No book on the soul can be complete without a consideration of what happens to us when we die.
It is truly astonishing that after millennia of human life on this planet and all the vast amount of knowledge that is now available to us, we still know virtually nothing about the most mysterious, frightening and challenging experiences of our lives—our birth and our death. From what other dimension of reality do we come at our birth? And to what other dimension of reality do we go when we die?

Even more extraordinary is the fact that science, and our culture as a whole have, until very recently, ignored the existence of the large body of material gathered over the past hundred or so years by institutions devoted to recording non-ordinary experiences: near-death, after-death and out-of-the-body experiences, as well as communications to the living from the “dead”. Nor has science accepted as worthy of attention the shamanic experiences of visionaries and mystics of all cultures and times which have testified to the existence of other dimensions of reality and the possibility of a direct relationship with them.

The belief of mainstream science that the death of the physical brain is the end of consciousness has created a kind of firewall, closing our minds to this evidence and confining us to a prison of our own making.

In view of the fact that death has always been part of human experience and comes to us all, sooner or later, it seems strange that something of the greatest significance to people is given so little attention.
As long as science insists that the universe is “dead”, with no inner dimension, consciousness or soul and that the physical brain is the origin of consciousness, these beliefs will continue to cripple and constrict the human spirit and limit the horizon of our sight.

This restricted vision of reality has left an aching void in many people’s lives that neither religious belief, nor scientific progress, nor improving the material circumstances of our lives can fill, although these are presented as offering all that is necessary to ameliorate the suffering of the human condition. What is missing is a sense of our relationship with an invisible dimension, knowledge of how this relationship can be cultivated, and how fear of death can ultimately be replaced by trust in our survival. There have been many great teachers who have pointed the way to a direct experience of reality but their message and their teachings have, for the most part, been misinterpreted or ignored.