Welcome to Our Paranormal Afterlife.

This is an Our Paranormal Afterlife remastered episode, and I'm your host, Simon Bown.

I've recently gone back and listened to some of the older episodes, and I was reminded

just how much valuable, relevant insight they still offer.

So I'm going to be re-releasing one episode each week, now with updated, remastered audio

for a better listening experience.

In this episode, I'm talking to Dr. Gregory Shushan about his book,

Near Death Experience in Indigenous Religions.

Gregory, thank you very much for coming onto the podcast.

It's great if you to give us your time.

I was really loved reading your book, Near Death Experience in Indigenous Religions.

Thanks very much. Can you tell us how it is that you came to write this book?

Yeah. Well, first of all, thanks for inviting me on your podcast.

It's a nice honor to be here.

So this book is a sort of thematic sequel to my earlier book, which was called Conceptions of the Afterlife in Early Civilizations.

That book dealt with afterlife beliefs in the ancient world in ancient Egypt, Mesopotamia, India, pre-Buddhist China, and pre-Columbian Meso-American civilizations.

In that book, I looked at the afterlife beliefs first and then kind of tried to determine if they might have been influenced by near-death experiences.

With the new book, what's interesting about it is there are actually accounts of near-death

experiences in the ethnographic and missionary and explorer literature of these indigenous societies.

And by indigenous societies, I mean mostly small-scale, pre-industrial

industrial societies in Africa, the Pacific region, and North America.

So I was able to look at actual accounts of near-death experiences from different societies and then look at them

...