Dr. Pim van Lommel, a renowned cardiologist, was so inspired by the stories his patients told of their Near Death Experiences (NDEs) that he became the first medical practitioner to risk his reputation with a full, systematic trial into the phenomenon.He interviewed 344 heart patients at his hospital who had all clinically died, some for five minutes or longer, before being resuscitated. Of these, 62 — or 18 per cent — reported some ongoing experience after the medical monitors had pronounced them to be dead. Van Lommel claims these are authentic experiences which cannot be reduced to the imagination, psychosis or an oxygen deficiency; people are permanently changed by an NDE. In Consciousness Beyond Life, van Lommel explains how people who are clinically dead can have such a transformative experience, illustrating his argument with stories of people who have gone through an NDE. In van Lommel's opinion, our consciousness does not always coincide with brain functions and he shows that, remarkably and significantly, consciousness can even be experienced separate from the body.

Pim van Lommel is a world-renowned cardiologist and medical expert on near-death experiences. For more than twenty-five years he worked as a cardiologist at an eight-hundred-bed teaching hospital in the Netherlands where he began studying near-death experiences in patients who survived a cardiac arrest. In addition to his sensational study published in the distinguished British medical journal The Lancet, van Lommel has authored chapters in several books about near-death experiences and also published many articles about the subject. Over the past several years, van Lommel has been lecturing all over the world on near-death experiences and the relationship between consciousness and brain function. In 2005, he was granted the Bruce Greyson Research Award on behalf of the International Association of Near-Death Studies. In 2006, the president of India awarded him the lifetime achievement award at the World Congress on Clinical and Preventive Cardiology in New Delhi.