“There's another world, love is real, we are all connected.” ~ Russel Brand

A lifetime of curiosity has lead me to some tentative conclusions: all is one, things are weird, we are all connected.

From here on earth, in meat-space as it were, ours is a limited perspective on an enormous mystery comprised of multiple, perhaps infinite, levels of extraordinary wonders and sub-mysteries, all on a grand cosmic scale that absolutely dwarfs the tiny creatures that we are.

It's humbling to realize that all of our knowledge, all our science and technology, all of our history is an exceedingly tiny drop in a vast ocean of space/time that we can barely begin to imagine.

The one true thing that can be said about existence is that it's weird. It's plenty weird. I have read erudite debunkers of that notion – but I don't buy it. Everything we think of as ordinary is an illusion overlying a deeper layer of mind-blowing reality, and the rabbit hole seems to go on forever. There is always a deeper level of reality, a higher degree of complexity not yet imagined. It's weird. We are not weird enough to grasp just how weird it is. Why? Yeah, I don't know. It's enough to make you wonder though. It has something to do with the nature of existence...I believe. Existence itself is far stranger than most of us have ever suspected.

The Hubble Space Telescope opened our minds to the enormity of all that we don't know on the cosmic scale. And for all that we've learned from HST and similar scientific instruments - and that's most of what we understand about the cosmos - the enormity of the unknown seems undiminished.

The Large Hadron Collider, with every question answered, likewise exposes new mysteries but on the quantum scale. It seems that the rabbit hole is ever thus...it just keeps going however big or small you care to go. There is always a deeper level of reality, new levels of complexity, greater iterations of the grand mystery.

“God is the mystery that lies at the heart of the universe.” ~ Albert Einstein

Virtually all ancient cultures believed in a spirit world or alternate dimension. A hyper-real higher plane of existence beyond ordinary human experience. What we know of it comes to us by way of the wisdom of those various ancient cultures or from the reportage of modern psychonauts.

“Is it possible that at the end of the 20th century, at the end of 500 years of materialism, reductionism, positivism, what we are about to discover is the least likely denouement that any of us expected out of our dilemma? What we're about to discover is that death has no sting.” ~ Terrence McKenna

Death has no sting.

“Somewhere,something incredible is waiting to be known.” ~ Carl Sagan

“There is something over the hill that is off the scale.” ~ Terrence McKenna

I do think the reports on DMT are very interesting and point to that other world as something more real than real. A place beyond that can be accessed by way of DMT. I think death may be a similar portal to that other dimension. There are nearly 20 million Americans alone who have reported a Near Death Experience (NDE).

From Wikipedia:

Near-death studies is a field of psychology and psychiatry that studies the physiology, phenomenology and after-effects of the near-death experience (NDE). The field was originally associated with a distinct group of North American researchers that followed up on the initial work of Raymond Moody, and who later established the International Association for Near-death Studies (IANDS) and the Journal of Near-Death Studies. Since then the field has expanded, and now includes contributions from a wide range of researchers and commentators worldwide.

According to the International Association for Near Death Studies:

Surveys taken in the US13, Australia14 and Germany15 suggest that 4 to 15 % of the population have had NDEs. Every day in the U.S., 774 NDEs occur, according to the Near-Death Experience Research Foundation (NDERF).16   
Of more than 800 near-death experiencers (NDErs) reporting to IANDS, 25% believed they were clinically dead at the time of their NDE.17
A large study conducted in the Netherlands showed that 18% of people who suffered a cardiac arrest and were clinically dead had later reported an NDE.18

If my take on these matters is accurate (and it may not be, I'm as capable of being wrong as the next guy) then people are simply ill-equipped to conceive of the utter strangeness of reality.

I first read Dr. Moody in 1978 and have been intrigued by his work ever since. I've read many refutations of his life after death hypothesis and understand the rational impulse to deny that life could possibly be that weird. I believe that Moody's work since 1978 has debunked all of those rationalizations. Again, I could be wrong and so could he. But my experience working on the Hubble Space Telescope and all the rest of my reading and philosophical inquiry leads me to suspect, just as conventional physics tells us, that energy is neither created nor destroyed and that reality itself is weird enough that Moody (not to mention virtually all of the world's major religions) could be right.

"When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro." ~ Hunter S. Thompson