My father died twice. The first time was in an ambulance as he was rushed to the hospital after suffering a heart attack. His heart had stopped beating for several minutes before the paramedics were able to revive him. Afterwards, he described a vision he had as he lay without a pulse in the speeding ambulance. He saw his brother Joe, who had passed away some years earlier, dressed in flowing white robes sitting on a kind of throne at the top of hill. As my father approached, Joe was laughing uproariously and waving his hand, urging him to turn around and go back. The second time my father died was about three years later. Again it was his heart that failed him. This time, though his brother Joe wasn't there to wave him back to this world.
What my father encountered in the back of that ambulance was a classic example of a near death experience (NDE). According to statistics compiled by the International Association for Near- Death studies some 35-40% of people who have had a close brush with death later report a NDE. They commonly tell of a feeling that the self has left the body, a sensation of moving through a dark space or tunnel, a vision of golden or white light and the receipt in some form of the message "your time has not yet come".
Are NDE's evidence for life after death or are they just the last, desperate projections of the dying brain? While modern science can explain why we age, it tells us very little about why we die, much less about what happens, if anything, after death. "In death, science is pitted against an impenetrable information barrier", says David Darling, an astronomer and physicist who has written several books on death and dying. "When we die, each of us makes a solo flight across that barrier and gives up all possibility of sending back news of what we find".