This sense of perfection has a built-in contradiction, one that Ram Dass once captured very succinctly by a statement he had heard from his Himalayan guru: "The world is absolutely perfect, including your own dissatisfaction with it, and everything you are trying to do to change it.

For any culture which is primarily concerned with meaning, the study of death - the only certainty that life holds for us - must be central, for an understanding of death is the key to liberation in life.

The knowledge of the realm of death makes it possible for the shaman to move freely back and forth and mediate these journeys for other people.

Research challenges the materialistic understanding of death, according to which biological death represents the final end of existence and of all conscious activity.

In the kind of world we have today, transformation of humanity might well be our only real hope for survival.

Dying people in pre-industrial cultures typically died in the context of an extended family, clan, or tribe.

We are not just highly evolved animals with biological computers embedded inside our skulls; we are also fields of consciousness without limits, transcending time, space, matter, and linear causality.