Norman Van Rooy (left), the producer of the NDE documentary Shadows: Perceptions of Near-Death Experiencers, sums it up this way: "It all begins for us at birth. We are thrust from the womb onto the carousel of life, carried away in a blur of activities from childhood to adulthood and then to old age. Each of us have our dreams, our relationships and we go to school; we work and play, day after day, week after week, year after year. Life is certainly busy. And yet we tend not to think about the fact of our inevitable death. It doesn't seem to make any sense that we will no longer exist as we know it. The fact is we will die and there is no way to avoid it. Like the child being born, we have no choice but to yield ourselves to the unknown. Like the seventy billion who have already passed this way through life, we will join their ranks at the rate of 130,000 a day. And in that same day, 400,000 new lives will be born. The cycle of life and death continues at an ever-increasing pace. The fear of death has given rise to a host of speculations about an afterlife. Religions, philosophies and cults have multiplied over the millennia, all trying to answer our need for comfort about this seemingly absurd fate that awaits each of us. And now science has turned its gaze toward the matter of death."