S2E27: Unlearning Our Fear of Death

In this series, we'll dive deeper into the revelations, challenges, and unexpected truths

from the slap at the tapes. The goal is to explore all the threads that weave together our understanding of reality. Science, spirituality, and yes, even unexplained things like side abilities. If you haven't yet listened to the slap at the tapes, I encourage you to start there. It lays the foundation for everything we'll be exploring in this journey.

We'll feature conversations with groundbreaking researchers, thinkers, non-speakers, and experiences who illuminate the extraordinary connections that made a fire explanation today, but won't for long. Sometimes I think about how different learning can look when we actually follow a child's curiosity.

“And that's why I've been exploring time for learning.”

It's an all-in-one online curriculum for pre-K through 12th grade, which means everything is in one place; core subjects, electives, even really engaging story-driven lessons for older kids that feel more like watching something cinematic than sitting through a lecture. What I love is the flexibility. You're not locked into a rigid schedule.

You can structure your day around real life, whether that's travel, creative projects, or just giving your child more space to go deeper into subjects they love. And for parents, it takes a lot of pressure off. They have tools for tracking, progress, transcripts, even diplomas, so you're still meeting requirements without feeling overwhelmed.

It's also been around for over 20 years, and has served more than a million students,

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That's time, number four, learning.com, to explore their curriculum and find the perfect plan for your student. You can get started with a monthly subscription to see just how much your kids enjoy learning on their own terms. Today, we speak with Emmy Award-winning filmmaker and artist Lynette Wallworth, who had

a near-death experience at just nine years old that reshaped her understanding of reality, dying, and what it means to belong to this world. This set her on a journey to explore alternative relationships to death, which led her

to indigenous people's traditions in Australia, Mexico, and the Brazilian Amazon.

Her work really dovetails with ours, and that she's exploring knowledge about living and dying that was once widely held and has since been lost, especially in the West. So Lynette, why don't you introduce yourself?

“So I'm Lynette Wallworth, I live in Sydney, Australia.”

I work in immersive technologies in emerging technologies, as well as traditional documentary. I had many, many supporters who helped me on my unusual quest to follow this sort of thread about our existence, our reality, and the edge of life. And this journey into exploring death emerged in a rather remarkable way. For me, that exploration began when I was young, I used to have seizures occasionally,

though grand mal seizures of an unknown course, so they could not be diagnosed. And frequently I stopped breathing. And the last seizure I heard was when I was nine years old. That set me on a path which has changed my entire life. Can you take us back to that day?

I was at my grandparents' house in the country, rolling on a big drum, just enjoying myself having fun. I fell, my hit my back, and I had a seizure, and I was alone. And by the time my family found me, I had stopped breathing altogether. So my dad had to resuscitate me, and I'm sure that was a terrifying thing for him.

But for me, I had just left my body completely. I saw myself on the ground, and then very swiftly I was traveling through life of extraordinary colour. And I knew that I was still myself, but I was no longer in my body, so I knew those two things.

And I came to a place where I met two beings who I didn't know, but I knew new me. I would say the sensation was most closely of being held in absolute love. But of a kind that I haven't experienced before, since, because it was overwhelming in its sense of belonging, and probably that's the big word I would attach to it, and the challenging word to live with.

Many years later I saw a photo of my great-grandparents, and I realized that was my great-grandfather, my great-grandmother, and I understood somehow, and nothing is spoken, there's just sensation that I needed to return, and that these people would be kind of standing outside of time, present for whoever from the family came next, and I knew that that would be my grandfather. So I opened my eyes, my dad was resuscitating me, the family around there was a lot of tension,

this together, where I have just been is enduring reality, and that thought has never left

me. Gosh, what an intense experience to undergo, so young.

“It was a difficult thing to do with as a nine-year-old, I think, I've often thought to have”

any deaf experience like that extends your understanding of reality, nowadays, and these are more common, but back then, I can't imagine this was understood or accepted, or maybe there wasn't even a lexicon around it. My, the deaf experience happened in the '73 years before Raymond Moody coined the term. There was no one I could talk to about this, so I was taken to doctors to have brain scans,

and I remember vividly telling the doctor what had happened to me.

The doctor said to me, "Oh, you had a dream."

I said to him, "No, this is the dream." I remember the sensation of realizing very swiftly, "Oh, I've said the wrong thing. I should not talk about this." And it happened to a child now, people would know to ask questions, but I just didn't have that help.

It was a different time. So even if others around you didn't understand it, what changed for you when you returned from your near-death experience?

“The best way I can describe it, it's like, if you lived your entire life on the surface”

of a lake, and everyone you knew was on the surface of the lake, every building was on the surface of the lake. Your entire existence was on the surface of this lake, and then one day you fell in. And underneath there is entire other existence where you move differently, it's fluid, light behaves differently, there's different beings, there's an entirely different experience

to be had, and then you get pulled out, and you have to act as though you know none of that. And that was a challenge of, let's get back to that word, belonging. So when they want to hear about native experiences, want to hear about what happened, what changes you is how you emerge from it, and what is changed is your relationship to everything

here. So actually the impact it had, is it made me a far more connected human being than I would have been, that feeling of connection doesn't fade. And so it changes your relationship to all other people, all life, all of nature, and how did it change your relationship to death?

I did not know for a long time that I had an unusual relationship to dying, but what it did for me was take away my fear of death, so from that early age I have not been afraid of death. It's not that I'm not sad when someone dies, I, of course, I experienced loss, I grieve, and mourn, and miss, but I do not fear the loss of connection or the loss of the ongoing

existence in some form of those I've loved, because it's what happened to me. And when you started to realize that you related to dying in a way others didn't, how did you make sense of that? It really wasn't until I started to work with different remote indigenous people that my relationship to death made sense to me, because it was similar.

“How did you first get introduced to these indigenous perspectives?”

You know, the really fortunate thing for me is the oldest living uninterrupted culture is here in Australia.

It's always been a part of my thinking to explore these cultural differences that exist

in my own place, and indigenous understandings of death came from my closeness with Tashka Yowanoa and the Yowanoa people. So the Yowanoa are from the Brazilian Amazon in accray, so I met Tashka at Oxford in England of all places, and he had come there with several other chiefs from the Amazon, brought there to talk about issues to do with Brazilian forests, and we met and we got on immediately,

and I asked him, "What do Yowanoa people feel about this?" So these are people who are using a visioning tool all the time, Ayahuasca, in order to go on to vision and state, and travel we might say without the body, and he said, "Yowanoa, we are sad when someone dies, but we don't fear death." And here's a clip that Lynette shared from her upcoming film that we'll hear more about later.

This is Mooka from the Yowanoa Tribe, describing his understanding of death, spoken here by our English translator. They say to him, "Human, animals, fish, trees, everything will pass through death. Death is a being that the great spirit has given to all that live on earth. So before dying, we will see many visions.

All unseen, there comes my grandfather, there comes my uncle, the death will open the

way for us. They will meet us and they will lead us to what they went. So tell people that they will reach this point, but they shouldn't worry. It's like surrendering your body to death." The Yowanoa have helped me understand myself.

The strands of myself that didn't quite fit in the culture was raised in Ay found a home with the Yowanoa. And so that was where I started to realize that the fear of death is not universal, it's cultural. And so then if it's cultural, what has impacted us culturally to make us so death denying?

That's a very interesting question. What about your indeed, you think, makes your experience relatable to them and vice versa? It's possible that there's a channel that opens up in consciousness when you have one of these experiences that is recognisable in some way to others who also have that same channel opening.

So we think about it like a spectrum of colour and we know we see visible colour and bees can see in the ultraviolet range.

“That's the best way of explaining it to myself because it's happened to me several times”

that I have no training, I should not actually have the ability to have these connections

apart from the fact that something was opened up in me as an annual that never closed

this down. And the Yowanoa people have this channel open by doing ayahuasca, right? Yeah. They know it because they have a practice of accessing that state. So when I was interviewing community members, I have not had an ayahuasca experience and

yet I understand what they're talking about, they understand what I'm talking about. That was the first place where I realized there's a kind of cohesiveness here to these states and I realized that I wanted to do a more explicit work about exactly this subject that would try and connect, what is this death denying aspect in Western culture? Where has that come from if it's not universal?

Because it's a void, right? So in some ways what you found is that many indigenous cultures have a more positive relationship to death because of these plant medicines or psychedelics like psilocybin or ayahuasca that allow them to leave the body and have an experience beyond just like you had with your NDE.

Those peoples who have not looked themselves away from the understanding that we have physical bodies and that they won't all die have just so much to tell us. If you're like me, you sometimes think back to college or those nights in your early 20s when you were just so present with your friends and those nights those moments feel kind of legendary because you're so present the laughter and the honesty and everyone's in that

zone at the same time dropping their guard and I think as you get older and especially as you become a parent or maybe get set in your work or marriage routine and just gets hard to find the time to connect with friends or loved ones that way.

“And I think that's what's so revolutionary about micro dosing psilocybin from schedule”

35 because it's not about tripping at all. With a small micro dose it's honestly more about feeling deeply present or connected with this just intense ability to listen totally undistracted with the people you love. And micro dosing can be used in a few different ways, you know, it can be used on heavy days to find clarity or to kind of reset and just feel human again or to spark some creative

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Schedule 35 operates from a decriminalized zone and they encourage everyone to understand and follow their local regulations. Please only purchase if it's legal, safe and appropriate for you. This led you to your next journey, which we came the documentary Edge of Life, where you really explore these themes by following a clinical psilocybin trial of two patients facing

the end of life, which opens up to a deeper investigation as the patients and the doctor's facility in the medical trial needed to journey beyond western medicine to seek guidance from indigenous knowledge holders in an effort to understand what they were going through and what has been lost from our culture around death and dying. So I think it's a fabulous basis for investigation.

I had reached out to this psychiatrist and psychologist, Morgan Justin, they were working

palliative care at some Vincent's Hospital, they had these 35 patients that they were going to offer psilocybin treatment for with psychotherapy. So they were on the same path as me, if you like, and using an ancient medicine that the mastic of use, as we know, was all along in order to help people find a new relationship to their approaching death.

So I said, "What are we filming this?" And I told them, "I have friends in the Amazon in other places around the world in Mexico who use these same medicines in different form, and I'm interested in how we might weave cultural understandings back together because it seems like there's a void in our culture.

What is this void about?

“Why is this cliff the people fall off at the end of life in western culture?”

All this terror attached to a sense of nothingness, because we have nothing to hold us. Yeah. No cultural knowledge. No story. Unless you belong to an organized religion, then you'll have some version, but a lot

of people in my country don't belong to an organized religion. Okay, so you start working on a documentary with the two doctors who are doing this medical trial with psilocybin to help two patients overcome their fear around death and dying, and what happened.

So with Justin Maga, I could follow these two incredible women.

And one of the women we follow rose. She belongs to Christian community. She's very held in her religious beliefs. She had lost her husband two years before she got her own diagnosis of cancer, and she's got three young adult children all in their 20s.

And she's thinking, I'm going to leave these young people with no parents. She was very distressed, she cried a lot of the time. And she was still practicing her religion, which I'm sure gave her solace, but she joined up to Justin Maga's trial because of her grief and anxiety. And she has this psilocybin experience and what she says is, she rehearsed her own death.

She's lying on the bed, and then she lifts up, and she sees her own body.

She sees her own body lying there.

She recognises that that is her. She is also now in herself somewhere else. She moves very quickly through light. She sees almost in some future home, her three children at their doing very ordinary things. I think she said her daughter was packing lunches into containers.

She sees, she's okay.

“She sees her son, then the next son, she realizes that life is going on in their fine.”

And the moment she has the thought that they're okay, she's removed again, and this time in this movement through reverberations of light. She's somewhere else and she sees someone coming to water and she realizes it's her deceased husband. And behind him is standing her deceased parents, and he leans in and kisses her.

And at that moment, she loses this anxiety about what all of these livings will mean for her. And she emerges from that psilocybin experience with a completely altered relationship to die. Wow.

It's really just such a remarkable gift to these women. The other woman in the film is Flavio. She also had an incredibly positive experience in her psilocybin session. And afterwards she was really interested to connect with some indigenous knowledge holders who could talk to her about their understanding of what to expect at the end of life.

And so we connected her with Sergio Pitchchis, who's a Mayan shaman and artist, and he shares through painting the Mayan understanding of that tradition and understanding of what will happen at the end of life and after. And here's that clip from a film translated into English. This is the opening of the painting I'll be explaining with a lot of love for Flavio.

My story begins with the life and death of the Mayans. Here the person has passed away. Her body becomes still in that moment, but the wheel continues turning in other dimensions. The wheel tells her she must continue her journey as a being who is no longer with us. This is when she gives away her being to the universe.

Nothing belongs to her anymore. Everything is returned to the universe, but she doesn't feel fear. She's not alone. She's going to go through a process where time does not exist.

“I believe what we call time is ruled by the universe.”

We're living being is governed by a form of a cycle. We don't disappear or die with simply recycled life.

We continue in this world.

Wow, that's so beautiful. And so in Flavio's last days, both Sergio and his brother Daniel, who's also a shaman, was sending messages to Flavio to offer instruction really about that process as she went to it. It was undoubtedly helpful. So from many people who are raised in Western culture and have a fear of death, one way

of reconciling that fear could be to connect with these ancient ways of understanding this passage into the next form. What about after someone passes? Like for those who are left behind and have a loved one that they're still grieving.

Is there anything you've observed as being specifically helpful to those who are in the midst

of, you know, what can be really crippling grief? Every single person without fail who I interviewed, who had seen the body of the person who don't. Either they'd been there when the death had happened or they'd come a little bit afterwards. Put their hands on that body and knew and said the same thing they were gone.

Like word for word, just that touch helps. We know something through our physicality that needs to be comprehended by our minds that are dealing with this extreme pain. The things that are so challenging is that so much of what we've done in the funeral industry is to remove ourselves from that, from seeing the dead or just touching them or combing

their hair for the last time. And some wonderful people working this industry are doing now is encouraging participation because they have to overcome our fear of even seeing a dead body. I think we've moved ourselves so far away because of fear and we've intensified our fear by doing that.

“And honestly that's why I made this film because very early on in my life I realized that”

I did not have a fear that I saw or could have a crippling effect on people who lost someone suddenly and I've been lucky enough to be called into communities where an understanding of what the end of life could be, what it does hold, what we may experience is held in an entirely different way. And I wanted through this film to try and do my best to thread that lack of knowledge back

together, honestly, to try and help. I love that and I think it's so important in so many ways, right? Because it feels like this moment is a time of remembering and reconnecting to knowledge and understanding of what we've lost. One of the palliative care experts in our film is someone you've also spoken to in one of

your episodes, Christopher Kerr and he so beautifully states, this is not new knowledge. This is lost knowledge. Yeah, he is so great.

He was interviewed a few episodes back and shared the most incredible insights that were

data driven, you know, from research about the visions people see as they approach death. And I guess, you know, that brings up the questions, so if anyone is grappling with a fear of death right now and can't or you don't want to have a psychedelic experience,

“are there other additional steps that can start improving their relationship to death?”

You know, the things I would do is if you are somewhere where you can connect with Indigenous people, find them, this is known to them, they have not lost this knowledge and if they're willing to share with you, find them, that capacity to hold this state open and to see the loss of it in our culture is very well known to many Indigenous people. And if you are facing death, build your interior landscape, even the practice of meditation,

spend time in your own mind, learn how to contemplate without being distracted by the entire screen world around us that is calling us into distraction because there's a place of knowing that you can't access takes time, takes practice, but it's there for all of us. Yeah, that's beautiful. Under it, flux guidance that we've heard over and over around these questions that we've been exploring on our show. And that guidance is simple, right?

It's about looking inward, trying to be mindful about regulating our bodies, our emotions,

“our thoughts, and just being quiet. So yeah, I love that. Yeah, I think we're coming to a”

time culturally where we're going to need all of this more because we're creating into some challenging times with a plethora of technologies that we have no idea how they're going to impact us culturally and socially. And we can lose things, we can lose things from culture. And the loss of those things, generations down, we may not even know they're gone, but the loss of them impacts us, you know, sense of self and sense of happiness. Yeah, you know, I think about that all the time.

widespread, people gathered on front porches. And now people are losing their appreciation for

“long-form storytelling because they prefer, you know, a 30-second reel or whatever. And then you go”

away before that, we could navigate from the stars. And now people don't even know how to use a paper map. So it's like what are the ramifications of technology and advancement when we keep losing skills that really connect us to nature and who we are. And it sounds like through technology and advancements and all that stuff. We've also lost our comfortability around things that are super natural like death. Yeah.

So I met this incredible anthropologist at Brown University. When I was doing research there,

Padja Faldri, I was telling her what I was doing and I was researching this work. And she said to me that we do not understand in the West how people like the Masatech held open this portal to accessing altered states, even during the first Spanish invasions of their territory, even at risk of torture and death. And what she's referring to here is that even after the Spanish arrived in the 16th century and began suppressing indigenous spiritual practices, the Masatech didn't

abandon their ceremonies. Instead, they protected them, bringing their mushroom rituals, which were central to healing and communication with the divine underground. And through that, we're able to carry them forward through generations. You know, it's a historical note, but it impacted me immensely because of the "why" of that, right? Because the "why" of that means we need this. We need it.

“Maybe it's a human right to have access to a direct experience of the mystical. That's what I have”

come to believe, which doesn't mean that you have to have that experience. But the removal of knowing that an extended experience of what this reality is available to you, that's an enormous loss. And so it has caused me to think about this idea of the direct experience of the mystical, and I don't know if you've talked to Brian Rurescu, who has done that work about trying to look at where the Western culture ever used psychedelics in any way, and whether that was part of

pre-Christian and early Christian history. Yeah, we interviewed Brian in season two episode seven, he's amazing, and he's a researcher who wrote the book, The Immortality Key, which argued that in the West, especially at Aleusius and Ancient Greece, and probably in early Christian and Jewish rituals as well, they likely use psychoactive substances, like potions or even in the form of wine, to induce these mystical experiences that caused people to not be afraid of death anymore,

and I really encourage people to go back and check out that episode season two episode seven, because it looks at how deeply ingrained mysticism and connection with the divine,

or those who pass has always been in cultures around the world, and so what you're saying is like a

global piece of information that's been lost. Yes, so part of Western culture, right? And I think he is suggesting that once Christianity was formalized around 300 and something AD, that those practices of an active ingredient were removed. So the questions around these direct experience of

“the mystical I think is important, because it's available to us, and it seems that a lot of”

organized religion has stood in between you and your direct experience of that mystical. There's much to be explored there about what is impacted Western culture, and what do we need to do to retrieve our experience of the transcendent? I think it's incredible what you're pointing out, it's so profound, and what's funny as you're talking, it makes me think about how over the years our burial practices, and even the funeral industry have undergone a huge shift. I mean, before the Civil War,

most people were buried at home and quickly, but when soldiers started dying away from their families, we began to embalm or chemically preserve the bodies so that they could be returned. But that was still pretty uncommon, and then when Abe Lincoln was assassinated, like everything changed, and it changed the funeral industry, and it changed our death practices in America forever, because they created President Lincoln's body around the country for public viewing, and they needed

to embalm him, so millions of Americans saw a preserve body, and many for the first time, and then this sort of became like a symbol of reverence, and a mainstream standard in how Americans

handled death and funerals, and it became a way of honoring the dead, so things are always changing,

and it was a cultural shift. And things can change again, it's true, and we'll have to change as we deal with other challenges, whether burial plots remain the same. People always got buried now, many more people get cremated, and these changes come about, because there's cultural need,

and we think it's always been that way, and I'm hoping there's some change happening around

“quantum physics. That is opening us up to this extended sensation of reality, the capacity of”

particles to know what another particle is doing, while separate from it, sounds a lot like telepathy, right? Yeah. Like science is moving in a direction that might help us also comprehend these states that we have until now, not many words to describe, but talking to the people of experience, these states, it's a huge key. Absolutely. In Western culture, I would say fear, these the biggest challenge to rewrite our understanding of what death is, and what it can be.

Gosh, and what beautiful work you're doing to help facilitate that change. Thank you. And if

people want to see amazing Lynette Wallwarts upcoming film, Edge of Life, it will be coming out

very soon on Apple TV. And by the time you hear this, it might be out already. We could just be so

“much better at this. Let's hope. Yeah, I mean, it's just another paradigm to shift, right?”

The death doesn't have to be terrifying, and to many cultures around the world. It's not, and they've kept the portals open to the other side that help them accept the cycle of life. So I'm glad that we're having these kinds of conversations. Yeah. It's not. I think so too. Thank you so much Lynette for this conversation. Thank you. This Friday and exclusive episode will be released on our subscriber-only backstage pass. Here's a clip from that episode.

Hey, all, this is Kai, and my team printed out a bunch of your questions for and asked me anything. So I have them all here, and I'll go through them as best as I can. The first is when will the documentary be released? Well, I have all sorts of news on that. So woof, we're finishing up our color correction, making everything look great. And tomorrow, I'm finishing the audio mix, which is, you know, we level out all the different sound effects in the music, in the dialogue, and voice

over on that type of thing. And then all those pieces of get put back together, and we should have a finished film in May, which is exciting. We will start submitting to film festivals, and hopefully start to do some impact screenings where we can bring it to communities who are really excited to see it. And we might even do a few like small theatrical releases that are targeted around the country. I'm hoping all that stuff will happen, like end of summer, early fall.

And then Q1 of next year, we hope to have it on a streamer that can be accessed around the world. By as many people as possible, we're already working with different post services that can translate the film into as many captions and languages as possible. So we hope to get it out to any of you in a matter where you're at. The next question is, what do not speakers think about extraterrestrial theories? If you'd like to hear more, subscribe to

become an exclusive member at the link in the episodes description. That's it for this episode of the talk tracks. But new episodes will be released every Wednesday. So stay tuned. As we work to unravel all the threads, even the veiled ones that knit together are reality. And please

“remember to stay kind, stay curious, and that being a true skeptic requires an open mind.”

Thank you to my amazing collaborators. Producers Katherine Ellis and Selena Kennedy,

technical directing audio mix and finishing by Jeremy Cole, opening and closing music by Liz with PW, and original logo and cover art by Ben Condor Design. I'm Kai Dickens, your executive producer, writer, and host.