ABSTRACT
Life is a fascinating journey and at some stage or another each one of us will ask questions such as ‘Who are we?’, ‘Is there life after death?’, ‘Does God exist?’ My aim in this book is to address these questions by stressing the vital importance of physicality, and to emphasize that we not only have bodies, we are our bodies. As William Blake put it: ‘Man has no Body distinct from his Soul: for that called Body is a portion of Soul discerned by the five senses, the chief inlets of Soul in this age,’ a statement that could fittingly be printed in every page of this book. We live in a time in which, on the one hand, there is a growing scientific consensus on the unity of mind and brain and on consciousness as a product of brain activity, while, on the other, the dualistic theories that separate mind and brain (and the implications that this separation has for our understanding of what it means to be human) remain deeply embedded in our culture, and appear to be supported by recent research into the experiences of those who claim to have been outside their bodies either during a close encounter with death (so-called ‘neardeath experiences’ or NDEs) or through the ingestion of dissociative drugs.
