Ever since the inception of the human race death has played a huge role in shaping people's lives. So what really happens when you die? Is the end of your life filled with agony, doom and gloom? Or do you pass away peacefully and glide off into the light? Under normal circumstances answering this question would be seem impossible question to answer... After all, once you're dead, you're dead. Right?

Some people stare death in the eyes and wind up tempting fate. They are inexplicably revived after minutes, perhaps even hours. Have you ever heard of people waking up in the morgue right before the mortician goes to cut into your clammy, pale flesh? It sounds crazy, but it's real. A similar incident happened to a baby!

What do these select group of individuals see, hear, taste and smell? Do they feel relieved or anxious? Some people who undergo a near death experience actually don't remember the death part. Like waking up from a coma, they just have a gap in their memories. Still, others who have had these near death experiences or out of body experiences have plenty of stories to tell use.

It's important though to acknowledge the separation between death from old age or natural causes and near death experiences. The end result isn't the same as one person passes away and another is revived. But studying both groups of people is paramount to our understanding of death. And this isn't an unpopular subject. Televisions shows like Spike TV's 1000 Ways to Die talk about death, albeit in a humorous manner. Human beings are simply obsessed with death.

The fact that everyone passes away means death is the great equalizer. How one dies is just as interesting as celebrity gossip to many of us. Organizations have even been created around near death experiences. These organizations, such as IANDS.org and NDERF.org research near death experiences and corroborate people's personal stories.

One story was even featured on ABC's Beyond Belief: Near Death Experiences and written about on the Daily Mail back in August 2011. None other than a therapist experienced a near death experience. Mary Jo Rapini recalls the state she was in after suffering a brain aneurysm.

"All of a sudden it just came over me and I was in it. I was in that light, and I came to this beautiful area," said Rapini. She continues by describing a heavenly, divine sort of room. "It's not human so it's difficult to express it humanly but the room was beautiful."

Researchers and medical professionals have begun to uncover many startling conclusions. On a May 2013 episode of the popular daytime TV program The Dr. Oz Show, David Kessler, a grief counselor and author, shares his thoughts and findings on life after death. He began to thinking differently about death after the passing of his mother when he was just a boy. Kessler believes his "mission" in life is to assist people through the last stages of their life, and give them "a more meaningful experience of this tough time in their life."

"Well it was interesting, I thought about this is good news, that life's most frightening moment, may not be as scary as we think. It all started for me, this is a profession that I think chose me. When I was young my mother was in the hospital not doing well... she ended up dying alone in an ICU (Intensive Care Unit) without my father there, without me there," said Kessler.

Kessler said that he was a skeptic [in terms of death being comforting] up until the point of his father's passing as well. He says his father was overcome with happiness when he saw his wife, David's mother, in a vision of some sorts. It's easy to judge people like Kessler as nothing more than half-baked loonies, but death isn't the easiest subject in the world to analyze. So Kessler deals in lot of what-ifs, but we all still have so much to learn.

Have you ever had a near death experience or some other sort of phenomena happen to you or a close friend? Let us know in the comments section below.