Monday 19th October 2026 ZOOM SPR WEB EVENT at 8pm (BST): The Same Mountain, Different Paths: A Cross-Cultural Investigation into Consciousness, Death, and the Nature of Reality - Chris McKinnell

REGISTRATIONS FOR THIS EVENT WILL CLOSE TWO HOURS BEFORE THE TALK IS DUE TO START. ALL SPR WEB EVENTS ARE RECORDED, AND A LINK TO THE RECORDING WILL BE AUTOMATICALLY SENT TO THOSE WHO REGISTER TO ATTEND WHEN THE RECORDING IS READY. From the speaker: For decades the study of anomalous experience has been split between two camps that rarely speak: the field investigator who has seen too much to dismiss it, and the laboratory scientist who will not accept anything that has not been controlled. This presentation is an attempt to stand honestly in both. It draws on forty-four years of cross-cultural investigation across six continents, roughly eleven thousand cases, and sets that fieldwork against the strongest skeptical explanations and the most rigorous mainstream neuroscience, to ask a single question: what is consciousness, and does anything about it persist? The talk follows the working paper it is drawn from, and takes the same disciplined position. The field cases are treated as phenomenological data, never as proof. A hard line is drawn between what was observed, what is inferred, and what remains conjecture. Every claim is paired with the explanation that would undo it.