February 4, 2025 • 17 mins
George Noory and author Gregory Shushan explore his research into near death experiences and beliefs about the afterlife in ancient cultures, how world religions have been influenced by NDEs, and stories of how people had experiences in other dimensions while their body was dead in this realm.
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
Now here's a highlight from Coast to Coast AM on iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2 (00:05):
Man, welcome back to Coast to Coast George Nori with you.
Let me tell you about our guest. Gregory Shushan, PhD,
is a historian of religions, an award winning author, leading
authority on near death experiences and the afterlife across cultures
and throughout history. Doctor Shushan has conducted his research at
various institutions, including the University of Oxford's Ian Ramsey Center
(00:30):
for Science and Religion in London's Institute of Archaeology. His
latest book is called Near Death Experience in Ancient Civilizations. Gregory,
welcome to the program.
Speaker 3 (00:42):
Thanks very much, George, appreciate it being on.
Speaker 2 (00:44):
Looking forward to this. Tell us a little bit more
about yourself. Incredible background.
Speaker 3 (00:50):
Oh well, thanks. I actually started out doing Egyptian archaeology
that was at the Institute of Archaeology in London, and
throughout the course of my research that it sort of
changed from being specifically archaeology being more like comparative religion.
I diffected at a certain point to religious studies, so
I could do these kind of cross cultural comparisons. But
(01:12):
the archaeological background, I think really helped to inform my
work and steer it in the direction that was going,
which is, you know, the importance of evidence, for example,
and doing things that are kind of methodical, scholarly sort
of way.
Speaker 2 (01:28):
My late father would have been one hundred and two
this month, was born in Cairo and stayed there until
he was six years old. They weren't Egyptian, but that's
where they were when he decided to come out and
see the world. Wow. Yeah, it's amazing. Since you've been
doing this, what has been the most fascinating aspect of
(01:51):
your work.
Speaker 3 (01:54):
That's a great question, and it doesn't have a simple answer.
I would say the most fascinating aspect is the similarities
across cultures of afterlife beliefs, and specifically the way those
beliefs correspond to near death experiences. So that kind of
my path is kind of trying to understand whether these
(02:15):
beliefs around the world have this shared experiential foundation to them,
basically that you know, they're the origins of the world
afterlife beliefs lying in mbes. But at the same time,
the other most fascinating thing is how they differ. So,
for example, near death experiences themselves differ quite a lot
around the world. We have very kind of stereotypical ideas
(02:38):
of what the near death experience is, and so one
of them, the kind of chief characteristics that come to
people's mind is speeding through a dark tunnel and then
coming out into bright light. But in some societies, for
example in Polynesia, they don't have a tunnel at all.
Instead they talk about walking along a path to the
(02:58):
other world, and they will even say that they they
were able to see the footprints of people who had
gone before them. So it's still this idea of trends,
you know, transferring from this world to the next world
in a spirit form, but there's no tunnel there. There's
a dirt passage dead. So that trying to understand those
differences in similarities, they think, is a really crucial question
(03:18):
in new death studies, which has really, i think not
been explored enough.
Speaker 2 (03:23):
Two ancient writings of books that I've got to ask
you about, the Egyptian Book of the Dead and the
Tibetan Book of the Dead, they seem to have a
pretty good handle on the afterlife.
Speaker 3 (03:34):
Then, absolutely they do. Yeah, And that was one of
the things that made me think you know that they
got these ideas about in afterlife from new death experiences.
Because when I the way I sort of got into this,
I was reading the ancient Egyptian text actually earlier than
the Book of the Dead. I was working at the
pyramid texts and coffin texts from the Old Kingdom and
(03:56):
then the Middle Kingdom, and I started noticing that if
you strip away some of the cultural descriptions from them,
were left with something that looks very much like a
near death experience. So the soul leaves the body, it
leaves the mummy, It travels through darkness, through these different
(04:17):
caverns and caves, through the other world. It encounters being
of light in the form of the sun god ray,
and it meets to seize relatives. There's a review of
their life, to kind of understand what they did in
their in their life and what kind of afterlife they
deserve on the basis of their actions in their life.
(04:40):
And so these elements were very similar to a near
death experience, I thought, And so that was kind of
what made me think, if they's if they're that similar
in Egypt, where else, you know, how far can I
extend this? And so then I looked at India and
China and meso America and Mesopotamia to try to, you know,
untangle where these beliefs are coming from.
Speaker 2 (05:00):
And the beliefs and mysteries are all over the place,
aren't they.
Speaker 3 (05:04):
They are, Yeah, And there's pretty much almost every culture
has some kind of afterlife belief. I mean, I did
another study on near death experience in indigenous religions and
tribal societies from the Pacific and Native Americans and Africans,
and I found something like seventy examples of near death experiences,
(05:27):
and among those at least half of them, more than
half of them. In fact, the person who was talking
to the missionary or the anthropologist actually explained, we know
about the afterlife because so and so went there on
this particular date and he came back, came back to life,
and he told us what he actually experienced.
Speaker 2 (05:47):
Did a lot of Shamans use the fear of the
afterlife or death to manipulate their population.
Speaker 3 (05:57):
I wouldn't say Shamans did that. I would say Shamans
learn to negotiate the afterlife realm and the kind of
experiences that people who have NDEs have. So I think
essentially they were trying to replicate a near death experience
without having to die, without having to be near death,
(06:17):
and part of the reason for that was so they
could benefit. They could have the same benefits that people
who have NDEs have. People have nd they often come
back transformed. People say they've become a more charitable person,
a nicer person, They lose a fear of death, and
then in the kind of or supernatural claims, they have
healing powers, precognitive powers, to lepathy and whatever. So a
(06:40):
shamanic journey to the other world which is controlled, it's
a practice done within the culture. They can control that
and then come back to life, whereas a near death experience,
you know, it's pretty issy if the person's going to
come back or not.
Speaker 2 (06:53):
Gregory, what does a near death experience mean to you today?
Speaker 3 (06:59):
That's a good question. Yeah, there's a lot of confusion
about this term. It was invented by Raymond Moody in
nineteen seventy five. He wrote one of the first books
about near death experiences, called Life After Life, and he
actually came up with that term. So some people they say,
you know, I had a near death experience today. I
was walking in the street and I almost got hit
(07:20):
by a bus the end, you know, And that's not
a near death experience. That's really just like somebody almost
had a brush with death. The near death experience really
is when somebody either temporarily dies or they're sick to
the point of being almost dead, and they when they
return to life, they talk about experiences that their consciousness
(07:42):
had well di somebodied from their body that's lying there.
So they will say, for example, that their soul left
their body and they were able to see the operating
tables in the cardiac war to say out a heart attack,
or they're able to see the street with the car
wreckage if they were in a car accident. And then
(08:02):
they go to the other world and meet a being
of white and relatives and all the rest of it.
And then they're sent back to their body where they
just wake up in their body. And that's what makes
it a near death experience that they actually came back
and survived it, and they have that conscious awareness of
experiences that happened during the time they were temporarily dead
or almost dead.
Speaker 2 (08:23):
I remember a story from one of our listeners, Greg
years ago where he had a after death experience and
he came back and told the doctor what he heard,
and what he heard was the doctor and the rest
of the staff laughing. Well, his body was on the gurney,
(08:44):
talking about him almost dying, but they were making a
joke out of it. They were having fun laughing about it.
And he came back and told the doctor, why were
you all laughing at me? And the doctor stopped, like
what he said, why were you laughing at me? I
was dying and I saw you, I was hovering above you,
(09:06):
and you were all laughing, and just shut the doctor
right up.
Speaker 3 (09:11):
I help that. Yeah, yeah, there are quite a few
examples of things, like that famous case of Pam Reynolds,
where he was a musician who had perfect pitch, and
she was able to identify the particular notes that the
bonesaw made that was drilling into her skull, and all
kinds of what they call her ritical observation while she
(09:31):
was out of her body in the operating room.
Speaker 2 (09:35):
How would you categorize your work different from most others?
Speaker 3 (09:41):
I would say, because I'm coming at it not from
medical science or psychology or even parapsychology. I'm coming at
it from the history of religions basically. So my main
question isn't so much whether in your death experience is
our proof of an afterlife or not, but the ways
in which near death experiences have been responded to in
(10:04):
different religions around the world, and the way they've helped
create religions around the world.
Speaker 2 (10:08):
How far back do you go?
Speaker 3 (10:11):
The earliest I've looked at are ancient Egyptian pyramid texts
and coffin texts, so pyramid texts about nineteen hundred BCD
something like that, and then also ancient sumer early Mesopotamian texts,
and that's going around roughly the same period, seventeen hundred
something like that. And I should mention too that the
(10:35):
in need, even of the Egyptians, as you said, really
had a line on what the afterlife is going to
be like. They were pretty obsessed with this death and
the afterlife. There are no examples of actual new death
experiences from ancient Egypt, and I don't think that's because
they weren't having them. It's because they didn't have that context.
They didn't have any genre of writing about NDEs. Basically,
(10:59):
the only thing is writing were used for word priestly,
religious ritual texts and accounting and documentary things. And by
documenting you know, sales and divorce decrees and things like that,
and then royal decrees, so there's no case of somebody
sitting around writing, you know, dear diary, I had this
near death experience today. But what's interesting is ancient sumer
(11:22):
I think probably has the world's earliest near death experience.
Everyone's probably heard of the epic of Gilgamesh, which is
kind of entered popular culture quite a lot. There's a
particular episode of that epic that didn't actually make the
final cut, and it's when the king was called gilgames
that was his Sumerian name earlier, and that is essentially
(11:45):
an account of his near death experience. Who's lying on
his deathbed, his sogoes to the other world and it
meets the Sumerian sun god, whose name is YouTube, and
this god with a panel of other gods who are
also radiating light. They help him review his life and
they figure out what he's what his faith's going to be.
They decide to make him a judge in the other
(12:06):
world any means of deceased relatives, and then he set
back to his body. So that's you know, seven or
eight typical near death experience episodes that are just in
this one account.
Speaker 2 (12:20):
What do we know about the afterlife today? Gregory that
the ancients did not know then, or do they know
as much as we do today.
Speaker 3 (12:31):
I would be tempted to say they know more because
really in contempt, Yeah, I think so. In contemporary Western
culture there is a real resistance to anything that has
to do with death, and that includes an afterlife. So
I would say nine out of ten scientists or doctors
(12:51):
we talk to are going to say, no such thing.
This is ridiculous. I mean even my word.
Speaker 2 (13:00):
What was that, when you're dead, you're dead?
Speaker 3 (13:03):
Exactly? Yeah, I think that's the prevailing view in our society.
And I even had a I was applying for a
fellowship with National Endowment from the Arts or something, and
one of the reviewer's comments was the entire project is
based on nonsense, and that was it. So that's how
what hostility and ridicule. There's still is a near death experience.
(13:26):
And I'm not even saying, you know, necessarily arguing that
they're really true. I'm just saying, this is an experience
that people have around the world. So in that sense,
I think for the most part, we have lost a
lot of the knowledge and wisdom that ancient cultures had
about after life and near death experience. If you look
at the Tibetan Book of the Dead, which you mentioned earlier,
(13:47):
it's almost like a roadmap of what to expect, and
it reads very much like a near death experience.
Speaker 2 (13:52):
How many of the ancients, Gregory used the substances to
put them in that position, like ayahuasca or stuff like that.
Speaker 3 (14:01):
Yeah, for some it's it's a little sketchy mysterious. We
don't really know if the Egyptians were doing that. I
think Sumerians had some opium, but as far as like
connecting them to their actual ritual practices, it's a little sketchy.
From these ancient times, definitely, the Metro American cultures did,
the Maya and Aztec and other Nwa cultures of that
(14:25):
that time and place. There was Chinese feminism for sure,
and definitely in India they had the mysterious drug called soma,
which was also the name of a god. So the
drug was like the deified version of the god which
they would consume and then have these, you know, otherworldly
(14:45):
sorts of visions which were very much tied into after
life realms. They would they would go and see these
after life realms in these hallucinatory visions.
Speaker 2 (14:55):
What message would you like people to get from the
book Near Death Experience and Ancient Civilizations.
Speaker 3 (15:04):
The first one that comes to mind, I think, is
that none of these religious beliefs after life beliefs or
NDEs around the world say that if you did something
wrong in this life you're going to suffer eternal damnation
in the other life. That's just not something that I
run across in NDEs. There's no binary heaven and hell.
(15:29):
It's it's just a transcendent experience in one of maybe
moving on to another realm or self development thing as
you're said, back to Earth.
Speaker 2 (15:38):
Do they believe in God?
Speaker 3 (15:41):
Oh yeah, yeah, there's some pretty much always some kind
of God or God's in these accounts.
Speaker 2 (15:49):
Even with the ancients, for sure.
Speaker 3 (15:52):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (15:53):
What does that tell you?
Speaker 3 (15:54):
I mean, like I said, you know, the being of light,
which everyone talks about, I mean near death experience contemporary MDes.
Often people will say I saw Jesus, or I saw
the Buddha, or I saw Mohammad. In these ancient accounts,
it's the sun god Ray or the sun God Utu
or whatever shining radiant deity, you know, was relevant to
(16:16):
that particular culture.
Speaker 2 (16:18):
How did you zero in on the civilizations that you
got for your book?
Speaker 3 (16:25):
These particular ones I decided to look at because they were,
first of all, they all emerged kind of organically and
independently as their own culture where they were. They It
wasn't a case of like you know, the Romans growing
out of Greek culture, or Judaism and Christianity growing out
(16:45):
of the wider Mediterranean culture. They're really like these unique,
not isolated, but cirely independent societies. And the reason I
wanted to choose those types of civilizations was to minimize
this idea, that of diffusion. They call it an anthropology,
which is essentially one culture came up with a myth
(17:06):
and then it spread from there throughout the world. So
with the civilizations, I chose that it's just the the
monsterbley did not happen. So the earliest is Egypt and
sumer and there was no connection between them, like stanning
out to China and Mesopotamia. You know, that just didn't
happen chronologically or in any other way. So I thought
(17:28):
that was important because finding these similarities cross culturally meant
that they couldn't be explained in terms of one culture
borrowing from another, so what could explain it? And that's
why That's where I argue that the near death experience.
Speaker 1 (17:44):
Can Listen to more Coast to Coast a m. Every
weeknight at one a m. Eastern and go to Coast
to Coast am dot com for more
Now here's a highlight from Coast to Coast AM on iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2 (00:05):
Man, welcome back to Coast to Coast George Nori with you.
Let me tell you about our guest. Gregory Shushan, PhD,
is a historian of religions, an award winning author, leading
authority on near death experiences and the afterlife across cultures
and throughout history. Doctor Shushan has conducted his research at
various institutions, including the University of Oxford's Ian Ramsey Center
(00:30):
for Science and Religion in London's Institute of Archaeology. His
latest book is called Near Death Experience in Ancient Civilizations. Gregory,
welcome to the program.
Speaker 3 (00:42):
Thanks very much, George, appreciate it being on.
Speaker 2 (00:44):
Looking forward to this. Tell us a little bit more
about yourself. Incredible background.
Speaker 3 (00:50):
Oh well, thanks. I actually started out doing Egyptian archaeology
that was at the Institute of Archaeology in London, and
throughout the course of my research that it sort of
changed from being specifically archaeology being more like comparative religion.
I diffected at a certain point to religious studies, so
I could do these kind of cross cultural comparisons. But
(01:12):
the archaeological background, I think really helped to inform my
work and steer it in the direction that was going,
which is, you know, the importance of evidence, for example,
and doing things that are kind of methodical, scholarly sort
of way.
Speaker 2 (01:28):
My late father would have been one hundred and two
this month, was born in Cairo and stayed there until
he was six years old. They weren't Egyptian, but that's
where they were when he decided to come out and
see the world. Wow. Yeah, it's amazing. Since you've been
doing this, what has been the most fascinating aspect of
(01:51):
your work.
Speaker 3 (01:54):
That's a great question, and it doesn't have a simple answer.
I would say the most fascinating aspect is the similarities
across cultures of afterlife beliefs, and specifically the way those
beliefs correspond to near death experiences. So that kind of
my path is kind of trying to understand whether these
(02:15):
beliefs around the world have this shared experiential foundation to them,
basically that you know, they're the origins of the world
afterlife beliefs lying in mbes. But at the same time,
the other most fascinating thing is how they differ. So,
for example, near death experiences themselves differ quite a lot
around the world. We have very kind of stereotypical ideas
(02:38):
of what the near death experience is, and so one
of them, the kind of chief characteristics that come to
people's mind is speeding through a dark tunnel and then
coming out into bright light. But in some societies, for
example in Polynesia, they don't have a tunnel at all.
Instead they talk about walking along a path to the
(02:58):
other world, and they will even say that they they
were able to see the footprints of people who had
gone before them. So it's still this idea of trends,
you know, transferring from this world to the next world
in a spirit form, but there's no tunnel there. There's
a dirt passage dead. So that trying to understand those
differences in similarities, they think, is a really crucial question
(03:18):
in new death studies, which has really, i think not
been explored enough.
Speaker 2 (03:23):
Two ancient writings of books that I've got to ask
you about, the Egyptian Book of the Dead and the
Tibetan Book of the Dead, they seem to have a
pretty good handle on the afterlife.
Speaker 3 (03:34):
Then, absolutely they do. Yeah, And that was one of
the things that made me think you know that they
got these ideas about in afterlife from new death experiences.
Because when I the way I sort of got into this,
I was reading the ancient Egyptian text actually earlier than
the Book of the Dead. I was working at the
pyramid texts and coffin texts from the Old Kingdom and
(03:56):
then the Middle Kingdom, and I started noticing that if
you strip away some of the cultural descriptions from them,
were left with something that looks very much like a
near death experience. So the soul leaves the body, it
leaves the mummy, It travels through darkness, through these different
(04:17):
caverns and caves, through the other world. It encounters being
of light in the form of the sun god ray,
and it meets to seize relatives. There's a review of
their life, to kind of understand what they did in
their in their life and what kind of afterlife they
deserve on the basis of their actions in their life.
(04:40):
And so these elements were very similar to a near
death experience, I thought, And so that was kind of
what made me think, if they's if they're that similar
in Egypt, where else, you know, how far can I
extend this? And so then I looked at India and
China and meso America and Mesopotamia to try to, you know,
untangle where these beliefs are coming from.
Speaker 2 (05:00):
And the beliefs and mysteries are all over the place,
aren't they.
Speaker 3 (05:04):
They are, Yeah, And there's pretty much almost every culture
has some kind of afterlife belief. I mean, I did
another study on near death experience in indigenous religions and
tribal societies from the Pacific and Native Americans and Africans,
and I found something like seventy examples of near death experiences,
(05:27):
and among those at least half of them, more than
half of them. In fact, the person who was talking
to the missionary or the anthropologist actually explained, we know
about the afterlife because so and so went there on
this particular date and he came back, came back to life,
and he told us what he actually experienced.
Speaker 2 (05:47):
Did a lot of Shamans use the fear of the
afterlife or death to manipulate their population.
Speaker 3 (05:57):
I wouldn't say Shamans did that. I would say Shamans
learn to negotiate the afterlife realm and the kind of
experiences that people who have NDEs have. So I think
essentially they were trying to replicate a near death experience
without having to die, without having to be near death,
(06:17):
and part of the reason for that was so they
could benefit. They could have the same benefits that people
who have NDEs have. People have nd they often come
back transformed. People say they've become a more charitable person,
a nicer person, They lose a fear of death, and
then in the kind of or supernatural claims, they have
healing powers, precognitive powers, to lepathy and whatever. So a
(06:40):
shamanic journey to the other world which is controlled, it's
a practice done within the culture. They can control that
and then come back to life, whereas a near death experience,
you know, it's pretty issy if the person's going to
come back or not.
Speaker 2 (06:53):
Gregory, what does a near death experience mean to you today?
Speaker 3 (06:59):
That's a good question. Yeah, there's a lot of confusion
about this term. It was invented by Raymond Moody in
nineteen seventy five. He wrote one of the first books
about near death experiences, called Life After Life, and he
actually came up with that term. So some people they say,
you know, I had a near death experience today. I
was walking in the street and I almost got hit
(07:20):
by a bus the end, you know, And that's not
a near death experience. That's really just like somebody almost
had a brush with death. The near death experience really
is when somebody either temporarily dies or they're sick to
the point of being almost dead, and they when they
return to life, they talk about experiences that their consciousness
(07:42):
had well di somebodied from their body that's lying there.
So they will say, for example, that their soul left
their body and they were able to see the operating
tables in the cardiac war to say out a heart attack,
or they're able to see the street with the car
wreckage if they were in a car accident. And then
(08:02):
they go to the other world and meet a being
of white and relatives and all the rest of it.
And then they're sent back to their body where they
just wake up in their body. And that's what makes
it a near death experience that they actually came back
and survived it, and they have that conscious awareness of
experiences that happened during the time they were temporarily dead
or almost dead.
Speaker 2 (08:23):
I remember a story from one of our listeners, Greg
years ago where he had a after death experience and
he came back and told the doctor what he heard,
and what he heard was the doctor and the rest
of the staff laughing. Well, his body was on the gurney,
(08:44):
talking about him almost dying, but they were making a
joke out of it. They were having fun laughing about it.
And he came back and told the doctor, why were
you all laughing at me? And the doctor stopped, like
what he said, why were you laughing at me? I
was dying and I saw you, I was hovering above you,
(09:06):
and you were all laughing, and just shut the doctor
right up.
Speaker 3 (09:11):
I help that. Yeah, yeah, there are quite a few
examples of things, like that famous case of Pam Reynolds,
where he was a musician who had perfect pitch, and
she was able to identify the particular notes that the
bonesaw made that was drilling into her skull, and all
kinds of what they call her ritical observation while she
(09:31):
was out of her body in the operating room.
Speaker 2 (09:35):
How would you categorize your work different from most others?
Speaker 3 (09:41):
I would say, because I'm coming at it not from
medical science or psychology or even parapsychology. I'm coming at
it from the history of religions basically. So my main
question isn't so much whether in your death experience is
our proof of an afterlife or not, but the ways
in which near death experiences have been responded to in
(10:04):
different religions around the world, and the way they've helped
create religions around the world.
Speaker 2 (10:08):
How far back do you go?
Speaker 3 (10:11):
The earliest I've looked at are ancient Egyptian pyramid texts
and coffin texts, so pyramid texts about nineteen hundred BCD
something like that, and then also ancient sumer early Mesopotamian texts,
and that's going around roughly the same period, seventeen hundred
something like that. And I should mention too that the
(10:35):
in need, even of the Egyptians, as you said, really
had a line on what the afterlife is going to
be like. They were pretty obsessed with this death and
the afterlife. There are no examples of actual new death
experiences from ancient Egypt, and I don't think that's because
they weren't having them. It's because they didn't have that context.
They didn't have any genre of writing about NDEs. Basically,
(10:59):
the only thing is writing were used for word priestly,
religious ritual texts and accounting and documentary things. And by
documenting you know, sales and divorce decrees and things like that,
and then royal decrees, so there's no case of somebody
sitting around writing, you know, dear diary, I had this
near death experience today. But what's interesting is ancient sumer
(11:22):
I think probably has the world's earliest near death experience.
Everyone's probably heard of the epic of Gilgamesh, which is
kind of entered popular culture quite a lot. There's a
particular episode of that epic that didn't actually make the
final cut, and it's when the king was called gilgames
that was his Sumerian name earlier, and that is essentially
(11:45):
an account of his near death experience. Who's lying on
his deathbed, his sogoes to the other world and it
meets the Sumerian sun god, whose name is YouTube, and
this god with a panel of other gods who are
also radiating light. They help him review his life and
they figure out what he's what his faith's going to be.
They decide to make him a judge in the other
(12:06):
world any means of deceased relatives, and then he set
back to his body. So that's you know, seven or
eight typical near death experience episodes that are just in
this one account.
Speaker 2 (12:20):
What do we know about the afterlife today? Gregory that
the ancients did not know then, or do they know
as much as we do today.
Speaker 3 (12:31):
I would be tempted to say they know more because
really in contempt, Yeah, I think so. In contemporary Western
culture there is a real resistance to anything that has
to do with death, and that includes an afterlife. So
I would say nine out of ten scientists or doctors
(12:51):
we talk to are going to say, no such thing.
This is ridiculous. I mean even my word.
Speaker 2 (13:00):
What was that, when you're dead, you're dead?
Speaker 3 (13:03):
Exactly? Yeah, I think that's the prevailing view in our society.
And I even had a I was applying for a
fellowship with National Endowment from the Arts or something, and
one of the reviewer's comments was the entire project is
based on nonsense, and that was it. So that's how
what hostility and ridicule. There's still is a near death experience.
(13:26):
And I'm not even saying, you know, necessarily arguing that
they're really true. I'm just saying, this is an experience
that people have around the world. So in that sense,
I think for the most part, we have lost a
lot of the knowledge and wisdom that ancient cultures had
about after life and near death experience. If you look
at the Tibetan Book of the Dead, which you mentioned earlier,
(13:47):
it's almost like a roadmap of what to expect, and
it reads very much like a near death experience.
Speaker 2 (13:52):
How many of the ancients, Gregory used the substances to
put them in that position, like ayahuasca or stuff like that.
Speaker 3 (14:01):
Yeah, for some it's it's a little sketchy mysterious. We
don't really know if the Egyptians were doing that. I
think Sumerians had some opium, but as far as like
connecting them to their actual ritual practices, it's a little sketchy.
From these ancient times, definitely, the Metro American cultures did,
the Maya and Aztec and other Nwa cultures of that
(14:25):
that time and place. There was Chinese feminism for sure,
and definitely in India they had the mysterious drug called soma,
which was also the name of a god. So the
drug was like the deified version of the god which
they would consume and then have these, you know, otherworldly
(14:45):
sorts of visions which were very much tied into after
life realms. They would they would go and see these
after life realms in these hallucinatory visions.
Speaker 2 (14:55):
What message would you like people to get from the
book Near Death Experience and Ancient Civilizations.
Speaker 3 (15:04):
The first one that comes to mind, I think, is
that none of these religious beliefs after life beliefs or
NDEs around the world say that if you did something
wrong in this life you're going to suffer eternal damnation
in the other life. That's just not something that I
run across in NDEs. There's no binary heaven and hell.
(15:29):
It's it's just a transcendent experience in one of maybe
moving on to another realm or self development thing as
you're said, back to Earth.
Speaker 2 (15:38):
Do they believe in God?
Speaker 3 (15:41):
Oh yeah, yeah, there's some pretty much always some kind
of God or God's in these accounts.
Speaker 2 (15:49):
Even with the ancients, for sure.
Speaker 3 (15:52):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (15:53):
What does that tell you?
Speaker 3 (15:54):
I mean, like I said, you know, the being of light,
which everyone talks about, I mean near death experience contemporary MDes.
Often people will say I saw Jesus, or I saw
the Buddha, or I saw Mohammad. In these ancient accounts,
it's the sun god Ray or the sun God Utu
or whatever shining radiant deity, you know, was relevant to
(16:16):
that particular culture.
Speaker 2 (16:18):
How did you zero in on the civilizations that you
got for your book?
Speaker 3 (16:25):
These particular ones I decided to look at because they were,
first of all, they all emerged kind of organically and
independently as their own culture where they were. They It
wasn't a case of like you know, the Romans growing
out of Greek culture, or Judaism and Christianity growing out
(16:45):
of the wider Mediterranean culture. They're really like these unique,
not isolated, but cirely independent societies. And the reason I
wanted to choose those types of civilizations was to minimize
this idea, that of diffusion. They call it an anthropology,
which is essentially one culture came up with a myth
(17:06):
and then it spread from there throughout the world. So
with the civilizations, I chose that it's just the the
monsterbley did not happen. So the earliest is Egypt and
sumer and there was no connection between them, like stanning
out to China and Mesopotamia. You know, that just didn't
happen chronologically or in any other way. So I thought
(17:28):
that was important because finding these similarities cross culturally meant
that they couldn't be explained in terms of one culture
borrowing from another, so what could explain it? And that's
why That's where I argue that the near death experience.
Speaker 1 (17:44):
Can Listen to more Coast to Coast a m. Every
weeknight at one a m. Eastern and go to Coast
to Coast am dot com for more
The Best of Coast to Coast AM News
Host
George Noory
Popular Podcasts
Math & Magic: Stories from the Frontiers of Marketing with Bob Pittman
How do the smartest marketers and business entrepreneurs cut through the noise? And how do they manage to do it again and again? It's a combination of math—the strategy and analytics—and magic, the creative spark. Join iHeartMedia Chairman and CEO Bob Pittman as he analyzes the Math and Magic of marketing—sitting down with today's most gifted disruptors and compelling storytellers.
Dateline NBC
Current and classic episodes, featuring compelling true-crime mysteries, powerful documentaries and in-depth investigations. Follow now to get the latest episodes of Dateline NBC completely free, or subscribe to Dateline Premium for ad-free listening and exclusive bonus content: DatelinePremium.com
The Breakfast Club
The World's Most Dangerous Morning Show, The Breakfast Club, With DJ Envy And Charlamagne Tha God!