Dualism or idealist monism as the best model for survival after death data

[Ninshub]

However, I would demur that whatever the origin of a metaphysical claim it shouldn't invalidate the claim itself which should be judged on its own merits. But mysticism of the kind that seems to inspire Vedanta, since it involves a person claiming to see something with little to no paranormal data, seems more suspect to me than a clear communication from the dead to the living. Just as some NDEs can be rendered suspect because they seem to closely align with proselytizing a religion (see some of the Pure Land Buddhist NDEs) there's just a...suspicious oddity to the historical context of certain Monist traditions...

OTOH, we do have NDEs that contradict each other as well, and some in-between life memories don't seem like they are literally real such as children's souls trying to hide in a grain of rice to be consumed by the mother. So the true nature of reality may not be discernible from paranormal data, though I would contend at least the communications that produce verified information have to be held higher than mystic visions.

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We can also look at mediumship cases, such as this one which has evidential aspects, where the dead child seeks to alleviate the grieving parents. She tells them it's okay because she is with grandma, not "Oh silly mom & dad we as individuals don't actually exist and there is nothing but the One Mind".

If we're going by paranormal data, it seems to me there is much less going for the idea that the One subsumes the Many. Rather they co-exist, perhaps in such a way that our ideas of distinct individuals divorced from their Origin is untrue in a non-dual way...but then the erasure of the Many strikes me as a violation of Non-Dualism as well...

Wow that's such a large issue to contemplate, I don't know if I have my feet on solid ground here.  

I agree with your second sentence ("But mysticism of the kind..."). But then I'm examining certain models or religious philosophies (like AV) to the extent that they share what I understand coming through paranormal phenomena, including NDEs. In his book Lessons from the Light, NDE researcher Kenneth Ring has a penultimate chapter called "Journeys to the Source: The Ultimate Lessons from the Light", which goes over themes that come across from certain NDErs' testimonies, subjects who seem to have during their NDE progressed further "into" the Light, into what Ring calls a "second" and "ultimate Light' - and I can't help but equate that knowledge as very similar to what usually comes across in perennial "mystic visions". And I will personally hold that higher (if the themes are consistent, which I find to be) than veridically-verified communications that most likely are saying something true and empirical about one dimension of reality, closer to where we are and can relate to as incarnate finite minds. (But that's just me).

So, for example, I wouldn't assume that the mediumship case about the dead child reassuring her grieving parents is the be-all and end-all of what that reality is. It's certainly one level or dimension, but who knows if there are larger truths or other dimensions? I tend to assume there are others, given what I've digested over the years as information. My 2 cents of course!