Welcome to Mind Escape.

Are you ready?

Are you ready to escape your mind?

All right, folks, welcome back to Mind Escape.

I am your host Mike.

We have episode #323 tonight.

If you were wondering, has it been a while?

Yes, it has been.

It's been about 3 months here since I've taken a little bit of a hiatus, break and break from social media.

I just needed to reset and recalibrate.

We've been doing the show for over 7 years now at this point, so I just wanted to address that really quickly.

Maybe the next episode I'll do a solo episode.

We'll talk about everything that's happened since cause some major things have happened.

But tonight we have a special episode.

I am joined by author and historian Gregory Schuchen, who's a PhD and he's written decent amount of books.

I think the one that I've read recently that everybody should go check out is Near Death Experiences an Ancient Civilization.

That link is down below.

And you can check out Gregory's website as well.

And he I have the Inner Traditions page.

Shout out to Inner Traditions for setting this up.

Thank you so much.

And there's also the Amazon link there too if you buy your books on Amazon.

So check those out.

Gregory is a, as I mentioned, a near death experience researcher for ancient civilizations.

He is a historian of religions, award-winning author, leading authority on near death experiences in the afterlife across cultures throughout history.

Doctor Gregory is a visiting research fellow at the University of Winchester Center of Death, Religion and Culture, and he's also a Fellow of Parapsychology of the Parapsychology Foundation.

He holds a degree in religious studies at the University of Wales.

Lampeter, his research methods for the humanities, and well, let's see what else here.

Oh, he's also an Egyptian archaeologist with a degree from the University or University College of London.

And let's see here.

Yeah, quite the resume.

How are you doing, Gregory?

Welcome on.

I'm good, Mike.

Thanks.

I tried to get it all in there.

There's so much you you do have a ton of qualifications and certifications and degrees.

So I just wanted to make, yeah, I just wanted to, you know, get get get that out of the way.

But so, yeah, welcome on the show.

This is something, as I mentioned to you off here, we've talked a lot about on the show near death experiences.

I've actually had my own near death experience, two of them within the last year and a half.

I was already fascinated the topic.

We had already been discussing it a lot on the podcast, and then I kind of had my own.

It's kind of added more questions than I even had before.

You would think if going through something like that, you would have more answers, but actually just added more questions to my repertoire.

But why don't we start about your origin story with this?

How did you get into it?

What made you write this book?

And let's start from there.

Sure, yeah.

And any perspective you have as an experience or on all this stuff, I'd be happy to hear that too.

So yeah, I, I started out in Egyptian archaeology at University College London.

And actually before that I had done some Eastern Mediterranean archaeology as well.

So I was pretty focused on, you know, things that didn't have anything to do with parapsychology or near death experience or anything like that.

I wasn't, you know, I don't still don't consider myself a parapsychologist really.

I'm, I'm really a historian of religions looking at certain kinds of, you know, parapsychological phenomena in relation to the ancient world, in relation to different religions around the world.

So, but I knew about a near death experiences that I'd, you know, read about them.

I read Raymond Moody's book, I'd seen Flatliners, whatever, and I always thought it was a really interesting phenomena.

I didn't really have a take on it one way or another, whether I believed in them or not.

It just kind of one of these things that's like, wow, people have these experiences and come back to life and talk about it.

I wonder if there's something to it.

And then I moved on to other stuff.

So but so I'm doing my Egyptian archaeology degree and you know, we're reading the ancient texts and some of these ancient texts, well, a lot of them have to do with the afterlife.

So there's the pyramid text, the coffin text book of the dead and and so on.

And they're pretty similar.

They, they do evolve over time in some ways, but for, for the most part, you know, it's 3000 something years of, you know, consistent beliefs in, in this stuff.

So as I'm reading them, I'm starting to think, you know this actually, if you strip away all of the the specific cultural cultural elements and just look at them as almost like symbolically, then it started seeming like a near death experience to me.

So for example, the spirit leaves the body, travels through darkness, comes out into a place of light where there's a being of light, which is in Egypt was the sun God.

They then have a encounter with their own corpse, which is symbolized by the the deceased being associated with the God Osiris.

So the text basically say, you know, you get to the center of of this area of the underworld and you encounter your own decaying corpse in the form of the God.

And that experience is what enables the soul to continue to the next stage in the afterlife.

And to me, that was symbolic of in near death experiences, people will see their body lying there.

And it's that realization that, you know, I'm dead and yet here I am having sensations and perceptions and consciousness realizing makes them realize that they're dead, that they've transcended their physical death.

And then they're able to continue into the next phase of, of the experience.

So exactly like the meaning behind the Egyptian expression of, of this idea, they meet their disease relatives.

There's like a life review type thing where they're, their actions on earth are kind of evaluated.

There's no return to, to the body except for visiting it because they, the soul has to visit the body, an Egyptian belief to kind of keep it maintained.

But it's not a near death experience per SE.

But it's just the, the concept of the afterlife was, was so similar.

So I just started thinking why that would be the case.

And, and given the fact that near death experiences happened all over the world, it seemed like the near death experience would be the basis for the belief rather than, you know, Egyptian afterlife beliefs influencing near death experiences around the world, if you see what I mean.

Absolutely.

And I was pleasantly surprised when I got into your book, not just because of your impressive background, but because of you approached it from a comparative analysis standpoint, which I really appreciate.

I feel like there's not enough bird's eye view on these topics and that's why you get some of the more woo takes on things and then or the Super strict takes that are, you know, don't allow for any kind of movement there.

So I really appreciated that.

How did you approach studying the ancient texts and the archaeological evidence to, you know, identify the different parallels with the modern NDE or near death experience?

Yeah, So the only, so the civilizations I compared were Egypt summer and Mesopotamia and the old Babylonian period of Mesopotamia, China before Buddhism, India before Hinduism specifically.

They kind of have some of the same gods kind of developed with as as Hinduism developed.

And then also from Mesoamerica, the Maya and Aztec civilizations.

So the the reason I chose those was because they were mostly developed independently of each other.

So there couldn't be any argument that like, Oh well, the Egyptians influenced the afterlife beliefs of the ancient Chinese and that's why they're similar.

So I wanted to kind of nip that argument in the buds because nobody can really argue that there's no evidence for anything like that to happen.

And the farther away the civilizations get in time as well as geographically, then the less likely it is.

So despite what people might see on ancient aliens or whatever, there's, you know, no influence from Egypt to the Mayan or Aztec civilizations or, or, you know, anything else.

So.

Yeah, you'll see stuff sometimes, like the cocaine mummy stuff, you'll see, you know, you know, actually the the Vedic stuff I found very interesting.

We did a deep dive on what was soma, the ancient elixir, and I went through all the comparisons from the Rig Veda and the Avesta and all the translations that obviously these people were having this experience from this elixir.

What was this elixir?

I can't, you know, there's different books on it.

Chris Bennett's cannabis historian, he believes it was cannabis.

Other people, who else?

There's Matthew Clark, who thought that it was maybe some sort of ayahuasca analog or something like that.

I came to the conclusion that it was some psychoactive compound with ritual.

It didn't matter 'cause there's different descriptions and when you look in the, what are they called?

Yasnas, The Yasnas and the the different parts of these books, it just seemed like there wasn't super, you know, consistent at least translations because I'm like, I'm not able to read ancient Sanskrit or Avastan or whatever, so I have to rely on the translations.

But it's so when you look at these tacks and all these different things, how much room do you leave for interpretation or do you try, are you making like leaps to try and connect these things or is it pretty plain if if you were able to show the person like some random person, a translation?

Yeah, well, I'm, I worked only with the most up to date, most scholarly translations out there.

So for example, there was when I first was working on this project.

This goes back 25 years by the way.

I first started it when I was doing my master's at, at the Institute of Archaeology and I, I, that was the section kind of comparing the Indian and Egyptian afterlife beliefs.

At that time there was no complete translation of the Rigveda at all.

And now there is I think 5 or 10 years ago, maybe a brand new like 3 volume translation, the first complete scholarly one in English ever.

So I updated everything with that and I actually was able to find more accounts of Ndes and more, more examples of, of relevant kinds of texts.

But really it's a, it's a case of with Egyptian, I was able to check some things to make sure that I was understanding correctly because, you know, I had the hieroglyph Middle Egyptian background.

But with the other languages, it's really a case of, you know, standing on the shoulders of giants, as they say, and, and accepting, trusting that all the generations of previous scholars, you know, have have come to basically a more or less correct translation that, that I can trust what they're saying.

So aside from that, I, I really let the context of the text steer me.

So if something was a purely shamanic text, like for example, you mentioned, you mentioned a soma, if it's a, a soma generated vision without an afterlife or death or near death context, I didn't really consider that at all.

It had to have that, that death and afterlife context.

So, so, but you're right that to some extent, because these are texts about the afterlife and not, you know, technically descriptions of near death experiences, like they don't say somebody died and came back to life.

Then there was a degree of kind of speculation to it.

And really kind of looking at like, if they're similar in all of these societies around the world, then how can we explain them?

And it seemed to me that because we have this experience that's also similar to these same phenomena that we're fighting around the world, and that seems like a good place to to start in explaining it.

And then on top of that, we have a few actual NDA accounts from all of the societies except for Egypt, which is which is interesting.

Yeah.

What's because you would have to know the mythos behind that particular civilization or religion or whatever, and then from there parse out these different experiences, if you will, from what was already known at the time, right?

Or something along those lines.

Yeah, and, and again, the context is a big thing.

A good example is, well, first I should say with Egypt, you know, the, the uses to which writing were put in ancient Egypt were extremely limited.

So it was these religious priestly texts, which were essentially ritual texts for the afterlife to to, you know, help the the money transition to the next World and have a positive afterlife there.

Otherwise, it was used for accounting and business and, you know, kind of royal types of occurrences.

It wasn't used for, you know, personal narratives or or stories very much at least not until the Middle Kingdom.

And there's no context for people to write down a near death experience that they had.

So but a good example of the kind of parsing the different types of texts that you mentioned.

If we look at ancient Zuma, we've got stories like the myth of Inana where the where the goddess Inana descends to the underworld and she goes there with the intent of over overthrowing the goddess of the underworld and taking her place.

This is kind of power play so she can become the queen of the underworld.

And it's got this whole, first of all, she's a goddess.

So it's, it's not happening to a human.

And it's got all these kinds of very mythological kinds of features to it.

It's involved also with fertility ideas, the circuit of Venus through the sky.

It's, it serves to explain different kinds of phenomena in the world.

So in contrast to that, we've got an account called The Death of Bill Gomez.

Bill Gomez was the Sumerian name for Gilgamesh who everybody knows from the Epic of Gilgamesh, but this particular text didn't make the final cut.

Basically it's it's a pre Epic of Gilgamesh story I like.

That better?

Was it Bill Gomez, did you say?

Bill Gomez.

Yeah, yeah.

I like that better.

Yeah.

And so this, this account, basically he's and by the way, he's believed to have been a historical king.

So he's the first like real individual, whereas Inana was a goddess.

Well 'cause they have that kings list too that goes back super far where you can't really justify through historical records.

Right?

Like their kings look similar to what?

Is it the the Egyptian one that with the old kings list too I'm I'm drawing a blank on?

Yeah, yeah, the text, a lot of those earlier kings are, you know, probably not.

It's.

Probably not like mythological or maybe exaggerated or obviously the timelines and everything.

Yeah, and they put gods on them and everything to to kind of have this origin myth of divine kingship that's, you know, extending into the present day to show, you know, my origins, you know, lion, Osiris and the sun God or, or whatever.

But, but in.

Yeah, in contrast to all that, we've got the epic of the the death of Bilgamed's text where, you know, he's known to have been a historical king, at least, you know, that's what archaeologists and and Assyriologists think.

And this text describes his NDE.

He's he's lying there on his deathbed after being, you know, almost mortally wounded.

He goes to the other world, traveling through darkness, meets the sun God, who's Utu.

So he's a being of light.

His relatives and friends are there people, other people who had died before him.

There's like a life review.

They they look at the deeds of his life and then he's transformed by the experience because the the judges in the other world decide to make him into an underworld judge.

So when he dies, when he comes back, he'll be one of those judges of the dead.

And then he goes back to his body and prepares his funeral and everything else.

So, so again, the context there is everything.

The context is we have a historical king and the account doesn't involve like some mythological type of event.

It's it's presented as being factual in contrast to like the story of Inanna or whatever.

So to me that's a huge difference.

In the Mesopotamian cultures, obviously we're talking about Syria and Sumair and Acadia.

The the underworld was depicted as dark and like a foreboding place.

How do you reconcile this as a positive element similar to some of the more positive elements that people have of like modern day interpretations of ND ES?

Yeah, that's a great question actually, because this is one of those kind of byproducts of my work that that I love encountering, but I don't expect along the way.

So.

So the kind of received wisdom in Mesopotamian Sumerian seriology studies is that exactly what you said, that the afterlife was seen as this gloomy shadowy kind of place and it was either punishment or you just kind of like half alive in this shadowy realm sitting in a corner doing nothing, this hazy kind of non semi existence.

But I actually found lots and lots of references in the Sumerian text to feasting in the other world, to light spring rivers, birds, meeting your deceased relatives, happiness, transformation rewards.

And just the fact that there are judges to judge you implies that, you know, there's a choice of of fates in the other world.

So I think this was something that was vastly exaggerated by previous scholars.

And I think it lies in the fact that like in the 19th century, a lot of these scholars came from Old Testament studies.

So I think they were viewing the Sumerian and Mesopotamian beliefs as like the precursor to Jewish afterlife beliefs, which are more kind of the shadowy half life kind of thing.

So it's almost like they systematically ignored a lot of these other descriptions.

And in fact, there's a fairly recent book about the Sumerian afterlife where the author says something like, because we have all these descriptions of positive afterlife beliefs in these texts, that means that they're not orthodox that that that we should we should kind of dismiss them and not really consider them as representative of Sumerian beliefs.

But the evidence is there.

So, So I don't think there is a conflict between those texts and the more positive features that we see in your death experiences.

Interesting.

As we mentioned, the Epic of Gilgamesh and now the Bill Gamesh, which we just learned about, which again, I like that name.

I don't know, it just rings a little bit better around the Dome for me.

But so we're talking about Mesopotamia that obviously their mythos is always some sort of hero or somebody goes on a journey.

How does that compare to modern Ndes?

Is that something like maybe that person's NDE was like a dream, Not a dream, but like how you know, people come back, they had this fantastic journey in the afterlife and then came back.

Is it, are those connected or is it just building off of this NDE and turning it into something more or something along those lines?

I think it's exactly that, yeah.

I think it's a case of this idea that people die and come back to life, that they can in, in exceptional circumstances, die and come back to life and tell about the experiences that their consciousness had while they were separated from their body.

I think just that one thing.

Well, combination of one thing was enough to influence a lot of these mythological stories about descent to the underworld and returning and things like that.

Again, a big difference like Bill Gimez, he goes outside the body.

He's explicitly described as, you know, his soul leaves his body.

Whereas Inanna and Demuzzi and, and these other kinds of Mesopotamian characters or gods, they usually go in the body or it's just not described at all.

And it's kind of presumed that they're in the body.

The myth of Demuzzi, he's that has a few really interesting features.

He, he realizes he's dead.

He's, he's in the other world.

And then he isn't in the out of body state, but he's able to see what's going on on earth.

And he only realizes he's dead when he sees that his mother and his sister are making beer out of his blood, out of the blood of his corpse.

And once he realizes that, it's again like that corpse encounter from ancient Egypt, that's like a transformational moment for him and he's able to to move on.

But that myth, it's like involved with wine and beer and the cycles of nature and basically the harvest.

I say the the blood beer or something similar to almost like Christianity, like drinking the blood of Christ or something along those lines.

Yeah.

Have you found any?

Was there any carryover between Mesopotamia into Egypt or is Egypt a Mesopotamia as far as you're concerned with the obviously there's tons of differences, but was there any overlap or are they completely distinct in their beliefs of the afterlife and and ES and things like that?

Yeah, they seem to be really distinct actually.

I mean, they, they did have trade and contacts and you know, from from really early periods, but it really seems not to have impacted their religious cultural development all that much.

There's a couple of references to Mesopotamian gods in the Pyramid Texts or like one God from Biblos, I think a couple of, and they were like minor deities.

So you know, how that crept in there we don't really know.

But yeah, it doesn't seem like there's there's really much that was shared culturally between them and or religiously.

I've so we've talked a lot about ancient Egypt.

I mean a lot of the ancient civilizations in general in the show, but specifically ancient Egypt.

I've always been fascinated with Egypt and Greece.

I don't know why.

I just feel, you know, some sort of interest or connection to those two ancient cultures, Greece for the philosophy and you know, all that stuff.

And then metaphysics and in ancient Egypt for, you know, the architecture and megalithic building, the possible psychoactive compound use.

And now we're talking about near death experiences.

When you look at stuff like the the Book of the dead, let's say, what are do you, is there specific examples of what is considered to be, you think an NDE based in that book or do you have to interpret it?

Is it like hard to find in there?

I mean, I feel like I've read part of it.

You know, I have like a picture book somewhere of it over here somewhere.

I can't find it, but yeah, like when you're looking through the like the diagrams and the pictures and the translations and everything is there, have you found specific things that you're like, that's an NDE or that's part of an NDE, or is it up for interpretation?

Yeah, I think it's up for for interpretation, but all of the NDE elements are embedded in the text somewhere.

For sure it's I've worked mostly with the Pyramid Texts and and coffin texts because they were the earliest.

And again, I wanted to kind of mitigate this idea that they could have been influenced by another civilization.

And so the coffin, the pyramid Texts, for example, are ritual texts and we're not even sure the order in which they're to be read.

They think that, you know, certain walls are to be read first as the as the coffin is, you know, wheeled into the pyramid.

But it piercing together like a sequential narrative of events of what happens in the afterlife is pretty difficult.

And to some extent it it's speculative, but in a lot of cases it's also pretty clear where where it's going.

So because, you know, obviously the soul leaves the body first.

It goes through all these kind of caves and caverns and perils has to like overcome different threats like it like a a venomous snake that attacks and apes with swords and all these kinds of, you know, half animal, half human, deep demons that that kind of try to annihilate the soul on the way to the other world.

So obviously you overcome those obstacles on your way to get to the sun God.

So it's really just partly a matter of logical conjecture.

But then at the same time with Egypt, it's it's more complicated because they also describe the afterlife is like a circuit.

So you, you join the sun God and you, you join him on his, his boat.

And that sails through the Milky Way and the cosmos.

And then it sails around the earth into the netherworld under the earth and then sails back again.

So in some texts it's that's portrayed as like a kind of eternal circuit of joining the sun God.

But then another is it portrays like the marsh of, of offerings or you know, particular paradise, kind of like area.

They portray that as the ultimate goal.

So, you know, whether that's an internal contradiction, which a lot of early Egyptologists thought, or whether it's a more kind of transcendental kind of description of, of omniscience and omnipresence of the soul, which is kind of what I tend towards is probably unknowable ultimately.

So yeah, there's lots of interpretation in all these texts.

While we're on the subject, I don't want to go too deep into this.

I just want your opinion as somebody who's an academic and a scholar.

What do you think about what's going on between this battle between online creators, content creators, people with pull and influence versus kind of the academic establishment in terms of archaeology right now, it seems like you have this battle between alternative and mainstream, as they're calling it.

Do you have a take on it?

Because personally, from doing the show, I've met a lot of cool people, scientists, authors, academics, and I've met a lot of cool free thinkers too, you know, So for me, I've met cool people on both sides.

I got into this through the alternative stuff and slowly kind of OK, now I'm going to look into what science has to say or academics has to say.

And I'm at the point now where it's like this window of mystery is a lot smaller.

There's still stuff to be found.

There's still mysteries.

There's still stuff like we're talking about right now where I've even had my own experience and I don't know what to think about it.

But then we have a lot of woo stuff out there too.

Like where do you stand on all that?

Do you have an opinion on it?

Do you know where do you think it's going?

Yeah, I have a lot of opinions on it.

So, you know, I started doing archaeology at University of London in 1996 or whatever, at a college there called Birkbeck, which was like an adult college kind of thing, Community College type, the British equivalent.

But their lectures were all from University College London, from Cambridge, from Oxford.

And then I went to University College London Institute of Archaeology, one of the most prominent archaeological institutes in the world.

I studied Egyptology there with some of the most, you know, well known Egyptologists in the world.

These were by and large, some of the most open minded, intellectually honest, interesting, progressive people that I've ever known in my life.

There was never ever any hint of them like hiding the truth or not being willing to go on, on wherever the evidence might lead them.

So, and I'm actually evidence of that because I was allowed, you know, I was supported in studying First I, I from my undergraduate thesis, I did a comparison of dreams in ancient Egyptian and Greek archives.

And then I did this near death experience project.

So they understood that I'm not, you can kind of study anything as long as you could do it from a theoretically, methodologically rigorous kind of standpoint.

So the problem I have with, I don't call them alternative archaeologists.

They think pseudo archaeologist is a better word.

There is only one type of archaeologist.

There's not mainstream or alternative.

There's pseudo and there's real.

So someone like Graham Hancock, I don't have anything against him personally.

A lot of these people, you know, obviously don't even know them.

So I don't think any more than I think actual archaeologists are hiding the truth.

I don't think these people are having a nefarious.

The hiding the true thing is odd to me in the sense that why wouldn't that person want to take credit for it?

Like if you found, let's say Plato didn't use Atlantis as almost like an out the allegory of The Cave but for a civilization.

Let's say he didn't do that.

Let's say there was a real Atlantis.

Somebody found it like how they found Troy.

Wouldn't that person want to take credit for that?

Like that's what I'm saying.

Like it doesn't make that that argument doesn't make any sense to me.

I never really understood that.

I do think that when you get into any sort of field, whatever it is, some people do like to think they're the expert on it regardless.

So I think online, from what I've seen, you do have some scholars kind of getting maybe not the best attitude with the general public.

And I think that leads to problems.

Now I'm not saying that they're not antagonized or anything like that.

I'm just making the point that like, it's a complex subject.

That's why I brought it up to you.

And I agree with you there is you've spent your life on this, you've gone to school for it and everything.

Somebody watching 2 YouTube videos that's pretending to know more about it than you do is kind of laughable, right?

So which which?

Happens.

It does happen and it's cognitive bias.

And that's something we talk a lot about on the show, you know, you know, through philosophy and psychology and you know, let's, let's, let's take it back to epistemology.

How do we know what we know?

What's the theory of knowledge behind this?

You know, if somebody doesn't have an answer, then what are we even talking about?

So.

Yeah.

And you know, archaeology is an evidence based field.

You know, people don't theorize without evidence.

Well, they might have in the old days, you know, and, and even in the old days when they would come up with these like, you know, grand diffusion kind of theories, like, you know, all civilization came from Egypt or from Druids or whatever it was his 19th century ideas.

Even then they tried to use physical evidence to try to piece it together.

And I, and I think, you know, they were maybe trying thought they were being innovative and, and we're, we're doing some genuine work, even if if they were later proved to.

Be wrong.

I don't even think there's that many people trying to do the physical evidence thing in this.

What do you want to call it?

Pseudo alternative, whatever it is.

What I've noticed is human beings, we love a good pattern, a good mystery, a good conspiracy, whatever it is.

We love putting things together and being the person to figure it out.

So I think there's just a lot of people out there that, you know, religions kind of fall on the wayside.

You have a lot of people that may be a little lost spiritually out there that are looking for something, whatever it is.

And I think that it's easy to get caught in this mind trap of, again, cognitive bias, pareidolia, trying to connect dots that aren't there, trying to fit things.

And then you have people trying to make content, trying to make money, trying to get a name for themselves, trying to do that whole thing.

So I think it's a a little bit of everything.

But yeah, yeah, I don't see much substance from this.

Whatever, again, whatever you want to call it, alternative.

And and that's how I got into all this stuff.

So I just want to keep pointing that out that like, you know, eight years ago or nine years ago or whatever, I was very romanticized by some of these ideas.

And then you start looking into you're like, oh, OK, this is, there's really nothing, not much to this.

But yeah, I still find it interesting.

I'll still watch some of the crazier stuff and just see what they're saying.

Sometimes there's a little nugget in there, you know, something cool.

But for the most part, a lot of it's just, again, it's just these mind people making these connections through their mind or making assumptions about things that they don't know about and things like that.

Yeah, and I think it is a lot of it is profit motivated.

It's people just seeing a way to to make money on these books and videos and and things.

But I think the people who are consuming it and believing it are also.

I don't want to generalize, but I think there's an element of paranoia in it.

There's such a mistrust of the government and of, you know, COVID vaccines and any kind of knowledge that that people have been, you know, fed, they're suspicious of these days, in some cases rightly so, because the government has lied to people on many occasions.

But we're at a point where like nothing is trusted.

And and so the the value of actual experts in fields is no longer.

Well, that's the other thing.

It's again, you, you spent a lot of your life dedicated to this.

Like, imagine for anybody out there that's skeptical of this, imagine putting yourself in your shoes, whether you're, you know, a mechanic or an engineer or whatever.

You spent your whole life doing this thing.

You know, to have somebody come in to watch like a couple videos on something or read a handful of books or whatever the case may be from, you know, different authors or whatever.

And to think that you know, more than somebody that's dedicated their life to something is kind of crazy, right?

Like I, I, you know, we all play Dunning Kruger and Oh, I, I probably could figure that out or whatever.

But at the end of the day, I think it comes down to being honest with yourself.

How much of something do you know?

Just because you want something to be true or it sounds better or more romantic or whatever, doesn't necessarily make it true.

And again, to these people that are studying this stuff like you and others or whatever, going through the scientific rigor and scientific method, to think that somebody wouldn't would pass up on publicizing a huge find or discovery or something like that doesn't make any sense.

And yeah, I mean, it's just that think about how many people actually do archaeology and all of them come to similar conclude like that doesn't make any sense.

It's.

Just these accusations that, you know, they're not excavating here where they should.

And again, I don't like dogma on any sides.

There are dogmatic scientists for sure, There's no doubt about that.

But it's just it comes down to, again, being able to be intelligent enough to look at the epistemology, the ontology, the teleology of these topics and, and really parse out what's what and be honest with yourself, be honest with your own bias.

Be honest with, you know, there's shows where I'm like, what is it?

Cave of Bones with Lee Berger, whatever I so badly want that pre hominid being to be able to make those symbols 'cause that would mean that they understood death and death burial before current modern day humans, which would take the metaphysics of an afterlife way back further.

You know, like, but there's skepticism surrounding that and questions surrounding that and you know, so it's things like that, like I, I fall into those same categories too.

So I have to catch myself and but yeah, I just wanted to get your take on it.

We can get back to your book stuff.

I just thought that we were kind of in that realm of things.

I thought I would ask your opinion on it.

Yeah, I'll just say one more thing.

And that's like, I think people don't understand, first of all, what the field methods and techniques and analytical methods of archaeology are like how they reach their conclusions.

And they also don't understand academia in general, like how academia works.

An archaeologist can't just say, I'm going to go, you know, excavate this particular spot in Egypt.

I'm going to go find the, you know, the secret lost library in the Sphinx or whatever.

You can't just do that.

It's hugely expensive.

You need all kinds of permits.

You know, you can.

I, I went on an excavation in, in Egypt.

We're actually in the country and the Supreme Council of Antiquities canceled it with no explanation, no reason, just, you know, left this excavation hanging.

So this kind of stuff can happen all the time, and that's obviously not the fault of archaeologists, but again, also just knowing what archaeology is, that as a discipline, I think that should be the first thing people learn before they start criticizing archaeologists for what they think that they're doing or or not doing.

And I, and I think a good rule of thumb is too is just can we all agree that we don't know everything?

And then we're constantly learning, you know, like I think if we can all achieve that, there's together that we, we come together.

Oh, this pictures not finished yet.

We need to keep, you know, chipping away at it.

And then the next generation will chip away at it and then there'll never be an end.

But who knows?

But yeah, so I, I just wanted to again, bring that up.

I, you know, I've done episodes on all the stuff we just talked about and everything.

And again, it's coming from the complete, you know, alternative view on all this stuff, all these topics and all the woo.

You know, we've had all the people like we're talking about near death stuff.

I'm trying to think we had, I don't know if you're familiar with Evan Alexander, who was a neuroscientist who had his own near death experience.

We've had him on.

I've had who else?

Lots of people.

He wrote an endorsement for the new book.

Actually he's, I think he's a pretty open minded, Yeah, serious, genuine.

Guy Rob Genteel.

I don't know if you're familiar with Rob Genteel.

He had two traditional near death experiences and he didn't have a heart for a while.

Actually, he was waiting for a heart transplant and stuff.

And then when he actually got the transplant, the the girl that he got the transplant from, he started having all these weird cravings and he found out like through talking with her family later on, like those were her favorite like snacks and things like that, which is kind of weird.

Like does the.

Do the organs have, do our organs carry some sort of consciousness or memory?

You know, it's, it's something to think about for sure.

Yeah, yeah, I've heard stories like that so.

All right, well, let's move on.

Let's move on back to the book then.

I don't want to go too far down.

Like I said, that's that could be a whole different separate episode.

Maybe we'll have you back on and just, you know, get into the weeds with that whole topic because I think that there's so many different things you could talk about too.

But OK, I do want to talk about 'cause I mentioned we talked about Soma, we've done episodes on Soma, What was Soma, the different theories, the translations.

When you're looking at Vedic traditions and everything, obviously reincarnation seems pretty central to their, their way of life and their beliefs and everything.

Do do the end.

Does the NDE stuff align challenge or like how does that work with this idea of of near death experiences in in ancient civilizations?

Yeah, that's a great question.

So in the earliest Indian texts like the Rig Veda, there is almost no hint of reincarnation.

It just, it's not part of the, you know, doctrine of Vedic religion yet.

But from the earliest times we have, there's like this stream of of accounts that are very much like near death experiences.

There's only a couple of brief ones in the Rig Veda, but then in the Upanishads and some of these later texts, they're very clear indications.

There's one about a little boy named Nachikitas who goes to the other world.

Well, first his his father, he's annoying his father.

His father's like giving away all of his worldly possessions.

And he says to his father, who are you going to give me to?

And, and his father doesn't answer him and he keeps pestering and, and so the father finally says, I'll give you to death, meaning basically that that he kills him.

So this little boy goes to the other world and he's waiting for Yama, the God of death, but he's nowhere to be seen.

He's basically left there alone for three days.

And then Yama finally appears and he's all embarrassed at his lapse in hospitality.

So, so he grants 3 wishes to this little boy.

And basically it's this whole kind of discourse about the secrets of life and death and the mysteries of life and death at that point.

And then the boy eventually will go back to his come back to life.

But I think as reincarnation becomes more of a, an established doctrine in Indian religion, the fewer of these near death experience type accounts we have.

So I think that's an interesting parallel.

It kind of like as reincarnation becomes the dominant ideology, then the near death experiences is less relevant.

So I mean, we do have some later accounts of like intermission memories where children who remember past lives will remember also their the death of their previous life.

And that's described very much like like a near death experience.

So we've got some of those from, you know, contemporary or 1940s onwards India.

But as far as the ancient texts goes, the others, it's kind of a a gap in NDE accounts for for a lot of at least Hindu history.

We've got a lot in Buddhism, but but from Hinduism there really aren't that many after a certain point.

Yeah, the soma thing, a lot of it points to communing with the gods, attaining light, immortality.

It's less about dying.

I mean, and there's some people that'll make the argument too, that, you know, that book the immortality key was based on is dying before dying or experiencing, you know, the psychedelic experience and the Hallucinian mysteries, dying before you actually die and understanding the importance of of this and everything like that.

But when you look at that, like, as I mentioned, it seemed to be more about life, like what you're saying, like the Rig beta.

I haven't read the whole thing, but just the parts that I read for the Soma stuff seem to be more about life and living and that kind of thing as opposed to like what you're saying, like ND death.

And I mean, obviously Egypt's heavy in, in, in death, like, you know, all the from the mastabas to the pyramids to the sarcophagus to everything, you know, the, the mummies, all that stuff.

So they have like a culture of death where it seems like the ancient, whoever they were, Indo Iranians, Vedic culture, whatever seem to be very into life and and that whole thing so.

Yeah, yeah.

And I think where we do have near death type experiences in the in the rig Vader or whatever it's the emphasis is, is less on the death aspect and what we can learn about death and dying and returning.

It's more about, you know, the kind of glories of the other world and, and this mystical consciousness.

There's even a near death experience of a horse in one of them, which I think is really interesting because it's described in similar terms of as a a human's near death experience.

Interesting, yeah, What was pre Buddhist ancient China in like in regards to these thoughts and metaphysics and religious stuff pertaining to the Indies?

We actually have quite a few ND ES from from ancient China going back to like the 8th century something 800 something BCE.

I don't remember the exact date, but they're presented and, you know, in contrast to a lot of the other cultures, they're not presented in, at least not overtly a kind of religious texts.

They're not like descriptions of of, you know, how to navigate the afterlife.

There are some examples we have that are actually official documents, like a government official filed this report about so and so who had an NDE in this village On this date.

It was witnessed by these people and here's the outcome.

So it was very much like possibly the first overt documentary type ND ES that we have.

And the earliest is is pretty interesting because it involves a man who has an NDE.

And while he's in the other world, he meets the Emperor of heaven.

He calls him.

And at the emperor's side, he sees a little boy.

And then when he comes back to life decades later, they're not really clear about about when it happens, but it's it's some years later and he's walking down the street and he sees a man blocking his path.

And the guy won't get out of his way.

And he starts to recognize them and they kind of make eye contact.

And he says, you know what's going on?

Where do I know you from?

And the little boy proceeds to describe the man's near death experience or the man, sorry, I gave it away.

The man proceeds to describe the other man's near death experience.

And it turns out that he was that little boy standing at the side of the emperor and that he happened to be having a near death experience at the same time as this other guy.

So that was a validation of near death experiences and basically that these experiences really happened and that that proved to the Chinese authorities that these were actual genuine experiences.

Interesting interesting.

We had a a live stream comment.

I love Greg, he's so well researched.

I'm currently getting my doctorate in psychology and I make, let's see Greg's research to my professors.

Oh, they're they make a point to point out your research to their classmates and professors and they said thank you.

Oh, thanks, thank you.

The real deal.

Let's see here.

Where else was I going to go with that?

So yeah, I find that interesting that the ancient China, I don't that's one culture I don't know a ton about from super antiquity.

So I would like to look into maybe that a little bit more as well.

Do you think that there's similarities in these afterlife beliefs across cultures?

Do they, you know, suggest a shared human experience of death?

Or could it be evidence of some sort of cultural diffusion?

What do you think about that?

Yeah.

Again, as I kind of outlined earlier, I think the, the cultural diffusion argument can be dismissed, at least in this case with these five ancient world areas.

And, and yeah, the as far as the similarities go of the, yeah, the conclusion I reach basically was that there was this set of similarities that were kind of, you know, each set was, was found or this set was found in each of these civilizations.

So it's almost like they were, you know, transported in the set.

And that was, you know, the these main elements of the NDE which were leaving the body, entering darkness, the disease relatives, the being of light, etcetera, etcetera.

They were practically universal.

I think there were a couple of cases where one or two might have been missing in in one of the societies, for example, like the panoramic life review that that we're familiar with from Ndes.

That's a little iffy.

They all have some kind of review of, of what your life was like.

But this like panoramic thing seemed to be yeah, pretty much missing in most cases.

So, yeah, and, and again, I think because of that consistent set of similarities, I think that shows that the NDE had to pre had to have preceded what was going on in all these cultures.

That's the only way that I can think of to explain them other than like some nebulous amorphous idea of like, oh, the human brain constructs myths in similar ways.

To me, that's not really an explanation because we don't construct creation myths similar ways and we don't have, you know, there's no like correspondence of each myth to each culture.

These are elements within afterlife myths that that are that are occurring in the in these sets.

So based on your research, obviously you know there's nobody knows the answer to this, but do you think that the do you think there is a metaphysical reality beyond this life?

And do you think that these ancient religions were suggesting it or like what do you think's happening here?

And then also give me your personal take on it after.

Yeah, they they were, they were presenting this as knowledge.

It wasn't like, you know, here's an idea of what, you know, we're speculating philosophically to these ancient civilizations.

And I think I guess to religious people in general, this is knowledge.

This is like something that, you know, me personally, I I don't understand belief and I don't have that knowledge.

So, so I kind of, I haven't decided one way or another.

I don't really to me, I, I either know something or I don't, I guess is the easiest way to put it.

And because I don't have direct knowledge of, of this, this phenomena, if maybe if I had an NDI would feel like I had that knowledge.

I know people who do have them talk about them in, in those terms.

A lot of people who have them are no longer they, they don't doubt at all that there's an afterlife or that they survived the, the death of their body.

I haven't had that experience.

So for me, it's just like speculation and, and I'm really not sure which, you know, what's going to happen to me there.

There is some, some of the evidence to me is pretty compelling, like like for example, the ancient Chinese one I mentioned that recalls these accounts in, in modern times where people will go, we'll have an NDE and go to the other world and they'll meet their Uncle Bill or whatever and they'll think, well, well, Uncle Bill's alive.

And then they come back to life.

They come back to their body and they're told, well, we're glad you came back.

But by the way, Uncle Bill died yesterday.

That kind of thing is like inexplicable to me, unless there's something really going on with this person soul leaving their body and going to another realm.

But then again, you know, you people could say the Super side hypothesis or whatever.

I mean, it's anecdotal.

Can we just be real?

Here from like a teleological standpoint like this is weird, right?

Like what's the point of what?

All right, like why are we here?

Like this is even if this was some sort of cosmic accident, you could make the argument that on the most base level, like almost like a Richard Dawkins argument of like us, our genes just want to replicate or we just want to survive, like everything else that's living or whatever.

But from the standpoint that we do have these faculties, these this consciousness that allows us to appraise the world around us in a way that other things don't.

That's the thing that always gives me pause.

And you could say, well, we're so much more evolved or were you evolved with these faculties or whatever?

I don't know.

I just like I said, it's just this is too weird, right?

Like the fact that we're even having this conversation right now, like this whole thing's just super bizarre, right?

Yeah, I agree.

And and I I do think though that it's very conceptually feasible that there could be an afterlife that's atheistic.

I don't think there has to be a God in an afterlife.

So like you know, there could be a Dawkins type type model that.

What if you get to choose like what are what are the atheists?

If they get there and they're oh, there is an afterlife, what do you think they Oh no, I'm going home, I'm going nowhere.

I'm nothing anymore, you know, like what do cause I don't know.

Again, it's just one of those it's just so bizarre to I've thought about this again.

I've had my own near death experience.

Well, let me just point out you can go back anybody listening and list.

I did a two or three-part thing on my near death experience.

My heart did not stop, but I did lose consciousness for a while.

It was lost so much blood that I needed a blood transfusion.

So I needed medical intervention now.

I saw a white light.

I felt like a warmth, but both my wife and my mom were there saying things and I was like in and out.

And it just seemed not maybe not.

Maybe I didn't cross that threshold.

You know, they always talk about when you, when you, when you listen to these people that had these real like vivid near death experiences, It seems like a most of them are people that have their heart stopped or they, they're had cardiac arrest, right?

I don't know if you're, I'm sure you're familiar with that aspect of this phenomena, but anything related to the heart, whether it's a heart attack or heart stops, whatever.

Those are the people that generally have the most vivid, most intense near death experiences.

Yeah, and there's also some evidence that seems the longer somebody's dead than the deeper experience they have.

So people who were only, you know, dead for a couple of minutes might leave their body and see their body and see a light and then Wham, but they're back in the body.

Or somebody who's who's dead for, you know, 20 minutes or an hour, they might go further and meet their relatives and see these, you know, supernatural landscapes and whatever else.

And actually, that's something else I should mention, which also relates to your comment about how weird it all is.

And that's how different Ndes are not only between cultures, but even between individuals.

You know, even Raymond Moody in 1975 in the the first modern book about ND ES pointed that out.

You know, he had this list of 15 elements or whatever and he said, but not one account that he's found has all 15 of them.

Check that out too, people listen.

It's called life afterlife.

I highly If you're interested in this topic, that's probably where you should start.

Or.

Maybe start with your your work, but then you know, obviously more modern stuff that's like the beginning of the more modern.

Yeah.

And in a lot of ways, it hasn't been superseded.

A lot of ND e-books are are repeating the same stuff that's been repeated for 50 years.

So which is not to disparage them because, you know, everyone has their own, their own take on them.

But yeah, so.

So anyway, yeah, sorry, go ahead.

So who do you think out of all the ancient civilizations you studied had the most data or knowledge on the topic?

I'm going to guess the Egyptians, but that's just a guess.

Yeah, that's, that's pretty.

That's a tough one.

I guess they were the most focused on it, but I don't know if they were as experientially focused as say, India was, for example.

I think it's impossible to tell because we don't have the text that that, you know, overtly talk about experience it.

It's, you know, again, kind of speculative, but, you know, they were ritually super, super focused on death in the afterlife, you know, almost obsessively.

So there's lots of also ritual stuff in the Rig Veda and and other civilizations.

China was probably a little less ritually focused, at least in the texts, and same with Mesoamerica.

So I think it just kind of, I think that's an impossible question to answer.

Yeah, yeah.

Because there's lots of experiential stuff in the ancient Chinese texts.

There's quite a bit in Mesoamerica.

So I think it's all kind of parsing the degrees to which they're interested in life after death, death philosophically and metaphysically or experientially or ritually, but, but everybody's interested in it.

Do you think now with the AI we'll be able to go back and kind of maybe use that as a tool to go parse some of these ancient texts and symbols and things out, trying to figure out, you know, maybe a little bit more definitively what's going on?

Or do you think that that's more still since we're designing the AI that'll be flawed in that, you know, I know it's kind of a chicken.

Yeah, yeah.

I think it's, it's more that to be honest, I think AIAIS may be good in yeah, helping to analyze things that already exist and maybe, well, things like reading scrolls that have been charred and they're rolled up and and archaeologists can't undo them, you know, to, to kind of use to scan them and then and then feed them through AI to try to get different kinds of of data information.

It's not a technology that I'm that I know that much about other than seeing how bad it is when I use like ChatGPT for some research question or, or, you know, ask it, the question about myself, it's gives out just tons and tons of wrong information.

The videos that people make of like you see on social media where there's like, you know, a gorilla cuddling a kitten or whatever, these weird things, to me, they look really creepy.

They're instantly recognizable as AI.

The music it puts out is it's it's got a vibe to it that I just don't click with.

So, and I think it's the uncanny valley, that thing where if something looks a little bit too human or or too much replicates something that a human does, it gives us the creeps.

I don't think it's AI has come out of that yet and I don't know if it ever will.

Interesting In terms of would you ever consider looking at look going back further than you have?

Like I know Echobecli tape, they just have like symbols and stuff on their T pillars and things like that, but would you ever consider trying to find evidence and older sites like that, maybe that transitional period of hunter gatherer into Mesopotamia or something along those lines?

Yeah, I mean, I that would be great.

But the text that I talk about in this book are the world's earliest discussions of an afterlife period.

Like there are no earlier texts in each of these areas.

So I mean, obviously the Egyptian texts are earlier than the Aztec texts or whatever, but as far as that area is concerned, it's the first text that originated.

What about Indus Valley?

Because I know that they haven't really translated everything from there yet.

Yeah, I don't think they have any substantial texts though.

They they don't have any, you know, body of work, a corpus.

So and see that's the problem with with archaeology.

There's a great article written I think in the 60s by Peter Peter Unko, which is still totally relevant and I I think, or at least I hope, it's still taught in undergraduate archaeology classes, but basically explains the dangers of trying to extrapolate from archaeological sites and especially burial sites, beliefs in an afterlife.

So for example, there was a lot of speculation that if the corpse position was facing West, then that meant they were facing the land of the dead.

If they were buried with their sword, that meant that they would be equipped with their sword in the afterlife in spirit form.

You know, the spirit of their their sword would go with them.

Or if they had offerings of food, that means they would be able to eat in the afterlife.

But Peter Echo found these ethnographic analogies, they're called basically similar types of burials in anthropological and indigenous societies through anthropology that had completely different meanings.

So for example, a sword was broken and buried to in order to destroy the power of that sword.

It had nothing to do with with the burial and gifts were thrown in the grave not to go accompany the other world, but as as as like the people having finished their feast, dropping it as as like the final tribute.

So so I don't think it's possible to like understand any prehistoric, you know, pretextual society's beliefs just based on their archaeological remains.

So I think we can speculate all we want, but.

No, no, that, that makes total sense.

I mean, without that, that library or that corpus of knowledge, it would be kind of, you know, you'd again, like you just said, you'd be kind of making assumptions, grasping at straws, you know, which is kind of what, you know, earlier what we were discussing with all the pseudo and alternative stuff and everything.

That's what a lot of that stuff is, is just taking like one point, kind of running with it.

But, and I, I found it funny when we were doing that part of the conversation, we got our, we got a thumbs down.

It's like, I don't really see too many thumbs downs.

I mean, I'm sure we've got them, but it just.

Again, people.

People want the.

They want the mystery, they want that, they want the mystique, they want the like I said, they, they, there's a whole bunch of people that want to believe in something right now.

And I think that, you know, saying civilizations older than it, they're, they're telling us, or we've got all the dates wrong.

We got all the knowledge wrong.

It's just romantic because it's like, oh, we got to figure this out, you know, we, there could be something special here, you know, and they fail to realize we are special.

But like I said, the fact we're having this conversation is amazing and nuts and crazy and we are dust from stars basically.

You know, like there are things to us that are magic that people overlook looking for this, you know, the pyramids being 10,000 years old as opposed to, you know, 4500 years old or whatever, you know.

Yeah, yeah.

There's plenty of mystery out there without, you know, going down without creating false mysteries out of, out of things that that don't exist.

Yeah.

And I, I think, you know, unless somebody is willing to engage with archaeology on the level, on its own level and on its own terms, nobody's ever going to be convinced of, of any pseudo archaeological claim.

And you mentioned earlier that, you know, people spend their whole lives researching these topics and then somebody comes along after watching a video.

But it's not even just person that's spend their lives doing it.

You know, Egyptology has been a discipline for a couple of 100 years since Napoleon or, or whatever.

And this has been, it's not just one person spending his, his or her life researching this stuff.

It's a standing on the shoulders of giants.

Once again, it's, it's this accumulation of knowledge which is constantly being approved upon.

Texts are being retranslated all the time.

You know, there's, there's 3 or 4 editions of the Pyramid Texts, for example, which is totally obscure text, let alone how many there are of the Book of the Dead.

So knowledge within these disciplines is constantly being re evaluated and rewritten.

Let me ask you a question too.

And this is just like a dream of my, this is something I considered early on at the podcast.

What if archaeologists compiled lists of mysteries or things that are mysteries within their field, so we know what the real mysteries are based on the people that are actually doing the digging.

That way if somebody does want to really investigate something or maybe they can help in that way.

I always thought that there could be like a, you know, we, there could be a team up or, you know, obviously somebody that hasn't gone to school for archaeology is not going to be able to go dig in the dirt and like you said, get permits and do all the thing.

But maybe they can look, maybe they're an expert in linguistics or maybe they're an expert at deciphering texts or maybe they can help in some way.

So I always thought like, instead of being like, oh, that's not a mystery or that's not a mystery.

We know that, we know that, we know that.

What are the real mysteries?

What are the things we can't agree on?

Like what are these Gray area topics that we can then look to be like?

These are the real mysteries.

Let's figure these out first.

I don't think there are any massive secret type life changing history change or.

Yeah, no, I don't even mean that.

I mean, like things like where's Genghis Khan buried or where's, you know, whoever, you know, Cleopatra, like what?

Whatever these things like, where are these things like that that are maybe not, like you said, like finding the Ark of the Covenant so we can all connect to the aliens or whatever.

You know what I'm saying?

Like something that's a little bit more legitimate.

Yeah, I think, I think it's part of what makes people go down these romanticized archaeology paths is because a lot of it is actually boring.

So.

So the answer that to that is probably just that there's more stuff to be discovered and there's more stuff to be interpreted and restored and cataloged.

It's, I mean, I would go when I went on excavations, you excavate tons and tons of shards of poetry, of poetry, of pottery, and then you put it in different piles depending on whether it's a rim or a base or a handle or, or a central piece.

And once you count them up and some of them go in a certain pile, some go in another pile.

Most of it you throw back into a pit and rebury.

So it really feels like this futile exercise.

But it's all about information gathering and largely for the next people who are going to be on the site.

And eventually these things will kind of combine to form some foundation for knowledge or theorizing.

So, so I can't even think of like some like great archaeological mystery that still needs to be solved.

It's, it's more of a question of like, how can we better understand what's out there?

And that's really the the goal and the point of of the whole discipline.

Interesting.

Yeah, I mean, I'm sure obviously we know that there's other mounds similar to Gobekli tape in that area that just have not been excavated yet.

So we know there's, yeah, we know there's other sites and stuff like.

Yeah, I was going to say, and I was just in Belize and I was at a site called Caracal, which took maybe 4 hours to to really explore.

And then after we explored it, the archaeologist guide who was there said, you've just seen 1% of this site.

So the rest of it is still covered by the jungle canopy basically.

So if 1% of that site takes 4 hours to see, imagine how vast, how massive that site is going to be.

But you know, it's going to take forever.

We're we're none of us are going to be around by the time that is is finished being exited.

I mean, that was a major, LIDAR was a major.

I mean, if you look at what Lidar's done for archaeology in the Amazon, it's insane.

Yeah, it is.

And and that's how they're able to tell, you know, what percentage is, is left unexcavated.

And so then the question is like, why should they excavate it?

You know, what is the point?

Is it only for tourists?

Are they really, really going to learn more of what they need to know by doing so?

And, you know, again, it's limited resources to to be able to put into this that the government doesn't.

You know, Belizean government doesn't have a lot of money to put into archaeology.

So it's got to come from universities and private funding.

So a lot of obstacles really in the field.

Interesting.

So where do you go from here?

What's next?

Is there something you're looking into?

What are your takeaways?

Is this some?

Was this a passion project?

And now this is kind of a culmination, like what's going on here?

No, I've, yeah, after this ancient civilization book, I I wrote a book on near death experience and indigenous religions.

And that's that's been out for a few years with Oxford University Press.

I'm now working on A and so both of those were comparative projects, The ancient civilizations ones one was a kind of wide grand comparison with these five civilizations.

The indigenous religions 1 was looking more at we have a lot of accounts of near death experiences from from these traditions.

I'm talking about like Native Americans and Africa and the Pacific is small scale tribal societies.

So we actually have accounts of near death experiences and they talk about how they influence their beliefs and you know, how they base their beliefs on them.

So it kind of zeroed in a little bit more from from the ancient civilizations book.

And now I'm doing one on your death experience in classical antiquities.

So looking at Greece and Rome.

And again, we have quite a few examples of ND ES from the.

Say, that one's going to be interesting too.

You'll be the Lucidian mysteries.

You have exactly the Pythagoreans with the transmigration of the soul.

You have a lot of different things happen in there in ancient Greece.

And everybody knows about the myth of UR, which is, you know, people say it's the earliest near death experience, which I don't think it was.

But not everybody knows about Pythagoras's near death experience or his intermission memories that he had between personalities when he was reborn from one personality to another.

He also remembered the the inter life state.

So I'm kind of bringing all this, this stuff together and talking largely about how these experiences influenced afterlife beliefs, but also the diversity of of attitudes towards them.

So they were ridiculed by, by some people, they were believed by some people and others just kind of we're trying to understand what the Hell's going on like we're doing.

Yeah, I mean, Pythagoras, aside from the number magic stuff seem to be influenced heavily by either Vedic or Eastern philosophy kind of in a, in a, you know, it seems to be compared to traditional Greeks and and you know that whole thing.

Yeah, you read that a lot and and that's one of the things I was just working on that today actually.

Everybody who writes about where did Pythagoras get his ideas about reincarnation, they always look for pre-existing models.

So they think, OK, maybe this other philosopher was talking about it.

Maybe he got it from shamans on the Black Sea, or maybe he got it from India or some other culture that believes in reincarnation.

Nobody looks back and thinks, well, people who have reincarnation memories, that's an actual phenomena that happens cross culturally.

He claimed to have had this experience.

He claimed to have remembered this state between lives and all this other stuff, so why couldn't he've gotten the idea of reincarnation from his own experiences?

Well, that's what I so that's what I was going to ask you next is we don't know how much of Pythagoras writings were attributed to him specifically or his cult members.

I think that that's what I 'cause if anybody's listening, I do a series called Masters of Rhetoric where it's kind of like basic philosophy course slash going into, you know, all of Plato's dialogues, breaking them down, the sophists and all that kind of stuff.

And we did touch on Pythagoras because we talked about the pre Socratics and everything.

And yeah, to your point, I didn't actually know that he had his own intermissions or past life.

You know, obviously we, you know, things we talked about like these acetate cults and being a vegetarian and transmigration of the soul and things like that.

But yeah, that's interesting.

I'll have to look into that.

Yeah, and to a certain extent within classical studies, things like that.

And even the myth of her or kind of seem like seen as an embarrassment.

Like, you know, class classicists are pretty, you know, stage type people.

They don't like all this, you know, paranormal stuff.

And they don't want to see the Greeks as being irrational and woo woo.

You know, the Greeks are the, the philosophers are the foundations of Western civilization, but they're actually, you know, tons of metaphysical thinking and supernatural stuff and, you know, magic, I mean.

Even Plato had this idea of the theory of forms.

There's this other realm where everything in our realm is based off of these more perfect objects in this other realm, you know?

Like, if that's not metaphysical, I don't know what is, you know?

When you look at at some of the classical scholarship about the myth of her, they literally say this is a shock to come to at the end of the Republic because it's, it's an embarrassment.

And how can we take this seriously?

It's like they're trying to sell it.

Reminded me of creationists trying to still be Christians in light of the existence of dinosaurs, you know?

It's like, I mean, I, I think the Republic's probably one of the greatest pieces of variety of all time, but that's just me.

And you can you make the argument like, we get our soul from Plato and we get our logic from Aristotle, right, 'cause when Plato would drive a point home, he would use mathematics or logic.

And then you get Aristotle and he's looking at biology and these biological factors contributing to the answers for things.

So, yeah, kind of a mix of it's kind of a mix of what we are, right.

Yeah.

And it's because of that rationality that ending the Republic with a near death experience upsets so many classicists.

You know, it's like, how can he be rational and still be, you know, recounting a near death experience is something that really happened.

Awesome.

Well, let's wrap it up here.

I'd love to have you back on.

Like I said, there's a, a ton of stuff that we probably could have discussed, but I, I really wanted to focus mostly on the near death stuff, obviously, because that's what your book's about and the topic and everything.

And again, everybody go check out Gregory's book.

I have the link down below at the bottom.

I have his website if you're interested in all of his links.

And then I have the inner tradition links to his book as well as the Amazon links.

If you purchase your books off Amazon.

Is there an audio version too?

Do you have an Audible yet for that?

Not yet.

I think there will be, but I don't think.

You should do it so.

Yeah, you should read.

It too I, I like that I, I, I'm, I'm a fan of I mean, I, I read a lot of books, but I also like listening to books too, like while I do stuff so.

Yeah, I volunteered to to read it, so hopefully they'll take me up on it.

Cool, sounds good.

We'll check that out.

As I mentioned before, we were on a hiatus for a few months.

I'll do a solo episode coming up where we I go over everything.

Let's former Co host Maurice got married.

So congratulations to Maurice and we'll have him back on soon to discuss some stuff.

He had some weird experience he wants to talk about.

Let's see here.

Oh, I did move a bunch of older episodes to our Patreon just to keep things clean and division of what the show used to be what it is now.

I think people get confused sometimes if you listen to episode 1 versus episode 323, you know, there's been a long path and everything.

And so yeah, some of those older episodes are on our Patreon now for $2.00 a month.

You'll also get exclusive content, which, you know, there's a good chance if we've had a big guest in the past, there's probably some exclusive content on there as well.

You can check out our documentary As Within So without From UFOs to DMT, which is again, looking at these different phenomenon through the lens of the mind.

Oh, check out Masters of Rhetoric, my other series, which is available on YouTube, Spotify, and all podcast outlets.

Episode #5 I will be firing up soon.

I don't know how soon, but I'm going to try and start, you know, working on that.

I do want to break down Plato's dialogues and the, the dialogue specifically with the Sophists.

So look for that.

And if you just want to support Mindscape in general, just click on the link tree link down below.

And we appreciate all your support.

So, but listen, Greg, this was a fantastic conversation.

I learned a lot.

And like I said, I'd love to have you back on again sometime in the future, even if you don't have a new book coming out, just to have a conversation.

Sure, anytime.

Thanks.

All right, well, there you have it folks.

Again, check out Greg's books.

Links down below, support, mind escape, click the link tree and I'll see everybody soon.

We love you.

Stay safe out there and everybody have a good night.

Night.