Abstract: Keith Augustine has provided a legitimate and cogent critique of a transcendental interpretation of near-death experiences, exposing weaknesses in the research methodology, paucity of the data, and gaps in the arguments. He offers evidence from psychophysiological and cultural correlates of NDEs that he interprets as favoring a hallucinatory understanding of these phenomena. however, his analysis relies on idiosyncratic definitions of psychological concepts, reads unidirectional causality into bivariate correlations, and underestimates the empirical predictions of the separation hypothesis. Despite less than compelling evidence for the transcendental hypothesis, it accounts for NDE phenomenology better than the materialist model.

Quarterly journal publishing papers related to near-death experiences, including research reports; theoretical or conceptual statements; expressions of a scientific, philosophic, religious, or historical perspective on the study of near-death experiences; cross-cultural studies; individual case histories; and personal accounts of experiences or related phenomena.