This long-lost early book on near-death experiences was written around the same time as Raymond Moody’s classic Life After Life, but totally independent of any knowledge of that more famous work.

Hampe was a German philosopher, and while the book made a huge splash in Germany it’s practically unknown to the English-speaking world, even though an excellent translation was published in the 1970s (finally now reprinted).

Hampe is a deep thinker though has a very engaging style. Knowing that he had his own NDE makes the book poignant and moving to read. What I find most interesting about it is the very different approach he took compared to Moody.

Rather than looking at the phenomenon as a scientific puzzle and focusing on the possibility that NDEs are evidence for an afterlife, Hampe was interested in their metaphysical implications. 

This is the most comprehensive book on Native American afterlife beliefs ever written.

What makes it especially interesting is that the author focuses on myths and legends of afterlife journeys – what he called “Orpheus myths.” He looks at them from many perspectives – historical and cultural – but most importantly experiential.

Writing almost 20 years before the popularization of near-death experiences in the Western world, Hultkrantz identified NDEs as a different type of experience from dreams or shamanic visions – and found that indigenous people did, too.

He also suggested that such experiences contributed to afterlife beliefs – that is, that they weren’t simply culturally created “stories” or hallucinations. Readable and entertaining as well as scholarly, it’s wonderful that this book is back in print after languishing in obscurity for decades!

Consciousness is said to be the greatest mystery facing science today and Christof Koch is the famous proponent of one of the top theories – Integrated Information Theory. But the book is not just tough science – he begins with describing the dramatic psychedelic experience he had in which ‘he’ completely disappeared. I wish he had said a lot more about the experience itself, but what I loved was that he has taken this personal experience and integrated it into his great work as a neuroscientist of consciousness.

I devoured Eben Alexander’s book about a neurologist’s experiences in a coma. It was fascinating, the kind of book that keeps you glued to your seat. A few years ago, I wouldn’t have even considered reading a book with that title. My rational mind wasn’t open to anything beyond what my senses could verify. I dismissed my mystical experiences as coincidences, skeptical of anything that challenged the laws of physics or hinted at mystery.

Though the word "heaven" still doesn’t resonate with me, I’ve begun to sense something unknown. William Blake said, "Everything possible to be believed is an image of truth." My growing awareness of my own mortality has made me more receptive to the unknown.

I no longer demand proof or argue with the unseen. Instead, I listen and allow wonder to rise naturally. Death, once seen as an end, now feels like a threshold into something vast… show more.

This book spent five years on the New York Times bestseller list. Despite what some see as controversial claims that the author spent ninety minutes in heaven and then came back to life, only five of the eighteen chapters dwell on Piper’s “near-death experience.” The majority of the book chronicles his horrifically painful struggle to survive and then recover the use of his legs which were mangled in an accident. He often begged God to let him die. Instead, God brought people into his life to help him move past self-pity and find a renewed purpose.

In my book, the character learns that death is not a permanent phenomenon, but something more cyclical – so it’s no surprise that The First Time I Died sits at the top of my list. The novel centers around Garnet McGee, who returns home for the holidays and gets swept away in a cold case involving the death of her boyfriend. That is, until she falls into a frozen pond and drowns. This story is a dark roast coffee with just the right sprinkle of sugar – a tragic death interwoven with memories of a once-in-a-lifetime love. 

Near-death experiences on the surface sound like they have no relationship to politics and economics. However, they allow us to make inferences about a “moral imperative” embedded within the structure of reality itself.

Near-death experiences are instances in which a person’s consciousness has remarkable perceptions—even though the person is sometimes clinically dead. In fact, the experiences are often reported to be “realer” than real. This perplexing phenomenon has been studied extensively by the University of Virginia’s Bruce Greyson, MD, and he explains in his book why many of these profound cases are likely not hallucinations. (And he further explained these concepts to me when I interviewed him for my podcast, Where Is My Mind?).

The life-changing messages from near-death experiences teach us that we are all interconnected at a deep and fundamental level. Many near-death-experience survivors even report that they relived their whole life, and they become each person… show more.

If you are curious to know whether consciousness and personality survive the death of the physical body, this book is for you!

For decades, materialist scientists and philosophers have claimed that NDEs are just elaborate hallucinations produced by a dying brain. Guess what? These scientists and philosophers were wrong! Indeed, The Self Does Not Die contains over 125 reliable (often firsthand) accounts of perceptions during NDEs that were later verified as accurate by independent sources (those are called veridical perceptions).

A number of these cases involved people who were clinically dead (i.e. no heartbeat, no breathing, no brain activity). These findings indicate that the materialist view about mind-brain relationship (the idea that the brain produces mind) is false.

Thinking about the hope of heaven kept my mental health positive while going through cancer treatments.

This book includes several near-death experiences of people all over the world who literally died for a moment and saw the afterlife. As a witness to the spiritual realm, they give us vivid descriptions of heaven and what they saw while their physical bodies were dead.

These amazing stories from people of different ages and religions point to the reality of a beautiful place that I can’t wait to experience after I die.

It’s no secret that uniformed men and women welcome canine friends in wartime. In our book, Bill Husselman and Mary Brandon wrote home regularly about dogs they or their mates adopted in France, Italy, and elsewhere.

That said, Robert Weintraub’s book is no ordinary tale about bonding between humans and animals. Weintraub painstakingly recounts how an RAF radar technician named Frank and a purebred English pointer named Judy survived separate hells at the start of World War II, only to be imprisoned in an internment camp in the Pacific. There, despite being close to starvation, they used their wits to keep each other alive, even as they were subjected to ever-worsening cruelty and malnutrition.

Weintraub’s story is spellbinding and inspiring–and no less a love story of loyalty between man and dog.