S2E48: Shared Death Experiences | Talk Tracks

What happens when someone seems to experience another person’s death from the inside? In this episode of The Talk Tracks, Ky explores the little-known phenomenon of shared death experiences - reports in which a loved one, caregiver, or even someone far away from the dying person describes seeing, feeling, or briefly accompanying part of their transition. We hear extraordinary firsthand accounts from Christine Coyne and Elizabeth Boisson, as well as the story of Dr. Joan Borysenko and her son, who both reported unusual experiences as Joan’s mother died. Researcher William Peters explains the patterns his team has identified across more than 150 reported cases, including a surprising number that occurred remotely, sometimes before the experiencer even knew a death was taking place. Ky also speaks with neuroscientist Dr. Marjorie Woollacott and physician Dr. Monica Williams about what these accounts may tell us about consciousness, the limits of our current scientific models, and why healthcare providers should be prepared to listen when patients and families report experiences they cannot easily explain. _______ Join The Telepathy Tapes Backstage Pass https://thetelepathytapes.supercast.com/ to get ad-free episodes, never-before-heard interviews, behind-the-scenes documentary footage, and access to our private Discord community. This is your invitation to come closer. To help shape what’s next. To be more than a listener… to be a co-creator of this paradigm shift. So if you’ve felt moved, if you’ve felt seen, if you’ve felt the call, subscribe today and join us: thetelepathytapes.com. https://thetelepathytapes.com/ _______ Thank you to our sponsors! MUD\WTR https://mudwtr.com/?_gl=1*2unfhc*_up*MQ..*_gs*MQ..&gclid=Cj0KCQjw79nUBhCgARIsADSHka0SAO1Qc5_xcdhByYj8NBnFe84YNi2X5uogqL7fm3lVzv5mG9JOv-4aAuOoEALw_wcB&gbraid=0AAAAABYBB4TH85sdZcrXeQVOQvZkoIWKt - Start your new morning ritual & get up to 43% off your MUD\WTR with code TAPES at mudwtr.com/TAPES! Alloy http://myalloy.com/ - Try the original estrogen-powered M4 skincare from Alloy. Visit myalloy.com http://myalloy.com/ and use code TAPES for $20 off your first order! Ka'Chava https://kachava.com/ - Go to kachava.com https://kachava.com/ and use code TAPES for 15% off your first order. Luminara https://www.luminara.care/ - If you’re curious about energy healing and ready to experience it for yourself, Luminara is offering 20% off your first session for listeners of The Telepathy Tapes. Just go to luminara.care https://www.luminara.care/ and use code TAPES20. Lola Blankets https://lolablankets.com/ - For a limited time, our listeners can get 40% OFF select Lola Blankets products with code TAPES at checkout, go to lolablankets.com https://lolablankets.com/. BiOptimizers https://bioptimizers.com/tapes - Make this the year you finally get your sleep, your energy, and yourself back. Get 15% off at bioptimizers.com/tapes https://bioptimizers.com/tapes when you use my code, TAPES. Shopify http://shopify.com/tapes - Start your business today with the industry’s best business partner, Shopify. Sign up for your one-dollar-per-month trial today at Shopify.com/tapes http://shopify.com/tapes. Quince https://www.quince.com/tapes - Elevate your summer wardrobe. Go to Quince.com/tapes https://www.quince.com/tapes for free shipping on your order and 365-day returns. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

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• 0:33Ky Dickens?

  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 Cassette, 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

• 1:14Ky Dickens?

  of until recently was the 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.

• 1:53Speaker 02

  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.

• 2:30Ky Dickens?

  So first, can you define what a shared death experience is?

• 2:33Speaker 02

  A shared death experience occurs when somebody dies, and a caregiver, loved one, and in some cases, just a bystander, reports that they somehow shared in, either knew about or witnessed, in 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

• 3:10Speaker 02

  loved one moving along, progressing through what we loosely call 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. The, a common term we hear in our research is, I don't have the words to describe the feelings that I had. These are not feelings I experience here in the human realm.

• 3:55Ky Dickens?

  Shared death experiences 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.

• 4:09Speaker 02

  The other element we see also is a boundary. There's a point at which the experiencer 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.

• 4:39Ky Dickens?

  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's studied is the relationship between the two people.

• 4:54Speaker 02

  There's a really important element in the shared death experience, and that is the bond. Usually, the bond between the experiencer 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. So those are some of the key elements we see in the

• 5:37Speaker 02

  SDE. 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, a sense of belonging. Many times, experiencers 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 experiencer. We often hear the experiencer 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,

• 6:19Speaker 02

  it was all explained and made sense to me. Many SDE-ers, similar to near-death experiencers, yearn to return to that place.

• 6:33Ky Dickens?

  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 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 William first introduced us to Christina Coyne, who experienced a shared death experience, or SDE, with her mother.

• 7:09Speaker 03

  My name's Christina, and I'm from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. I'm just a pretty, normal person, you know, single mom, and, you know, raising my son. I was born and raised Catholic. However, I strayed away from the religion. I had more questions about, like, why would God do this to this person? You know, just like everybody, a lot of people have questions. I'm a 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.

• 7:52Ky Dickens?

  Okay, so why don't we start at the beginning? Who did you share a shared death experience with?

• 7:57Speaker 03

  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, and my brother left, and I was the only one in the room with her. I hugged her. I said I loved her. And so, and I just, I felt like this, like, rush of energy come that, like, she was gonna, like, something

• 8:39Speaker 03

  was gonna happen. And 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? And it was just spinning. And I was completely aware the whole time of what was going on. So I was very scared. And I remember, my exact thoughts were, what is happening? And then, there was a tunnel. All of a sudden, there was a tunnel in my peripheral vision. And I was no longer surrounded by the hospital

• 9:22Speaker 03

  equipment. Instead, I was, like, in a world of light. And there was a vivid, beautiful white light that surrounded me. There was 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, like, had substance to it. It was like the environment itself, but it was like the light was alive. I was very happy. I was so happy. It's just like, this 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, like, peaceful state for, I felt like, about three days, paralyzed by

• 10:07Speaker 03

  that happiness and the joy and the peace and the beauty of the realm 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.

• 10:32Ky Dickens?

  Elizabeth Boisson, co-founder and president of Helping Parents Heal, described a similar experience when her son Morgan tragically passed away from elevation sickness while on a trip to Mount Everest.

• 10:42Speaker 04

  My name is Elizabeth Boisson 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.

• 11:25Speaker 04

  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 Cave Creek. And then when he went to the University of Arizona, he became a cheerleader and everyone called him Big Bear

• 12:10Speaker 04

  because of his bear hugs. And he had gone to China one time first in his sophomore year. And then he went back in 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 Tibet 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.

• 12:52Speaker 04

  So they all left and landed in Lhasa 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 in Tibet, which is about 19,000 feet. And normally you need an acclimation 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.

• 13:36Speaker 04

  And unfortunately, they were all getting very sick because of altitude sickness. Morgan 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 yurt, 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.

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• 15:03Ky Dickens?

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• 15:46Ky Dickens?

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• 16:30Ky Dickens?

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• 17:11Ky Dickens?

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• 17:31Speaker 04

  ... 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 foaming at the mouth and they couldn't wake him up.

• 17:56Speaker 04

  One of the kids, whose 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-pound, six-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 Boisson, 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,

• 18:41Speaker 04

  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 Boisson, 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.

• 19:22Speaker 04

  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 my husband, 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.

• 20:07Speaker 04

  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 hand and she led him to me. So she already knew how to do this. And she helped Morgan to do this as well. So it was, it was truly one of the most incredible experiences.

• 20:50Speaker 04

  And I started helping parents heal a few days later.

• 20:53Ky Dickens?

  Wow. So in the moment he was passing, were you able to physically feel what he was feeling?

• 20:59Speaker 04

  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, you're just going to hit a wall and it's going to be terrible. And I knew that wasn't true.

• 21:40Speaker 04

  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.

• 22:25Speaker 04

  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 having 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

• 23:08Speaker 04

  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.

• 23:43Ky Dickens?

  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 the person who is dying. I wanted to understand how someone who's spent their career studying the brain might approach stories like these. That brought us to Marjorie Woollacott, 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 Borysenko, a Harvard-trained scientist and pioneer in mind-body medicine as her mother was dying.

• 24:21Speaker 05

  I was asked by David Lorimer, when we were doing a conference called Beyond the Brain, to interview Joan Borysenko. 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 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 it's like from the neuroscience point of view and what it's like from the meditator point of view with your own mother as you're going through this.

• 25:06Speaker 05

  What 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, is 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 and tell us what's happening. And in fact, she went down and she found her mom lying on a gurney, all alone in the corridor.

• 25:51Speaker 05

  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, Joanie. And he says, stop. She has to have an orderly take her. And Joan's mother said, Joanie, 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, Joanie, 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

• 26:36Speaker 05

  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 with such 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.

• 27:20Speaker 05

  And Joan rolls her mom out and she reminds us that her mom is really the cynic, but Joan said something to her that 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 her 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.

• 28:05Speaker 05

  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 appeared to her. She looks at Justin, she looks at Joan, and she says, Eddie's here. Do you think he's waiting? And then she became unconscious. And Justin and Joan are on either side of the bed.

• 28:46Speaker 05

  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 light.

• 29:29Speaker 05

  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 of your little meanness, 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 review with her mother and herself together.

• 30:10Speaker 05

  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 and everything, the whole room, was made of light. She could see both the light and the form. And she looked across her mom's dead body and there is her son, Justin.

• 30:55Speaker 05

  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.

• 31:37Speaker 05

  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 at him 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.

• 32:17Speaker 05

  And Joan then told me, now that experience completely changed me. When I'm off-center, 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've got a light, but we've 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've 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.

• 32:59Speaker 05

  She said, our journey is about removing the blocks to love's presence. So that light is there in all of us.

• 33:07Ky Dickens?

  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 loved died. And as powerful as these anecdotes 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 William Peters, who you heard from at the beginning of the episode, has set to find out as part of Shared Crossings Project's initiative.

• 33:45Speaker 02

  As we went along, we put out more specific requests for SDE experiencers. 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, we have 70 some odd codes, which are essentially features of this experience.

• 34:20Ky Dickens?

  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.

• 34:37Ky Dickens?

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• 35:21Ky Dickens?

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• 35:52Speaker 02

  After we collected more than 150 cases, we realized 64% of our cases were remote.

• 36:01Ky Dickens?

  A large quantity of these experiences included no physical proximity. In fact, the majority of the shared death experiences reportedly happened miles apart.

• 36:10Speaker 02

  And the remote SDE is not that much different than a bedside SDE in terms of content, in terms of what the possible features are. So this was really an eye-opening experience for us as researchers.

• 36:26Ky Dickens?

  Nearly two thirds of the cases they collected happened when the experiencer 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 is 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.

• 36:58Speaker 02

  What was also incredibly compelling was when the shared death experience occurred, when the experiencer did not know that their loved one was dying. They had no knowledge that the person was dying. And then they had this 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?

• 37:42Speaker 02

  And yet at the moment of death, they are getting a stimulus response that's kind of not based on the five sense stores 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 phenomenon. 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.

• 38:24Ky Dickens?

  Studies like this are largely built from people's retrospective 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, an 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.

• 38:54Speaker 06

  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 who we are as a species. So, you know, unlike the near-death experience, which has been dismissed as a physiologic aberrancy, 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.

• 39:28Speaker 06

  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.

• 40:03Ky Dickens?

  Marjorie Woollacott, 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.

• 40:20Speaker 05

  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 that's 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 neuroscience is 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.

• 41:03Speaker 05

  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 ascending tracks in our brainstem 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.

• 41:44Speaker 05

  But the beauty is that those filters turn down at certain times. When the mind is still, they turn down. When we're in 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 they can't get through to you. So we know that the quiet mind is critical because now the 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 really experience another realm with full awareness.

• 42:29Speaker 05

  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 what 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.

• 43:14Ky Dickens?

  For Monica, 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.

• 43:23Speaker 06

  What's important for me as a healthcare provider is that patients and their families can feel comfortable coming forward to me and my colleagues and the entire healthcare 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 healthcare provider in the room, whoever's standing before the patient and the family to go, you know, this has been reported and I can give you a referral to someone that you can talk to about this. So normalization, appropriate referral, that for me is a huge win.

• 44:07Speaker 06

  That's positive for all parties.

• 44:10Ky Dickens?

  Maybe that's also where the science of shared death experiences has to begin. Simply taking seriously the fact that people across different 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 Woollacott, 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.

• 44:50Speaker 02

  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.

• 45:10Ky Dickens?

  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 does 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,

• 45:55Ky Dickens?

  even the veiled ones that knit together our reality. And please remember to stay kind, stay curious, and that being a true skeptic requires an open mind. To dive in deeper, subscribe to our Backstage Pass by visiting our website. With it, you'll unlock access to bonus content like telepathy tests, Ask Me Anything interviews with myself and guests. You'll be able to enjoy the podcast ad free, connect with other members on our Telepathy Tribe Discord, and hear and see exclusive content from the Telepathy Tapes Vault. Visit our website at thetelepathytapes.com for more info on how to subscribe to our Backstage Pass. Thank you to my amazing collaborators. Producers Katherine Ellis and Selena Kennedy. Technical directing, audio mix and finishing by Jeremy Cole. Opening and closing music by Elizabeth P.W.

• 46:39Ky Dickens?

  And original logo and cover art by Ben Condor Design. I'm Kai Dickens, your executive producer, writer, and host.