William Peters, Shared Death Experience Science |544|

William Peters, one of the leading authorities on the remarkable shared death experience phenomena.

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Book: At Heaven’s Door

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[00:00:00] Alex Tsakiris: On this episode of Skeptiko the truth about what happens after we die. Now I could jump right into that truth. With today’s outstanding guest William Peters. But why go with the straight truth? When we can mix in a little bit of Hollywood, Stephen King fantasy, crazy stuff. A clip.

[00:00:26] Clip: You can hear me imagine like me, I don’t know about magic. I always call it. The shining

[00:00:36] Alex Tsakiris: That’s when the movie doctor sleeping. And while that clip sure is scary in spooky, the movie does stumble onto some kind of real truth about the afterlife and in particular, the transition to the afterlife that can be experienced by other people who were in the room, it’s called a shared death experience. And you’re going to hear about it in this amazing interview I have coming up. But first. Another clip from the movie where Danny.

And yes, this is Danny from the shining all grown up. Anyway, Danny is in hospice with this older gentlemen whose dying and Danny is experiencing that crossing over.

[00:01:20] Clip: What a visited from to sleep really is. So what do you see today? let’s see your twin sons four years old and he them, I do ah, look at that. I could take a cards all out of order. not scared of hell dog, huh? I lived a decent life. Don’t think there is such a place anyway. I guess I’m scared of. There’s nothing. We don’t end Charlie. I know that for certain, I don’t know much else, but I know that we don’t

[00:02:12] Alex Tsakiris: , not bad. But how about this? How about one of the world’s leading authorities, unshared death experience, a psychotherapist who studied it for over 30 years. Runs an organization with multiple PhDs, including medical doctors. Who’ve looked at the phenomenon.

so what is today’s guest William Peters find? How about this story? Imagine this at this point, this cus already had a very , traumatic near-death experience when he was just 17 years old, . Nearly killed him. Very nearly paralyzed them. He recovers from that and he got a Cates his life to kind of service .

Winds up through a series of events working with homeless people, people in need in San Francisco And as he’s telling the story that he’s about to tell circa 1980s, this happens to be a lot of people who have contracted aids and are dying and are completely shunned and ostracized by society. So they’re living in these burned out buildings

in the worst parts of downtown San Francisco. This is back in the day when there were worse parts of San Francisco. Now it’s all billion dollar condos. Nonetheless. William has his first encounter with a story that is a shared death experience. It’s unbelievably remarkable. This is. among the most important. Research scientific medical research. That’s coming back to us right now. Because again, when we say shared death experience, These are a group of people living people.

Who witnessed that transition? That crossing over . And when you study it scientifically. Like today’s guests. William Peters has done.

It lines up with so many other things we know about survival.

So here’s one of the stories from the interview. You’re about to hear.

[00:03:56] William Peters: I said, Brad, would I be able to talk to your other, um, brothers? And, you know, he was like, kind of, okay, but like really like he’s a little bit hesitant, you know, I’m still a mental health worker, you know, and, you know, we have not treated this community well, quite frankly.

Um, but we had a good enough relationship. So I remember going down there taking this long walk and, you know, from, you know, from the Tenderloin district of San Francisco, across market street, this was a abandoned, many buildings, burned out. It was not safe. Drug deals, prostitution. And there we are. We hike up one set of stairs. Cement only concrete only. And there is these tents and a fire pit, and some of his brothers are there, but this was mid day. And so it’s just a few of them there, but they had been there. And so I remember talking to them and I asked them, and they looked at Brad as if to say, do you want us to share this? And, and they did, but what they did was they, they acknowledged an experience that was profound, but what I, I knew in their eyes that it was profound and they talked about the light and they talk,

they also stumbled upon their words because as I learned later now with, you know, hundreds of interviews, the ineffability of this experience, , , but they gave me enough to know like, okay, We are talking about a shared experience.

[00:05:32] Alex Tsakiris: One of the things I think is so incredible about that. Again, putting these pieces together. So you’ve had a near death experience, so you’re open

but when we step back, this is so paradigm shattering that I just don’t think many people would be put in that position where they could absorb any of that.

[00:05:51] William Peters: , I’m going to add another piece of information that was also central in this, , I was living and working in central and south America

and most of the people I was working with were indigenous people. , these were shamanistic cultures and I was listening

and I remember hearing these expressions of journeys. This is the language that these Imada people were sharing with me as I would spend a good deal of time with them. And, and it fit because my near death experiences you’ve so keenly, um, identified as a transformational experience in my consciousness, if you will.

And my understanding of how this world is put together, their experiences fit with that

[00:06:35] Alex Tsakiris: so that’s great. And it’s really an amazing interview. And I could just leave it at that, but I can’t help. Poking in there with a little bit of skeptical stuff, because. , as somebody like this ups the game in terms of bringing such important, important. Science to the table. I think we have to equally up our game in terms of bringing the inquiry to perpetuate doubt.

[00:07:01] Alex Tsakiris: . That’s excellent. And I’m sure, . That you are going to be effective and make a difference. Just like you’ve made a difference already. I have a slightly different spin on it. My take is number one, we are all leading rich spiritual lives. And as plain and ordinary, as that might seem to you and I, we have to look at the fact that that completely contradicts the paradigm that we’re all in second point for me is that we all have the ability to choose the light at any time in every time.

And along with that, for some reasons that we don’t totally understand some people don’t choose the light and people choose the darkness consistently sometimes. And unfortunately what we’ve witnessed and we have to come to grips with is some of those people have reached very, very powerful and influential positions add to that the fact that their motives and who they are is often hidden and deceptive.

So with that, this is the working hypothesis. This is the other part going a little bit further that I’m not asking you to agree with, but I just want to throw on the table. And that is, as it relates to medicine and religion, there’s obviously many, many, many, the majority of people in medicine are working in a heartfelt light war, your kind of way.

But the, unspoken directive of Western medicine is to disconnect you from your spirituality to disconnect you from your divinity. . , cause you can have it both ways. They could jump over tomorrow to your understanding of this broader view of consciousness.

This more accepting view of divinity and nothing would have to change in medicine. So the fact that they hold onto it, I think is important and it can’t be overlooked. And then I think when we look at religion, I think there’s the same thing going on and a lot of ways. And that is wonderful people, amazing experiences that people are having with the spiritual, but fundamentally an unspoken directive to become the sole or at least primary intermediary between you and divinity between you and the light between you and spirituality.

That’s what religion wants to do.

[00:09:29] Alex Tsakiris: Stick around my interview with William Peters is coming up next.

(—)

[00:09:33] Alex Tsakiris: Welcome to skeptical where we explore country heal science and spirituality with leading researchers, thinkers and their critics. I’m your host, Alex carers. And today we welcome William Peters to skeptical. William is the founder and director of the shared crossing project and author of the newly published at heaven’s door. What shared journeys to the afterlife, teach us about dying well and living better. He’s very smart guy, undergraduate degree, Berkeley, masters, Harvard, long-time psychotherapist, lots of advanced training, which we might even talk about.

Very interesting stuff there. And, you know, beyond all that, William is one of these people who just has an amazing life of service to others. And that’s going to come out as we talk about his story, and we’re going to talk about this shared death experience science and the very researchy stuff that he does.

And that’s great. But, what I hope we get to is the spiritual stuff . That is really, I think at the core of what this guy’s work is all about. So William, , congrats on the book and thanks so much for joining me on skeptical,

[00:10:53] William Peters: Alex. Thanks so much for having me. It’s a real honor to be

[00:10:56] Alex Tsakiris: here. Very nice of you to say.

So, you know, I guess the natural place to start because a lot of people have heard of shared death experience, but plenty people haven’t give us a quick definition and then we’ll talk a little bit about your background.

[00:11:16] William Peters: Yeah, so, uh, the shared death experience happens when somebody dies and a caregiver or loved one and sometimes a bystandard will report that they feel like they shared in this journey from the human life into the afterlife.

And the afterlife is the term that our research participants use. They say afterlife, and they often say that it’s a benevolent afterlife.

[00:11:44] Alex Tsakiris: great. The backstory on this is amazing. It can jump off in a million different ways, but you came to this because you had a near-death experience when you’re a 17 years old, which really pivoted your life in some, I guess, ultimately positive voice, but also some challenging ways.

And it leads you to sitting in a seminar with Dr. Raymond Moody, who a lot of people know and go, oh yeah, he’s the guy that coined the term near-death experience, which he did, but he’s also the first person to talk about the shared death experience. And I love the way you talk about the circumstances that brought you there, and then you weren’t even aware of this, but in a way that echoes at several points in your life, it’s like making sense for you of these experiences that you’ve had, that didn’t make sense before.

So maybe you want to walk us through your, your story, which is really quite remarkable.

[00:12:48] William Peters: Thanks. Yeah, I think you’re right. You contextualize this a bit. Cause you know, I, wasn’t the type of guy, um, who in high school could see myself studying death and dying and spiritual experiences around them. Uh, but at 17 years old I had a really, you know, Uh, near-death experience in a skiing accident, high speed skiing accident crushed.

My spine was catapulted out of my body. I mean, for your audience, it’s a classic near-death experience. Moving away from my body on the ski slope, very much at peace, completely sublime feelings, watching my life be reviewed. Uh, for me seeing the teachings of karma right there, like the intricate detail of this movie of my life was just stunning, everything mattered.

And then I’m in this beautiful galaxy moving through the rib tunnel. I see the light. And when I see the light, I had a response, very unlike most ND ears. And that is I, I knew I was dying and I knew I’d been there hundreds, if not thousands of times before, but I had also did not want to die. As pleasant as this place was, I was in, I was not ready to die.

And I pled with, you know, I grew up Catholic. So I pled with God and said, don’t let me die. Don’t let me die. And I was essentially in that light for a long period of time. It felt like very comfortable, very much at peace. But then at one point, you know, after my pleading, I felt this pushback energetically on my being.

And in that moment I heard make something of you. And that was it. And that was ominous a statement to me. I didn’t know what that meant, but I think unconsciously I’ve been working out that command for quite some time, because I’m very much aware that I was given a second shot at life here. And, you know, the severity of that skiing accident was that, you know, an orthopedic told me I was one 30 seconds of an inch away from being a paraplegic.

And so I’ve lived with chronic pain and difficulty walking at times and what have you. But so that experience got into me, but I, I did not think of that experience for another decade as far as I can remember. Uh, but it did change me. And I appreciate you bringing up that this kind of service mission that I seem to have gravitated towards in my life because after college I went straight to central and south America and found myself in the midst of two civil wars each in Guatemala and the other in Peru, and was working with a great deal of, of death and destruction and poverty and famine and hunger.

And what have you. Uh, and I was there ostensibly, I think. To help. But the truth of the matter is these people were teaching me how to deal with my own sense of pain and loss that I was feeling cause I was in really severe pain in my back and body. So, um, the other thing that happened is I came back, worked in the aids epidemic in San Francisco.

I was a social worker. I was hired because I spoke Spanish, but the aids epidemic broke out and ended up working with, uh, this community of mostly gay men who were dying in skid row in San Francisco. And at that time we didn’t know much about the HIV virus. We didn’t know if it was contagious, how it was, you know, we didn’t know the extent of the transmissibility of it.

So for me, working with this community was considered high risk. Um, but I just felt comfortable in call, but the reason I’m bringing this up primarily as I was starting to hear these profound end of life stories,

[00:16:32] Alex Tsakiris: I just want to tee up a couple of things, , because I really want to hear that story.

I want to tell people that in the book you will find so many of these incredible and I’m reluctant to even call them stories because. William is a professional psychotherapist on his team. He has very top notch medical doctor and anthropologist.

These are case studies that they’ve done interviews. So he’s going to tell these stories, which are incredibly dramatic. And the book is just a treasure trove of these case studies that are very well presented, but they really weave together into this whole narrative of your life. So I just want to add one other thing, you know, when you have your near death experience at 17, you have nowhere to hang that off of, in terms of near death experience.

There is no near death experience. Raymond Moody, unbeknownst to you has just coined the term a couple of years ago. And then this, the amazing thing about the story you’re about to tell is you’re about now to experience a shared death experience, which absolutely no one is talking about. But again, in this way that we don’t understand your life is being given these events that you were then asked to kind of weave together.

So please tell us, tell us this first kind of amazing story.

[00:18:05] William Peters: So I’m a social worker in San Francisco and. I’m working with this population, and this is a population that is experiencing incredible devastation death. It’s like a plague. So their willingness to come to me for not just emotional, spiritual support, if you will, but also I was providing food for them and, you know, all sorts of supplies because this individual who, um, I mentioned in the book who was such a wonderful man, Brad was coming to me, you know, almost on a weekly basis.

He lived in a community of homeless, um, dispossessed as he called them brothers all, uh, all contracted aids and in a, just a temporary community, if you will, and a burned out building in San Francisco. So he’s coming ready early. And one morning he comes into me early first one through the door and he looks absolutely exhausted beleaguered.

And I say to him, I go, oh my gosh, Brad, what’s up. And he’s says to me, you know, um, Randy died. I said, oh, I’m so sorry. And he responds, um, yeah. So am I, but it was such a beautiful death. And then I’m taken back and I respond. Beautiful doubt. Please tell me. And as I’m in our food pantry, filling up his bags of food for his community, he is recounting this story and it goes like this.

He says, we were circled around Randy. We knew he was at death’s door. And at the moment of death, he rises out of his body through a cylinder light. And we, we watch him rise up this light and he stops just above us, looks around at us and he thinks each of us for caring for him. And what we notice about, uh, Randy, is that he is now healed.

He, his body that was covered with lesions and you know, those deaths in those days with Carlos’s sarcomas, just ugly deaths, that he has none of that. And he’s telling us he’s free of his body and he’s happy. And then he travels further up that cylinder of light and his God and all these brothers, this community are rejoicing and hugging and feeling this beautiful goodbye of their beloved friend, Randy.

And so. I think Brad, when he was sharing this story, as well as others, he would share with me because as I learned in my relationship with Brad, even previous to this, he was what we would call psychopomp. He was somebody who, maybe a death doula or a midwife in modern parlance. He knew how to help people weave this human life and go onto the next.

So he was that leader, almost a Shawmut in this community, but very informal, you know, these are all, you know, ad hoc communities, if you will. And so, but, but he was, as he was sharing this with me, it’s almost matter of fact, almost checking me out, but I always believed, uh, Brad and others who share these stories with me.

And I think unconsciously, I believed it because I’d had that first near death experience and they, you know, Raymond Moody and now I’ve had subsequent conversations about this is we believe these are the same experience in terms of capacity of phenomena. Why? Because they’re taking place in that same terrain, that same geography that lives between human life, human death and what comes after this.

[00:22:07] Alex Tsakiris: I just wanted to interject one thing, William, because the scientist in you, even at the time yeah. You believe it because you had a near-death experience, but if I remember correctly, you go there, right. You go there and you ask the right. Not everyone would do that

[00:22:23] William Peters: So thank you. Yeah. Thank you. So I was so fascinated by this, um, you know, and I said, Brad, would I be able to talk to your other, um, brothers? And, you know, he was like, kind of, okay, but like really like he’s a little bit hesitant, you know, I’m still a mental health worker, you know, and, you know, we have not treated this community well, quite frankly.

Um, but we had a good enough relationship. So I remember going down there taking this long walk and, you know, from, you know, from the Tenderloin district of Santa of San Francisco, across market street, down into the old area, which is now south of market. Now in that late eighties, early nineties, south of market is not what it is today.

This was a abandoned, many buildings, burned out. It was not safe. Drug deals, prostitution. And there we are. We hike up one set of stairs. Cement only concrete only. And there is these tents and a fire pit, and some of his brothers are there, but this was mid day. Most of the cars I went during my lunch hour, most of them were out doing what people who are, are without a home do during the day they go and get services.

They forage for food. And so it’s just a few of them there, but they had been there. And so I remember talking to them and I asked them, and they looked at Brad as if to say, do you want us to share this? And, and they did, but what they did was they, they acknowledged an experience that was profound, but what I, I knew in their eyes that it was profound and they talked about the light and they talk, but they also did something really interesting.

They also stumbled upon their words because as I learned later now with, you know, hundreds of interviews, the ineffability of this experience, when you’re talking to someone who’s well-dressed, as they were not a mental health worker, they’re a little tentative and scared, you know, and, and they’re living in a, in a building that is not theirs.

So, um, so I could feel that in them, this is the, this is the psychotherapist in me at that time. I wasn’t licensed at that point, but that’s the person who’s syncing in saying, oh, this is really hard for them to talk about, but they gave me enough to know like, okay, We are talking about a shared experience.

And it was, I mean, just to look at their eyes and they’re looking at Brad as if to say, do you want us to share this with him and Brad knowledge? Yeah. You can trust him.

[00:25:07] Alex Tsakiris: One of the things I think is so incredible about that. Again, putting these pieces together. So you’ve had a near death experience, so you’re open and then you’re open enough and all these other pretty terrific ways to connect with these people and hear this story.

But when we step back, this is so paradigm shattering that I just don’t think many people would be put in that position where they could absorb any of that. Because again, this is way, way outside of anything we consider within this consensus reality thing that we talk about here. And we’re going to talk about that some more, but I don’t want to lose the fact that this is paradigm shattering.

We’re talking about a group of people who collectively experienced this connection with the afterlife through this person who is making that transition. I mean, I just like, I can say it over and over again. That’s so remarkable. It’s so remarkable. And it’s so remarkable that you were the person who was there because you were uniquely able to.

Take that experience and run with it the way that you have with this book and w with this project and with this whole thing.

[00:26:25] William Peters: Yeah. Well, thank you for saying that, you know, I’m going to add another piece of information that was also central in this, and that is, you know, I was living and working in central and south America and working with refugees of, um, of these civil wars there.

And most of the people I was working with were indigenous people. Uh, they Imada Indians, uh, in Southern Peru. And, and also of course in Bolivia, these were shamanistic cultures and I was listening and as I was, you know, learning my Spanish and we were both speaking second languages to each other. So when you have that appreciation, you talk slower, you clarify things.

And I remember hearing these expressions of journeys. This is the language that these Imada people were sharing with me as I would spend a good deal of time with them. And, and it fit because my near death experiences you’ve so keenly, um, identified as a transformational experience in my consciousness, if you will.

And my understanding of how this world is put together, their experiences fit with that because they talked about. Dream travel and going to other realms. It was a part of their reality. So having just spent three years in these, in this environment, coming back and getting my first job and then hearing Brad and others talk about this was like, oh, okay.

You know, this makes sense to me, it all kind of fits together. And I will say, uh, I’m a pretty good synthesizer of things. And that with my receptivity and openness, I will say that’s one of the things I think I do. Well. I struggled a lot of other things, but that’s something I can do. Okay.

[00:28:10] Alex Tsakiris: So near the end of the book again, the book is at heaven’s door. You really want to check it out. I think you’ll really enjoy it. It is somewhat of a page Turner with all these stories. It’s, it’s not weighted down, but it’s also a personal book near the end. You talk about the passing of your dad. You talk about it in a very complicated way with the family relationship, which I appreciate all family relationships are complicated, but it’s also a really important story.

It’s like a bookend to this, to this book, you know, and it wraps up a lot of things and brings them all together in a way. Could you, would you mind telling about that story? Sure.

[00:28:51] William Peters: So, um, yeah, here I am. With my family. My father has been in a memory care facility for a number of years and we are in COVID.

And so no one has

[00:29:08] Alex Tsakiris: seen my father. Well, this is just, again, this is present day. Now you’ve gone on 20 years of working with in grief therapy, being completely immersing yourself in all this near death and after death, hospice stuff, you’re like an expert in a million of these different fields, but you are like one of the foremost experts on this shared death experience when your dad is approaching his crossing.

So now you’re like from one end with Brad, where you’re kind of this, what is this thing now? You’re like one of the leading experts in the world at this, but you’re at your dad’s crossing. Would you say that’s fair to say,

[00:29:53] William Peters: I’d say that’s true. Yeah. I mean, and that, to be really clear, there are not very, there’s only a handful of people are even looking at the shared death experience.

And I, I should,

[00:30:03] Alex Tsakiris: it’s not your problem. That’s not your problem. That’s I mean, there should be thousands. So, you know, that’s not, that’s not like a mark against

[00:30:10] William Peters: you. No. I’m. Yeah, absolutely. And, you know, and I, I should say, you know, uh, the research I, as a researcher, I, you know, we have a great team here. I mean, I have Dr.

Michael Consella, who’s our chief of research and comes at this from, uh, you know, uh, religious studies and cognitive sciences and, you know, Dr. Monica Williams and emergency room physician. These we’re really tackling this multidisciplinary Lee in a way so that we can really look at what these experiences are, but in the moment that I’m with my father, all that doesn’t matter.

Um, here I am with my father. We have been granted access just as there’s been an opening in COVID, we’re still dressed in PPE, and we’re doing sitting vigil now with, with him, my brother and sister, and my mother all taking kind of shifts if you will. But I had the opportunity to be with them most of the day, you know, for days.

And as at the moment of death, um, a couple things happened that I’ll share. One is I’m all of a sudden I’m pulled into a different space, and this is a common experience. So here’s the thing that is really important as an experience, or I’ve had probably a couple dozen shared death experiences. And the thing that is the kind of the gateway experience to it.

There’s usually a shift in energy, a frequency shift that I noticed in my body does a focused attention. In other words, my, the aperture for my life gets narrow. I hear a high pitch in my ears, and this is all energetic stuff happening. And then the light changes, and this is all happening. And then all of a sudden, boom, I’m in another dimension.

And I am seeing my grandmother and my aunt who had both died a couple of decades earlier. And they’re there and they are looking, looks like they’re at the foot of the bed elevated dark background. It looks like they’re looking down at my father. That’s the angle I’m getting. And then I see this man come across, uh, who wishes to, to actually talk to my mother.

I never seen him before, but I recognized him energetically. It was my grandfather because he died when I was two years old. And he has a beautiful exchange with my mother. And I say, that’s more, you can see that in the book. Is there something really important that happens there, but I’m now wondering why are we not taking my father?

He is laboring. He has. He’s ready to go. And I’m wondering why. Why are we not taking him? Uh, why are you, I’m actually talking to my grandmother and aunt, why aren’t you taking him? And I can see this cylinder of light coming down from where they are about a quarter of the way almost to my father’s body.

And I get this sense. I’ve seen these before and we see it in the research. This light is often a bridge for the dying to travel up as they leave. Oh, we saw that. I just talked about that with Brad and Randy, what he saw. So

this amazing experience happens. And that is that they, they both my aunt and my grandmother avert their gaze and they move out up, up above my father’s body basically.

And they basically tell telepathically, tell me this, this force is in charge. He’s in charge. What I realized is that he’s in charge. Like he, I, as I, as I move my attention over to that presence, if you will, and I locked my energy field into it, and I don’t know how that happens, other than I just move my attention there.

And I feel this pull on my heart and bam, I go, oh my gosh, this is that force that I have identified in the research as the conductor. And what I have seen is this conductor manages the transition. Of a human spirit soul call it what you want consciousness from a human body into the afterlife. And when I lock on that, I feel the awesome power and force of this being, and it is just the energies coursing through my body.

I start weeping right there I go. Oh my God. I mean, I can, we brag now. I mean, that’s the conductor, that’s this force that is going to take my father from this human life into the afterlife. And just in that moment, I don’t have words for it. It’s like, it’s the majesty of the universe. It’s like, it’s this great mystery.

And it is so all inspiring and heartwarming. I don’t have words for it. And, and so at that moment, right, as I’m feeling this, my brother walks into the room and that moment is lost as I’m pulled back into the material human dimension. And unfortunately I was never able to get it back. Um, because then my brothers there conversation goes on, even though I should say my, my mother and sister were there with me when I was having that experience, they w they were, we were very much kind of in silence or just like, there was a, there was a, a vigilance going on there.

Um, so my father dies peacefully. Beautiful. And then afterwards I stayed with the body. The rest of my family members left, you know, gradually and just said, you know, we’re leaving. And I want to stay with my father until, uh, the more cane and to the, excuse me to the funeral. Um, you know, authorities came to take his body, the mortuary, I should say.

And so during this time another beautiful experience happens, his caregivers who’ve been taking care of him during COVID. Cause there was no family members, they are knock on the door and ask if they can come in to pay their last respects. And I was like, well, thank you. Yes. So six of these beautiful caregivers from all over the world, Alex, these were, these were people that, you know, we’re speaking English as their second language.

Most of them, I mean, there were fluent, but it was like, oh my gosh, do these beautiful people that are here to take care, to say goodbye to my father. And they said the most beautiful things about my father. And, and now you alluded to this and I did go into more detail in the book. I had had a challenging relationship with my father.

He was a business person and a venture capitalist, and he’d done well in Silicon valley. He could not understand, um, his spiritual son. Um, he just couldn’t. Um, and. It could understand even the psychotherapist is he just didn’t didn’t, didn’t just jive with him. So we had a relationship that had some tension in it, certainly distance and more than anything else, a lot of disappointment about not being able to see each other and connect.

And I expressed that to my father, to his courts saying, oh, you have such a wonderful, loving relationship with these caregivers, but we didn’t have that. And I’m sad about that. And in that moment, I’m in another visionary state and I’m watching the movie, a movie that has scenes that some I know that I can kind of remember, but most of them, I could not.

In other words, oh my gosh, where are you getting this footage from? Because there was not anything I remember, I would remember the place maybe, or that, that chapter of our lives together, but that, but the actual scene and the feelings and the, the expressions. No. And so for me, this is, you know, this is that what we call that shared life review.

And I was watching a review of our life together. And in the, you know, in our research, we’ve identified three different types of life reviews. This is one of them where you’re reviewing your life with the departing loved one together. And. It was healing for me to see that there were times when I knew that he loved me as best he could.

And there was also the delivery of a very important message. And that is that my father was not just my father. He was a human being as well, who had his own challenges, traumas, tribulations, you know, his father died young and he lived a life with that grief and not having the tools to work with it the way I was given tools to work with it, my own grief.

So these are very, very healing, um, experiences, uh, this life review. And, and so, you know, it’s really important for us when we look at the shared death experience that you said quite well, it challenges our scientific medical perspective on things. Absolutely. You know, here we are, I’m in relationship with having these experiences, you know, with a consciousness seemingly that by fiscal ism cannot exist anymore.

And here I am having this experience with what I’m experiencing, interpreting as his consciousness in some way, there’s some way we are still in relationship, even though he is, you know, this is now an hour or two after his physical, uh, human death, medical death, I should say. So. But the transformation that I experienced in my relationship to my father because of the shared death experience was so healing.

And this is, you know, I’m a psychotherapist. I work in end of life. And I want these experiences to be known because they’re healing. They’re fascinating, but, but they’re more than anything else. They offer a different, holy, more meaningful and healthy way to look at not just death itself, but what is the purpose and meaning and context for our human life, the sense that we survive human death and go on.

And it’s that going on piece that the shared death experience seems to lay a pretty solid foundation for, especially when you pair it with the near death experience, because it is the same terrain we are in the same space. And we have done the research to verify that.

[00:41:24] Alex Tsakiris: Yeah, that’s a, that’s quite extraordinary.

And I want to pick up on that and kind of jump back and forth between those two aspects of the scientific and our consensus reality and where all the stuff seems to be really happening in this extended consciousness reality that we don’t really have. A handle on and you’re trying to help us get a handle on it.

So the best way I know how to do that is kind of do its gift code style a little bit, which you led me right into because near the end of the book, man, you take the gloves off William. I mean, you take the gloves off regarding the medical community. You really call them out in their lack of wisdom about the dying process, about the end of life process, you rip into the religious and faith communities in a very appropriate way about their handling of it. And you even take aim at your own people. They’re in hospice and particularly people who are focused in end of life.

And again, I think you do it in a very honest way, a terrific way. My only complaint would be that you don’t even go far enough. And I want you to talk about, I want you to talk about that a little bit and then I want to kind of throw out my working hypothesis on that. So tell me, tell me where you’re at on that.

I thought it was very brave of you to do because you’re professional and you’re, this is your community and you’re willing to kind of call them to task. Great.

[00:43:04] William Peters: Yes.

So.

You’re correct. I was very much walking align here. I work with, you know, healthcare providers, mental health providers, specifically, uh, hospice workers of all kinds of end of life practitioners across the board.

And I know the constraints that these dedicated workers are under right now during the COVID let’s face it. I mean, the every system that provides any kind of, uh, healthcare is just going far and beyond, uh, what would be expected of a normal human being and the amount of care and attention and care and compassion and love that they’re providing for us.

So, and I work with these people and I love them. Uh, but the point being here is that this is a top-down system and the top of this food chain is medical sciences. And that is locked in a paradigm that cannot explain near-death experiences, shared death experiences. And for that matter, most end of life phenomena, whether it’s post that dreams and visions or pre death, Dreams and visions.

All of that is utterly unexplainable by our current scientific materialist model. There are so many good people within that system that know about the experiences I’m talking about. And yet my, and yet they can’t talk about it. My fundamental goal was to give those people a resource research-based that they could go to their supervisors, their higher ups, and say, look at the data is here now.

Now, Alex, the share crossing research initiative, which I’ve already said, but it’s comprised of, you know, Dr. Michael can sell our chief of research, uh, and the Dr. Monica Williams and ER, physician, we have published in the American journal of hospice and palliative medicine. That is a leading journal. This is a foundational piece that basically validates the shared death experience with a robust research, uh, qualitative of course, uh, but it’s robust and it’s significant and it’s getting attention.

We’re also just published in omega journal of death and dying. And so. We are, we have now put our stakes in the ground in both the academic and medical communities. And this book now connects the, not just the public, the public interest books, a general audience book, for sure. But the leading, you know, the people that are really buying this up now in droves.

So what I’ve been told, all sorts of hospice workers and end of life workers and, and mental health people, because they know that these experiences happen, but they want to know how they can talk about them and have a literature scholarly literature that can back them up. Because you can’t talk about these experiences in a lot of medical settings without being essentially reprimanded.

Like, don’t talk about those hallucinations. Those are delusions. Don’t, don’t affirm, uh, something that’s not real. And so now my, as a, to answer your question directly, my goal is for this book and our research to put a wedge right in there just to get space so that good people working every day with death and dying, have the support and affirmation to say, Hey, I can talk about this.

Here’s the data.

[00:47:02] Alex Tsakiris: Yeah. That’s excellent. Much needed. And I’m sure, sure, sure. That you are going to be effective and make a difference. Just like you’ve made a difference already. I have a slightly different spin on it. My take is number one, we are all leading rich spiritual lives. And as plain and ordinary, as that might seem to you and I, we have to look at the fact that that completely contradicts the paradigm that we’re all in second point for me is that we all have the ability to choose the light at any time in every time.

And along with that, for some reasons that we don’t totally understand some people don’t choose the light and people choose the darkness consistently sometimes. And unfortunately what we’ve witnessed and we have to come to grips with is some of those people have reached very, very powerful and influential positions and add to that the fact that their motives and who they are is often hidden and deceptive.

So with that, this is the working hypothesis. This is the other part going a little bit further that I’m not asking you to agree with, but I just want to throw on the table. And that is, as it relates to medicine and religion, there’s obviously many, many, many, the majority of people in medicine are working in a heartfelt light war, your kind of way.

But the, the unspoken directive of Western medicine is to disconnect you from your spirituality to disconnect you from your divinity. That is a directive that is in there. This is my hypothesis, not yours. It’s not like, oh, cause you can have it both ways. You don’t have to, you could, they could jump over tomorrow to your understanding of this more broader view of consciousness.

This more accepting view of divinity and nothing could change. Nothing would have to change in medicine. So the fact that they hold onto it, I think is important and it can’t be overlooked. And then I think when we look at religion, I think there’s the same thing going on and a lot of ways. And that is wonderful people, amazing experiences that people are having with the spiritual, but fundamentally an unspoken directive to become the sole or at least primary intermediary between you and divinity between you and the light between you and spirituality.

That’s what religion wants to do. You know? So it’s a little bit. Darker than where you’re at. I understand what the wedge and the line that you have to take. I just want to let you know that that’s, what’s on the table for me, even if I’m not going to be there all the time. And Hey, you know what I, again, I appreciate the book because you’re willing to at least go part of the way there in as one of your colleagues, Dr.

Monaco Williams in the book we’re talking about at heaven’s door puts it, you know, doctors are trained, this is her quote to be body engineers working inside a disease-based system. And I don’t know, it’s kind of, kind of scary in a way

[00:50:36] William Peters: you bring up two extraordinarily relevant points about the role of modern medicine in terms of its relationship to humanity, to the subjects, if you will, that they’re charged with caring for, I, I know the perspective you’re talking about.

I see it more often than I wish I had to admit and acknowledge. Um, there is absolutely. And Dr. Monica Williams was very clear in stating this, that the training for doctors, uh, uh, it’s changing, but historically. Body engineers is what they are and to look at spirituality. And the notion that, that the being there working on actually is more than just a physical body.

Our medical system is getting there. And there are certainly people within the system. I assure you, I work with these good people every day that hold that. And they’re in there trying to transform the system, but I would be not true to myself. And my experience to deny what you’re saying does not dot perspective is operative.

And it takes place in our medical system far too much every day. And I want to be an agent of change in that sensitive to the training they had offering the entire system a more holistic, a more science based, true science. Let’s look at this phenomenon. Let’s listen to these good people who have these experiences who knew nothing about them.

I have identified a pattern that is so difficult to deny. Let’s look at this as scientists, not as people who are devoted to a paradigm that doesn’t hold up, but they need to hold onto it because that’s how you maintain your membership and the medical group. I believe me, I have some fierceness in me about that, because I don’t want to tell you how many times I have been with, you know, my clients, patients, and they’re receiving medical care for a body, but the soul and spirit is telling everyone in the room I want to go home.

And the medical community is committed to prolongation of human life at all costs. So that human spirit with emotions and feelings is being hijacked by the medical model. And this is all not ideal. Let alone, it’s not ideal. It’s not healthy for everyone in the room, dying and caregivers. So Alex I’m with you.

I just want to also say that it’s the model is what it is, but there are so many good people in it trying to change it. And I, I put my support and connection and community with those because they reach out to me all the time saying, William, can you talk here? Can you speak at grand rounds? Can you do this?

I want you to meet this person. We’re, we’ve got an opening here, you know? Um, and there are a lot of, I want it, I’ll say it. There are a lot of white haired old man. Who are in this patriarchal system, cause that goes with this too. And they are sunsetting and good people are coming in with a much broader perspective that are true scientists that were willing to listen to the research I’ve done.

And others, there are others doing similar research and I’m hopeful that, that we’re going to get changes. It’ll be pockets first. Like anything else that will happen in some areas and, and the rest of the country medical system will follow for the religious piece. I also, um, will concur with you. I have a great deal of disappointment that spiritual care and chaplaincy is reticence to take up the shared death experience and other end of life phenomenon in any rigorous systemic way and other way.

In other words, to really pursue the education and the research that would demand that they change their end of life, spiritual care protocols and methods. I think there’s a, there’s kind of a, a comfortableness and, and all, all of spiritual care. And I, when I say spiritual care, that includes chaplaincy and, um, all the type of care you get for spiritual life in, um, and end of life settings, because they go by different terms, uh, depending on where you are in the country and world for that matter.

And there’s an openness amongst a lot of spiritual care provider. For sure, but there’s not the willingness that I’ve seen yet to really explore what these phenomenon are and to bring it into the Canon of understanding of end of life and what is being experienced by the die in their caregivers. And if we know that shared death experiences are happening, what does that mean for our care?

Like how, first of all, should we have education for anybody who comes into hospice and says, Hey, just so you know, these experiences happen and here’s a series of end to end of life phenomena. You may see, we call them shared crossings. So here’s end of life, um, visions and visitations, here’s terminal lucidity.

Here’s the shared death experience. Here’s various forms of after death communication that when you’re done with the dying, you may be visited by him or her and welcome it because everything we know suggests that these are missions missions from the other side to tell you that they’re alive and well.

And thank you for having no shared in their life, just ended with them. You know, so all of this in my, in my, you know, estimation, humbly, although not stating at that humbly should be like end of life, human preparation, 1, 0 1 for death dying and end of life, it should just be standard. And yet the, the two institutions responsible for that act of death and dying and end of life, medical sciences and spiritual care or religious care are both at this point, institutionally hesitant to embrace this full continuum of spiritual experiences.

We call them shared crossings. They go by end of life, phenomena, whatever they’re, they’re not being fully embraced and brought into the candidate of understanding and care at the end of life. And this is what I would call a gap in care, a huge gap in care that harms not just the dying, but also the caregivers and loved ones who feel like when they have these experiences, they doubt themselves.

They wonder if they’re having some sort of psychotic moment. When in fact they’re getting a tremendous spiritual gift that can transform their relationship, not just to the dying or to the deceased, but to themselves, into their very understanding of who they are as a human being and what their essence is as a, uh, they’re say, immortal human beings and mortal being.

So I’ve said a lot there, but you get the.

[00:58:21] Alex Tsakiris: I do. And you said it quite well, so I want to pick up and thread back into a couple of things that you said in particular. I want to talk about consciousness and, , what I sometimes call extended consciousness because you’re not only an expert in this sheer death experience, but as you talked about your you’re an expert in a bunch of this other stuff, that’s in this realm.

So near death experience, you’ve not only had two near-death experiences, but you’d studied the literature extensively. You’ve interviewed people like Eben Alexander and your colleagues with him and Raymond Moody and all these people you’re in that community. you’re, well-versed in professionally trained in past life regressions in past life, regression, hypnotherapy all.

That’s a fascinating whole other aspect of that, but you’re there, you understand that out of body experiences, again is different. You are inexperienced, sir, as well as being well-versed in that literature. So I could go on and on, you mentioned some other ones, but my starting point on this is always to kind of step back really.

And again, Pounded on this a couple of times we’re going to pound it on it. One more time, all these different bodies of evidence and the science that goes with them, completely contradict this. You are an epiphenomenon of the brain consciousness and the delusion is just completely insane from a historical and a cross-cultural perspective.

It’s just, it’s just so silly, so if we can just kind of put a bow on that, say, okay, that’s done. We’re not even going to worry about wrangling that it, which is just a distraction and kind of gets us thing, what you have done in what you offer us the opportunity to do with this book at heaven’s door.

And with this amazing body of case studies that you’ve put together on shared death experiences, you give us the opportunity to kind of catapult past a lot of that stuff and start asking some really interesting and very challenging questions about extended consciousness questions that, you know, as, as wonderful as your summation is and your, , call of hope to people in your very positive message, not taking a darn thing away from that, but there’s some challenging aspects of this as well.

That. I just have to throw on the table though. So tell us the story about Ron, because this is a different kind of extended consciousness realm that he winds up in and you wind up in, and again, it’s like you can’t help, but feel like the great conductor has set all this stuff up for you because the experience with Ron relates to your second near death experience in a very, very interesting ways.

So can you fill people in on that whole thing?

[01:01:30] William Peters: Yeah, I th I think, , probably better here, Alex is to start with my second a near-death experience because it lays the contextual understanding for the, my, my, one of my early and quite formative shared death experiences. So I think I’m 30 years old, uh, and I, I contract a rare blood disease.

Uh, idiopathic thrombocytopenia just means essentially that I’m have a very low platelet count. I’m at risk for drowning in my blood. So I co into the ER, the emergency room in Kaiser Oakland. And next thing I realize I am above. I’m a buyer. I’m going to ceiling in a room that I realize is the ICU. It’s really important the way I’m saying this, because I have no idea who I am anymore.

All I am is listening to some nurses, talk about the various four patients in this ICU. And then they talk about this patient. Who’s this young 30 year old man. Who’s got no history of illness or any, anything really. Um, they can’t understand why he’s here. What’s happened, why he has idiopathic thrombocytopenia.

And I go, that’s kind of interesting. I’m looking at the other people in the beds, got to move my consciousness around there. And I, and I am saying, I am a consciousness viewing this world without any sense of identity. There’s no William here, but then I go over and see this who’s in this bed that they’re talking about this 30 year old guy, because I’m curious.

And as I look at the guy in the bed, I realized, oh my God, that’s me. That’s that’s me. What? Wow. And I have this kind of like my in my consciousness is trying to process this, you know? Um, but, but I’m really all of a sudden I’m doing something else like, okay, I see that. I don’t go back into my body. I moved back down the hall.

I’m watching the janitors, uh, do their midnight work. Cause this is like two or four in the morning. And. And then the doctor comes in sometimes later and taps on my hand and says, Mr. Peters, Mr. Peters. And then I have this question, well, what if I answer him? What will that mean? I debate about this for a little bit and I eventually do answer him.

And as I answer him, I kind of feel in my body, uh, as if like, you know, energetically, it’s like shower. When you’re in a warm shower, you feel the warm energy kind of spread out across your, uh, your physical being sincerely. But what I really noticed is as I started talking and I opened my eyes, I was now looking at him through my body when, uh, previously I was looking at the top of his head, uh, so very profound experience from that.

It was very clear to me that I was not, at that point. I realized whatever, identify as myself was not the physical body period.

[01:04:40] Alex Tsakiris: Right. So just let me, uh, just add a couple of tiny points here, cause I want you to get to the next story, which is a profound in a deeper way and in a spiritual way. But this is also kind of separate from spirituality as if anything can be separate from spirituality.

It can’t, but you know, now you’re talking in terms that someone who is an out-of-body experience, sir, would relate to very well. You know, it, all the things that you’re talking about and maybe less so from a near death experience and you could fit it in that peg over there, but then again, you know, maybe not.

And that’s, what’s interesting, right? Because it raises this question. Why do you lack an identity in this one in, not in this one, why do you have this ability to kind of bounce around and hear stuff, but one, you know, how could that even be? How does that even make any sense? But then number two, how does that relate to the fact that you’re.

Not connected in a really profound way spiritually to all the other stuff we hear about. So, and then as you’ll tee up in the story with, Ron is what does this say about space? What does it say about time? And then the part that you added that I thought was really quite brilliant. I’d never thought about before.

What does this say about this idea that we commonly refer to as a parallel universe? Cause you’re kind of in two places at the same time, more so in this second story in this first, but I think it’s the seeds are there. So do you want to tell the story about round? Yeah. So,

[01:06:14] William Peters: you know, this experience with Ron took place at the Zen hospice project where I was a volunteer hospice worker for a number of years.

And I had been visiting with Ron on a regular basis. And he had been in a, we call, um, unresponsive state for, I think a few weeks. So, but I was reading to him and we know as hospice workers, that the last sense to go before you die is hearing. So we often read to, or talk to lovingly to our patients. In this case I had been reading Ron’s would, was kind of, he loved adventure stories.

He’d been a merchant Marine. And so I’m reading Tim, the co Jack London’s called the wild. And as I’m reading it to him, I suddenly realized that. Looking down at my body reading, I’m seeing the top of my head. I’m seeing the words on the page. I’m watching my voice speak and there’s Ron still in his bed, you know, unresponsive prone.

But to my right side is Ron. Ron is there with a big smiling face eyes. These white eyes was looking in glaring at me. He is so happy. He’s smiling. His teeth is red. He’s a radiant being. And he’s looking at me as if, to say, check this out. So to say, look where I have been. And, and he’s, I get the sense that he’s invited me here.

And I’m just with him. I’m a little stunned, but appreciative and sharing this moment with him. I can’t tell you how long I was there. I don’t think it was that long because we didn’t really have any more significant, um, you know, communication if you will. But sometime later I’m back in my body reading and, and I think I just kept reading.

And then a few moments later, I stopped and I said, I gotta talk to my supervisor about this because I love my supervisor. Um, you know, his name was Eric . He was a veteran of the aids epidemic. Previously. She’d been doing hospice work for, you know, two or three decades, two decades. I think it’d be appropriate.

Um, and I shared it with, uh, Eric and he said to me, Oh, William, you know, this is the 24 bed open hospice, I should say. So old hospital, you know, indigent, indigent people of San Francisco. And so a lot of death happening. And as the long hallway, and as I’m walking with him, I share this experience and he doesn’t even stop walking.

He goes, William, um, phenomenal, rolling by just let it go. You know, Mary needs you in bed for, and I’m like, oh, okay, well, this is indicative of a lot of things here, Alex. One is, here’s a, here’s a wonderful man. Everybody loves Eric, super knowledgeable wise, Buddhist been through it all. And he kind of dismisses my experience.

So I would have a lot more of these experiences in different types of shared death experiences. While at hospice there, I never mentioned BU about any of this to anybody. I got loud and clear. This is not something you talk about. It’s whatever, but here I am secretly fascinated by these experiences, you know, and, and I mean, I, I, I would, they were to be clear.

I would have a lot of experiences that were more. Well, we call changing the geometry of the room, changing the time-space continuum. So there’s something about that death vortex opening up and, you know, feeling the buzz in my, in my ears and the light changing and the hard angles of the room, the right angles, getting softer, and then the feeling, the pressure on my chest, the rising up, and then all of a sudden I’m in a different space.

That’s, you know, but would you call that an autobody experience? We’d have to, I’d have to go through a variety of them to go into, but I do not go into them in the book, uh, because they’re too detailed. But the point being here is there’s many points here. One is that experience I have with Ron, which happened about 10 years after my second near death experience.

. , in the ICU, that space I was in, . , in the at Zen hospice project was very similar. It was the same location, just up high, just below the ceiling. So, you know, as a researcher and experiencer, I know the different dimensions. I’m still in this human realm in a certain way. I just did the kind of outer edges of it because I know if I go a little further.

Well, everything changes. We’re no longer in a physical dimension. . , and I can look down and see it, but where I am is not in it. So that’s a conversation for another day, but, but this really affirmed once again, wait a minute. I have an existence as an, as a self of some type, which I’ll just call consciousness that survives a human body that is not dependent upon a human body and certainly not a brain.

Uh, and the other piece about this is in this situation with Ron, I did maintain a sense of connection to, you know, William reading that book down there. But I think that’s because there wasn’t any trauma involved. I mean, I was just popped out. I know that happens. But with the, with the blood imbalanced, I was unconscious for, I was in a darker space.

I do remember just nothingness for a while before I came to in the ceiling of my bed. And I don’t know why that, excuse me, in the ceiling of the ICU. I can’t explain all that. I mean, I probably could, if you, if you were to ask me deep questions, but they’re, they’re both the same in the autobody feature and a separate consciousness from the physical body brain, but they’re a bit different in my sense of identity.

William, the human being

[01:12:35] Alex Tsakiris: said, I think that’s super interesting. And the thing we need to kind of try and parse it out a little bit, if I can ask you to do that, because we do have this connection to, like you mentioned, shamonic traditions and other wisdom traditions, and then we have all sorts of other stuff that we don’t even have to get into here, but are talking about these other extended consciousness realms, and they talk about them in the way that you just did of, oh, this one’s close.

This one’s far away. This one’s above this, one’s below. And then that’s kind of from a non-spiritual perspective. And then when we get into the spiritual perspective, things shift a little bit and we’re confronted with a really, really big questions, which the biggest me always is the hierarchy of consciousness.

You know, that you’re already referring to it in a way, even though you don’t use that exact language, but the conductor is at a higher, if you will level than some of these other folks. And what does that say? It implies God for lack of a better term. But we’re kind of uncomfortable with that, but even on want, pull that back and saying we’re uncomfortable with that.

Forget being uncomfortable or comfortable with it. Just from a phenomenological kind of perspective. We have this one experience that doesn’t seem to have any of that, but completely defies time, space and sequence, you know, this parallelism. Um, and then we have this other experience that seems to be all about this big vertical leap that you’re going to make in terms of spirituality.

Ah, you know, this is terrain. We do have to, it does it to, we have to dig it, dig into this, does this because you face such an enormous challenge that you’ve laid out, which has just, you know, you got all these, you got your plate, just hospice, you know what I mean? That’s on your plate right now, help people.

But the, the big meal is still out there as well as what does all this stuff mean?

[01:14:41] William Peters: Well, you you’re, you just touched on the challenge that I face pretty much every day. And that is, you know, , what is the significance of the shared death experience in terms of, you know, the, the research and the meaning around it?

What, what is the sequentially in my mind. Who are the people we’re asking to look at this and transform, or incorporate this wisdom and knowledge in some ways it’s like, you’ve, you’ve identified Alex the various, . , if you will constituencies that, that need to be, they need to take this up and we need to have a conversation.

They need to address the reality of these experiences. . ,

[01:15:21] Alex Tsakiris: or they need to steer everyone away from addressing this as much as they possibly can, because it doesn’t really fit in with the way things are either where they want to take things or even on the simpler term, just upsetting the way things are right now.

So, I mean, that’s just, I want to throw my,

[01:15:40] William Peters: yeah. I mean, and in certain way I feel myself wanting to be, well, I can tell you where I go organizationally. Cause I run a, you know, a disorganization, where are we going to allocate our resources and attention? The truth of the matter is when people who, um, have levers of change and are willing to get the word out in a way that I think like you can do it in a way that is, um, efficacious wise, thoughtful.

And can influence people. That’s where we go. Do I know where the, where this is? This change is going to happen? I don’t know where that hundredth monkey is. It could be in medicine. Hey, it could be that, you know, the, you know, the surgeon general stands up tomorrow and says, you know, I want to say something my, you know, my granddaughter gave me this ad heaven’s door for my birthday, and I got to tell you, I had one of these things.

Okay, well now we’ve got a game changer and I’m willing to respond to, or, or a big influencer, you know? Um, you know, you’re, you’re certainly huge in your particular field of, you know, what I would say, consciously oriented spiritual people who are looking at new models that are actually more reflective of the way things are say, okay, got it.

Simply. Um, but you know, it would be great if, um, you know, Oprah Winfrey, you know, said, Hey, by the way I heard about these and I had this with my aunt without her, you know, so what I’m saying to you is, I don’t know where the transformation is going to take place. I don’t know what that lever is going to be.

I do feel very strongly about. That it’s going to happen because you can’t deny this. I mean, the, the letters I have received emails from just the last month of having this book out has been absolutely spectacular people from all walks of life saying, I had this, thank you. I’ve never shared it. And you know, and so, and, and even medical doctors saying I had this with my mother, I’ve never been able to talk about it.

And I see patients all the day, they share these experiences every, you know, all the time, but every now and then I hear these in my medical practice. And I don’t know what to say, even though I’ve had it. So I don’t know where it’s going to happen, but I do feel it will. And maybe I’m just an optimist, but, well,

[01:18:05] Alex Tsakiris: no, you’re, you’re, that’s awesome.

I mean, you are, you are a people helper. . You are . , in service, you know, and that’s just such a beautiful, beautiful thing to see and to experience someone who’s doing that and has done that for so long. So I got it. You got to do that. Totally. Get that. I’m going to hit you with one other one, though, that adds a little bit of color and complexity to this, which I really appreciate that you don’t shy away from that in any way.

I mean, you deal with it, head on, you just have a heart that says, let me help the people who I can help right now. Uh, let me help comfort them. Let me help. Cause grief. I like that. We haven’t talked about grief because grief is complicated and there’s another show can talk about all that. But you work with people who are really, really crippled by grief and you’re trying to help and all that.

So let’s do this as we kind of head towards wrapping this up, back to the strangeness. Can you tell us the story about Gail and the clink of the China? Because this is another one that, you know, again, I just got to pull back a little bit, cause you get into the shared death experience like, oh wow, this is great.

This is great. And then you put, you got to check yourself up on the taco Y clique of the China, what the hell?

[01:19:35] William Peters: Yes. So Gail she’s, you know, Gail is the first story. We, you know, sharing the book. It’s the first one that I really. Uh, want to want the audience to hear and grapple with right away. So Gail is in the hospital with her father and her father.

You know, she doesn’t know where he is on the map of life. Doesn’t know if he’s going to get out of the hospital. Doesn’t know if you know, this is his moment. So she’s in the hospital bedroom with him and he starts coding. So the medical staff ushers her down to the waiting room and she’s alone in the waiting room.

And what she describes is she finds herself in a visionary realm, walking down a beautiful path, and she feels the presence of her father with her. She doesn’t say she actually sees him, but she knows that he, she is with him and they’re walking down this beautiful country road. And then all of a sudden she sees this little path go out to this kind of other estate, if you will a states probably too, um, too much grandeur, but there’s a gate.

And there’s people behind that. She hears talking and she hears voices. Of people, either that she remembers from her childhood who had pre-deceased, uh, her, and of course her father. And what she hears is that these people referring to Walter by his childhood name, by his younger name, that name that was only used in the family when he was, you know, in his twenties or something in childhood and twenties, I think it’s like Walter or something, because now as he grew up, they call it a wall, but she recognizes these voices and she recognizes the names being exchanged.

And she’s thinking, oh my God, there’s my aunt, my aunt who died. And there’s my grandmother who died. She’s putting this together. And then she hears the clinking of the China and that, and she realizes she all at that moment, she hears Walter’s coming, Walter’s coming, he’s coming. And now we are getting this sense of what, you know, I have defined his visit was known before Raymond talked about this to Raymond Moody, this welcoming party, well known in the sh in the near death experience.

And here we have it again in the shared death experience, they’re preparing a party, a gathering to welcome Gail’s father home. And as she approaches the gate, she realizes this. Uh, boundary upon which she cannot pass. This is the boundary in the spiritual well, and we know this well, both in the NDE and the SDE, and then it ends and she’s back in the waiting room and the doctor comes down the hall and says to her, I’m, I’m sorry to tell you.

And she interrupts him I believe and says, I know I was just with him. I know he’s died. And the doctor steps back and rolls his eyes and walks out without saying anything like, like, you know, anyway, I can go off on that one, but I’m like clinically. So there’s two things here. So you’ve got Gale with this spectacular welcoming party experience with her father, um, into the next dimension, you know, into the afterlife it’s Banella.

So for Gail, what’s so profound about this and what we see for all of our eyes, I say almost all of our experiences is this sense that her beloved father is now alive and well in a, be in a beautiful afterlife being greeted by known family and relatives welcomed home. And so for Gail and many other SD experiencers, she knows that.

Her departed loved one is in a great place. And this radically transforms her grief. Like she’s not wondering where her father is. She knows he’s alive and well, she knows that she’ll see him again. She even says that and, uh, and her fear of death is completely alleviated. This is one of the great hallmarks of these near-death and shared experiences is that our relationship to death and die is wholly transformed from one of fear and anxiety to one of wonder and awe and receptivity to this great event, this great adventure that awaits us all.

So, and then the last piece I’ll say about this, but I don’t want to end here because it’s not a positive piece, but my, my yearning, my longing for Gail and anybody who has any of these experiences in a hospital is that when a medical professional, and usually it’s a doctor who comes to the surviving loved ones and announces a death, says, Hey, I have some news for you.

I’m really sorry to say to you. And, and then, you know, at some point Gail has the confidence. Now Gail is a very confident person. So she told the doctor right there, boom, this is what happened. But my hope is that that medical professional will say, oh, kale, that’s wonderful. You had a shared death experience.

Tell me more, I want to know more about this. That is such a gift. This is known in the research. You are so blessed to have this, and if you, I would love to hear more right now, if you feel comfortable. I also have someone on staff who knows all about this. We want to help you make sense of this. And we want to affirm that what you had is a known experience.

That is a gift that you can continue to be with, and it will are the research suggests that this is really beneficial for you and your loved ones. That’s what I hope for.

[01:26:11] Alex Tsakiris: Yeah, that’s awesome. It’s a great story. And again, you know, William tells a great story. He also writes a great story. , this book, like I say, it’s kind of a page Turner. You’re going to want to hear story after story. And I guess we should add, you know, and talk about the shared crossing project in shared crossing.com because the other thing that Gail can do in this situation is you’re kind of filling the gap, right?

So she could go to. Shared crossing.com and she could find someone where she could feel a I’m sure she’d feel a real welcoming about that experience. And that’s an unbelievable gift that this book brings. Having said that, because we said that over and over again, I do want to take this story in a slightly different direction as well.

Because again, I think this is, to me, this is one of the barriers to really the acceptance of this whole stuff, all this stuff. And, , people like you and I and our community, we can have a tendency to not fully appreciate what that paradigm changes.

Like, you know what, because we forget our own paradigm change. You are different, you had it at 17 through a near-death experience, but for the rest of us who don’t have those experiences, it’s a lot of grinding on a grinding on it. I’m a smart person. How could I not know about this? Uh, the world works the way it works and I’m comfortable with it.

How could everything be upside down? Because that’s what you’re really kind of demanding here. Gail story does not make any sense from a consensus reality perspective. It just, it doesn’t. And we can’t pretend like it does or shoehorn it back in or no, it just. Does it make any sense and what it points to?

I think the really challenging part is that maybe our barrier to understanding Gail story is understanding just how clouded our consensus reality perspective is because everybody you’re talking to William is coming back and going, no, you don’t get it. That’s real. You’re not real. You’re not experiencing reality when I was there.

That was reality. Isn’t reality. That’s a lot for us to kind of wrap our head around and I’m sure you struggle with that. I’m sure you probably struggled or have struggled with it yourself, but I’m sure you also struggle with it with the people you tried serve.

[01:28:48] William Peters: Yeah. You said that very well, Alex, one of the frequent comments we hear during our interviews, and of course I feel the same way being an experiencer is that that dimension that we go to during these experiences is more real than real.

This that is the ultimate reality and that this human experience is the dream. It’s the delusion. It’s, it’s a temporary. Experience a realm that we go to to learn and to have experiences and hopefully evolve our souls. I mean, there’s a whole paradigm around this where you can agree with or not. And not all our experiences will say what I said, but they will, when, when they’ve had a particular experience, assert that the human experience is not the ultimate reality where they went during that often short period of time, uh, is the ultimate reality.

And often we hear the term, that’s our true home. That’s where we truly reside.

[01:30:01] Alex Tsakiris: Great. A couple other things let’s, uh, just throw on the table if we can. Uh, you’ve also, you know, really understand the work of Gregory Sean and you’ve studied it. And have you collaborated with him at all or talk to him? I

[01:30:17] William Peters: have not.

Um, but I do see us, we’ll be speaking at some conferences coming up. I do hope to, to, um, to meet him. Uh, I have, uh, just a tremendous amount of respect for his work. It is. So, I mean, so challenging in such a good way really stretches us, not just spiritually, but multiculturally. And I think that is what we, we need that in spades.

So I just, yeah, I’m a huge fan and admirer of his.

[01:30:46] Alex Tsakiris: Great. And so am I for all the reasons that you said, because if we were going to pull back a little bit and say, let’s try and get a handle on this from this reality, then we’d immediately want to go cross cultural and cross time to kind of wipe out, flush out any of those factors that are playing in.

And that’s exactly what Sean has done, right? He said from kind of an anthropological standpoint, let’s look at near-death experiences across all these cultures, and let’s go back in time as far as we can with these accounts. And it’s amazing what he finds. . , he’s kind of reticent to go too far because he’s really even more locked into a system that doesn’t allow any of this stuff, but it also kind of throws a monkey wrench into some of this stuff that we’re talking about because it all doesn’t break as cleanly as we’d want it to in terms of a nice, neat story of all goodness and wonderful than all this.

I mean, you got shamans journeying to some dark places as well. You know, and if we look at the near death experience literature, we have the, traumatic and the distressing, what we call near-death experiences. We know they’re under-reported by researchers and because they’re under-reported by experiencers, you don’t want to come out and say, I went to hell.

The first question is. What did you do? What did you do before that? You know, kind of thing, but there’s, there’s all sorts of aspects to this that we’re not really sure we even want to explore. , what are some of your thoughts about that? Because I’ve heard you say you didn’t directly come across that in your work, but you got to know that it’s out there in some way that we don’t totally understand.

[01:32:36] William Peters: Well, the, the, not totally understand, I can say that for sure. The whole thing. I mean, I may sound like I’m, you know, knowledgeable and sure about, uh, the shared death experience in these phenomenons. And I am, you know, qualitatively this, I can say, this is what we’ve seen. There’s a great pattern here. . , and I can see it replicated over and over again and not just my clinical work, but also in the research.

So, uh, but you’re talking about these distressing realms that are reported by Nancy Bush for one in the NDE community. I mean, Eben Alexander starts out with this earthworm. I view it was just kind of a dark dense realm and his early stage of his near death experience

[01:33:17] Alex Tsakiris: , I would just interject that then if we go cross culturally from a shamanistic standpoint, all over the place, right?

So it’s kind of confirming of those other realms, whatever we are to make them.

[01:33:30] William Peters: Yeah. And so, yeah, if you want to take the, you know, the more, . , pre-modern cultures, if we use it in shamanistic and indigenous, and what, how do you, they all have, . , different realms, some of which we would call distressing or, you know, non desirable.

I don’t know if I’d call them hell realms, but there there’s certainly there is, this is known in shamanism that there are a variety of realms to be visited that you can go to. And a lot of it is, . , I don’t know if I’d say merit based, . , because that’s very, . , kind of Judeo-Christian if you will. I do think, I do think there are ways in which you can cultivate your consciousness and do practices of which the, these, you know, indigenous Shamana communities are, our cultures are.

You know, the replete with they, they, they have a series of practices that prepare the soul and spirit for these journeys and to, and to really go to certain places based on what they’ve learned in their tradition about how you access different realms.

[01:34:30] Alex Tsakiris: . , again, if I can just interject because it, and I’m sure you’ll all agree.

It, it just has complicated and the further you get into it, it’s complicated. I interviewed a guy who was a Buddhist dream yoga practitioner worked with a very accomplished teacher and his teacher at some point said, gee kid, you’re doing great. Now what you’re going to do is you’re going to visit the hell realm and that’s what he was supposed to do.

Dream yoga and he did. And so he was, he was a visitor. What does that mean? Do other people choose to visit those realms? We have this whole, . , magic tradition and other traditions that tell us, oh, you can gain things from that, from those realms. And those are a whole other conversation for a whole other time.

But I just think if we pull back the lens and we broaden this, the possibilities and start stringing them together in a meaningful way. And that’s again, when I say, you know, you have to do the work that you’re doing it it’s it’s, you just have to, and we have to change in the way that we’re changing, but it opens up all these other vistas that we, we gotta be ready for because that’s the next step in all this too, you know?

[01:35:44] William Peters: Yeah. Well, and I think this cross cultural piece is really important because, . , when the Western paradigm that you’ve referred to this kind of scientific materialism, when it, if it truly comes into relationship with pre-modern paradigms, this is where quite frankly, these pre-modern paradigms are far more sustainable and believable and reality-based than the narrow confines of scientific materialism.

It just, ours works maybe in a test tube, but it certainly doesn’t work when you test run it in the real world. And I think that, and that’s something that I learned early in my life. Uh, from my time in central and south America, working with a digital cultures, it’s just like, well, this makes sense. You don’t have to leave anything out, you know?

Um, you know what I mean? You don’t have to leave out these experiences. So, . , but let me share an experience with you here, Alex. That’s really important to note and it really gets it when you’re talking about. . , and that is, we have an experience that we call that sympathetic shared death experience. So if you remember in my book, I re refer to Sarah, Sarah wakes up one morning in Santa Barbara, and she’s got a fever and she’s very sick.

She throws up, she has no is going on. Um, her family says we’re taking you to the ER, she happens to be a paramedic. She goes, absolutely. I got to go. She gets ready to go. And then, ah, she starts feeling a little better. She goes, well, hold on. It might be passing that she gets a little better, but she’s still not feeling well.

And then she gets a call from her sister who she’s very close with and she says, Sarah has some very sad news for you. You know, your niece died of a drug overdose, accidental drug overdose about an hour ago. And Sarah. Wow. You know, just broken with grief and then as Sarah defined so well in the ensuing days, she starts thinking, wait a minute, she’s a paramedic.

She knows what a drug overdose looks like. She’s pushing it all together. And then she also realizes something else. I thought I actually, in my experience, I was feeling my niece in some way. I can’t explain it, but I was connected to, I feel like I was connected to her and let’s boil it down to the low gravy.

Sarah comes to the conclusion I was experiencing my beloved nieces, last moments of her human existence. And I was probably going into this experience of death with her. I was sharing her death in, in whatever way that, you know, that makes sense. So we have, I, we have, you know, I want to say certainly a half dozen, maybe up to a dozen of these experiences, they come with drug overdoses.

Unfortunately also with cardiac arrest, you know, people, having their people thinking they’re having a heart attack and then find out that a loved one of theirs died of a heart attack, uh, at the same time. Uh, so these talk about stretching, the scientific materialist model, that being that the brain.

Responds to phenomena in the immediate environment. Only there is no extended consciousness. There is no, the brain is the mediator through the sixth sense doors, all within the immediate environment, the sympathetic shared death experience blows out right out of the water. Now, of course, most scientists scientific materialists, and maybe reasonable scientists would say, ah, you know, you only have a dozen cases, could be conjecture.

People get sick, you know, whatever. But I don’t know. I use the reasonable human, um, kind of assessment and say, uh, there’s too much going on here. Now of course, I’ve had these experiences and I’ve studied them. So I, they fit in my paradigm. Um, but there’s one, yeah, there. So that’s a distressing Ste that, you know, doesn’t get it.

Some of the larger multicultural questions that you’re bringing up, but it does get at this distressing part. And, and there are a lot of people that I found that come into my clinical practice who have reported these and were concerned about just their. The fact that they could have an experience like this.

Does it mean they’re vulnerable? Does it mean there’s something that matter with them? Are they two poorest? Are they still connected? Are they going to die from this? So all of this information, I want to get out as a mental health provider and say, Hey, this is a sympathetic shared death experience. It happened to you because your loved one was dying.

You had a conscious, you have a conscious connection with this person, but you’re not in danger of dying. Your, your health is fine. This is a sign of a really lovely bond that you had. And if I push on this, I think that maybe your loved one was reaching out to you, . , in some way, . , either asking for help or trying to say goodbye.

[01:41:05] Alex Tsakiris: You’re a nice guy and a good therapist. I don’t know. I dunno. I, I definitely can’t fill that role. Hey, one other question. And then I want to hit some of the high points of, . , the research, some of the stats that I think people can take away, do a phenomenal job. Again, you know, peer reviewed, published, you’re playing the game the way it should be played in terms of using the scientific method.

And, you know, we, can’t totally bash science. And, and that’s, I guess my last question to, you know, is the technology angle on this is extremely interesting, challenging all those kind of things. So when we look at near death experience science, you immediately go to resuscitation We don’t know what to make of it, but people are being brought back to life after they die in ways that wasn’t possible, you know, kind of a few years ago. And then if you go one step further and I interview these guys and I don’t know quite what to make of them, but I’m definitely not a Luddite. So, you know, push the technology for it.

But you look at Gary Schwartz, the university of Arizona, they’re working on a soul phone, they’re saying, Hey guys, forget after death coming out, forget after death communication, but let’s take that after death communication one step further and you can type out some messages to the deceased. what do you think that is?

Uh, that is, you know, we’re talking about the cross-cultural and all the things we can learn from the other wisdom traditions. The flip side of that is we might, from a Western perspective, stumble across some things that are going to add some, you know, seasoning to the stew as well. What do you think about the role of technology in this both now and moving forward?

[01:42:46] William Peters: I have a good deal of respect for Gary Schwartz, his work and the cell phone, as you mentioned, and mark Pitstick, who’s been his, you know, was involved with, I think he still is. These are, these are, these are smart people using the, the technological means available and definitely pushing us in this well, I haven’t seen a way that technology could help with the SDE, other than this notion of being more formalized and making, what has historically been called death compacts, you know, a death agreements,

[01:43:18] Alex Tsakiris: You do report, you know, kind of the electromagnetic interference part of it, that is part of your thing.

Yeah, I

[01:43:26] William Peters: agree that I, yeah, absolutely. We definitely see, . , you know, all sorts of which is kind of historically referred to as, . , synchronicities around end of life. It’s a type of phenomena, . , with Peter Fenwick and Elizabeth from the UK call as deathbed coincidences as such. That means, you know, electronic devices in particular like lights flashing, a digital clock stopping at the time of death, or even later, uh, significant dates like anniversaries or birthdays and things like that.

I mean, I, I, I can say I, I, we study these, you know, I want to tell your viewers, if you have any of these phenomenon, we are there related to end of life, death and dying. You know, we are into them and we study them and we’re building. Uh, a database for this. And my next book is going to be about the series.

We call it the spectrum of mental life experience. I actually crafted this spectrum to capture this full continuum of experiences that begin with pre-death premonitions go right through end of life, visions of visitations terminal city showed up experience all the ADC, you know, the post-death visions, visitations and synchronicities throughout the technological piece.

I’m I don’t, haven’t seen that really play out other than the way that I I’ve seen you. You know, the examples you, you bring up, it’s absolutely clear. And I think you saw that in the case and, and, and at heaven’s door Emilia, uh, B who loses her 13 year old son to cancer. They talk about lights flashing when, you know, when he, when they talk about him and movements of furniture and knocking and all this stuff that we see, but I’m going to tell you something, I think we can do better than that.

I think that what the data that we are gathering is we don’t need to go too far a field from really hitting on the, these shared death experiences that are reporting this connection and an amazing phenomena, uh, that can’t be known any other way, you know, and I just think eventually. As it’s really this it’s the credibility we’re looking for.

Alex. We just need an Eben Alexander to, to have an SDE. And I mean that, because Evan is just a wonderful person, he had a, you know, a neurosurgeon associate professor at Harvard. Well-respected wonderful, man, thoughtful. We need some more, you know, people of that stature to speak up. I look at, I am very well received.

I am grateful that when people hear me talk and my colleagues, the medical community are very receptive, but we need a major influencer to come out and help us. I think that’s going to be more than anything. Um, and these are not, I don’t know if I’m answering your question specifically about the technology.

I just don’t. I, when I’m talking, when I think technology, I’m thinking the electrical stimulation that happens around a death and dying of which is well noted in the literature.

[01:46:41] Alex Tsakiris: So as we wrap things up here, let’s talk about some of the numbers, some of the stats, because they are helpful and they come through in your, in your research. And again, folks, this is real peer reviewed research, as William said, published in, you know, really the top journal in his field, which is all you can ever go to just because you’ve never heard of that journal doesn’t mean anything.

You’re not in his field. So it hit on some of these they’re there from the shared crossing.com website, under research. And for there, you can also find all the other things we talk about. You can look at events, media, you can connect with these folks in a meaningful way, but which one of these stats do you think we might want to touch on?

[01:47:24] William Peters: Well, I think they’re all spectacular. I think the one that, you know, 64% of shared death experiences happen remotely. That means they’re not at bedside. And when Raymond was Raymond Moody was doing his initial research on this. He was dealing only with, um, bedside accounts. But then when I did a lit review, I started, you know, basically seeing the research done by Peter and Elizabeth Fenech in great Britain.

And they were having these deathbed coincidences. Well, these were essentially shared death experiences, but they were remote. They were not at bedside. And so, and then when I put out, um, you know, when I started giving talks around this and reaching out to my colleagues. And creating a larger net of interest.

If you will. Then we S we found out that with our, you know, many hundreds of cases, now that 64% of these seem two thirds roughly are remote. So that’s interesting to people. Um, here’s another piece that is, uh, that I find probably of all the phenomenon here. This is probably the most interesting to me is because I’m one of these 41% of people report having more than one Ste.

So that means there’s something happening for these people. And I’m going to suggest it’s some sort of energetic, constitutional change at the, at the dome at the level of psychic, spiritual structure, whatever that means. That’s probably a lot of mumbo jumbo, but, um, but you get the point because, you know, I’m an ad dept in the sense that if I had, once I had my near-death experience, you know, I started out, I had another near death experience that I had shared death experiences.

And, you know, and now when you get me around death and dying, I’m just easy to have them. So, and we, and most people, many people are that way. It’s like once you have one, it begets more. And so the other thing is these meditation practices, um, are, you know, we know that mindfulness practices really seem to be, uh, helpful and having people have these experiences, so that 64% of our research, uh, responding.

Expressed that they have a mindfulness practice and that can be meditation. That can be prayer. That can be yoga. . , and then the last thing that I love is that, you know, almost 80%, 79% of our people who have an SDE are likely to have another experience. . , we call them shared crossings, another type of, . , spiritual experience related to death and dying.

And that’s really amazing because that means that once you have an SDE, you’re now kind of more open or available to have other communications with the deceased and kind of have what we call a continuing bond and ongoing relationship with your departed loved one or loved ones.

[01:50:16] Alex Tsakiris: Awesome. Now the other stat that jumped out at me is 87% of those interviewed reported that their experience had left them.

Absolutely convinced that there’s a benevolent after life.

[01:50:29] William Peters: Wow. That’s game changing. Yeah. Game-changing but also, . , matches the NDE literature as well,

[01:50:36] Alex Tsakiris: so, correct. Correct. Good point. So folks again, our guest has been William Peters, the new book, hope you check out. I think you’ve really, really enjoy it. I think you’re going to want to share it with other people in your life because so many people, you know, once you start, once you started talking about this.

You’ll open up people in a way, but it’s at heaven’s door. What shared journeys to the afterlife, teach us about dying well and living better. William awesome work. My man. You are so to be congratulated. I’m so, so happy you joined me here. Yeah.

[01:51:13] William Peters: Thank you, Alex. And if I can’t, I just want to remind your viewers that there’s a lot of resources on our website, share crossing.com.

There’s a video library for people to see firsthand experience first trying to counsel them experiencers. And then if I may, I have a great event with, uh, it’s a free event with Dr. Raymond Moody. We’re going to be talking about how the shared death experience changes everything. And you know, Raymond is, you know, he is the one who populize the term shared death experience.

And I came in with him afterwards to really have done the deeper research and my team, you know, should be, I should, you know, I want to let everyone know that I have a research team of Dr. Michael Consella and Dr. Monica Williams and others here that really have forwarded this. But that’s a great event with Dr.

Raymond Moody and myself on March 12th. You can find it on our website.

[01:52:03] Alex Tsakiris: Awesome. I hope people check that out. I’m not sure this will be up in time, but I can send out, I can send out a note or something if you, if you send me the link. Yeah. Because

[01:52:15] William Peters: it’s a free event. I mean, it’s a great event, which is trying to get the word out and yeah,

[01:52:19] Alex Tsakiris: Tom.

Well again, terrific having you on. I really appreciate it. Fantastic.

[01:52:24] William Peters: You know, it’s funny, my publicist said that you were going to be kind of hard on me and I didn’t. I thought you were just you’re you’re not hard at all. You’re just a great engaged interviewer, really the best one I’ve done and I’ve done a fair amount of them.

Um, but the other one who did a really good one, I think it was a call. I listened to your interview with Rick art. Uh, Rick Archer. I thought, you know, my buddy. Yeah, he did. Yeah. Well, you guys both give long interviews. This is, uh, almost two hours. So,

[01:52:51] Alex Tsakiris: uh, I just didn’t want, I just wanted to get through it and I didn’t want to cut.

I never go this long, but I just wanted to cover what we had to cover, because this is so, you know, this is your life, but I mean, this is so, so important, all these different levels. So I appreciate you spending the extra well,

[01:53:11] William Peters: Thank you so much,

Alex.

[01:53:13] Alex Tsakiris: Thanks again to William Peters for joining me today on skeptical.

One question it up from this interview, the obvious one. What do you make of the shared death experience? I think it’s incredibly important. Scientifically. What do you think. Let me know. Love to hear from you. Love to hear from folks who are listening. . Anyways, there’s some more great episodes coming up. I promise you that next one. Oh my gosh. This is.

I don’t know, I’m still, I’m still rocked by the next one. Anyways, stick around for all of that until next time. Take care. Bye for now. (music: Tomie’s Bubbles Candlegravity). [box]