NDE reports do not clearly identify a "place"

Bruce Greyson writes: On the day after her thirty-fifth birthday, without any warning, Róisín Fitzpatrick suffered a brain hemorrhage that left her in a life-threatening situation in the intensive care unit. She described for me the near-death experience she had in the ICU: “I became pure energy and realized that ‘I’ still existed even though I was no longer an individual person in my physical body. Instead, I had merged to become one with a greater, light-filled consciousness. 

“There was no beginning or end, no start or finish, no life or death, no ‘out there’ or ‘in here.’ It made absolutely no difference if I was in my body; it was not even relevant because I had become at one with this incredibly potent, highly charged field of energy. 

“Surrounded by a hushed silence, I became enveloped by undulating waves of opalescent and crystalline light. Simultaneously, there was a feeling of love and bliss that extended on to infinity. From this place everything was possible because only love, joy, peace, and creative potential were real. My understanding of ‘reality’ was turned 180 degrees when I learned that at our deepest level of consciousness, we are energy beings of pure love and light who are temporarily residing in physical bodies.”

Greyson adds: Because half of the experiencers in my research could not describe a “place” they had gone in their NDEs, and there was little consistency in the descriptions of the other half who did describe a “place,” none of these images can be called “typical” of NDEs.

Greyson, Bruce. After (p. 148-49). St. Martin's Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.

NDE survivors say experience was "definitely real"

Bruce Greyson reports: "Jayne Smith, who had an NDE at age twenty-three during a bad reaction to anesthesia during childbirth, told me, 'Never, ever did I think it might have been a dream. I knew that it was true and real, more real than any other thing I’ve ever known.' LeaAnn Carroll developed a massive blood clot in her lung at age thirty-one that stopped her heart. She said about her NDE, 'My death experience is more real to me than life. Nancy Evans Bush, who had an NDE at age twenty-seven during a bad reaction to nitrous oxide, said, 'Yes, it was more real than real: absolute reality.' Susan Litton, who had an NDE at age twenty-nine, told me, 'There was no sense of doubt whatsoever. Everything had a sense of being more real than anything that would normally be experienced in the physical world as we know it.' Chris Matt, who had an NDE when he rolled his car over at age twenty-one, said, 'I have no doubt that it was real. It was vastly more real than anything we experience here.' Yolaine Stout, who attempted suicide at the age of thirty-one, said, 'This was more real than anything on earth. By comparison, my life in my body had been a dream.'

Greyson adds: "Their memories of the NDE had more detail, more clarity, more context, and more intense feelings than memories of real events. And that is exactly what people had been telling me for decades—that their NDEs were more real to them than everyday experiences. On the other hand, for people who had come close to death but didn’t have an NDE, their memories of the event were not recalled as more real than other real events. Two other research teams, in Belgium and in Italy, came up with the same results."

Greyson, Bruce. After (pp. 96-97). St. Martin's Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.

Greyson explains the purposes of his "NDE Scale"

I wanted to bring some logical order to the study of near-death experiences. To tackle this problem, I developed the NDE Scale in the early 1980s as a way to standardize what we mean by the term “near-death experience.” I started with a list of the eighty features most often mentioned in the literature on NDEs and sent this list to a large sample of experiencers. Then, through a series of repeated assessments by experiencers and other researchers, with the help of statistical analyses, I whittled the scale down to a more manageable list of sixteen features.

So the NDE Scale is not a measure of how deeply an experiencer may be affected. It’s simply a tool that researchers can use to make sure they’re investigating the same experience. And in the thirty-eight years since it was first published, the NDE Scale has stood the test of time, having been translated into more than twenty languages and used in hundreds of studies around the world.

Twenty years after this scale was published, and long after it had become accepted as the standard tool of NDE researchers worldwide, I was challenged by two skeptical scholars I didn’t know: Rense Lange, a statistician from Southern Illinois University School of Medicine, and Jim Houran, a psychologist then at the University of Adelaide in Australia. These scholars had no previous interest in NDEs but were applying a complicated statistical test to various scales that had been developed by other researchers—and in the process “debunking” some of them. They wanted me to give them the raw responses on the scale that I had collected from around three hundred people who had come close to death and let them carry out their sophisticated statistical test on the data to see whether the NDE Scale was valid. 

Apprehensive, I had reservations about working with them. I’d already put years of work into this scale, and it had become accepted by scholars around the world. I wasn’t familiar with the statistical test they wanted to carry out. I didn’t know whether it was a good test, and whether my scale would hold up under it. What if the scale failed the test? Would it cast doubt on all my work with NDEs? Would it ruin my credibility and my career as a scientist? 

On the other hand, if the NDE Scale was faulty, I certainly wanted to know that! How could I refuse to share my data and put my scale to the test? If I was truly a skeptic, how could I be skeptical of other people’s ideas but not my own? I’d met too many academics who called themselves “skeptics” but refused to look at any evidence that might challenge their own beliefs. Could I swallow my pride—and my fear of failing—and expose my data to an independent test? That’s what intellectual honesty required. That’s what a true skeptic would do.

That’s what my father, had he still been alive, would have wanted me to do. I handed over all my data on the NDE Scale, the responses of hundreds of people who’d had near-death experiences and waited for the results from Rense and Jim. As the months went by, I had many fitful nights second-guessing my decision to subject my work to that scrutiny. But each morning, in the light of day, I knew that it was the right thing to do. To my great relief, their analysis ended up confirming the validity of the NDE Scale. 

It showed that the scale measured one consistent experience that was the same for men and women and for people of all ages, across many cultures. NDE Scale scores were the same no matter how many years had passed since the experience. I heaved a huge sigh of relief. My NDE Scale—and by extension NDEs themselves—had been given the stamp of credibility by a team of skeptics who not only had no stake in near-death experiences but would have been happy to discredit them.

Greyson, Bruce. After (pp. 54-56). St. Martin's Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.

NDE researcher Bruce Greyson: life reviews

Among all the participants in my research, a quarter reported a life review. Some experiencers told me that their entire lives flashed before their eyes, from birth to the present or in reverse order. Others said that they were able to view different scenes from their lives at will. The vast majority described this life review as more vivid than ordinary memories. Some experiencers told me that they were shown images from their past, as on a movie screen or on pages in a book. But many, like Tom, reported that they re-experienced these past events as if they were still happening, with all the original sensations and feelings. 

Three-fourths of those who had a life review said that it changed their ideas of what things are important in life. Half of those who had a life review experienced a sense of judgment, most often judging themselves, about the rightness or wrongness of their actions. And more than half experienced these past events not only through their own eyes, but also—like Tom—from the viewpoints of others, feeling those other people’s emotions as well as their own.

Greyson, Bruce. After (pp. 39-42). St. Martin's Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.

Tom Sawyer's NDE life review

Bruce Greyson reports that Tom described, at some point during the NDE that followed, reliving painful incidents from earlier in his life: “I experienced a total life review. The best way to describe it is to give you an example. When I was around eight years old, my father told me to mow the lawn and cut the weeds in the yard. Aunt Gay, my mother’s sister, lived in the cottage out back. She was always fun to be with. Certainly all the kids thought she was a cool person to know. She had described to me her plans for some wildflowers that grew on little vines in the backyard. ‘Leave them alone now, Tommy,’ she said. 

“However, my father told me to mow the lawn and cut the weeds. Now, I could have explained to my father that Aunt Gay wanted the weeds left to grow in this particular area. Or I could have explained to Aunt Gay that Father had just told me to mow the lawn and said to cut that patch of weeds. Or, I could methodically and deliberately go ahead and mow the yard and cut the weeds. I did that. I deliberately decided to be bad, to be malicious. 

My Aunt Gay never said a word to me; nothing was ever mentioned. I thought, ‘Wow, I got away with it.’ End of story. “Guess what? I not only relived it in my life review, but I relived every exact thought and attitude; even the air temperature and things that I couldn’t have possibly measured when I was eight years old. For example, at the time, I wasn’t aware of how many mosquitoes were in the area. In the life review, I could have counted the mosquitoes. Everything was more accurate than could possibly be perceived in the reality of the original event. I experienced things that cannot be perceived. I watched me mowing the lawn from straight above, anywhere from several hundred to a couple of thousand feet, as though I were a camera. I watched all of that. My life review was absolutely, positively, everything basically from the first breath of life right through the accident. It was that panoramic view. It was everything.”

Bruce Greyson, After (2021), 39-40.

An extraordinary NDE life review

Barbara Harris Whitfield had an NDE at age thirty-two when she suffered respiratory complications while immobilized after back surgery. She described a life review in which she re-experienced abusive childhood events from the perspective of other people involved: “As I left my body, I again went out into the darkness. Looking down and off to the right, I saw myself in a bubble—in the circle bed—crying. Then I looked up and to the left, and I saw my one-year-old self in another bubble—facedown in my crib—crying just as hard. I decided I didn’t want to be the thirty-two-year-old Barbara anymore; I’d go to the baby. As I moved away from my thirty-two-year-old body in the circle bed, I felt as though I released myself from this lifetime. As I did, I became aware of an Energy that was wrapping itself around me and going through me, permeating me, holding up every molecule of my being. 

“In every scene of my life review I could feel again what I had felt at various times in my life. And I could feel everything everyone else felt as a consequence of my actions. Some of it felt good and some of it felt awful. All of this translated into knowledge, and I learned—oh, how I learned! The information was flowing at an incredible breakneck speed that probably would have burned me up if it weren’t for the extraordinary Energy holding me. The information came in, and then love neutralized my judgments against myself. I received all information about every scene—my perceptions and feelings—and anyone else’s perceptions and feelings who were in the scene. 

"There was no good and no bad. There was only me and my loved ones from this life trying to be, or just trying to survive. “I went to the baby I was seeing to my upper left in the darkness. Picture the baby being in a bubble and that bubble in the center of a cloud of thousands and thousands of bubbles. In each bubble was another scene in my life. As I moved toward the baby, it was as though I was bobbing through the bubbles. At the same time there was a linear sequence in which I relived thirty-two years of my life. I could hear myself saying, ‘No wonder, no wonder.’ 

"I now believe my ‘no wonders’ meant ‘No wonder you are the way you are now. Look what was done to you when you were a little girl.’ “My mother had been dependent on drugs, angry, and abusive. I saw all this childhood trauma again, in my life review, but I didn’t see it in little bits and pieces, the way I had remembered it as an adult. I saw and experienced it just as I had lived it at the time it first happened. Not only was I me, I was also my mother. And my dad. And my brother. We were all one. I now felt my mother’s pain and neglect from her childhood. She wasn’t trying to be mean. She didn’t know how to be loving or kind. She didn’t know how to love. She didn’t understand what life is really all about. And she was still angry from her own childhood, angry because they were poor and because her father had grand mal seizures almost every day until he died when she was eleven. And then she was angry because he left her. 

“Everything came flooding back. I witnessed my brother’s rage at my mother’s abuse, and then his turning around and giving it to me. I saw how we were all connected in this dance that started with my mother. I saw how her physical body expressed her emotional pain. I could hear myself saying, ‘No wonder, no wonder.’ I could now feel that she abused me because she hated herself. “I saw how I had given up myself in order to survive. I forgot that I was a child. I became my mother’s mother. I suddenly knew that my mother had had the same thing happen to her in her childhood. She took care of her father during his seizures, and as a child she gave herself up to take care of him. As children, she and I both became anything and everything others needed. As my life review continued, I also saw my mother’s soul, how painful her life was, how lost she was. In my life review I saw she was a good person caught in helplessness. I saw her beauty, her humanity, and her needs that had gone unattended to in her own childhood. I loved her and understood her. We may have been trapped, but we were still souls connected in our dance of life by an Energy source that had created us. 

“As my life review continued, I got married and had my own children and saw that I was on the edge of repeating the cycle of abuse and trauma that I had experienced as a child. I was becoming like my mother. As my life unfolded before my eyes, I witnessed how severely I had treated myself because that was the behavior shown and taught to me as a child. I realized that the only big mistake I had made in my life of thirty-two years was that I had never learned to love myself.”

Greyson, Bruce. After (pp. 42-44). St. Martin's Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.

Sir Francis Beaufort NDE life reviews

Greyson writes: "As I looked for research that had already been done on life reviews, I discovered that this was also not a new phenomenon. In 1791, when British rear admiral Sir Francis Beaufort was only a seventeen-year-old midshipman, he fell off a boat into Portsmouth Harbor on the southern coast of England. Unfortunately, he had not yet learned to swim. After exhausting himself struggling to breathe, he lost consciousness and immediately experienced a feeling of calmness and noticed changes in his thinking. He later described it this way: “From the moment that all exertion ceased—which I imagine was the immediate consequence of complete suffocation—a calm feeling of the most perfect tranquility superseded the previous tumultuous sensations—it might be called apathy, certainly not resignation. Though the senses were thus deadened, not so the mind; its activity seemed to be invigorated, in a ratio which defies all description, for thought rose above thought with a rapidity of succession that is not only indescribable, but probably inconceivable by anyone who has not himself been in a similar situation. 

“The course of those thoughts I can even now in great measure retrace—the event which had just taken place—the awkwardness that had produced it—were the first series of reflections that occurred. They took then a wider range—our last cruise—a former voyage, and shipwreck—my school—the progress I had made there, and the time I had misspent—and even all my boyish pursuits and adventures. Thus traveling backward, every past incident of my life seemed to glance across my recollection in retrograde succession; not, however, in mere outline, as here stated, but the picture filled up with every minute and collateral feature. In short, the whole period of my existence seemed to be placed before me in a kind of panoramic review, and each act of it seemed to be accompanied by a consciousness of right or wrong, or by some reflection on its cause or its consequences; indeed, many trifling events which had been long forgotten then crowded into my imagination, and with the character of recent familiarity.” Beaufort described his thoughts not only speeding up but encompassing every single incident in his life and judging every action as right or wrong. Many of the experiencers who shared their stories with me described this kind of life review."

Greyson, Bruce. After (pp. 37-38). St. Martin's Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.