Welcome to our paranormal afterlife.

This is episode 165 of paranormal stories.

In this episode, I'm reading from Gregory Shushan's book,

Near Death Experience in Ancient Civilizations,

The Origins of the World's Afterlife Beliefs.

When I have guests on my podcasts, I read their books to work out questions for the episodes.

When reading these books, I always find such amazing information that never makes it into the

podcast, and here I get a chance to give you a peek into the book.

I've put a link to the book in the show notes, and I did seek permission to record this

extract, and the author kindly said yes.

So I'm going to read from chapter 9, which is titled Experiential Origins of the Afterlife,

Near Death Experiences, Charmonism, and Dreams. experiences, shamanism and dreams.

And this is what Gregory has written.

Although the relationship between NDEs and afterlife beliefs has gone unacknowledged

in the history of religions, some scholars have recognised more generally that myth and belief

have origins in experience. In many ways, myths and beliefs

are ways of making sense of our experiences and fitting them into some kind of comprehensible

worldview. Such profound, unusual, rare and transformative experience as NDEs would be no

exception.

When we find similar beliefs around the world, it makes sense to look for common experience types that might explain them.

As Wendy Doneger put it, we can approach the problem by extrapolating from what all the

myths have in common, modified in the light of what we can simply observe

...