In my NDE, "I felt free from my brain."

How might we explain near-death experiences in circumstances when the brain is incapable of processing the experience and forming the memories that a person has had? Bruce Greyson begins his answer by suggesting the “association between brain activity and mental function” does not necessarily mean the electrical activity in the brain has caused the thought or feeling. Maybe the thought has caused the electrical activity in the brain.” Saying, as many do, that “the mind is what the brain does is no more of an explanation than saying “making music is what a musical instrument does. Neither statement is an explanation. A relationship between the mind and the brain is a proven fact. “But the interpretation that the brain creates the mind is not a scientific fact.”

When eight years old, Steve Luiting nearly drowned. As an adult, he described to Greyson his near-death experience: I seemed to change points of view, as if I was changing location in a room. One second, I was the terrified person; and then I was the other calm one ‘watching’ the terrified one. I was both and yet not. The ‘real’ I was the calm one, but I had always identified myself as the other until now. My mind expanded to that of an adult capacity, and then beyond. I suppose, without the limitation of a child brain, it allowed my true nature to express itself again. It’s made me think that our understanding of the brain is actually backwards. The brain filters out everything and doesn’t help our thinking but hinders it, slows it down, focuses it. Maybe, because it is so good at filtering and focusing, we don’t remember our prior existence—or future events, either.

At the age of seventeen Michele Grown-Ramirez, while doing a jack-knife dive facing away from the pool, smashed her head on the diving board and fell unconscious into the water. Later, as an adult, she also shared her near-death underwater experience with Greyson: I ‘saw stars’ everywhere and gradually felt time go faster and slower at the same time, until it felt timeless. I felt a strange pull away from my body and realized I was dying. The pull was very strong, and I felt surrounded by presences, people who knew me and each other, but especially my two grandmothers. In that timeless span, I felt free and at peace. It was such a wonderful feeling, I felt like I could fly; towards a great Light that was God, and a future where I was loved and things made such profound sense. It was a realm of love, peace, calm, and acceptance, which had no space and yet was all space. I felt free from my brain! And the ‘thinking’ I had was very free, simple, and clear. It was remarkable to be going through a brain over-firing, or randomly firing, or down, or whatever, and yet to still be able to have free-clear thoughts, and suddenly feel this pull as if I was no longer being constrained to this world and its limits.

Greyson proposes that: “These two near-death experiences, and many more like them, suggest your mind—the part of you that experiences consciousness—is not the same as your brain—the mass of pink-grey matter inside your skull.”

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 Bruce Greyson, After: A Doctor Explores What Near-Death Experiences Reveal about Life and Beyond, 116-122.