Brad Stuart Md

I'm a physician with 50 years of experience, half in internal medicine practice in Emergency Rooms, hospitals and ICUs, and the other half in home hospice and palliative care. I've developed programs that became national models in home-based care for people with serious illness and their families, and I've advised Medicare in creating new payment models for that care. So much for changing the healthcare system from the inside. Now it's time to explore foundational aspects of our experience of reality, life and death. In medical school I became disillusioned with the way we treat our sickest and most vulnerable patients. I yearned to write a book then, and now I finally have. However, this is not the book I wanted to write back then. This is the book I needed to read. This book should be read by all physicians who care for the seriously ill, and by anyone confronting life-threatening illness. More importantly, this book is for anyone who wishes to look deep inside to discover who you really are - your essence - before you're confronted with the end of your own life. It's also for those who love science, but sense that it needs a wider and deeper paradigm to give it meaning, to allow it to connect with what's ultimate and eternal. I'll describe frontier discoveries in neuroscience, particularly in brain behavior under the influence of meditation, psychedelics and near-death experiences. This evidence indicates that science and spirituality are converging in ways we could not have foreseen. The visions that mystics have described for thousands of years, and that today's materialistic science has scorned so far, may contain more truth than we know. The bottom line: death may not be what you think it is, and you may not be who you think you are.