ABSTRACT
This introduction provides an overview of key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book outlines specific religious beliefs and practices relating to death, dying, and the afterlife, many, if not all, and addresses religious and spiritual issues as well, such as the matter of death itself. It illustrates many of the ways that certain beliefs, categories of belief, or certain practices share common elements across religious traditions. The book covers phenomena often experienced by individuals across cultures that claim to report details of the afterlife or of the survival of human consciousness beyond death. It further discusses the phenomenology of death through experiences of the dying process, both from the perspectives of the dying and of the bereaved. The book then offers some additional scholarly perspectives on the subject, ranging from the anthropological and archaeological, to the philosophical, existential, and representational.
