Of course, anything said about death can only be founded upon belief. We simply won’t know until we experience it, notwithstanding the assertions of priests, of great religious texts, or the tales of enlightened beings assuring us that death is this or that. Perhaps the nearest we can get to knowing about the state is through out-of-body and near-death-experiances. However, even when someone "returns" after being pronounced clinically dead, it doesn't necessarily mean that they have died. After all they have returned to tell their tales, and any way the brain is known to continue quite a feverish activity up to thirty minutes after a person's heart has stoped.

Near-death-experiences appear to be far more widespread than suspected. It has been found that more than one person in twenty in both America and Europe has apparently had some form of experience of "dying" and of being revived and returning to normal everyday state.

A classic feature to be found in the near-death-experience is that of the instantaneous life review - the drowning man who sees his life pass by in a flash. Those who have managed to return from death, or have been hypnotized into a supposed rememberance of other lives, report that every moment is played back, complete in its entirety, from the important to the most trivial. They all stress that it only takes an instant and yet every emotion and feeling, every sense and intellectual memory accompanies those brief playbacks.