Hello and welcome to Psychic Teachers. I'm your host Samantha Faye and I'm Deb Bowen.

And today we're going to take a look at what cultures from around the world have taught us about the afterlife.

Where do we go when we die? What will we see? How common are the world's views on life after death and where do we differ?

Now I think it's really interesting to note that line beneath the surface of all the world's beliefs about the afterlife

is this universal fear of death. And I think if you really paused a hundred at Deb, don't you think that unspoken fear of death is at the heart of so many key decisions we make in life?

I do indeed, Samantha. And you're right. That we're unaware of. We just we don't even think of it in terms of fear of death. That is the underlying fear.

Yeah, it really is. And I don't think that people want to acknowledge it. I don't think they want to think about it.

And yet if you if you look back to even our original creation stories and myths, you'll see that every culture has a creation story that explains why we die and almost all of them blame us for this dreaded fate of mortality.

Some African tribes tell how God wanted to see who was worthy of immortality. So he sat in man to race against the snake, but man got distracted by a beautiful woman.

The snake got to God first was declared the winner and the snake got the prize of immortality.

You know, that image of that snake and that adversarial relationship with humanity.

Transcendence, that's another thing that transcends almost every culture in some way.

Yeah, you can find it in every myth almost. It's fascinating to look at the commonality.

Yes, the epic of Gilgamesh is an ancient story. Most of you probably had to read in high school or college.

He goes on this huge log adventure, searching for immortality. He was asked to stay awake for six days and seven nights to gain this.

This gift of not being able to die, but he failed at this and he was then offered a plant that would give him immortality, but it was stolen from him by guess who?

A snake. The Hopi and the ancient Greek myths tell us that we are immortal, but we have forgotten this.

The Hopi teach that our world has been destroyed three times, causing us to sink further and further into forgetting our original immortality.

For the Greeks, this forgetfulness is symbolized by the river Leithy, which means oblivion.

When the newly dead drink from this river, they would forget everything about who they were and where they came from.

This belief in many myths that when we cross over, we drink from something, whether it's, you know, this tea or this river water, and it makes us forget who we are and that we are indeed immortal.

Many Hindu and Buddhist traditions teach that we're almost asleep in this semi-permanent state of separateness from which we need to awaken.

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