Life after Life by Raymond A

The Pharmacological Explanation
Although there are some superficial similarities to the hallucinations of 
persons who have taken medicines or drugs, there are important differences too.
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In drug-induced altered states of awareness, the brilliant light is not 
personified and no ineffable feelings of peace and happiness result. The description of 
the after-death world is literalistic with reference to the subject’s religious training. 
The beings are identified as angels. The individual talks of going to heaven, which is 
in an ‘up’ direction. She repeatedly stresses the vagueness of her experience and it 
apparently had no impact on her belief in an afterlife.
In many cases no drugs had been administered prior to the near death 
experience.
Physiological explanations
It is often proposed that since the oxygen supply to the brain is cut off during 
clinical death, the phenomena perceived must represent some kind of last 
compensatory gasp of the dying brain.
The main thing wrong with this hypothesis is that many of the near death 
experiences happened before any physiological stress of the required type took place.
Neurological explanations
There are some similarities with the experiences of neurological seizures 
occasioned by a focus of irritation in the brain, where past memories are seen. 
However, these images do not come in the order of their lives, nor are they seen all at 
once, in a unifying vision. These events were not the highlights or the most significant 
occurrences of their lives. They were not presented to them for judgemental or 
educational purposes.
Psychological Explanations
There are various psychological theories. Some critics have a feeling that the 
subjects are lying. Others think that they are unconsciously embellishing whatever 
experience they had. Many of the symptoms have been replicated in people subjected 
to isolation.. But in as much as isolation research has not come up with any 
satisfactory explanation for the experiences of those subjected to isolation, giving 
isolation as the explanation for near-death experiences would only convert a mystery 
into an enigma.
Nor can we treat these experiences as delusions, as the accounts tally too 
much. The subjects are emotionally stable, normal people who can distinguish 
between dreams and reality. Their accounts also receive corroboration form 
independent observers.
We should at least leave open the possibility that near death experiences 
represent a novel phenomenon for which we may have to devise new modes of 
explanation and interpretation.
Conclusions
Moody says that he is not under the delusion that he has proved that there is 
life after death. At the same time, the inability to construct a proof may represent a 
limitation of the currently accepted modes of scientific and logical thought.
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Studying near-death experiences is important because it might throw light on 
the nature of death. If these experiences are real, they have profound implications for 
what every one of us is doing with his life.
Post script
In the edition printed in the year 2000, Moody makes three points. First, NDEs 
have been proved to be part of a broad spectrum of alternate states of awareness 
related to death and dying. One of these is the startling phenomenon of the empathic 
death experience, in which someone sitting at the bedside of a dying person