physically died and were then resuscitated have reported the reality of a world beyond death, a world that awaits all who die. These reports of near-death experiences have been taken seriously by everyone but the professional skeptics. This is not to say that the claims have been or should be accepted at face value. The skeptics, on the other hand, have either dismissed the claims as a priori impossible or clutched at any straw to explain them away.

    But despite three decades of onslaughts from the skeptics, the NDE phenomenon continues to pick up momentum. A 2007 story in Time magazine reported that “These are the best of times in the NDE field, with research gathering pace and new insights emerging.”1 More important, the worst that can be said about NDEs is that they have a 50-50 chance of being simply a product of brain biochemistry. But the features of certain NDEs (awareness of what is taking place

at a distant location) make it unlikely that at least these NDEs are simply activities of the dying brain.

    The term near-death is accurate because death itself is a process. “The process of dying occurs at different levels of organization from the organism to the organ, cellular, and sub-cellular levels,” writes Dr. Linda Emmanuel, “And each set of systems can decline on a somewhat independent trajectory.”2 Dr. Michael Sabom applies this model to the NDE idea: “There is no definable moment of death, but only a process of dying which starts with life and eventually ends in death. The journey through a near-death experience may best be understood as an experiential counterpart to this physical dying process. And whether this journey ends in life or in death is determined not only by the