Maybe it’s true, as the NDEers claim, that physical death unites us in the next life. It’s certainly true that it unites us in this one, though largely against our will. At the conference, I was perplexed by Alexander’s dazzled insistence that “we are all deeply connected” in the glittering web of the universe. Strip away the woo-woo embellishments, and you have a basic account of life on Earth. We are strange animals on a shared planet, tethered to each other by our social and biological dependence, by the complex networks that govern our lives and deaths. Only in a society deformed by individualism could this fact be repackaged as a mystical insight.