Ordinary waking consciousness has a habit of presenting itself as the default, the sober baseline against which every other state of mind is measured and usually found lacking. Dreaming is dismissed as noise. Meditative states are dismissed as suggestion. Psychedelic and near-death experiences are dismissed as chemical or neurological malfunctions. The assumption underneath all of these dismissals is rarely argued for directly.

I come to this as someone with a deep investment in philosophy of mind and relational ontology, and as a shamanic practitioner who has sat with people navigating the territory between life and death. This is not an abstract question for me. It is one of the most urgent questions there is. And it deserves better than either the credulity of true believers or the reflexive dismissiveness of those who have decided the answer before examining the evidence.