This book provides abundant evidence that "near death experience" are a phenomenon that can not be attributed to the imagination, psychosis or lack of oxygen. The facts show that consciousness is much more vast and complex than the brain that still exists despite the absence of all brain function. Pim van Lommel introduce these experiences in a broader cultural context that goes from different religious visions of the past to new estimates of quantum physics, where these phenomena take place within a coherent theoretical models.