Near-Death Experiences in Tibetan Buddhism and Across Cultures

Join us on Sunday, May 26 for this opportunity to discuss near-death experiences with two leading researchers. We will gather in-person and broadcast Alyson Prude in the Mangalam Library via Zoom at 2-3:30pm. We'll take a short break before Gregory Shushan's in-person presentation at 4-5:30pm.

If you would like to join online, you can register for the entire series here. It's FREE, but donations are welcome.

Description: Tibetan language accounts of returns from death identify delogs (‘das log) as people who have died, usually uneventfully, and then reawakened to resume their former lives. What are these people like, these delogs who have seen the afterlife? What do they say about their death experiences? I will draw from my ethnographic research with contemporary delogs to describe common features of delog testimonies as well as significant variations between individual delogs’ reports. I will also explain how delogs are viewed by their communities: what contributes to people trusting, doubting, or discrediting delogs and their messages?

Alyson Prude is Associate Professor of Religious Studies at Georgia Southern University where she teaches courses introducing students to Religious Studies and Asian religions. Her research focuses on issues of power and authority, relationships between normative Buddhist and indigenous traditions, and contemporary delogs in Nepal and Tibet. Her publications include “What Makes Folk Buddhism?” (Living Folk Religions, 2023) and “A Reexamination of Marginal Religious Specialists: Himalayan Messengers from the Dead” (Journal of the American Academy of Religion, 2020). She received her Ph.D. from the University of California, Santa Barbara.

In this talk, award-winning author Gregory Shushan, PhD, will review his decades-long research into the historical, cultural, and religious dimensions of near-death experiences. Shushan reveals the symbiotic relationship between such experiences and beliefs about an afterlife, exploring and explaining both differences and similarities across cultures. As parallels, mediumistic descriptions of the afterlife are also considered, alongside memories of between-life states in children who claim to remember past lives. While Shushan frames his research within the history of religions, his findings have profound implications for the possibility of an actual afterlife and what it could be like.

Gregory Shushan, PhD, is the author of The Next World: Extraordinary Experiences of the Afterlife, Near-Death Experiences in Indigenous Religions, and Near-Death Experience in Ancient Civilizations (forthcoming later this year), and editor of Mind Dust and White Crows: The Psychical Research of William James. He is a historian of religions with degrees in Egyptian Archaeology, Eastern Mediterranean Archaeology, Research Methods in the Humanities, and Religious Studies. Dr Shushan is a Visiting Research Fellow at University of Winchester’s Centre for Death, Religion and Culture, an Adjunct Professor in Thanatology at Marian University, a Research Fellow of the Parapsychology Foundation, and candidate for a second PhD at Birmingham Newman University, with a project entitled, To Die and Rise Again: Near-Death Experience in Classical Antiquity. He is also the founder and commissioning editor of Afterworlds Press, an imprint of White Crow Books.

Recordings of these talks will be shared via email a few days after the event.

Host or Publisher Mangalam Research Center