The End of Death

Boldly subtitled 'how near-death experiences prove the afterlife', this book covers a range of phenomena including OBEs, deathbed visions, after death communication and reincarnation. It does not pull any punches and on the first page the author states that he knows that we are immortal, directly from his own experience, which he introduces early in chapter 2. Like Swedenborg, he states that physical death frees us from the bonds of matter, but does not change our essential nature. She combines a knowledge of the literature and integrates this into her own experiences and those of others. The 10 phases of the NDE will be familiar to many readers, and the overall implication is that we need to revise the traditional neurophysiological theory of consciousness, all the more so on the basis of evidence from NDEs in the blind.

The author draws sobering lessons from NDEs during attempted suicide, again observing that suicide does not change the mental state. The chapter on children sends the same message of continuity. Towards the end of the book, Alfred Russel Wallace makes an appearance as the heretic scientist in contrast to Darwin; Wallace also understood the spiritual side of life along with many other distinguished scientists of his generation. For him, man is a duality, death is the separation of this duality and our path is one of progressive evolution. The take-home message of this and many other books on similar topics is that we need to live our lives on the basis of love, learning and practising forgiveness, doing as much good as we can, being compassionate and peaceful. This could be summed up in a question quoted: 'what have you done with your life to show me?' - our encounter with the being of light.