Evil was necessary because without it free will was impossible, and without free will there could be no growth—no forward movement, no chance for us to become what God longed for us to be. Horrible and all-powerful as evil sometimes seemed to be in a world like ours, in the larger picture love was overwhelmingly dominant, and it would ultimately be triumphant.

I understand what happens to the brain when people are near death, and I had always believed there were good scientific explanations for the heavenly out-of-body journeys described by those who narrowly escaped death.

There is no scientific explanation for the fact that while my body lay in coma, my mind - my conscious, inner self - was alive and well.

Laughter and irony are at heart reminders that we are not prisoners in this world, but voyagers through it.

I'm not the first person to have discovered evidence that consciousness exists beyond the body. Brief, wonderful glimpses of this realm are as old as human history.

I finally chalked it up to the fact that the brain is truly an extraordinary device: more extraordinary than we can even guess.

I grew up in a scientific world, the son of a neurosurgeon.