I joined THC a few days ago, although I first became a subscriber during Greg's early days in this venture, but I let my subscription lapse. I live near Liverpool England, but I've spent a lot of time in South America. More recently, I've been travelling in southern Mexico, because I'm interested in Zapotec culture.
The interview with Dr. Shushan stimulated a lot of ideas for me, because I've been studying/experiencing similar topics for more than 50 years. It really began with an NDE experience. It wasn't my own death, but that of a friend who'd died shortly before my experience and whom I met in a dream in which I asked him many questions. During our conversation, I heard a bell ring in my ear, followed by an authoritative voice in my head telling me, " Your time's was up, you've got to go now." Next, I remember the sensation of moving through space rapidly and of glimpsing my body beneath me on the bed, before blacking out feeling the shocking sensation of being thrown onto the mattress. I opened my eyes to the sound of a telephone's bell ringing downstairs, so I got out of bed to answer it. (It was 50 years ago, that was all we had back then). My tutor at the further education college where I was a student (to you it would be Junior College), had rung me to ask why I had not gone in to take an exam that morning. I mumbled some excuse. He didn't tell me off, but instead just said I could take it some other time. His encouragement worked and I decided not to drop out of college. It changed the course of my life, yet I can't remember a single question I'd asked my dead friend's spirit in that dream and even less of anything he might have told me by way of answers to my questions.
The moral to my story, if that is the right word, is that all of this is more real than the day-to-day world in which we live our bodily physical lives. We judge it by the standards of our physical world when we use the term weird, but it has a logic that goes beyond what we can comprehend physically. Our western culture has shut us off from this reality, firstly through dogmatic religion, and more recently through materialistic science. Mirroring is just one example of this very different kind of logic (it comes from the Greek word logos, by the way). I was very interested to learn how many Native Americans' NDEs involved encounters with white people, but the typical academic/post modernist explanation that this concerns colonialisation and cultural repression may be just the tip of this particular iceberg of collective human (sub)consciousness. It's a curious fact that, from the 19th century onwards in England, many mediums have claimed to be in contact with spirit guides who identify themselves as Native Americans, and specifically from North America, not Latin America. This is just one example of that weird mirroring, or symmetry, which has a logic that goes beyond what we may ever understand by confining consciousness just to what happens inside the human skull. Ultimately, it may have something to do with our own ineptitude as westerners of European descent to navigate what lies beyond the physical, for the reasons I've already mentioned. It is to the credit of the native peoples of the Americas that they have put their knowledge of post-mortem journeys, gained through shamanism, at our disposal.
