S2E48: Shared Death Experiences | Talk Tracks

Hi everyone, I'm Kai Dickens and welcome to the Talk Tracks brought to you weekly by TTT Media.

“In this series, we explore the threads that weave together our understanding of reality.”

Science, spirituality, consciousness, and even unexplained phenomena. Because every era has ideas once dismissed as impossible until someone was willing to investigate them seriously. And on this show, we do just that. In our second season, the consciousness cassettes, we took a deep dive into near-death experiences. Moments, when someone claims to leave their physical body and travel beyond this realm of existence, returning profoundly changed.

And walking into that season, I'd heard of near-death experiences.

What I've never heard of until recently was a notion that someone else could accompany you on this type of journey.

Shared death experiences occur at the moment of someone's death. When a stranger or loved one reports suddenly seeing what the dying see. Feeling what they feel, or even accompanying them part of the way through what seems to be a transition into somewhere else. In this episode, we'll hear from people who say they've experienced the death of someone they've loved, from a perspective that somehow wasn't entirely their own.

To understand what these experiences are and what researchers are finding, we first spoke with William Peters, founder of the Shared Crossing Project, who has spent years studying Shared Death experiences.

I'm William Peters, I'm the founder of the Shared Crossing Project and director of our research initiative.

I'm also a psychotherapist and I specialize in families and end of life. So I began the Shared Crossing Project in about 2011, and I was really interested in end-of-life experiences, whether they're near-death experiences, after-death communication, all sorts of end-of-life dreams and visions. And then, of course, the Shared Death Experience, which is the one I knew the most about, because of my own personal experiences and my experiences as a hospice worker.

“So, first, can you define what a Shared Death Experience is?”

A Shared Death Experience occurs when somebody dies, and a caregiver loved one, and in some cases, just a bystandard, reports that they somehow shared in either new about or witnessed

and some cases, even accompanied the dying person into the initial stages of the afterlife.

And what they tend to report is that this experience of human death is a journey. In other words, the dominant motif is journey. They see or experience their departing loved one, moving along, progressing through what we loosely call in the afterlife. And it's often a process of ascension. It's often moving towards the light.

There are a lot of these characteristics that are similar to the near-death experience, so think about seeing deceased relatives, think about seeing elevated spirit beings, think about the moving towards that luminous loving light. And the feelings associated with this are sublime, that a common term we hear in our research is, I don't have the words to describe the feelings that I have.

These are not feelings I experience here in the human realm. Shared Death Experience can take many different forms, but William says certain features show up again and again. And one of the most interesting is that even when someone feels as though they're accompanying the dying person somewhere, there often seems to be a point where they can go no further. The other element we see also is a boundary, there's a point at which the experienceer will accompany,

or observe the dying person in transition, and then all of a sudden they realize, oh, I cannot be with or observe this person any longer. And in that moment, in a flash they're back in their human body, in their human life, and they're often quite startled because they have no context to hold that experience.

“But that raises another question, why would a living person experience any part of someone else's death in the first place?”

William says there isn't a definitive answer, but one pattern that appears repeatedly in the cases he studied is the relationship between the two people. There's a really important element in the shared death experience, and that is the bond. Usually the bonds between the experience and the person dying is quite strong. So often with spouses or parents with children, siblings, close friends.

But there's also something else that's quite striking. Sometimes these relationships are quite strained. And in some cases the shared death experience serves to heal a relationship that you would think should be strong, say between a parent and a child, and the shared death experience occurs as a healing.

And I think if I were to put it down into the three characteristics that summarize the power of the SDE.

“The feelings of love, since a belonging, many times experiences would tell us this felt like home.”

This was more real than real. And the last piece of this is a kind of wisdom or knowledge that is bestowed upon the experience. We often hear the experience or express in that realm. I knew everything. Any question I had about the purpose of my life, the purpose of a human life, human pain and suffering.

It was all explained and made sense to me. Many SDEers, similar to near-death experiences, yearn to return to that place.

What's so fascinating about this though, is that the person returning to this reality is not the

person who's actually passing. Why does this happen?

“Are we actually able to tap into the feelings or experiences of someone's separate from us moving on?”

This feels so beyond the grid of anything I've ever heard about or considered. And I wanted to hear some firsthand experiences to quell the question in my brain. Is this something someone desperately wants to experience or could this just be a hallucination or imagination clouded by grief? So will you first introduce us to Christina Coint, who experienced a shared death experience or

SDE with her mother? My name's Christina and I'm from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. I'm just a pretty normal person, you know, single mom and raising my son. I was born and raised Catholic, however, I strayed away from the religion. I had more questions about why would God do this to this person?

You know, just like everybody, a lot of people have questions.

I'm very logical person, so I never believed in like, you know, near-death experiences and

things of that nature. So this when this happened, I was extremely surprised and baffled by it. Okay, so why don't we start at the beginning? Who did you share a shared death experience with? I had it with my mom and she died very suddenly.

She was a very healthy person. She actually was just about to go grocery shopping and she had a brain hemorrhage three days later. They took her off of life support completely. So she was 54, her body was still young. She was struggling to breathe really fighting and we knew that she could die at any time now.

So I came in the hospital that morning in my brother left and I was the only one in the room with her. I hugged her, I thought I loved her and so and I just, I felt like this like rush of energy calm that she was going to, like something was going to happen. In I whispered in her ear, I said, "It's okay, mom." I said, "You know, I'm here. God's here." I said it three times. And when I said that that's when the room started to move, it was like spinning all of a sudden.

I felt this shift. It was almost like disaster had struck. You know, it was just spinning and I was completely aware the whole time of it was going on. So I was very scared and I remember my exact thoughts were what is happening. And then there was a tunnel, I also said there was a tunnel in my peripheral vision. And I was no longer surrounded by other hospital equipment and instead I was in a world of light.

And there was a vivid, beautiful white light that surrounded me. There's no darkness, nothing. It was very, very beautiful. And I could feel the pressure of the light against my skin and my body became light.

“As well, which is why I think I was scared. So the light, it had substance to it.”

It was like the environment and south, but it was like the light was alive. I was very happy. I was so happy. This is like the sense of love ran through my veins and my mom kept going towards this other light and that's when I came back here and I she was dead. I was in this peaceful state for I thought like about three days, paralyzed by that happiness and the joy and the peace and the beauty of the round that I saw.

It was just as real as this between us right now. The thing that gets me the most is that I how much I felt it physically. I wasn't dreaming. I wasn't daydreaming. I wasn't tired. I was like fully awake and conscious the whole time. Elizabeth Boyson, co-founder and president of Helping Parents Heal,

while on a trip to Mount Everest. My name is Elizabeth Boyson and I am the co-founder and president

“of Helping Parents Heal, which is an international organization that supports parents who have a child”

or children who have passed and I unfortunately have had two children pass myself. One was in France and it happened two days after she was born. That was Chelsea and that was in 1991 and the reason that I mentioned Chelsea is because she plays into the shared death experience that I experienced later on with Morgan with her brother. Morgan was already born at the time. He was two years old when I came home from the hospital. I'd been in the hospital for two months on an IV to keep from having

Chelsea and so I was thrilled to be able to get home to Morgan in spite of the fact that having Chelsea pass was the most difficult thing that I'd been through up until then. After that, Morgan grew into a beautiful young man. Six foot seven, he was 280 pounds, size 17 foot. He was

“everybody's friend. He was like a huge teddy bear. He was always hugging people. He was on the football”

team here in Keith Creek and then when he went to the University of Arizona, he became a cheerleader

and everyone called in big bear because of his bare hugs and he had gone to China one time first

in his sophomore year and then he went back and his senior year and he was studying there and since he knew more Chinese he was kind of like the big brother for everybody who was there and they decided during the fall break to go to Tibet and they'd been studying to bet with their professors, the professors were planning to go and I was excited about the opportunity because I had lived in India for about five years when I was in high school and in college and so I was excited for him

to be able to see this beautiful country. So they all left and landed in Lassa at 11,000 feet. There were 13 students that went and when they got there, they slept one night and immediately the next morning they started going up to the Mount Everest base camp into that which is about 19,000 feet and normally you need an acclamation period to be able to go from 11,000 to 19,000 feet. They had a Chinese tour guide with them. The two professors decided not to go at the last moment

and so it was just these kids who didn't really know very much about altitude sickness who were going up the mountain together and unfortunately they were all getting very sick because of altitude sickness. Oregon was helping them out because he was the one who spoke Chinese the best and he was the one who was holding their heads when they were throwing up outside the bus. They were even urinating inside the bus because this is one of the signs of altitude

sickness actually and when they got up to the base camp because the Chinese tour guide was pushing them up the mountain as quickly as possible to get there before nightfall. Morgan had a terrible migraine and went to sleep. They were in a yeart which is a huge tent and during the night he was getting up and wandering around the tent and calling people by the wrong name. I love having a morning

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Aim, which is also a sign of altitude sickness. And at nine in the morning, the next morning, they were going to go back down the mountain, and Morgan was filming at the mouth, and they couldn't wake him up. One of the kids, who's mother is a doctor in Washington State, he called his mother and his mother said, "Get him down the mountain as quickly as possible," which was no easy task with this

280-found 6-foot-seven young man, but they loaded him onto the bus, and they started down the mountain, and by that time, the director of the program had called me, and he let me know what was going on. He said, "Miss West All, one of the kids who has his phone with him, it's Morgan's roommate. Can I give it to you?" And I told him, "Of course." And so I immediately called Colin, and by that time, Morgan had stopped breathing, and so they picked him up, carried him off the bus, and they were doing

CPR on him in this plane up at the top of the mountain. And of course none of these kids were experts in CPR, the poor things. And so, Morgan said, "Miss West All, it doesn't look good." He's not breathing, we're doing CPR on him, but nobody really knows what they're doing. And I told him immediately, Colin put the phone up to his ear, and when he did, I said to Morgan, "We love you, we're proud of you, and don't be afraid." And I immediately felt this enormous bear hug from Morgan. It was the most

incredible hug that I've ever had from him. And I feel like he took me over to what he was experiencing at that time, which was pure love, pure peace. I was so blown away by this, and I was sitting there next to my husband in his office. And my husband said, "Can I speak to him because I was so

“calm?" And I said to my husband, "I think it's too late." And I has been, of course, broke down. My daughters,”

when they came home that evening, broke down as well. But I knew at that moment when I crossed over with him that he was 100% fine. He was not at all in any pain. He was joyful. He was excited.

And one of the things that he had told me was that he would always be with me. And I know that he

is, and even to this day, that was in 2009. I still feel him all the time. And the reason that I mentioned Chelsea at the very beginning is because I've been told by mediums in the past, that Chelsea was the first person to meet Morgan when he transitioned. She grabbed his hands

So it was, it was truly one of the most incredible experiences. And I started helping

parents heal a few days later. Wow. So in the moment he was passing, were you able to physically feel what he was feeling? I could feel what he was feeling, but none of the pain. I didn't feel and you know, when you have altitude sickness, your lungs fill with water, your brain fills with fluid. But there was no pain whatsoever. I just felt so light and so loved. And so filled with gratitude.

“I think it was the weirdest thing. And so the football moms here who were moms of the other kids on”

the team, when he was in high school, they were all telling me, Elizabeth, you're fine now, but in a few weeks or a few months, you're just going to hit a wall and it's going to be terrible. And I knew that wasn't true. I knew that what I was experiencing was something that was, first of all, actually the real truth about what happens when we transition. I felt that way. And not only that, I felt like that every single parent who has a child transition must be feeling the same thing.

So one of the reasons that I started helping parents heal was to be able to meet these parents and find out about their own experiences. But unfortunately, at the time, there weren't any support groups that allowed parents to talk about this, to talk about their connection with their kids on the other side. So I would go to these support groups and I tried to tell about these

incredible signs that Morgan was sending me. And I would be told by the moderator, we don't talk

about those kinds of things in this group. So in the parking lot, I would be swarmed by parents saying, "I'm not in the same thing happen to me." Tell me about this because we aren't allowed to talk about this. And I was really surprised that that wouldn't be something that people would talk about, because it's probably the most healing thing that we can experience when we have a child who transitions.

“And I must say that that's probably the worst thing that any parent, any person can ever experience”

is to have a child transition. And of course, we would rather that those kids still be here with us. But being able to know that they're happy, healthy, and home, and that they are able to communicate with us because they work as hard as we do to communicate from the other side. And they teach each other how to do so too, which is really exciting. Just as Chelsea taught Morgan, I think that he had a crash course in learning how to communicate with us because we got so many

signs in the very beginning. Christina and Elizabeth's experience are very different, but they share something remarkable. Both describe momentarily accessing a reality and emotions that seem to belong to a person who is dying. I wanted to understand how someone who spent their career studying the brain might approach stories like these. That brought us to Marjorie Wolcott,

“a neuroscientist and longtime professor at the University of Oregon who has spent the last decade”

studying consciousness and the extraordinary experiences surrounding death. Marjorie told us about one shared death experience that especially stayed with her. It happened to Dr. Joan Boysenko, a Harvard trained scientist and pioneer in mind-body medicine as her mother was dying. I was asked by David Lorimer when we were doing a conference called Beyond the Brain to interview Joan Boysenko. She's a person that a lot of people may have heard about before

because her own background is phenomenal in that she got her PhD from Harvard Medical School working in cancer cell biology and she's a distinguished pioneer in integrative medicine and she's a world renowned expert in the mind-body connection and she has her own background

in meditation. She had this amazing shared death experience with her mother and I thought she's

the perfect person to actually integrate in our understanding what is like from the neuroscience point of view and what is like from the meditator point of view with your own mother as you're going through this. Where she told me is that basically in 1988 her mother died in the very hospital where Joan was working. She didn't really get along very well with her mom most of her life. They were like oil and water as how she explained it and she said her mother was then in the hospital now

and she was dying and on the last day of her life she developed this internal bleed and the doctors wanted to know the source of the bleeding. So she was taken from her room down to nuclear medicine to do a scan and she didn't come back all day long and that family was waiting in the room to find out what had happened and they said to Joan well you work in the hospital you go down and find her

gurney all alone in the corridor. Joan got a doctor and he came over and Joan's mother said

“why have I been lying here all day long and he said well it's very very busy and she said well”

I'd like to go back to my room now and say goodbye to my loved ones and so Joan's mother says take me to my room, Joan and he says stop she's has to have an order they take her and Joan's mother said, Joan ignore him steal the body so Joan's running down the corridor with the gurney and they get into the elevator and her room is on the seventh floor so they're in the elevator and she looks at Joan and she says, Joan I've made a lot of mistakes with you.

She says I thought if I criticized you I'd get to it before somebody else and then you could change your behavior and people would like you better and I see this was a bad mistake and I'm thinking

that you thought I never loved you and Joan said that had crossed my mind and then she looked at

“Joan was such a love and such simplicity it was like there was no distance between them and she”

said would you forgive me and Joan's heart flew open and she said she felt like there was just one person there then Joan said to her I've been a beautiful daughter and I've showed up but I haven't really loved you can you forgive me and they had this amazing moment of forgiveness and the descent of such peace and then the doors opened and they were on the seventh floor and Joan rolls her mom out and she reminds us that her mom is really acidic but Joan said something

to her and she said she would never have said otherwise because her mom would have laughed.

Joan said I'd like to exchange a soul quality with you mom and she asked your mom for her courage because she had tremendous courage whatever happened very evenly she would always go

“through it and Joan on the other hand said she was always a lot more fragile and her mom said”

what I would like from you Joan is your compassion and Joan was stunned because her mom was not the sort of person to notice that and clearly she had and Joan realized my God she sees me all that time she actually sees me then Joan gets into her room and Joan and her son Justin are there and

Justin is about 20 years old and they're sitting with Joan's mother and Joan's son was amazing

he crawled into his grandmother's bed with her and he held her and he told her all the ways that she had made his life better and before she finally became unconscious she was going back and forth across the veil and Joan's father occurred to her she looks at Justin she looks at Joan and she says any's here do you think he's waiting and then she became unconscious and Justin and Joan are on either side of the bed and suddenly Joan felt this kind of tug and suddenly bam she's in

another level of consciousness and in this realm she has this vision and it's a vision of a pregnant woman delivering a baby and Joan is both the pregnant woman and the baby and she said it felt completely embodied and she had an interesting realization she said as the baby was being born it was an uncomfortable state for both mother and child but she felt the whole thing from both perspectives and then when the baby was born her consciousness switched totally into the baby and in that

baby body she was born into a light and she's thinking to herself nobody can describe it it's the warmth the love the extraordinary love I cannot believe it and she said that love was completely unconditional because you have an awareness that this life has known every thought you ever thought that it's aware of all your mistakes all your little meanness is everything and it only emanates mercy and she thought to herself this is like having a cheering session for your soul's evolution

she then started to have experiences of vignettes for her mother's life and it was a whole life reboot with her mother and herself together and each vignette was about some argument or something that had gone on between them but she saw it from a totally different level and she saw how each interaction has served the growth of consciousness and heartfulness and discernment in both of them that both were served by that friction that was happening and when the experience

ended her last thought in that vision was such gratitude that her mom had birthed Joan back and Joan had now birthed her mom back into another realm and Joan opened her eyes

looked across her mom's dead body and there is her son Justin and his eyes are open and he says

“mom the room is filled with light can you see it and Joan said oh yes I can see it and he was so moved”

he was weeping and Joan goes around the bed and she sits next to him and he looks at her and he starts by saying over and over again I can't believe that a soul would give an entire lifetime to another person he kept repeating this and she said Justin what are you saying he said I had a vision and he said what I understand is that grandma Lily was a very great soul who took a role in this lifetime much smaller than who she was and she did it in service of our mission because your

purpose is to be a teacher of love and you needed someone who was not so lovable to you because it was the tension between you that allowed you to understand what love was missing and what was necessary and so not to miss a good opportunity Joan looked into and said hey I've made a lot of mistakes as a mother could you forgive me all these mistakes were made in love's service and then Justin said the light that was grandma's last gift to us she was holding open the door to

eternity so we could have a glimpse and Joan then told me now that experience completely changed me when I'm off said her I have such an easy shortcut back I put myself back in that hospital room and I go through that birth tunnel and I'm there with the being of light there with my mother and

“Justin and I think that's reality we got a light but we also got a big lampshade called the ego”

and it doesn't matter the ego doesn't last through time it's simply a container because we got to be able to experience all the depth of sorrow and joy so we wear away some of the ego and then that larger sense of self comes she said our journey is about removing the blocks to love's presence so that light is there in all of us Joan and Justin's experience is extraordinary two people sitting on opposite sides of the same hospital bed both describing a room filled with

light at the moment someone they love died and as powerful as these antidotes are they pose an

important question what is going on here where does one person's conscious experience end and another begin can these shared experiences be studied and stand up to science in any way and if researchers

“are able to collect enough of these accounts what patterns emerge well that's what will impetus”

we heard from at the beginning of the episode has set to find out as part of shared crossings projects initiative as we went along we put out more specific requests for SDE experiences we really had a very impressive positive response like hundreds of cases came forward and we did our first research we started I think in 2016 2017 and we had 162 cases and that's a pretty robust collection when you're when you're publishing and these are in depth interviews we

did coding and we figured out you know 770s some odd codes which are essentially features of this experience william and his colleagues began cataloging what people actually reported looking for similarities and differences across cases and then they noticed something they hadn't expected this episode of The Tlapped the Tapes is brought to you by alloy health here's something nobody tells you the skin changes that start in your 40s aren't just aging their hormonal

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the shared death experiences reportedly happened miles apart and the remote SDE is not that much different than a bedside SD in terms of content in terms of what the possible features are so this was really an eye opening experience for us as researchers nearly two thirds of the cases they collected happened when the experience or wasn't even at the bedside and in some of the most intriguing cases the person didn't know their loved one was dying at

“all that distinction feels important because many conventional explanations for unusual experiences”

surrounding death involve things happening to the person who was dying like changes in oxygen brain activity medication or physiology but in a shared death experience the person reporting the experience isn't dying and in a remote shared death experience they might not even be anywhere near the person who is dying what was also incredibly compelling was when the shared death experience occurred when the experience or did not know that their loved one was dying they had no knowledge

that the person was dying and then they had the shared death experience and so now it really challenges the current medical model which is that brain creates consciousness and at the moment of death consciousness ceases well this is very interesting because how is it that a loved one has no knowledge of their loved one dying and yet at the moment of death they are getting a stimulus response that's kind of not based on the five sensors that we have they're not in the

room they're not seeing they're not smelling they're not touching you know they're not observing any of this phenomena and yet they have this experience and it's remarkably similar if not identical in phenomena to a bedside SDE so this is really a challenge to the current scientific model and it suggests remote consciousness and it suggests all sorts of other views of what consciousness is for our species studies like this are largely built from people's retro respective reports of

what happened to them we are in a space where we can't quite understand what causes this experience and the research can't prove that these people were literally accompanying another consciousness into the afterlife so determining the mechanism is challenging to study still for Dr. Monica Williams any emergency physician who now serves as a medical director of the shared crossing point those remote cases raise a serious question about whether our current models can account for everything

people report there is a very powerful pattern in some of the shared death experiences

that suggests that it is time for a paradigm shift in the medical model of consciousness and

physiologic abearance see the last act of a dying brain a hypoxic brain if you are away from the bedside of a dying person and that person's dying unexpectedly and you have an experience that is parallel to the near death experience the features often overlap no one can say that was a response to a stimuli either internally or externally so whatever model of consciousness we're working from presently is too small to contain

this experience and to explain it so we need to expand our model of consciousness and what it is to be human and in that expansion that creates the space for this to be engaged for all people Marjorie Wolcott who shared the story of Joan came to the same question from a different direction Marjorie spent decades studying the brain as a neuroscientist we introduced her to

you first in season one and she says that from the traditional neuroscientific framework she was

trained in shared death experiences are difficult to account for from the reductionist neuroscientist traditional perspective that I was trained in you can't explain it because again what they're

“saying is you have five senses and as all you have and so you should only be able to experience”

what's happening in the room what the person's saying to you ears eyes et cetera so saying that because I'm a neuroscientist that's been studying consciousness for a long time I see the other perspective and so this is the perspective that I'm bringing to it first of all what we know in neuroscientists that in order for any human being to survive in the world we have to have

filters in our brain to really reduce the incredible amount of electromagnetic information coming

in from all over to a level that we can actually not be overwhelmed with and that's why we have just the five senses and the eyes just give us a tiny bit of the visual spectrum and the same thing with our ears a tiny bit of the auditory spectrum et cetera so it's like right away we know we're not seeing everything with our five senses and then further we have these various centers and sending tracks in our brain stem that actually give us mainly what we're expecting to see so

that we can keep our attention focused on what we want to focus on and then we have this default mode network in our brain that is also called the mind wandering network because it's our egoic narrative about what we're doing in the world and how we're interacting with others it's very

“important but it also just makes everything smaller and smaller and smaller but the beauty is”

that those filters turn down at certain times when the mind is still they turn down when we're a meditation they turn down and we know that a lot of times with for example after death communication from a loved one it's when you are asleep you have a dream that they can come through or sometimes they come through to a neighbor because that person has a quiet mind and it can't get through to you so

we know that the quiet mind is critical because now that filters are taken off to a large degree so

my own understanding then is that from research we know that in a near-death experience when somebody has cardiac arrest everything's turned off and therefore it's easier for them to go and a really experienced another realm with full awareness but in this case you're saying okay the person that's dying has the filters turned off but what about the person that's still alive how can they also experience it and that's that beautiful mystery and somehow we are not using

the five senses anymore the inner senses though are giving us the perfect image that we can then retain and remember forever and was everybody says that has these experiences is it is more

“real than real for them and they know this is not a hallucination and I think that's the most”

fascinating thing for me is that it changes their life even if they're a skeptic even if they're an atheist they say I now know something else is true because I saw it I felt it with my own being from Anika the immediate question isn't whether medicine is ready to explain it or confirm it it's whether medicine is ready to listen to those who are experiencing it what's important for me as a health care provider is that patients and their families can feel comfortable coming forward

to me and my colleagues and the entire health care system and saying I've had this experience and to have them supported when they when they're willing to share with me so again I'm not asking anyone to say I believe this I'm asking any health care provider in the room whoever standing before the patient and the family to go you know this has been reported and I can give you referral to someone that you can talk to about this so normalization appropriate referral that for

me is a huge win that's positive for all parties maybe that's also where the science of shared

families backgrounds and circumstances are reporting experiences with striking similarities and

“then asking why William and his team are continuing to collect cases other researchers including”

Dr. Marjorie Wolcott are looking at shared death experiences alongside near death experiences terminal lucidity which is a rare phenomenon in which a person with severe brain disease or

profound cognitive impairment briefly regains clear thinking memory or the ability to communicate

shortly before death so they're looking at all these things and other phenomena that seem to emerge around the boundary between life and death. I feel like I'm doing this work because

“it's so important and no one else is really doing it we hope that that changes I think there's now”

a good deal of knowledge and people are getting more I think comfortable with these experiences and I think our culture is gradually opening to it. Shared death experiences don't yet give us an answer to what happens when we die but they may complicate something we thought we understood about what happens while we're alive because perhaps the strangest thing about these experiences isn't the light or the tunnel or even the feeling that someone has entered another realm it's that sometimes

another person who isn't dying seems to experience it with them even when they aren't aware a death is happening and that of course leaves us with a question that science is only beginning to seriously investigate where to the one consciousness end and another begin and how separate are we. Thanks again for joining us and we'll do a follow-up AMA on this topic soon. 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 to dive in”

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producers Katherine Ellis and Selena Kennedy technical directing audiobooks and finishing by Jeremy Cole opening and closing music by Elizabeth PW and original logo and cover art by Ben Condor Design. I'm Kai Dickens your executive producer writer and host.