NDE\'s and skeptics: Ethan Alexander's new interview (Identity)

by David Turell , Thursday, July 27, 2023, 20:56 (483 days ago) @ David Turell

Effects of DMT discussed:

https://www.realclearscience.com/blog/2023/07/26/neurosurgeon_compares_his_near-death_e...

"More recently, Alexander’s popular account of his near-death experience attracted the attention of Pascal Michael, a PhD student in psychology at the University of Greenwich. Michael met Alexander after seeing him speak at an academic conference and was informed that Alexander had experimented with 5-MeO-DMT, a psychedelic closely related to DMT, secreted from the glands of the Colorado River toad.

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"In the interview, Michael asked Alexander to deeply describe both experiences. Per Alexander’s recollections, both evoked feelings of transcending time and space and glimpsing the multiverse, while at the same time eliciting a sense of unity with his surroundings, as well as a profound — almost divine — love for everything and everyone.

"The most vital similarity between Alexander’s near-death experience and his 5-MeO-DMT trip was “ego death,” the dissolution of his sense of self. “The annihilation, though temporary, of the sense of one’s individuated self and all of its concomitant autobiographical memories often gives rise to an experience of being a ‘cosmic being,'” Michael explained. This, he noted, is key to the psychedelic-induced mystical experience and any potential benefits extracted from it.

"Alexander also described many differences between the two events, avowing that during his near-death experience he came across both menacing and divine beings, and even briefly ventured to another world. At one point, he also passed through an “abyssal emptiness and yet suffused with nurturing light” and came upon a “threshold” which a feminine entity prevented him from crossing.

"Due to these dissimilarities, and the fact that, at least for him, the near-death experience vastly surpassed that of the psychedelic, Alexander does not ascribe to the theory that DMT causes near-death experiences, preferring a transcendental explanation – that he briefly glimpsed some form of afterlife.

“'[The 5MeO was] like looking through a little peephole, as opposed to being full-bore swimming and being immersed in the Pacific ocean of being completely into that oneness experience [of the NDE],” he told Michael.

"Michael notes, however, that all the contrasting moments in Alexander’s near-death experience are broadly characteristic of DMT psychedelic trips. So Alexander’s episode by no means disproves the broader theory that near-death experiences could be caused by the body’s internally produced psychedelic compounds. Nor does it confirm it."

Comment: having read Alexander's book I can understand why he discredits the psychedelic drug. Especially with later conformation of what Alesander learned about himself.