Mind the Shift Podcast

For almost half a century, professor Bruce Greyson has researched the interface between life and death.
He was a materialistically trained doctor when he first came across near death experiences. He was intrigued, began researching them and thought he would soon come up with a simple physical explanation. The more cases he studied, the farther away from that he came.
The research material has increased since the 1960s because of our enhanced capability to resuscitate people with cardiac arrest.
”On the other hand, we have accounts of NDEs from ancient Greece, Rome and Egypt that sound exactly like the ones we hear today”, says Bruce Greyson.
It is estimated that one in every 20 people in the US and Europe (areas that have been surveyed) have had an NDE or NDE-like experience.
Some common features are:
• Thinking faster and clearer
• An intense feeling of peace and wellbeing
• Being in the presence of a loving, living light
• Paranormal phenomena: leaving the body, ESP, etc
• Reaching another type of existence
• Meeting dead loved ones or deities
A few NDE’ers have unpleasant experiences.
”That is often people who have a strong need to be in control of their life. It can be terrifying to be out of control. When they surrender, it becomes a pleasant experience”, Greyson says.
He thinks it is important to document corroborating evidence, such as NDE’ers’ account for things they have seen or heard in the hospital or outside it while being clinically dead, things they could not possibly have known about if they had not in some way left their physical body.
One mindblowing case is a clinically dead man in a hospital in South Africa who experienced that he visited another realm and met the soul of a recently deceased hospital nurse – before any of the nurse’s loved ones knew she had died.
The fact which most challenges the notion that the brain produces consciousness is that the brains of NDE’ers are flatlined. There doesn’t seem to be any activity going on.
Standard explanations don’t hold, like lack of oxygen or influence by drugs:
NDE’ers have better oxygen supply than those who haven’t had the experience, and drugs seem to inhibit the possibility of having an NDE rather than induce it.
It is as if the brain has to ”get out of the way” in order to have these experiences.
”People use the metaphor of looking up at the sky during the day. You don’t see any stars, but it’s not that the stars aren’t there, it’s just that they’re blocked by the sun. And that’s the way the brain filters out thoughts for us”, Greyson says.
Bruce Greyson has mostly studied NDEs, but lately he has also done research on what he and a colleague have labeled terminal lucidity, when people with dementia or Alzheimer's suddenly become lucid a few hours or days before they pass away.
Will the world one day accept that there is more to life and death than what is physically measurable?
”I have spent my career lookin at scientific evidence, and that’s ultimately not what convinces people”, says Bruce Greyson.
”What convinces people is personal experience, usually. So the more we can do to help people having these experiences, by meditation or other spiritual practices, the better.”

University of Virginia – Division of Perceptual StudiesProf Bruce Greyson’s websiteAfter (book)
Irreducible Mind (book)
IANDSNDERF

There is a shift going on in our perception of sex and gender.

One specific development is a shift from emphasizing biological gender, or sex, to emphasizing psychological gender. That is, you are the gender you feel you are, no matter what you have between your legs.

But should young boys and girls who feel they’ve been born into the ”wrong” kind of body be allowed to go through advanced surgery to physically correct their biological sex?

This question and this change is something the Swedish writer and journalist Kajsa Ekis Ekman has pondered a lot. In her book ”On the Existence of Gender” (translated from the Swedish title) she thoroughly dissects what is happening and reveals that the shift has some pretty unexpected – and unwelcome – ramifications.

Counterintuitive as it may sound, this new perception of gender is a setback for the decades-long fight for gender equality, according to Ekis Ekman. Why? Because the biologism that many feminists wanted to do away with is in a way back, but this time in the form of the notion of a fixed, inner essence of gender.

”Earlier, sex was seen as something that was just there and gender was seen as a construct. In the new definition that is taking hold you basically switch these two around: you are born with an innate feeling of gender, whereas sex shouldn’t be used at all”, says Kajsa Ekis Ekman, a combative writer and a pronounced socialist and feminist.

Boys who behave in traditionally feminine ways and girls who behave in traditionally masculine ways are both told they should embrace their feelings of being born into the ”wrong” bodies. In this way, we are back to an emphasis on the traditional gender roles, Ekis Ekman says.

The concepts ”woman” and ”female” are effectively obliterated in many contexts, whereas men’s spaces aren’t being questioned in the same way.

When the main thing is what gender you feel you are, it all comes down to stereotypes, Ekis Ekman reasons.

”If it has nothing to do with the sex, if it has nothing to do with the body, why even connect it to male and female? Why not call it a personality?”, she wonders.

If the sexes are to be scrapped it will also be difficult, if not impossible, to keep statistics about gender discrimination: pay gap, criminality, health treatment etcetera.

And what about the overarching issue of possible innate differences between the sexes, apart from some obvious physical ones? Kajsa Ekis Ekman thinks that neither the idea that ”all is biology” nor the one that ”all is social structure” is sustainable, although she stresses that the differences in the brain that have been debated seem to be more of tendencies than of known differences, because they overlap.

”But the fact that men can’t have babies and women can’t produce sperm does not overlap. A woman can’t escape the consequences of sexuality the way a man can. That’s always going to be a factor.”

Kajsa’s Instagram handle: https://www.instagram.com/ms.ekis.ekman/

Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100044241859116

Latest book ”On the Existence of Gender” (”Om könets existens”): https://www.bokforlagetpolaris.se/om-koenets-existens/t-0/9789177954552

Other books: https://www.adlibris.com/se/sok?q=kajsa+ekis+ekman

In the early 1990s, Dr Robert Schoch was able to confirm John Anthony West’s theory that the Great Sphinx must be much older than the fourth Egyptian dynasty, judging from the visible water weathering (there was more, but this was the crucial ”smoking gun”). The huge sculpture must have been there during the wet African period, which ended long before the dynastic Egyptians.

”I am a classic academic in many respects. When I first went to Egypt in 1990, it was not to prove that civilization goes back further than we are told. I was convinced it would be my only trip to Egypt”, says Schoch.

But that trip was to be followed by many more. It changed his career and life.

Re-dating the Sphinx to a much earlier period than in textbook history gave Robert Schoch a global reputation. At first, he was fiercely attacked by archaeologists and Egyptologists. Today, the notion that the Sphinx may be 12,000 years old is a bit more widely accepted. The discovery of the megalithic site Göbekli Tepe in Turkey, which the mainstream has dated to at least 10,000 BCE, was a game changer.

”It confirmed everything I had said about there being a civilization much earlier than what we are told”, says Robert Schoch.

To talk about a ”civilization before civilization” is still far from uncontroversial, however.

As late as in August of this year, there was a bit of a buzz around a study that was interpreted in a way that made Schoch’s / West’s dating of the Sphinx look impossible, but it turned out to be over- and misinterpretations.

Schoch is convinced that the Sphinx, Göbekli Tepe, probably the base elements of the Giza pyramids and many other megalithic structures worldwide were originally constructed by a civilization that was wiped out by cataclysmic events at the end of the last ice age, events that reshaped the face of the earth. The geological period in question is called the Younger Dryas and lasted from ca 10,900 BCE to ca 9,700 BCE.

Many other researchers also adhere to the Younger Dryas cataclysm theory, but when it comes to the cause of the cataclysm, Robert Schoch still walks a different path. According to Schoch, the available evidence does not primarily point to impacts by comets or asteroids, but to huge solar outbursts.

The sun is more unstable than we think. We know of several dramatic solar events during the last few millennia, like the Charlemagne event in 774-775 CE and the Carrington event in 1859. But these would appear like a walk in the park compared to what happened at the end of the last ice age.

The solar outbursts some 12,000-13,000 years ago melted the ice sheets and even melted stone. They caused huge wildfires, floods, catastrophic climate change and lethal radiation. A solar induced dark age ensued, which lasted six thousand years.

Survivors sought shelter underground for centuries or even millennia. Ancient city-wide tunnel and cave systems can be found in many locations around the world, for example in Cappadocia in Turkey.

There is also biological evidence, like the mass extinction of megafauna at precisely this point in time. This mysterious disappearance makes sense when accounting for large solar outbursts, including high levels of dangerous radiation.

And there is cultural evidence, in the form of strange petroglyphs and other depictions all over the world that look like plasma formations in the sky. 

”The truth is that we have incredible hubris. Natural events can devastate us”, says Schoch.

”All the astrophysical evidence is leading up to another really devastating solar event. We’d better learn from what happened.”

Robert Schoch’s website

ORACUL website

The book Forgotten Civilization (revised and expanded edition)