PREFACE

This booklet is about a fascinating subject - which is taboo for a lot of people. Is what we experience in everyday life all there is, or is there an extended version? Summarized in this question:

What does it mean when you die?

Your body doesn't function anymore, that's clear. But is that the end of your personality? The Dutch neurobiologist Dick Swaab wrote a book entitled 'We are our brains' and if you give a book such a title it's clear that your answer to the last question is a resounding 'yes!'

There are, however, some 24 million people all over the globe who have a rather different opinion, not because of their faith or conviction, but from experience. They had a so-called Near-Death-Experience (NDE) that radically changed their vision on life and death.

In recent years the phenomenon has received more attention. One of the books that contributed to this discussion is 'Consciousness Beyond Life' by the Dutch cardiologist Pim van Lommel. The book became a bestseller in Holland and was translated into a large number of other languages. The subtitle of the book is 'A scientific vision on the near death experience' and that word 'scientific' is correct as long as it's about describing and classifying the phenomena. However, when van Lommel adresses the question how an NDE fits in with our scientific knowledge, van Lommel uses a lot of words that simply boil down to the statement that in his opinion the explanation must be found in the non-local properties of atomic particles - without actually explaining the why and how of that statement.

In this booklet I'm trying to get a better understanding of an NDE by approaching the problem from a different physical point of view. In eleven short chapters I'll let you join my quest. My final conclusion is that the so-called dual model (we have both a body and a mind), rejected by many scientists, not only in the end gives the best description how you and I fit together, but also allows a description of NDE's in agreement with all known facts - contrary to the explanations presented by researchers with too strong materialistic a priori's.

The NDE's teach us that body and mind can temporarily separate from each other and the deeper phases of the phenomenon also indicate that this separation will become permanent at the time of death, although that doesn't mean the end of your mind, your soul or, the indication I will mostly use: your self.

With that statement we enter a subject area that for many ages was primarily the playground of churches and other religious organizations. I therefore couldn't resist the temptation to look for traces of NDE's in existing religious concepts concerning death and the afterlife. In an appendix, chapters A1 to A4 you'll find short surveys of the ideas about this subject in five world religions and how they compare with the experiences of people who had an NDE.

When the word 'religion' is used the term 'mystery' is not far off. That is, of course, in general as may be expected. In St Paul's eulogy on love in his first letter to the Corynthians he writes that our knowledge is limited, we can't know everything and you can find the same kind of statement in other religions. There lies a danger, however, in the use of that word 'mystery' as a characterization of the deeper grounds of a religion. It creates a distance to everyday life, your relation with the here and now. What I will try to make clear in this booklet is that death is admittedly a boundary for what we can understand, but that it is not an abrupt transition, that it's more a fluent and partly reversible connection between the world we experience and the mysterious world we call heaven on the other side of that boundary.

For some people this will be hard to digest. Nowadays the worlds of science and religion have grown so far apart that for them the thought that in the end they nevertheless do meet is pure folly. And yet that folly appears to be a concrete reality, people who experienced the deeper phases of an NDE may well have stood at heaven's edge.

I have - of course - done my utmost to make the story as clear as possible. Several people who read the manuscript, however, remarked that it was still 'pretty spicy stuff'. To help you a bit, if you share that opinion, I have preceded each chapter (except nr. 11) by a summary that contains the gist of the chapter, hoping to make it more accessible in this way. But if you want to know the arguments that let to my views it's unavoidable that you read the full story...

I wish you much reading pleasure - and an optimistic view on life!

Bilthoven, March 2013
Wiebe Oost

As stated the book exists only in Dutch at the moment.

You can read summaries of the chapters in English by clicking here.

A publisher interested in the production of an English translation should contact me. The mail-address to use is .