Are Near-Death Experiences Universal?
Finding universal, cultural, & individual layers with Gregory Shushan, PhD
This week features guest author Gregory Shushan, PhD, a historian of religions, an award-winning author, and the leading authority on near-death experiences and the afterlife across cultures and throughout history. You can find him on Substack here and on Patreon here.
In this essay, you will read how:
Near-death experiences are known from around the world and throughout history.
As we will see, accounts of NDEs share many similarities but also have cultural and individual differences.
The similarities mean that NDEs originate in something beyond culture—they are not simply culturally constructed.
Although afterlife beliefs influence NDEs, it is a symbiotic process: the experience itself is also a powerful generator of new religious and spiritual beliefs.
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In mid-third century BCE China, a man “sickened and breathed his last.” After several days, however, he revived “and said he had witnessed all sorts of things relating to kwei and shen [demons and deities] in the heavens and on earth, with the sensation of being in a dreaming state, and by no means dead.”
This is just one of over a hundred similar narratives from ancient and medieval China.
Over 700 years later and over 5000 miles distant in Greece, Plutarch recounted the experience of Thespesius of Soli who, in c. 81 CE, apparently died then returned to life three days later.
Thespesius claimed that his soul had left his body and traveled to a place where stars radiated light “on which his soul was smoothly and swiftly gliding in every direction.” He “could see all around himself as if his soul would have been a single eye.”
He met spirits of deceased relatives, one of whom took him on a tour of otherworldly places of reward and punishment. Previously wicked, avaricious, and given to “lewd and illegal acts,” Thespesius returned transformed into an honest, devout man and “altered the whole course of his life” (Plutarch in Platthy 1992: 74). More than twenty such accounts survive from classical antiquity.
Some 2,000 miles away and 500 years later, a Spanish monk named Peter apparently died and was “restored to life again.”
He claimed that while dead, he had seen the souls of men he had known in life suffering various torments in hell, before he himself was rescued by an angel from the same fate. The angel sent him back to his body, instructing him to lead a better life, which he did after “waking out of the sleep of everlasting death.”
This is one of five such accounts found in the Dialogues of Pope Gregory I (c. 593) (Gardiner 1989: 47–50), followed by dozens of others from medieval Europe.
“Mainstream” Western scholarship has completely failed to recognize the significance of NDEs to afterlife and other religious and “supernatural” beliefs.
Over 900 years later and more than 5000 miles away, the Spanish missionary and early ethnographer Bernardino de Sahagún (1547–1569) (IX:3, II:498, 181, n. 20) recounted an experience of a Mexica princess—the daughter-in-law of the fifteenth-century ruler Moquihuix.
Quetzalpetlatl reported having died, then being led by a youth to the joyous land of the dead. There she encountered deceased relatives and the deity Tlaloc, and underwent a positive transformation when he gave her the ability to heal the sick upon her return to Earth.
Over 2000 miles across the North American continent and almost 150 years later, the Algonquin told English astronomer and explorer Thomas Hariot (1588: 37–38) about two of their people who had visited the otherworld.
The first, which was said to have occurred a few years prior to Hariot’s arrival, involved a “wicked man” who had been “dead and buried,” then revived. He described how his soul had journeyed to a hellish realm, but was saved by a deity who made him return to his body in order to teach his people how to avoid such negative fates.
In the second, contemporary with Hariot’s visit, a man left his body during his own funeral. His soul walked along a path lined with houses and abundant fruit trees. He met his deceased father, who sent him back to his body to tell his people about the happiness of the other realm. These are the earliest known of roughly 70 such Native American accounts up through the mid-twentieth century (Shushan 2018).
Back across the continent and midway in the Pacific, over 250 years later George Charter was a missionary working on the Polynesian island of Raiatea.
In his journal of 1838–1856, he recounted the experience of a woman named Terematai who had lain unconscious for a number of days. When she revived, she described a trip to a heavenly realm where she saw people she had known in life. She wanted to stay in the other world, “but God sent me back to exhort my family that they may be saved.” She returned “in a very happy state of mind and appeared wholly absorbed in spiritual subjects” (Gunson 1962: 218). This is one of nearly 40 such accounts from across the Pacific.
Around a hundred years later, over 9,000 miles away across two oceans and a continent, in southern Africa the missionary W. C. Willoughby (1928: 99) recounted the experience of a BagammaNgwato boy.
The boy died, and “went away” to a place where he saw his deceased brother as well as his father and uncle. The uncle told him he must return to Earth because he should not leave his mother. “They sent me back with great peace,” the boy said. He revived with “new life,” fully recovered from his illness. Around a dozen such accounts are known from sub-Saharan Africa.
Defining Near-Death Experiences
Spanning almost two-and-a-half millennia and originating in seven different parts of the world with seven very different religious traditions, these are all examples of a phenomenon that would later be termed “near-death experience” (NDE).
Sometimes reported by individuals who are resuscitated from a period of temporary clinical death or near-death, NDEs were scarcely known in contemporary Western cultures prior to 1975 when named and popularized by the American psychologist Raymond Moody. Since then, however, examples have been identified from throughout history and around the world.
Because one of the key issues in near-death studies is determining whether the NDE is a universal human occurrence, it’s important to clearly define the experience.
But doing so has proven surprisingly elusive.
Since death and dying are obviously universal, the nature and meaning of NDEs should be universal as well. If the NDE is not the same for everyone, this requires explanation regardless of whether we believe the experience is simply a collection of special effects generated by a compromised brain, or that it’s an actual indication the consciousness of human beings survives the death of our bodies.
Although no two NDEs are exactly alike, and none contain all the defining elements, they’re made up of a number of typical sub-experiences. These include
Out-of-body experiences (OBE) in which consciousness seems to temporarily leave the body
Rising upwards and seeing one’s own “corpse” below
Entering darkness or a tunnel
Emerging into bright light
Meeting deceased friends or relatives
Encountering a being of light or other spirit or deity
Glimpsing or entering other realms which are often seen as one’s true “home”
A sense of moral evaluation or self-judgment
Exceptionally vivid senses, clarity, and feelings of transcendence
Being instructed or choosing to return to the body
Lasting positive transformations following the return
Additional possible experiences include distortions of time, visions of the future or precognition, loud noises, music, vivid colors, reaching a border or limit, and feelings of peace, joy, understanding, love, and acceptance (Greyson 1983; Fox 2002: 100f).
Those who have such experiences almost invariably interpret them in spiritual or religious terms. The phenomenon has been the subject of a great deal of speculation.
This speculation concerns the possibility of survival beyond physical death, mind–body dualism, and the nature of an afterlife. It also relates to our understanding of human consciousness and its place in the cosmos.
In Search of a Common Core
Even the most skeptical of researchers generally accept that NDEs occur.
However, there’s no general consensus on which elements actually define the experience. The specific components that constitute an NDE remain a subject of debate among experts in the field.
Moody identified fifteen “stages” which have been used as the basis for nearly all subsequent NDE research (including the development of the widely used “Greyson scale”) (Greyson 1999). But Moody was describing a composite experience, for he found that no NDEs included all the elements, and only a few had as many as twelve.
Why this is the case isn’t clear.
There’s some evidence that the manner in which a person dies (or almost dies) impacts the experience. Those who attempt suicide tend not to have a life review, for example (Ring 1980: 194)—though neither do people in indigenous societies (Shushan 2018: 222–24). The duration of an NDE might also help account for differences (Stevenson & Greyson1996). The life review may come at a later stage in the dying process.
This is supported by the findings of some researchers (Sartori 2008), though it conflicts with those of others (Grey 1985; van Lommel et al. 2001). There is also a human tendency to elaborate events into sequential narratives, so it’s difficult to determine whether or not the order of the various NDE elements is consistent between accounts (Grey 1985).
The same year Moody’s book was published, the German Lutheran minister Johann Christophe Hampe published a book called To Die is Gain (Hampe 1975), independently identifying the NDE and its main elements.
Unlike the examples Moody cites, however, Hampe’s NDErs returned to the body the same way they left it (through a tunnel). Hampe also reported only a few encounters with deceased relatives, and none of a loud noise (Fox 2002: 55ff).
Even earlier, two popular books also independently confirmed NDEs for twentieth century Western readers: Brad Steiger’s The Mind Travelers (1968) and Jean-Baptiste Delacour’s Glimpses of the Beyond (1973).
The latter uniquely described accounts in which NDErs claimed the ability to control or influence the “afterlife” environment, similar to a lucid dream. These idiosyncrasies found in Hampe and Delacour are consistent with findings that some elements are experienced only in particular cultures (in this case, German and French), as we will see.
The NDE is by no means a rare phenomenon. Thousands of books and articles have been written on the subject, and tens of thousands of reports have been collected from around the world.
Some NDEs are distressing, though they otherwise often correspond thematically to the more typical positive examples, but in an apparently inverted way.
Thus, the individual feels fear and panic during the out-of-body-experience (OBE), is filled with despair rather than exhilaration when entering darkness, encounters an evil presence, and sees hellish places.
It’s unclear if there are, in fact, fundamentally different negative and positive NDEs, or if it’s simply a matter of individual perception and interpretation of the same kind of experience (Greyson & Bush 1992; Serdahely 1995). The theologian Paul Badham (1997)—one of the first to look at the relationships between NDEs and religious beliefs—notes that in contrast to positive NDEs, negative examples are more dreamlike, they do not normally hold the same significance for the NDEr, and are not remembered with the same vivid clarity over time.
Like any experience, NDEs are also subject to the vagaries of memory and how people relate them. An OBE, for example, is not always explicitly reported, though obviously it’s a journey of the soul, not the body, which is being claimed. Presumably, anyone who has had an NDE believes that they did, in fact, leave the body.
Darkness is another element which might easily go unmentioned if the more interesting and memorable element is the contrasting radiant light.
Accounts of NDEs should also be seen as literary artifacts (Zaleski 1987; Couliano 1991).
Like any literature, they are at least partly products of intertextuality, meaning that they’re situated within a narrative genre and thus follow certain literary conventions—that is, those found in other accounts of NDEs. Ultimately, the extent to which interpretation and narrative—by both NDErs and researchers—affect conclusions regarding our ability to define NDEs is unclear and surely varies from case to case.
Neither sex, religion, degree of religiosity, or other demographic factors have a significant bearing on the occurrence of NDEs (Ring 1980).
Nor is there a correlation with resuscitation technique, types of drugs administered during surgery, fear of death, foreknowledge of NDEs, or education (van Lommel et al. 2001). The NDE is by no means a rare phenomenon.
Thousands of books and articles have been written on the subject, and tens of thousands of reports have been collected from around the world. It’s estimated that they occur in roughly 10% of people who revive after being pronounced clinically dead or who physically come close to death (Fenwick 2005: 2). Among cardiac arrest survivors, the percentage is somewhat higher, at 12–18% (van Lommel et al. 2001).
While these estimates are significant, so is the fact that up to 90% of people who temporarily die or almost die do not report having had NDEs.
It’s not clear whether the experience simply does not happen to everyone, or whether some just don’t remember it, or don’t report out of fear of being ridiculed or doubted or for some other reason. Conversely, NDEs (or at least very similar experiences) can occur in individuals who are not actually near death at all but believe themselves to be, such as when falling from a height or nearly drowning, though without being in any real mortal peril (Stevenson et al. 1990).
Rather than a single experience, the NDE is best regarded as a collection of sub-experiences: a variable combination of a number of possible elements from an established repertoire.
NDEs, History, and Culture
Accounts of allegedly true NDEs can be found in texts from ancient Greece and Rome (Platthy 1992), the ancient Near East, medieval to modern Europe (Zaleski 1987), ancient to modern China, India, and Japan (McClenon 1994; Campany 1995), pre-Columbian Mesoamerica and modern Mexico (Shushan 2025), eighteenth- and nineteenth-century United States, twelfth-century to modern Tibet, modern Thailand and the Philippines (Belanti et al. 2008; Shushan 2025), and in the indigenous societies of the Pacific, Asia, the Americas, and Africa (Shushan 2018).
There are also comparable narratives in mythological, visionary, ritual, and other religious literature ranging from the Coffin Texts and other ancient Egyptian guidebooks to the afterlife, to the Indian Upanishads and Atharva Veda (Shushan 2025), the Zoroastrian account of Ardā Wirāz, Jesus’s descent to hell in the New Testament apocrypha, descriptions of the dying process in the Tibetan Bardo Thödol (Book of the Dead) (Badham 1990, 1997; Shushan 2022), and many, many others.
Historical and cross-cultural accounts are important in establishing the universality or otherwise of NDEs. But this task is made particularly complex by the fact that accounts vary between cultures as well as between individuals.
Making sense of the similarities and differences is, in fact, the key issue in studies of NDE narratives from different times and places. Comparative research shows that while accounts of NDEs share many common elements worldwide, those elements are embedded in descriptions that are specific to cultures and individuals.
This shows that NDEs begin as pre-cultural or non-cultural events, which cause experiences that are both culturally distinct and cross-culturally consistent.
The sociologist Allan Kellehear (1996: 28) stresses the sociological contexts of NDEs, suggesting that the variations between accounts in different cultures can be “accounted for by examining the way certain societies emphasize or downplay certain cultural images and symbols.”
Thus, while NDEers in the West may describe moving through a tunnel, elsewhere they describe more generally moving through darkness. In other words, the key concept is not the tunnel at all, but the themes of transition and moving from a dark place to a bright one.
Kellehear also argued that the lack of life reviews in small-scale societies was due to a lack of distinction between the self and that which is external to the self.
Members of such societies have no sense of personal guilt or moral responsibility, for correct behavior is encouraged by laws and fear of communal consequences within the social group, not by ideas of individual divine justice. One would therefore not “seek a life-review in evaluative terms or be impressed by a biographical review of their individual deeds” (Kellehear 1996: 38).
While largely correct (see Shushan 2018), the suggestion does overlook the fact that NDEs are not sought, but spontaneous, and that some form of individual evaluation and a reckoning of one’s earthly life have been reported in NDEs and religious beliefs of indigenous societies, even if a “typical” panoramic life review is absent (Counts 1983; Wade 2003; Shushan 2018).
Making sense of the similarities and differences is, in fact, the key issue in studies of NDE narratives from different times and places.
As Kellehear acknowledges, generalizing about NDEs in such societies is problematic, particularly as very few examples were known at the time his book was written.
Since then, the differences in how NDEs are interpreted and integrated into local beliefs have become much clearer. During the research for my book Near-Death Experience in Indigenous Religions (Shushan 2018), I found nearly 150 accounts of NDEs, or references to them, from North America, Africa, and the Pacific, prior to significant missionary influence or conversion.
I then compared how NDEs were culturally negotiated in the various indigenous traditions. I found that in Native North America, NDEs were commonly valorized, and attempts were made to replicate them in shamanic visionary practices.
In addition to the sixteenth century Algonquin account mentioned earlier, I found dozens of indigenous statements that afterlife beliefs originated with the NDE of a known historical individual. In contrast, in Africa, NDEs were often considered to be aberrational, viewed through the lens of local possession, sorcery, and zombie beliefs.
They were therefore rarely incorporated into accepted afterlife conceptions, except as something to be feared and avoided.
I also found that despite the cross-cultural similarities of these narratives with those found in other parts of the world, certain NDE elements correspond to social organization or scale. Aside from a lack of panoramic life reviews, only in small-scale societies, for example, do NDEs commonly feature an afterlife realm located in or accessed via an earthly locale. Instead of traveling there by rushing through a dark tunnel, it’s reached by walking along a path or road.
The rationale for the NDErs return to the body is culture-specific, though being instructed to return (for whatever reason) and returning is cross-cultural.
However, it seems that it’s not simply a matter of cultural and individual interpretation of the “same” experiences, but one of cultural and individual perception.
In other words, how the experience is experienced varies by individual, in real time. This includes the use of local symbols to express ideas, feelings, and events associated with the phenomenon. As Kellehear (2001: 34) summarized:
Culture supplies broad values and attitudes to individuals and these provide individual orientation during an experience. In this way, cultural influences provide a basis for interpreting NDE content, and furthermore are crucial to shaping the retelling of the experience to others from one’s own culture.
This provides a framework for understanding the cross-cultural evidence that elements of the NDE are thematically analogous cross-culturally, but experienced and interpreted in individual- and culture-specific ways.
The reason for returning to the body is a good example.
In contemporary Western NDEs, the return is generally a matter of unfinished business: either the NDEr doesn’t feel ready to leave family or friends, or has some important unfulfilled goal to pursue.
In Chinese and medieval European NDEs, however, the return is often due to mistaken identity: the otherworld entities got the wrong “Jane Doe” and she was sent back to her body when the error was discovered. This suggests socially and culturally constructed interpretations of a thematic universal “return” element.
In other words, the rationale for the NDErs return to the body is culture-specific, though being instructed to return (for whatever reason) and returning is cross-cultural. This is yet another indication that NDEs are culturally and individually experienced and expressed (or “mediated”), but that they appear not to be entirely culturally constructed.
If they were, accounts from around the world and throughout history would not share such core elements as leaving the body, seeing the body below, darkness, other realms, encountering deceased relatives, a spiritual being radiating light, conduct evaluation or life review, barriers and obstacles, the attainment of divine or universal knowledge or wisdom, and positive after-effects upon return.
In summary, like any experience, NDEs are rooted in the cultural environment of those who have them. They’re processed live by an enculturated individual, then recounted in socially, religiously, and linguistically idiosyncratic ways.
It’s a symbiotic relationship in which culture-specific beliefs and individual expectations influence universal experiences and vice versa (McClenon 1994; Kellehear 1996; Belanti et al. 2008; Shushan 2018, 2022, 2025).
Local attitudes towards death and the afterlife affect receptivity to NDE phenomena and determine how the experiences are actually undergone and how they’re subsequently symbolically expressed. NDEs clearly reflect established local beliefs and also share apparently universal structural similarities.
Philosophy, Religion, and NDEs
The existence of broadly similar accounts describing experiences that by definition occur as a result of being physically near death, from such different times, places, and cultural-linguistic backgrounds, points to pre-cultural origins of NDEs.
In other words, the experience must originate in something other than the particular symbols and beliefs that characterize any particular society’s views on the afterlife.
Scholars such as the theologian Carol Zaleski (1987: 195), however, believe that there is no objective status to the phenomenon at all. She writes that because the experience cannot be divorced from culture, we must “renounce the notion that some original and essential religious experience can be discriminated from subsequent layers of cultural shaping.”
However, cases of NDEs in very young children, those who don’t believe in an afterlife, or whose beliefs conflict with their experience demonstrate that NDEs are not a product of expectation (see also Athappilly et al. 2006). An acknowledgment of “cultural shaping” does not indicate that there are no aspects of the NDE that are independent of culture.
In other words, the fact that culture influences or shapes experiences does not mean that experiences do not also influence culture.
This raises the issue of the relationship between NDEs and religious beliefs about the afterlife.
Although Zaleski (1987: 190) discovered a number of similarities when she compared modern Western NDEs with medieval European “otherworld journey” visionary texts.
She also found that the medieval accounts focused on punishment and the process of judgment, whereas modern accounts are more concerned with education and rehabilitation. Privileging the differences, she concluded that “the otherworld journey story . . . is through and through a work of the socially conditioned religious imagination.”
But this conclusion doesn’t explain the parallels Zaleski herself discovered, or address the significance of the fact that the medieval accounts share with modern NDEs numerous familiar elements: OBEs, tunnels and darkness, glimpses of other worlds, encounters with beings of light and other spirits, evaluation of one’s earthly life, borders and limits, guides, reluctance to return to the body, and positive spiritual transformation upon revival.
While these similarities may not be surprising, considering that Zaleski’s medieval and modern examples are both firmly rooted in predominantly Christian worlds, they also occur in the cross-cultural examples.
Indeed, Zaleski’s conclusion implies the impossibility of cross-cultural consistency, unless we accept that different, culture-specific forms of “socially conditioned religious imagination” somehow lead everywhere to a similar kind of “story.”
This is not to ignore the numerous differences between accounts (also unsurprising given the cultural, geographic, and temporal distances involved), though difference neither negates nor explains away similarity.
Zaleski also argues that the supposedly neutral descriptive terms used by near-death researchers are not only potentially inaccurate, but are equally culturally constructed.
A good example of this is the term “being of light,” used to describe radiant entities regardless of whether the NDErs said that they met Vishnu, the Buddha, Jesus, or Muhammad. This type of argument side-steps similarity, and ignores the significance of the fact that beings who radiate light are reported by NDErs cross-culturally.
Interestingly, this is explicitly supported in the Bardo Thödol which states that a “Clear Light” will appear in whatever form is most beneficial to the individual: as Vishnu to a Vaishnava Hindu, as the Buddha to a Buddhist, as Jesus to a Christian, or as Muhammad to a Muslim (Badham 1997).
The description of dying in the Bardo Thödol, in fact, so closely corresponds to the NDE that it can effectively be seen as verification that the book genuinely is what it purports to be—a preparation for what happens at death. This is again regardless of whether the experience has a biological or spiritual origin (Becker 1985; Badham 1990).
This raises the issue of the relationship between NDEs and religious beliefs about the afterlife. The notion that religious beliefs can be rooted in extraordinary experiences has a long pedigree beginning with E. B. Tylor and Andrew Lang in the nineteenth century, though it was fully articulated with David Hufford’s (1982) “experiential source hypothesis.”
In my book Near-Death Experience in Ancient Civilizations (forthcoming 2025), I compare such beliefs in ancient societies that had little or no contact with each other (Old and Middle Kingdom Egypt, Sumerian and Old Babylonian Mesopotamia, Vedic India, pre-Buddhist China, and pre-Columbian Mesoamerica).
As well as expected culture-specific idiosyncrasies, I found cross-cultural elements to these afterlife conceptions which correspond thematically to the NDE. The authors of the ancient texts were familiar with the phenomenon of individuals who apparently die, return to life, and subsequently relate having undergone something very much like what we know as a “near-death experience.”
The experiential source hypothesis is reinforced by indigenous cases, such as those in many Native American societies, where NDEs were explicitly said to have formed local afterlife beliefs and even to have been the bases for particular religious movements (Shushan 2018; Hultkrantz 1957).
These findings support the notion that while the NDE is both experienced and interpreted in culture-specific modes, it nevertheless has universal elements which in turn influence belief. These findings also independently validate the hypotheses of Hufford, Kellehear, and McClenon: that culture-specific beliefs influence the phenomena, and vice versa.
A Missing Chapter in the History of Religions
It’s clear by now that NDEs are complex, multi-faceted phenomena which can be approached from various different disciplines and perspectives, using diverse theories and methodologies. It’s not simply a question of “are they real or not,” but of the various ways in which they can be understood.
As Zaleski (1987: 181) pointed out, “a comprehensive theory of near-death experience” would require a synthesis of “all of the medical, psychological, philosophical, historical, social, literary, and logical factors.”
Theories integrating a number of such factors while still taking seriously the testimonies of NDErs have, in fact, been put forth by a number of scholars (McClenon 1994, Kellehear 1996, Badham 1997, Paulson 1999, and Shushan 2018, 2025).
These theories attempt to account for both similarities and differences between accounts. They present models which accept the idea of a structurally universal NDE. These models also consider a number of other factors. These include local cultural contexts and religious beliefs. Cognitive, psychological, and neurophysiological findings are also taken into account. In some cases, such as with Badham and Shushan, philosophical and metaphysical speculations are included as well.
In any case, three interrelated conclusions can be drawn from looking at the historical and cross-cultural accounts. They demonstrate clearly that
The NDE is a common experience type that is regularly interpreted in religious terms across cultures—particularly in relation to what happens when we die;
These experiences cannot be attributed entirely to cultural expectation;
They can lead to new beliefs and change preexisting ones.
Prior to the modern “discovery” of NDEs by Moody, and long before they became embedded in the popular imagination, a few anthropologists and other historians of religions independently came to similar conclusions.
They recognized accounts of NDEs as being something other than dreams or visions and found that they contributed to religious beliefs and rituals of the people they studied. From E. B. Tylor in the nineteenth century to Åke Hultkrantz in the twentieth, the experiential source hypothesis in relation to NDEs was repeatedly rediscovered—and repeatedly ignored.
This is partly to do with the fact that for the most part, these scholars did not fully develop the theory or even write an entire book or article about it.
Instead, they made almost casual speculations or observations—a paragraph or two lurking in the pages of an ethnographic report or musing on cross-cultural consistencies in books on “primitive” religions.
Overall, however, “mainstream” Western scholarship has completely failed to recognize the significance of NDEs to afterlife and other religious and “supernatural” beliefs. This is a serious gap in the history of religions, motivated not by science but by prior religious or philosophical or disciplinary commitments.
This is what I try to rectify in my work, by looking at the evidence in the most objective way possible and interpreting it from the perspectives of the people who have the experiences themselves. This is done in combination with an open-minded interdisciplinary comparative approach and a willingness to follow the evidence—wherever it may lead.
Author Biography
Gregory Shushan, PhD, is a historian of religions, an award-winning author, and the leading authority on near-death experiences and the afterlife across cultures and throughout history.
His books include The Next World: Extraordinary Experiences of the Afterlife, Near-Death Experiences in Indigenous Religions, and Near-Death Experience in Ancient Civilizations, and as editor, Mind Dust and White Crows: The Psychical Research of William James.
Dr. Shushan is a Visiting Research Fellow at University of Winchester’s Centre for Death, Religion and Culture; Adjunct Professor of Thantaology at Marian University; Research Fellow of the Parapsychology Foundation, and candidate for a second PhD at Birmingham Newman University, researching NDEs in Classical antiquity.
I appreciate this article very much. It’s full of fascinating fact and detail.
Thank you Coming Home!
NDEs are fascinating! I used to think it was as all bogus- nonsense as related by a dying brain. But the similarities are so striking and the experiences so vivid I can no longer dismiss them.