To avoid having their brain annihilated, many people have unfortunately fled from a sense of proportion by rejecting science outright, retreating into fundamentalist religiosity, or at the very least enveloping themselves in a blissful (to them) shroud of ignorance.

There is no freedom, there is no true choice, not in the slightest. In this view, we ourselves are no more than wind-up dolls, automatons, executing thoughts and actions that we inherited from everything that came before us. Every choice we make is illusory from this perspective, because even the atoms and molecules in our brain are just following

In her book The Near Death Experience: Mysticism or Madness, theologian Judith Cressy points out that a number of the biographies of celebrated mystics tell of an apparent dying, followed by a return to life with a visionary message to pass on.

Belief, as the sagacious Robert Anton Wilson once remarked, “is the death of intelligence”. Once we believe in something, we stop questioning that model of reality, and

It is in Book 10 of Plato’s classic, The Republic, that we find a remarkable narrative which suggests that the near-death experience has been with us throughout history. Here the

It may well be, it seems to me, that each individual consciousness ought to be compared to a brain-cell in a universal mind.

What was it about Moody’s book that made it such a hit with the general public? No doubt the diminishing role of organized religion in many peoples’ lives during the 20th century had left a spiritual hole that the NDE filled quite adequately. But it was perhaps something more than this as well. A century previous, before ‘near-death experience’

The curious fact that human consciousness seems to be a way for the universe to observe itself ties in closely to developments in science over the past century, most notably in the field of quantum physics – the field of science concerned with phenomena at the microscopic scale (atoms and sub-atomic elements). The enigma that emerges at the quantum

“you, your joys and your sorrows, your memories and ambitions, your sense of personal identity and free will, are in fact no more than the behaviour of a vast assembly of nerve cells and their associated molecules”.