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CHAPTER 3. HOW TO SEE THE BRIGHT LIGHT AT THE END OF THE TUNNEL WHILE YOU’RE STILL ALIVE Near-death experiences are indeed the only more or less straightforward glimpse of life after death. Unfortunately, we will now be discussing just that phenomenon. “Unfortunately” because you will have to examine its nature from a completely different point of view. Simply put, it is clear that both out-of-body travel and lucid dreaming are of the same nature as near-death experiences at clinical death. However, the first two somehow fail to prove the existence of an afterlife. They even refute some commonly advanced claims. Before examining the issue, I would like to start by saying upfront that I am not trying to prove that there is no afterlife. I would only like to demonstrate that one of the phenomena associated with the life-after-death issue may possibly be of a wholly other essence and significance. Perhaps we could start by saying that from a purely logical point of view, it would be incorrect to consider “neardeath” experiences to happen near the moment of actual death, as accounts of them are always related by living people... Maybe this all has more to do with life than death. I would also like to note that Raymond Moody, whose book we will be citing, did not go so far as to state that the accounts he gathered were unambiguously conclusive evidence of the survival of the soul and life after death. He merely made a hypothesis and backed it up using the excellent testimonies he collected. You’ll have to admit that if you hadn’t known beforehand that the following accounts belonged to people who were at the edge of death, it would have been easy to assume that they were written by alive-and-well practitioners of out-ofbody travel: (Life after Life by Raymond A. Moody) ...I could feel myself moving out of my body and sliding down between the mattress and the rail on the side of the bed-actually it seemed as if I went through the rail-