who has worked for more than twenty-five years in a teaching hospital with eight hundred beds. Speaking to hundreds of his patients who had suffered cardiac arrest, he was stunned to discover that, far from losing consciousness during the period when they had been clinically dead, his patients remembered having experienced an extraordinary experience, something van Lommel, as a scientist, was difficult to accept. Thus, he decided to study the phenomenon systematically for twenty years in his clinic with a specialized team, and in 2001 published a synthesis of his research in the prestigious medical journal The Lancet, thus causing an international upheaval.

This book provides abundant scientific evidence that "near-death experiences" are a phenomenon that cannot be attributed to imagination, psychosis or lack of oxygen. The facts show that consciousness is something much more vast and complex than the brain and that it still exists despite the absence of all brain function. Pim van Lommel introduces these experiences into a broad cultural context ranging from the different religious visions of the past to the new budgets of quantum physics, where these phenomena have a coherent place within their theoretical models.