Research on NDE differences in different cultures/races

Sorry for my confusion of this YouTube interview with Sci's superficially very similar at a glance YouTube video interview of the same NDE researcher, but on another NDE-related subject. I deleted the erroneous post I entered following Sci's. The following is what I originally intended to post as a new thread:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dtdfjlsli8E

An excellent and interesting 19-minute survey of some of the studies that have been carried out of NDE differences from the typical Western model, of NDEs in Eastern cultures, by a Swiss IANDS NDE researcher. Overall, I think the most important result is that most of the essential features of NDEs were evident in all the cultures surveyed. Most significant are the implications. It seems that the characteristic appearance of conscious experience (usually hyper-real) while the brain was dysfunctional, and OBEs, were two of the common features in the covered cultures. These two features are especially important in showing the veridicality which establishes to a high degree of probability the universal to all cultures reality of the separation of spirit from body/brain and entry into the beginning stages of an afterlife, which in turn even better debunks the current materialist scientistic mantra that the mind must be a function of the physical brain. This crucial (though not amounting to 100% proof) evidence for the immateriality of the mind and consciousness and the existence as a soul or spirit is made even more certain by the evidence of multiple NDEs ocurring all over the world, defeating one of the skeptic theories, that they are hallucinations fuelled by expectations and fears peculiar to our culture and prevalent religion.

In some cultures certain details differed, as for instance in Japan where apparently in the sample of cases found, there were no instances of past life review and the "tunnel" or other modality of transitioning, and the characteristics of the experience of the "Light" were different from those in the Western NDEs. It was interesting that in 100 cases from China all the characteristic features of NDEs in the West were present, despite great differences in culture and race.

Going well beyond the above interview, a new comprehensive NDE research article and analysis just came out, most importantly on the multi-era history going back to ancient times, and on the multi-cultural aspects, of NDEs, at https://cominghomechannel.substack.com/p...-universal . I think it is well worth reading.

Paraphrasing the introduction:

- Near-death experiences are known from around the world and throughout history. They are not peculiar to our culture and society as skeptics would claim.
- Accounts of NDEs share many similarities but also have cultural and individual differences. The similarities or common characteristics greatly outweigh the differences.
- The many similarities mean that NDEs originate in something universal beyond culture—they are not simply culturally constructed, and the most important commonality has been the universal belief after the experience that it was of separating from the body . These are the most important conclusions.
- Although afterlife beliefs influence NDEs, it is a symbiotic process: the experience itself is also a powerful generator of new religious and spiritual beliefs.

A sampling from the article's extensive analysis, starting with some examples of historical multicultural NDE accounts:

In mid-third century BCE China, a man “sickened and breathed his last.” After several days, however, he revived “and said he had witnessed all sorts of things relating to kwei and shen [demons and deities] in the heavens and on earth, with the sensation of being in a dreaming state, and by no means dead.”

This is just one of over a hundred similar narratives from ancient and medieval China.

Over 700 years later and over 5000 miles distant in Greece, Plutarch recounted the experience of Thespesius of Soli who, in c. 81 CE, apparently died then returned to life three days later.
Thespesius claimed that his soul had left his body and traveled to a place where stars radiated light “on which his soul was smoothly and swiftly gliding in every direction.” He “could see all around himself as if his soul would have been a single eye.”

He met spirits of deceased relatives, one of whom took him on a tour of otherworldly places of reward and punishment. Previously wicked, avaricious, and given to “lewd and illegal acts,” Thespesius returned transformed into an honest, devout man and “altered the whole course of his life” (Plutarch in Platthy 1992: 74). More than twenty such accounts survive from classical antiquity.
........................................................................................................................
Tthe Spanish missionary and early ethnographer Bernardino de Sahagún (1547–1569) (IX:3, II:498, 181, n. 20) recounted an experience of a Mexica princess—the daughter-in-law of the fifteenth-century ruler Moquihuix.
Quetzalpetlatl reported having died, then being led by a youth to the joyous land of the dead. There she encountered deceased relatives and the deity Tlaloc, and underwent a positive transformation when he gave her the ability to heal the sick upon her return to Earth.

It’s unclear if there are, in fact, fundamentally different negative and positive NDEs, or if it’s simply a matter of individual perception and interpretation of the same kind of experience (Greyson & Bush 1992; Serdahely 1995). The theologian Paul Badham (1997)—one of the first to look at the relationships between NDEs and religious beliefs—notes that in contrast to positive NDEs, negative examples are more dreamlike, they do not normally hold the same significance for the NDEr, and are not remembered with the same vivid clarity over time.
Like any experience, NDEs are also subject to the vagaries of memory and how people relate them. An OBE, for example, is not always explicitly reported, though obviously it’s a journey of the soul, not the body, which is being claimed. Presumably, anyone who has had an NDE believes that they did, in fact, leave the body.