[Review of the book The little book of life and death, by D. E. Harding].

Abstract

Major advances in human understanding almost always come from questioning a supposedly obvious truth, and that is why I strongly recommend this book to everyone interested in near-death studies.It calls into question a whole range of common assumptions about life and death, prompting noted thanatologist Ram Dass to proclaim in his Foreword that "after this gift, the literature on dying will never be the same again."And while near-death experiences (NDEs) are touched upon only briefly towards the book's end, they are dealt with from a perspective that differs radically from any of the approaches I've yet seen taken in this Journal, a perspective that I believe could be the clue to significant new discoveries in the field.Perspective is a topic integral to D. E. Harding's original profession of architecture, in which he graduated from the University of London in the years between the two World Wars; but in his 30s he began to apply the principle of perspectival flexibility to the whole of life in quite radical ways.He became a champion "lateral thinker," of fering a fundamental "paradigm shift" in the understanding of hu man consciousness two decades before the invention of either of those now-overworked and often misunderstood terms.Inevitably, almost no one grasped what he was after when he published his first book, The Hierarchy of Heaven and Earth, in England in 1952.I myself could not grasp it then, and wrote him off as just a weird religious propagandist, never dreaming that a quarter century later