sources of knowledge, but they put indease at the top.
Speaker 5: And an interesting you know, just to make a point
Speaker 5: on this is the term near death experience wasn't even
Speaker 5: invented really in popular culture until Raymond Moody in nineteen
Speaker 5: seventy five. So it's a fifty year old concept basically
Speaker 5: in the popular consciousness. And I was looking at texts
Speaker 5: going back to, you know, the sixteen seventeenth century. So
Speaker 5: even though they had no term for near death experience,
Speaker 5: and it wasn't like a kind of popular zeitgeist kind
Speaker 5: of thing. They were still describing those kinds of experiences
Speaker 5: and you know, trying to replicate them with shamanic practices.
Speaker 7: Basically, I wonder I'm speculating that a lot of ritualistic
Speaker 7: practices today might have origins in this initiation process of
Speaker 7: stream process or inducing the idea that they might be
Speaker 7: experiencing an NDE. Like when with the monks maintain a
Speaker 7: new name, oh am, i am I here for a
Speaker 7: few seconds or so, sorry, the idea that some ritualistic
Speaker 7: initiation rights kind of contain a nd element, and Buddhist
Speaker 7: monks getting a new name and even being knighted, uh,
Speaker 7: and the Freemasonic initiation where they actually do a mock death.
Speaker 7: I wonder if you might know some initiatory practices where
Speaker 7: they perpetuated the idea that one was in danger.
Speaker 5: Yeah, yeah, that's a good point, especially with the Freemasons.
Speaker 5: I think the Freemasons probably got it from ancient Greek
Speaker 5: and Roman mystery cults, which which I think, and a
Speaker 5: few other scholars think, like Juliaeustanova and Richard Seaford. Classical
Speaker 5: scholars that basically those experience, those mystery cult initiations were
Speaker 5: almost like rehearsals for near death experiences and for the
Speaker 5: dying process, and they were constructed with knowledge of near
Speaker 5: death experiences in mind, so essentially, and there really are
Speaker 5: also equivalents to shamanism. So the initiate would you know,
Speaker 5: go into this situation psychologically prepared to have this you know,
Speaker 5: other world journey type of experience and rebirth. At the end,
Speaker 5: they'd be disoriented, possibly through the use of drugs. They'd
Speaker 5: be led into like a dark subtrainean chamber, and those
Speaker 5: descriptions of you know, almost like special effects, like this
Speaker 5: whole kind of experience was planned in advance, so there
Speaker 5: would be some kind of deity, probably coded in gold
Speaker 5: or silver, and then bright lights suddenly shone on it
Speaker 5: when your eyes are not adjusted to the dark, and
Speaker 5: you meet various kinds of you know, beings in this
Speaker 5: dark place, and then eventually you're let out and you
Speaker 5: emerge into the bright light, which is actually you know,
Speaker 5: just the space outside of the underground chamber, and it's
Speaker 5: that experience that's you know, you're transformed from that moment
Speaker 5: on and then you're eligible to have a more positive
Speaker 5: afterlife when you actually do die, and then then and
Speaker 5: you also have this kind of special status as an initiate,
Speaker 5: which you know, people who have NDEs also have a
Speaker 5: special status by virtue of their knowledge and having had
Speaker 5: that experience to begin with. So yeah, I think there's
Speaker 5: parallels and a lot of a lot of culture is
Speaker 5: about I started calling it the shamanic replication hypothesis, which
Speaker 5: because it needed some kind of shorthand name, and that's
Speaker 5: kind of the idea that people are basing their religious
Speaker 5: beliefs or their afterlife beliefs on endase that's Soften referred
Speaker 5: to it as the experiential source hypothesis. This which is
Speaker 5: a term that David Hufford came up with in relation
Speaker 5: to sleep paralysis. But I think there, you know, they
Speaker 5: sound like, uh, you know, stodgy academic terms, but I
Speaker 5: think they're they're useful shorthands to just kind of precisely
Speaker 5: describe what what these ideas are.
Speaker 1: Really doc would you described right now? Sounds like a birth.
Speaker 1: You're in darkness, a light at the end of the tunnel,
Speaker 1: you come out and you see a whole bunch of
Speaker 1: people there.
Speaker 4: Yeah, and they are yeah, that's sure. In fact, thing
Speaker 4: I thought of, Yeah, Carl Sagan.
Speaker 5: Had had the theory, I think all the way back
Speaker 5: in the seventies that near death experiences were actually you know, uh,
Speaker 5: emerging memories of birth, and and he said, Okay, you
Speaker 5: go through a dark tunnel, you meet a being of light,
Speaker 5: and all this kind of.
Speaker 4: Parallels. But I kind of don't think that's the case.
Speaker 5: And the reason for that is actually the same reason
Speaker 5: that that might work challenges some of the materialist interpretations
Speaker 5: of NDEs, and that's the diversity across cultures. So, for example,
Speaker 5: like the most common stereotype in NDEs about getting to
Speaker 5: the other world is that you rush through a tunnel
Speaker 5: right and then and there's the light at the end
Speaker 5: and you emerge. But in a lot of examples across culturally,
Speaker 5: there's no tunnel. So like in a lot of Polynesian accounts,
Speaker 5: they walk along a path to the other world, and
Speaker 5: they will even say things like I look down and
Speaker 5: I could see the footprints of all the spirits who
Speaker 5: had walked to the spirit village before me. There's one
Speaker 5: woman who as she's walking, she sees somebody else walking
Speaker 5: back in the other direction. Because that person was having
Speaker 5: an NDE and they're on their way back from they're
Speaker 5: on their way back to their body, and she's still
Speaker 5: she's on her way to the spirit world. So yeah,
Speaker 5: this diversity of ways of getting to the other world.
Speaker 5: And there was nothing about rushing through a tunnel. She's
Speaker 5: just walking. So when scientists say, you know, the near experiences,
Speaker 5: you know, the tunnel is basically literally tunnel visions as
Speaker 5: your oxygen is deprived in your brain and your senses
Speaker 5: start shutting down.
Speaker 4: It doesn't really work if.
Speaker 5: Everybody isn't having that kind of experience across culture, because
Speaker 5: our brains are basically the same around the world.
Speaker 2: Yeah. See that has even said something that I've thought.
Speaker 2: I mean, maybe that even makes sense, just as duw
Speaker 2: that we're all the same is I do think, sometimes
Speaker 2: not all the time, like you just said now, that
Speaker 2: people will have like maybe a common experience having an NDE,
Speaker 2: you know, like maybe common even visuals or maybe our
Speaker 2: brain will make sense of a different situation depending on
Speaker 2: our belief system, but very close to the same thing.
Speaker 5: Yeah, it's a really tricky question because so I'll just
Speaker 5: give a couple of more examples. One is the being
Speaker 5: of light, you know, people will see this being of
Speaker 5: light and they'll come back and they say I saw Jesus,
Speaker 5: and the researcher will say, okay, describe him.
Speaker 4: Say it was just this pure, brilliant, brilliant.
Speaker 5: Beautiful light. I just knew it was Jesus. But they
Speaker 5: don't say she was on the cross, he had a
Speaker 5: crown of thorns. And then somebody else will go there
Speaker 5: and say I saw the Buddha, or I saw Mohammed
Speaker 5: or Krishna or whoever.
Speaker 4: So whether this really is.
Speaker 5: Just like some kind of being of light that's objectively
Speaker 5: just to being of light and we all see it differently,
Speaker 5: or whether it's a relative.
Speaker 4: Or what, there's kind of no way of really knowing that.
Speaker 5: But then there's other examples where so, in the kind
Speaker 5: of stereotypical Western examples, when you're sent back to your body,
Speaker 5: you're told, okay, it's not your time to die.
Speaker 4: You need to go and care for your loved ones.
Speaker 5: You know, your son needs you, your daughter needs you,
Speaker 5: or whatever it is, your spouse needs you, or you
Speaker 5: didn't fulfill something about your life. You need to finish
Speaker 5: studying to be a doctor so you can help people.
Speaker 5: That kind of thing whereas in different cultures in India
Speaker 5: and Japan, China, I will go to the other world.
Speaker 5: Let's say I have a near death experience and I
Speaker 5: get there and I'm told it's not your time to die.
Speaker 5: There's been a clerical error. We've got the wrong Gregory Shushan.
Speaker 5: We want the one who lives in upstate New York
Speaker 5: or whatever.
Speaker 4: So you go back to your body.
Speaker 5: So then I'd go back to my body and wake up,
Speaker 5: and this other person who happens to have my name
Speaker 5: would would die permanently. So not your time to die
Speaker 5: is the same, and say that to the body is
Speaker 5: the same. But the reason for it is obviously cultural.
Speaker 5: And that's the kind of thing like I don't know
Speaker 5: how to explain.
Speaker 2: Like they like be men up and they're like looking
Speaker 2: at the body coming to the ship and then they're
Speaker 2: looking at the screen and they're like, that's not the
Speaker 2: same to it. How do you screw that up?
Speaker 4: Yeah?
Speaker 2: That is amazing. I mean, I wouldn't cartells do the
Speaker 2: same thing.
Speaker 7: It makes those correspondences so much more powerful and so
Speaker 7: much more revealing in the sense what I'm experiencing right
Speaker 7: now is the idea of the atman is Brahmin, which
Speaker 7: is variously expressed, and your story of being revealed o
Speaker 7: Cyrus and Osirius as you it's like the same same
Speaker 7: kind of thing and very very interesting.
Speaker 5: Yeah, the big challenge has been, you know, untangling the
Speaker 5: similarities from the differences and what is this, what is
Speaker 5: the similarity cloaked in a symbol, and what is actual
Speaker 5: really a difference. And then on top of that, it's
Speaker 5: not just similarities that are associated with NDEs. For example,
Speaker 5: there's only in Native American accounts and ancient Greek accounts
Speaker 5: is there's this idea of rocks that are clashing together
Speaker 5: in the other world and you have to like slip
Speaker 5: through the rocks before your soul is squished. So that's
Speaker 5: an ancient Greek myth. There's no NDE with with that
Speaker 5: theme in it, but there are Native American indies with
Speaker 5: that theme. And there's you know, pretty much no possible
Speaker 5: way that Native Americans of the nineteenth century or earlier.
Speaker 5: We're learning ancient Greek myths from missionaries. You know, they're
Speaker 5: going to be tough biblical teachings because the goal is
Speaker 5: to convert them.
Speaker 4: So you know why that's the case.
Speaker 5: It was just some somebody had the same idea across
Speaker 5: cultures in thousands of years apart. They just their their mindset. Okay,
Speaker 5: what's another cool way I can illustrate dangers in the
Speaker 5: other world?
Speaker 4: And they came up with this. That's the only way
Speaker 4: I could explain it.
Speaker 2: Do anybody want to ask anything before I ask another question?
Speaker 3: Sure, I'll jump in really quick. Thank you, Nick. So
Speaker 3: I thought it was really great, doctor Shohn.
Speaker 8: When you kind of described the post Vedic we'll say,
Speaker 8: like aman landscape of that. But there is a really
Speaker 8: interesting contract parallel to Osiris. You probably are familiar with it.
Speaker 8: But Shiva, who is more you can describe as like
Speaker 8: a daytime god and then his ferocious form, his kind
Speaker 8: of nighttime form is Birava.
Speaker 3: So you could.
Speaker 8: Say in a way that those parallel, at least parallel
Speaker 8: those two figures. And he even has a specific form
Speaker 8: called Samhara by Rava, who is like the liberatory by Rava.
Speaker 8: So it is kind of like both the apotheosis and
Speaker 8: the unification at the same time. So I think that's
Speaker 8: quite interesting. And he is often described as blazing red
Speaker 8: like ten thousand. All contract texts really described that, but
Speaker 8: blazing red like ten thousand sounds.
Speaker 3: So I do think that's quite interesting.
Speaker 5: Yeah, yeah, I think that's a good parallel, and it's true.
Speaker 5: I mean in the different Indian and Hindu traditions that
Speaker 5: you know, apotheosis, transcendence, divine union or realization of divinity
Speaker 5: of the self is just like permeated throughout a lot
Speaker 5: of Hindu traditions.
Speaker 8: Well, he also has an association with the Nine, which
Speaker 8: I that's what initially sparked that. So I was actually
Speaker 8: wondering if Osius has any astrological association that you're aware of.
Speaker 8: If you're not, that's really okay.
Speaker 4: But yeah, he is.
Speaker 5: He's associated with installation of Orion, but I don't I
Speaker 5: don't know the significance of that, to be honest, but
Speaker 5: I did find that I'm not calling it to mine
Speaker 5: right now, but there were other other afterlife deities associated
Speaker 5: with with Orion, which is there might be some significance
Speaker 5: there that's passed.
Speaker 1: Me by doc I what you and Jen we're talking
Speaker 1: about right now, And then something you said earlier about
Speaker 1: the being of light. Isn't there like a practice in
Speaker 1: Lakota where they have like a sun ritual where they
Speaker 1: pierce themselves and hang for about four or five days,
Speaker 1: and they I guess they do it not only for
Speaker 1: the Sun ritual, but a communion with the spirit, the capital,
Speaker 1: the capital s spirit. And then you would mention the jaguar,
Speaker 1: and I from what I've read, the jaguar is very
Speaker 1: symbolic as the I guess representation of the Sun for
Speaker 1: for sure in in Incan, but also with Aztec and Mayan.
Speaker 1: And then with what you're saying about all of this stuff,
Speaker 1: is it is it that they are trying to commune
Speaker 1: with the Sun or with a star because when you
Speaker 1: mentioned Orion, Orion had in its belt, has the nebula
Speaker 1: where stars are born, and almost seems to be kind
Speaker 1: of coming together in a way to me in my head.
Speaker 5: And I may be wrong, but yeah, I don't know
Speaker 5: if they're you know, so much depends on what they
Speaker 5: think and see these stars and planets in the Sun
Speaker 5: as so whether they're trying to communicate with it as
Speaker 5: a planet or a stars, or as the being that
Speaker 5: it embodies or the being that they think it is.
Speaker 5: I think a lot of that is kind of becomes
Speaker 5: inaccessible to us because we're we the evidence we have
Speaker 5: is so limited, and we can't get inside the heads
Speaker 5: of these these past people. But it's also the case
Speaker 5: that in different cultures, including ancient Greece, they actually saw
Speaker 5: the stars as souls of the dead, and then there's
Speaker 5: some mystic examples of that too. In the Povo, I
Speaker 5: think that the souls are stars, so that might be
Speaker 5: I think a key element that that the stars are
Speaker 5: seen as these deities to be communicated with in some
Speaker 5: of these different traditions. I should add with Native American cases, though,
Speaker 5: the ghost dance tradition, which which a lot of people
Speaker 5: have heard of, the ghost dance is basically a kind
Speaker 5: of democratized shamanic ritual for accessing knowledge in the other world.
Speaker 4: So people will do.
Speaker 5: Repetitive dancing and chanting and again probably drug taking with
Speaker 5: the intention of collapsing, visiting the spirit world, and coming
Speaker 5: back to life. But what's so interesting about that to
Speaker 5: me from from my perspective is that these these traditions
Speaker 5: were founded on the near death experiences of their profits.
Speaker 5: So actual individuals had NDEs came back to life and said,
Speaker 5: now I'm going to teach you how to access this
Speaker 5: other world, and so that included, you know, communing with
Speaker 5: beings of light and different kinds of deities and spirits
Speaker 5: in the other world. And I think that's a parallel
Speaker 5: with the you know, the sun tradition that you were talking.
Speaker 1: About, yeah, and what you're talking about with the ghost dance.
Speaker 1: I think the aspects and minds also have that same dance.
Speaker 1: And I want to say they call it sol which
Speaker 1: is like the Sun dance as well. So that's very interesting.
Speaker 1: How like it all just revolves around almost the same
Speaker 1: thing over and like you said, across cultures, it is conserved, right,
Speaker 1: it's almost you know, the.
Speaker 5: Same, Yeah, I mean, just the fact, aside from NDEs,
Speaker 5: just the fact that so many different cultures have their
Speaker 5: own methods of trying to bring about a visit to
Speaker 5: the other world by leaving your body. I mean, that's
Speaker 5: that's already a pretty interesting thing. And then when you
Speaker 5: add on the NDE layer to that and see it
Speaker 5: as you know, nds are spontaneous, it's not like they're
Speaker 5: people are trying to have them for the most part.
Speaker 5: So I think those cermonic traditions basically emerged from people
Speaker 5: having NDEs and talking about them, and people thinking, oh, well,
Speaker 5: how can I get there without actually dying.
Speaker 2: Something? I did when I ask, and I think this
Speaker 2: might be like a good good way to go into
Speaker 2: it without kind of getting off the topic when it
Speaker 2: comes to uh these NDEs. And I know before you
Speaker 2: had mentioned knowledge and now you're mentioning people that like
Speaker 2: want to have this experience like usually hearing about it.
Speaker 2: I guess what is it that is a benefit? Like
Speaker 2: is one like when you mentioned knowledge before, I've had
Speaker 2: said on the show it's not to the extent like
Speaker 2: the matrix with NEO, but when I've had magical experiences,
Speaker 2: I will wake up and understand things I didn't know before.
Speaker 2: Is that something that when you said knowledge? Is that
Speaker 2: something like you're getting out like understanding things that made
Speaker 2: no sense prior? Or is it like? And what is
Speaker 2: the other like what's the known benefits to these people
Speaker 2: that are practicing this stuff for this like why are
Speaker 2: they doing.
Speaker 5: It for a spontaneous in near death experiences? It's practically
Speaker 5: a universal thing that there is some benefit to having
Speaker 5: had the experience, so either even it's even just as
Speaker 5: basic as like I no longer fear death.
Speaker 4: There's lots and lots of people who say that.
Speaker 5: Some claim that they have telepathic or precognitive kinds of abilities.
Speaker 4: Some people just are nicer.
Speaker 5: They come back and they're like philanthropic and they they're
Speaker 5: kinder people, and they might devote their work to their
Speaker 5: lives to charity from that moment. And then in different cultures,
Speaker 5: there's Native American examples where they're given instructions and kind
Speaker 5: of detailed descriptions of like a particular kind of healing
Speaker 5: plant and like go find this plant on this particular hillside,
Speaker 5: and that will cure you people of the current plague
Speaker 5: that they're they're experiencing. Sometimes they're given like an actual
Speaker 5: physical object in the other world which they bring back,
Speaker 5: and that that stretches my credibility level because I don't
Speaker 5: think that physical object would be able to you know,
Speaker 5: what is physical in an afterlife.
Speaker 4: Kind of realm.
Speaker 5: But yeah, it's always some kind of positive, transformational kind
Speaker 5: of effect. And yeah, and it shows up symbolically in
Speaker 5: a lot of the ancient accounts.
Speaker 2: It's interesting that you mentioned you mentioned something about I
Speaker 2: guess like understanding the plants. Whatever Lisa has brought that
Speaker 2: up before, I think is involved with like these people
Speaker 2: you tell the story. I don't want to think it
Speaker 2: for it.
Speaker 1: Yeah, No, I spent I spent a little bit of
Speaker 1: time with a shaman down in Peru, the Amazonian p Amazon,
Speaker 1: and and he in questions and stuff like that I
Speaker 1: had of him. I asked him with the processes, and
Speaker 1: he had said, well, you know, it's passed down from son,
Speaker 1: from father to son. It's more of a lineage or
Speaker 1: genetic type thing. But the processes, they send the sun
Speaker 1: out into the forest or into the jungle rather, and
Speaker 1: and they give up meat, they give up any kind
Speaker 1: of you know, desires of the flesh really, and in
Speaker 1: that year or two years, they're basically learning the language
Speaker 1: of plants. And at that point, through meditation everything, the
Speaker 1: plants begin to speak to them and tell them what
Speaker 1: is necessary for their tribe or what is a cure
Speaker 1: for this. And the shaman went on to say that,
Speaker 1: you know, he talked about duality, that the spirit is
Speaker 1: very kind to the innocent mind, and that you know,
Speaker 1: a bite from the snake, and he held up, you know,
Speaker 1: a dead snake whatever. He held up a dead snake,
Speaker 1: and it had a checkerboard and then he goes, the
Speaker 1: cure to that is this and it was a bark,
Speaker 1: and then he placed it right next to the snake
Speaker 1: and a head a corresponding pattern, and so he even
Speaker 1: went into that whole thing. But the he mentioned that
Speaker 1: the main thing was a communion of learning the language
Speaker 1: of the plants, because the plants help do everything. So
Speaker 1: that's interesting in.
Speaker 5: That, Yeah, and that that's paralleled with you know, peyote
Speaker 5: traditions in the Southwest and Mexico and also in Africa
Speaker 5: with the god Eboga, who is the kind of deity
Speaker 5: of Ebogaine, which is a hallucinogenic plant. So yeah, these
Speaker 5: these plants are actually deified and they're they're seeing themselves
Speaker 5: as sources of knowledge too that you can directly benefit from.
Speaker 5: And it's also in India there was soma. Nobody knows
Speaker 5: what soma was, but it was, you know, the way
Speaker 5: it's described, it was basically a hallucinogenic substance brewed from
Speaker 5: some kind of plants that in that is like an
Speaker 5: eye opening path to wisdom. So I think it's a
Speaker 5: that's a pretty common.
Speaker 4: Cross cultural theme.
Speaker 5: And again a lot of them have associations with, you know,
Speaker 5: visions of the other world in the afterlife.
Speaker 1: Yeah, they're the whole is asca thing. You have to
Speaker 1: combine two separate plants and who would have come up
Speaker 1: with separate I mean, with combining those two separate plants,
Speaker 1: But they said it was given to them when the
Speaker 1: Shamans walked with them their their ancestors. And then obviously
Speaker 1: the ritual of going through an ayahuasca ritual that you're
Speaker 1: basically you know.
Speaker 3: Whatever have you.
Speaker 1: But yeah, I mean you would have never combined those
Speaker 1: two unless it had the knowledge had not been given
Speaker 1: to them during that knowledge ritual.
Speaker 3: Yeah right.
Speaker 2: I do find this interesting, this whole idea with the
Speaker 2: plants telling you or speaking to you, because you know
Speaker 2: how many known occultists put out books on herbs and plants.
Speaker 2: It is like a constant thing if you really, like,
Speaker 2: if you were to look at it, like a lot
Speaker 2: of occultists, like you know within like Wickan or flee
Speaker 2: Make or you know anything, you know, any kind of
Speaker 2: a tradition is a lot of them do cover herbs
Speaker 2: a lot. I mean, I just I just found anything
Speaker 2: and then another thing. Not to get into it, like
Speaker 2: too far, but it's just like even when it comes
Speaker 2: to occultists or scientists that are a cult especially Nazis,
Speaker 2: they're huge into phlebotomy, I mean botany, bany, the huge
Speaker 2: into plants like this just seems like something interesting with
Speaker 2: I guess the magicians and their obsession with plants. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 2: something behind that. I don't know, this is a common.
Speaker 7: I wanted to say that I love the expression that
Speaker 7: you coined the shamanic replication process? Am I saying? Am
Speaker 7: I saying it correctly?
Speaker 4: Yethesis? Yeah? Hypothesis?
Speaker 1: Excuse me.
Speaker 7: It makes me think that this is a useful terminology
Speaker 7: for not only the ND elements that we see in religion,
Speaker 7: but a lot of a lot of other things are
Speaker 7: very much part of a shamanic replication and opposite. A
Speaker 7: lot of new or modern religion is shamanic rejection too, rite,
Speaker 7: I mean a lot of it has the total a
Speaker 7: version of the feminine and herbal systems.
Speaker 8: For instance, Well, the piggy back off of what Nick said,
Speaker 8: I think that there is actually a Native American one
Speaker 8: of them. That there's a mohawk myth about the first woman.
Speaker 8: So she's like the falling star, I guess you could say.
Speaker 8: So she falls from the pleroom on to the turtle's back,
Speaker 8: and she's lonely. So who does she call down from heaven?
Speaker 8: She calls down the medicine men. That's the first people
Speaker 8: that come. But they don't come as people, they come
Speaker 8: as plants. So I think that that is maybe like
Speaker 8: because you can look at the plants as just a grammar,
Speaker 8: just like you people do with astrology, Like there's much
Speaker 8: stronger astrologers than me, but that you can look at
Speaker 8: plants in very much the same way, just like we
Speaker 8: often do on the show with Kabbala and all that.
Speaker 8: So I think that's the relationship. It's like I said,
Speaker 8: doctrine of signatures, and I think this is like what
Speaker 8: both Lisa and Nick really spoke to was this, like
Speaker 8: so there are kind of patterns that you can recognize
Speaker 8: that maybe aren't yeh. The story is cultural, but there's
Speaker 8: something that also transcends that.
Speaker 2: And almost even almost even the actions of what the
Speaker 2: people get into after the facts seem to be almost common.
Speaker 2: Like even look at the Voyage manuscript there people are
Speaker 2: trying to figure that out and it's a book of
Speaker 2: plants are herbs and I don't even know if they're
Speaker 2: real or not, and their uses of it. It says
Speaker 2: again funny how it's like another work by an ocultist
Speaker 2: and it has to do with like understanding herbs and
Speaker 2: what they're used for, like they speaking to you. It's
Speaker 2: just the whole thing again, you're stuck on understanding what
Speaker 2: all these.
Speaker 3: Herbs are for.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's just in a different scenario to like.
Speaker 5: Ancient sumer and the you know epic of Gilgamesh. Part
Speaker 5: of his journey, which is he has after life journeys,
Speaker 5: he goes to Paradise, he goes he basically has a
Speaker 5: near death experience. Part of his goal is to seek
Speaker 5: out the plant of life, the plant of immortality. And
Speaker 5: then there's parallels in China and India and elsewhere as well.
Speaker 5: I don't know if there's any culture wark it doesn't exist,
Speaker 5: some kind of a they're seeking some supernatural plant.
Speaker 2: That's interesting, I mean. And then I think I think
Speaker 2: Lisa might have said it before on the show. I
Speaker 2: think the plan has a lot of same signature. Basically,
Speaker 2: like a human life is formed something like that has
Speaker 2: the Fibonacci sequests within it, or they used.
Speaker 1: To most of the arrangements in the way that they're
Speaker 1: formed follows you know, the golden ratio or the Fibonanci ratio,
Speaker 1: and so that's kind of like you know, redundant and
Speaker 1: especially you know, with when you get into Pythagoras or
Speaker 1: Empedocles or anything like that of the ancient philosophers, they
Speaker 1: start to kind of allude to something of the sorts.
Speaker 1: But even going back all the way to the beginning
Speaker 1: of this episode, the not the number nine. I believe
Speaker 1: there was a Pythagoreans that did not like the number
Speaker 1: nine because because they it just it was beyond them.
Speaker 1: So they were obsessed with ten, right, But when it
Speaker 1: came up to nine, they they were not They didn't
Speaker 1: really like it. I guess that's kind of what I
Speaker 1: read or whatever, that it baffled them. It's done.
Speaker 7: They despised the number two for its diffiveness.
Speaker 3: Also start on.
Speaker 1: And then some of the in Egypt, whenever they're depicting,
Speaker 1: you know, about death and whatever, the lotus flower is
Speaker 1: the lily is present throughout some of the.
Speaker 5: So mhm, yeah, I'm actually my name comes from the
Speaker 5: Egyptian word for lotus, which is sho shine. So maybe
Speaker 5: I have some ancient Egyptian ancestor way back.
Speaker 2: Awesome. One question I didn't want to ask you, and
Speaker 2: I really want to do it at the beginning, but
Speaker 2: maybe it's a good idea to do it near the end. Now,
Speaker 2: what was what was the idea that sparked the passion
Speaker 2: for you to even write this book?
Speaker 5: I mean it was really obviously like life after death
Speaker 5: is kind of a universal interest, you know, I guess
Speaker 5: for people who just you know, automatically dismiss it as
Speaker 5: ridiculous to begin with. But you know, when I first
Speaker 5: read about Dyes, when I was like a teenager, I
Speaker 5: just thought I already had an interest in like, you know,
Speaker 5: paranormal stuff, and I had books about, you know, weird events,
Speaker 5: and one called Phenomena about like, you know, how it
Speaker 5: rained frogs and fishes in medieval Europe and this kind
Speaker 5: of just strange stuff. So I had this kind of
Speaker 5: baseline interest even as a pretty young kid. But there
Speaker 5: was something about NDEs that just seemed like, wow, so
Speaker 5: these people are clinically dead for a period measurable by
Speaker 5: actual science, then come back and talk about these experiences
Speaker 5: and they seem to have these similarities. But I didn't
Speaker 5: really pursue it. It was it was just something that
Speaker 5: kind of lodged in my in my brain. And then
Speaker 5: I had read a book by Carol Zeleski called Other
Speaker 5: World journeys, and she basically looked at medieval accounts of
Speaker 5: monks and nuns who traveled to the other world and
Speaker 5: come back, and they're basically near death experience. And that
Speaker 5: stuck in my head too, because she makes this She
Speaker 5: draws all these parallels with near death experiences in those accounts,
Speaker 5: the context and the contents of the accounts and the
Speaker 5: culture and all this stuff, and then at the end
Speaker 5: she basically says, but they're all products of the imagination.
Speaker 4: I just thought, wait, how can that be.
Speaker 5: The case if you know, these ancient medieval accounts are
Speaker 5: similar to contemporary accounts. So that kind of argument lodged
Speaker 5: in my head, and then it just kind of resurfaced
Speaker 5: as I was doing the research on the Egyptian afterlife
Speaker 5: texts and snowballed from there, you know, twenty six years
Speaker 5: later or whatever it is now and I am now
Speaker 5: doing like my fourth study on the subject, which is
Speaker 5: going to be ancient Greek and Roman near death experiences.
Speaker 5: So rather than like a big comparative kind of thing,
Speaker 5: it's really just kind of drilling down into the different
Speaker 5: ways that Greeks and Romans viewed and ease, you know,
Speaker 5: like the myth or that Plato talks about. He presents
Speaker 5: it as an illustration of his philosophies and the things
Speaker 5: that he's arguing about the immortality of the soul. But
Speaker 5: then people later on just think like, wow, that was embarrassing.
Speaker 3: You know.
Speaker 5: There's a later a Roman text called the Dream of
Speaker 5: Cipio where it's believed that he actually had an NDE,
Speaker 5: but Cisero thought, no, that's just too unbelievable and too embarrassing.
Speaker 5: Plato failed with it, so I'm just going to say
Speaker 5: it was a dream. So this idea of how they
Speaker 5: were perceived over time, I think it is really interesting,
Speaker 5: and sometimes they're just ridiculed as well in some of
Speaker 5: these ancient texts.
Speaker 2: You know, I find it interesting. You said that you're
Speaker 2: in the stuff, you're into this stuff at a very
Speaker 2: young age. Did you ever think, like, I guess, maybe
Speaker 2: like in the middle of your life, that you'd be
Speaker 2: like coming back and like full circle to be able
Speaker 2: to look at the things that interest you as a
Speaker 2: child and be able to incorporate it in your life
Speaker 2: and like live like live your life like in a
Speaker 2: sense like that.
Speaker 5: Now, No, I didn't at all, And in fact, you know, yeah,
Speaker 5: I thought I was standing to be an egyptologist, you know,
Speaker 5: I was going to be a straight up egyptologist.
Speaker 4: And as I was going, I was thinking, like, Okay.
Speaker 5: Do I want to retranslate the same literary texts over
Speaker 5: the years? Do I want to go on excavations and
Speaker 5: get emphasem of breathing and all that dust? And basically,
Speaker 5: you know, Egyptology is such an incremental process. It's like
Speaker 5: there there aren't huge discoveries that's going to lead to
Speaker 5: some new shift and knowledge over time. They might find
Speaker 5: a lot of more lot more artifacts or whatever, but
Speaker 5: it's very kind of the things that are being learned
Speaker 5: are very incremental. And I just thought, do I want
Speaker 5: to be stuck in that one civilization for the rest
Speaker 5: of my life? And I thought, no, I actually like
Speaker 5: to do this comparison with ancient India. And then oh,
Speaker 5: that's interesting, And so I just kept branching out essentially,
Speaker 5: and and NDEs gave me that focus and kind of
Speaker 5: opportunity to look into all of these different cultures and
Speaker 5: civilizations around the world.
Speaker 2: For you, Yeah, thanks, anybody else got any more questions?
Speaker 6: I haven't, okay too, oh No, I just wanted to
Speaker 6: ask our guests that if he is familiar with Korean
Speaker 6: shamanism and the Princess Bari myth, because I think it
Speaker 6: perfectly fits in with both his sort of nine criteria
Speaker 6: and also a very interesting because it posits like not
Speaker 6: the Anana figure, but like sort of like a daughter
Speaker 6: of man to go into the underworld and retrieve like
Speaker 6: sometimes it's given like a Buddhist tax. Sometimes I'll say,
Speaker 6: like Kishi Garba, who's the Buddha of the hell realms
Speaker 6: or the Earth matrix, and so she'll have to go
Speaker 6: down herself and retrieve it as part of like her
Speaker 6: test orthurgic kind of process.
Speaker 5: You could say, no, I'm not familiar with that, but
Speaker 5: but I will look into it. I know a scholar
Speaker 5: who works in out of body experiences in Korea, Samantha
Speaker 5: Lee Treasure, who has a new book out on ubiz.
Speaker 4: I bet she would know about it, so we'll ask her,
Speaker 4: thank you very much. But I did. I did find that.
Speaker 5: Uh, there was a Chinese nde of a woman named
Speaker 5: Meo Sean who was about to be beheaded by her
Speaker 5: father because she didn't want to become a Buddhist nun.
Speaker 5: And just as that was about to happen, she's carried
Speaker 5: away by a tiger in the forest and she has
Speaker 5: a new death experience that comes back, and according to
Speaker 5: this myth, she then becomes, you know, the the prominent
Speaker 5: Buddhist figure of Kwanyin. So that's that's an interesting text
Speaker 5: of like basically an NDE context given for the emergence
Speaker 5: of this you know, extremely important Buddhist figure.
Speaker 3: Well, that's really interesting.
Speaker 8: Sorry, at least that you that you say that, because
Speaker 8: guan Yin has other kinds of we'll say incarnations or
Speaker 8: forms that are directly related to coastal like Chinese coastal
Speaker 8: shamanic practices where they actually apotheosized the female shaman ask
Speaker 8: into like the their kind of diaism.
Speaker 3: We'll say, it's like a broad category. So yeah, great,
Speaker 3: thank you.
Speaker 5: Sure, Yeah, yeah, that's I talk about that a little
Speaker 5: bit in the book. Even though it was after the
Speaker 5: periods I was looking at, because I was looking at
Speaker 5: pre Buddhists China, I thought this was just too interesting
Speaker 5: of an example to leave out.
Speaker 6: Yeah.
Speaker 1: My mine was just more of a comment that all
Speaker 1: of this reminds me. And I don't know if you
Speaker 1: have seen the series of the OCA, I'm sorry, Yes,
Speaker 1: on and it reminds me of a lot that purposeful
Speaker 1: trying to die or flatliners right back back, how they
Speaker 1: were trying to you know, get further and further out
Speaker 1: to find more and more information. And so it almost
Speaker 1: it almost makes me feel like that, you know, they're
Speaker 1: the modern day version of like what you were talking about,
Speaker 1: them trying these different cultures trying to gain all this
Speaker 1: information and access. That was it. It was just a comment.
Speaker 5: Yeah, Yeah, it's interesting how it kind of entered into
Speaker 5: the pop cultural zeitgeist. But I haven't heard of actual people,
Speaker 5: you know, trying to do flat lighting. I mean, I
Speaker 5: guess there's there's a pretty big explosion in people wanting
Speaker 5: to go to Ayahuascow with shamans and things like that
Speaker 5: and or d MT or whatever it is, and I
Speaker 5: think that probably ties into like the shamanic impulse that
Speaker 5: humans just happen to have.
Speaker 2: H That was one thing I also wanted to ask you, Uh,
Speaker 2: I guess, you know, maybe it has gotten a little
Speaker 2: bit more popular than the normal, But do you think
Speaker 2: going forward in the future, do you think maybe they'll
Speaker 2: be more scientific and maybe public interest in understanding NDS one.
Speaker 5: Ah, it's really hard to say, I think unless unless
Speaker 5: some scientists can can come up with some good evidence
Speaker 5: that then needs to be tested again and get some
Speaker 5: kind of media attention. And if they're a you know,
Speaker 5: valid scientist publishing in a peer review journal, I don't
Speaker 5: think so.
Speaker 4: I think there's just as much.
Speaker 5: Hostility and negative reaction to the subject as there's always been.
Speaker 4: Really, and you.
Speaker 5: Know, pretty much every every article that comes out in
Speaker 5: the media is about scientists discover NDEs or all in
Speaker 5: the brain. You know, there's a recent one about this.
Speaker 5: You know, they've identified a burst of electromagnetic energy right
Speaker 5: at the moment of death in humans and in rats,
Speaker 5: and so they said that must be the life review.
Speaker 5: This is, you know, the responsible for all the barriers
Speaker 5: in the brain shutting down right.
Speaker 4: At the moment of death.
Speaker 5: So your your consciousness has flooded with all of your
Speaker 5: memories happening at once. But the challenge to that is
Speaker 5: cross culturally, that that life review doesn't really happen. You know,
Speaker 5: I haven't found accounts of like this big panoramic life review,
Speaker 5: and they need to kind of expand their their theorizing
Speaker 5: to include cross cultural diversity of these kinds of experiences,
Speaker 5: which which so far hasn't happened yet.
Speaker 7: I guess from from from what I gathered from you
Speaker 7: is the Egyptians weren't in necessarily focus on reincarnation but
Speaker 7: the afterlife. But could you compare or or are there
Speaker 7: comparisons between the Book of the Dead, if you will,
Speaker 7: from Egypt and the Book of the Dead into that
Speaker 7: that was found, And I wonder maybe isn't the Book
Speaker 7: of the Dead in Egypt more accurately named the Book
Speaker 7: of coming forth by day? Could you could you break
Speaker 7: that down a little bit?
Speaker 5: Yeah, I mean I looked mostly at the earlier afterlife
Speaker 5: text The Book of the Dead is made up like
Speaker 5: basically two thirds of the Pyramid texts and Coffin texts,
Speaker 5: which which preceded it by you know, over a thousand years.
Speaker 5: I wanted to look at the earliest phases of Egyptian
Speaker 5: religion before there was much possibility of influence from other cultures.
Speaker 5: So but having said that, for the most part, it
Speaker 5: is this, they're all guide books to the afterlife, and
Speaker 5: they're ritual texts that where the ritual action would kind
Speaker 5: of mirror the activities of the soul in the other
Speaker 5: world in order to kind of facilitate their safe passage
Speaker 5: and achieving a positive afterlife. In the Egyptian case, it's
Speaker 5: you know, as I mentioned, whether that ultimate state was
Speaker 5: this kind of omnipresent, transcendent kind of thing, or whether
Speaker 5: it was certain people went to the field of Russia's
Speaker 5: and had this eternity and the happy hunting grounds, and
Speaker 5: certain people joined the Sun god on the cosmic circuit.
Speaker 5: That's kind of unclear. With the Tibetan text, you know,
Speaker 5: the goal I think is clearer. It's also which met
Speaker 5: book of the Dead is known as the Bardotzal Total.
Speaker 5: It's also a guidebook to the afterlife realm, but focuses
Speaker 5: more on the afterlife realm being an intermediate state either
Speaker 5: prior to a new rebirth or that you transit through
Speaker 5: on your way to liberation for the extremely limited few
Speaker 5: people who can attain that. And so part of that is,
Speaker 5: you know, recognizing the illusory nature of what's going on
Speaker 5: in that experience, and recognizing the clear light of pure
Speaker 5: reason as an illusion rather than as a deity, and
Speaker 5: being able to kind of overcome that.
Speaker 4: In order to avoid being reborn. Basically, so that whole
Speaker 4: element of.
Speaker 5: You know, rebirth and liberation is absent from the Egyptian text,
Speaker 5: and I don't know if that's because you know, they
Speaker 5: saw they just didn't have the concept of rebirth, and
Speaker 5: maybe that state in the other world was the divine
Speaker 5: liberated state. And in fact, an interesting parallel to make
Speaker 5: is the main fear in the Egyptian Book of the
Speaker 5: Dead in pyramid texts and coffin text wasn't like you know,
Speaker 5: damnation or anything like that, or even rebirth. It was annihilation.
Speaker 5: It was basically this fear of non existence. So they
Speaker 5: have these different demons, like there's apes that will threaten
Speaker 5: to cut off your head or a snake that spits fire,
Speaker 5: but it wasn't like the pain or the torment that
Speaker 5: they're going to cause you.
Speaker 4: It's the fact that they.
Speaker 5: Could lead you to non existence, that you're going to
Speaker 5: be annihilated if if your soul is killed by these
Speaker 5: these kind of entities. So you know, if you can
Speaker 5: make that parallel in some ways that in some sense
Speaker 5: into ben and Buddhism, annihilation is liberation, and then egypt
Speaker 5: annihilation is like the ultimate horrible fate.
Speaker 3: Thank you, that's great, thank you.
Speaker 2: Sure, I'm gonna ask uh probably wrap it up soon.
Speaker 2: We ask you a ton of questions already. Thank you
Speaker 2: very much. I appreciate you dealing with them. Is there
Speaker 2: anything that you want to say about your book? You know,
Speaker 2: but you know his book before we wrap it up,
Speaker 2: that you might want to at least, you know, promote
Speaker 2: or push a point whatever it is.
Speaker 5: Yeah, I mean, I think we covered a lot of
Speaker 5: basically what it does. I talk a little bit about
Speaker 5: it in the end, about you know, in light of
Speaker 5: all the diversity of near death experiences and afterlife beliefs,
Speaker 5: like what kind of afterlife could even be conceivable? Because
Speaker 5: you know, some scholars will say, you know, if there
Speaker 5: is an afterlife, then why are all these why are
Speaker 5: all these NDEs different? So I was kind of trying
Speaker 5: to find a way to reconcile that idea and to think, like,
Speaker 5: why does everyone's after life experience have to be the
Speaker 5: same in order for it to be valid? And so
Speaker 5: I kind of came up with this idea of like
Speaker 5: I called the projection model of a near death experience,
Speaker 5: where essentially those nine elements that we talked about at
Speaker 5: the beginning or something like them, you're leaving the body,
Speaker 5: encountering the being of light, and deceased relatives. These kinds
Speaker 5: of things happen more or less to most people having
Speaker 5: an NDE, but we all project our cultural symbolism on
Speaker 5: them while they're happening.
Speaker 4: So it's not just like.
Speaker 5: We come back and make sense of it, but I
Speaker 5: think we actually perceive them in a way that it's
Speaker 5: almost like our culture and our symbols make them perceivable,
Speaker 5: make them experienceable, and without that then it would just
Speaker 5: be this kind of blank experience, if that makes any sense.
Speaker 4: So I think that.
Speaker 5: Diversity isn't necessarily a challenge to their really actually being
Speaker 5: an afterlife state.
Speaker 4: And I also think that.
Speaker 5: There's some really interesting Native American examples where missionaries are
Speaker 5: trying to convert them and saying, you know, you need
Speaker 5: to believe this what it says in the Bible. This
Speaker 5: is what Jesus said about your reward in heaven and
Speaker 5: possible punishment and hell, and these Native American people would say, well, actually,
Speaker 5: hang on a minute. We know somebody who died and
Speaker 5: came back to life just last year, and he told
Speaker 5: us what it's going to be like in the other world,
Speaker 5: and that kind of flicks with a lot of what
Speaker 5: you're telling us and you're basing what you're saying on
Speaker 5: something that happened, you know, thousands of years ago, So
Speaker 5: why should we believe you. So I think there's a
Speaker 5: kind of lesson to be learned from that. In contemporary society.
Speaker 5: I'm always surprised at how many people were kind of
Speaker 5: continue to have fears of death based on what I
Speaker 5: think of as like toxic theology, the kinds of religious
Speaker 5: beliefs that they grew up with that were they were
Speaker 5: conditioned to fear death and essentially to fear the process
Speaker 5: of dying. They think they're going to go to hell,
Speaker 5: they think they're going to be judged and tormented by devils.
Speaker 5: And the people who are closest to the dying experience,
Speaker 5: people who have endes, aren't saying any of that. You know,
Speaker 5: they come back and say, I saw this amazing being
Speaker 5: of light, I had this transformative experience, And they come
Speaker 5: back happier, better people, who are more charitable, and more
Speaker 5: open to diversity and all these kinds of things. So
Speaker 5: I kind of feel like there's there's wisdom and knowledge
Speaker 5: and to be gained from listening to those experiences, where
Speaker 5: whereas people are more used to falling into the doctrine
Speaker 5: of organized religious beliefs, which you're often based on fear
Speaker 5: and manipulation and control, which I don't go into much
Speaker 5: in the book, but it's but it's kind of a
Speaker 5: the natural progression in a way of how to think
Speaker 5: about this stuff and where it all leads.
Speaker 2: To definitely, uh, weird stuff to like I don't know something,
Speaker 2: something's up with it, and it's like unexplainable. And I
Speaker 2: really appreciate you coming on and talking more about it
Speaker 2: with us. Definitely something. I mean, maybe in the future
Speaker 2: we get you back on again, we could talk more
Speaker 2: about it or your other writing, you know, all the
Speaker 2: works as well, but.
Speaker 4: Sure, anytime.
Speaker 5: And yeah, that's I mean, the more I've learned about it,
Speaker 5: there's always some there's always some like almost like the
Speaker 5: afterlife obstacles that the souls encounter. There's always some obstacle
Speaker 5: thrown in the path. Like you can't just find one
Speaker 5: single way to understand this and then write them off
Speaker 5: as like, Okay, it's experience of life after death or okay,
Speaker 5: it's just all in the brain. It's just way more
Speaker 5: complicated than most people think.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, I mean again, like you were saying, you know,
Speaker 2: I said before, sometimes like this is just different for
Speaker 2: different people because it's the language they understand in their brain.
Speaker 2: With the pre program too, you were saying before people
Speaker 2: see Jesus, see people see Buddha. Why I guarantee you
Speaker 2: when was a Christian that were Kintholic that was seeing
Speaker 2: Jesus like you know, or they were exposed to that
Speaker 2: at some point in their life and so it's uh again,
Speaker 2: It's just I think it's a very deep thing to
Speaker 2: try to think about and understand what the body and
Speaker 2: the soul is going through, you know. Very interesting. Yeah,
Speaker 2: uh again, Gregory, thank you so much for coming on.
Speaker 2: That was an amazing chat. Really, that was an amazing episode.
Speaker 2: I really appreciate it.
Speaker 4: So thanks for having me on.
Speaker 2: Yes, yes, and all your stuff will be in the
Speaker 2: bottom after the show. Actually, if you don't mind, you
Speaker 2: can email me every single link you want me to
Speaker 2: put down there in the show notes and I will
Speaker 2: include it. Okay, great, awesome, And again, thank you Lisa.
Speaker 2: I really appreciate you coming on. Ethan and Jin the
Speaker 2: Ninja again, you know, the rejects guys are great, awesome questions.
Speaker 2: I really appreciate you joining me. Yeah, thanks, Yes, definitely,
Speaker 2: and again go check out his stuff. And I would
Speaker 2: even say go look up for other interviews he's done.
Speaker 2: He's done other interviews on other shows. He's doing other
Speaker 2: interviews on you know, other shows. I'm sure I saw
Speaker 2: something that you did from twelve years ago. Go check
Speaker 2: out his work on YouTube. He's got some stuff out there,
Speaker 2: you know, he's got some interesting stuff to talk about,
Speaker 2: you know. So thank you again. And that is the
Speaker 2: end of another recult rejects. Until the next one. Everybody
Speaker 2: be well later.