Dr Álex Gómez Marín, a Spanish scientist who led his own lab at the Alicante Institute of Neurosciences until in 2021 a catastrophic stomach haemorrhage left him clinically dead for several seconds. “I saw three figures waiting for me lovingly in the light,” he recalls. “They weren’t deceased relatives, but spirit guides. I felt no fear, though I was certain that I was being received and that if I accepted their help, I was going to die.” When the trio offered him the choice of either returning to his body or dying, Marín said he made his decision: “I thanked them and told them, ‘Not yet.’ I decided to return.” Marín now believes our brains don’t simply generate consciousness, but rather they act as a kind of filter for a consciousness that exists independently in the universe. Instances have been recorded of patients saying they could see things in operating theatres while floating above their bodies that they could not physically have seen while lying on a surgeon’s table. The most frequently cited story was reported by Dr Jean-Jacques Charbonier, an anaesthetist and intensive care physician at the Saint-Jean Languedoc clinic in Toulouse. A female surgery patient reported floating up to the ceiling and looking over a partition to watch another patient’s newly amputated limb being placed in a yellow plastic bag. Charbonier said he checked afterwards: in the next theatre at the same time a leg had been amputated and placed into a yellow bag.