Encounters with deceased and divine beings

Bruce Greyson affirms in After: “More than two-thirds of the experiencers I’ve studied say that in their near-death experience they encountered at least one other person. Two-thirds of those say they met a deceased person—an experience that offers at least the potential for some verifiable information. But almost 90 percent of them say they encountered some kind of divine or godlike beings.” He was surprised to find, however, that among those experiencing a divine being only “one-third identified the being as an entity consistent with their religious beliefs, while double that number—two-thirds –said they could not identify the god-like being.” 

This evidence seems to weigh against the suggestion that near-death experiences simply reflect a person’s cultural and/or religious background.

Greyson argues: “The important point seems to be not how experiencers identify or label the divine beings, but how they feel in the presence of the divine. Regardless of the label or the surprise, they consistently describe feeling peaceful, calm, tranquil, ‘at home,’ grateful, and, most of all, loved.”

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

Greyson confirms veracity of NDE memories

To test the veracity of old near-death memories, Bruce Greyson writes that in 2002: “I began tracking down people I had interviewed about their near-death experiences in the early 1980s, asking them to describe their near-death experiences for me again.” Greyson found “there were no differences between what the experiencers told me in the 1980s and what they told me decades later. 

This suggests that experiencers’ memories of near-death experiences are reliable. And by extension it also suggests that studying experiences that happened years ago is as valid as studying recent near-death experiences.”

“Several researchers have found consistent changes in experiencers’ perception of self, relationships to others, and attitude toward life. Experiencers return from near-death experiences with a new or strengthened belief in life after death, a feeling of being loved and valued by some higher power, increased self-esteem, and a new sense of purpose or mission. This new sense of purpose or mission in life is often related to an experience of having been sent back, or having made a choice to return to life, to complete some work.'

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

Physicians confirm Alexander's severe coma

Bruce Greyson writes: "Skeptics have also suggested that Eben Alexander was never 'in danger of dying' during his coma. With two other physicians, Surbhi Khanna and Lauren Moore, Greyson reviewed the complete medical record of Alexander’s hospital treatment. All three of us concluded independently that he had been extremely close to death, with a brain as disabled as it could have been, and that while that was happening, he witnessed things that a comatose person should not have been able to perceive. The date showed that his coma had not been related to the drugs he was given. The medical record noted that he was rapidly falling into a coma by the time he reached the hospital, before he received any medication. And six days later, he came out of the coma before the medications were stopped.

“According to our current understanding of how the brain works, it should not have been possible for Alexander to have had any experience at all during his deep coma—let along the most vivid and memorable experience of his life. And yet, he did. Furthermore, he is not the only person to have had a vivid and profoundly memorable experience during such a medical crisis.”

Bruce Greyson, After: A Doctor Explores What Near-Death Experiences Reveal about Life and Beyond, 113-114. 

Chemical "causes" of NDEs? Greyson's analysis.

Bruce Greyson writes: “I was recently part of a multinational research team that analyzed language usage and language structure in 625 accounts of near-death experiences and compared them to almost fifteen thousand accounts of unusual experiences of people taking any of 166 different drugs. We found that the drug states most similar to near-death experiences were those associated with ketamine. However, we were careful to note that other common effects of ketamine don’t appear in near-death experiences, which suggests that near-death experiences are not simply an effect of the drug. In a similar vein, Karl Jansen, the neuroscientist who has most fiercely promoted the ketamine model for near-death experiences, concluded after twelve years of research that he viewed ketamine as ‘just another door’ to near-death experiences, and not as actually producing them.”

Other scientists argue that “near-death experiences might be connected to serotonin, adrenaline, vasopressin, and glutamate, all of which are chemicals that transmit signals between nerve cells. But in spite of the theoretical reasons for thinking that brain chemicals might be involved in near-death experiences, there has been no research looking into this possibility.” Greyson says, “I don’t expect any such research to be done in the near future. Bursts of these chemicals in the brain tend to be very short-lived and localized, so to find them, we’d have to look at exactly the right time at exactly the right place in the brain—and as I discovered, we don’t even know where in the brain to look.”

Bruce Greyson, After: A Doctor Explores What Near-Death Experiences Reveal about Life and Beyond, 109-110. 

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.

"The plural of anecdote is data."

Greyson writes: "Quoting personal experiences is not objective evidence from a scientific perspective, and many scientists are dismissive of what are characterized as anecdotal accounts." Yet, he reminds us: “Most research starts with scientists collecting, verifying, and comparing anecdotes until patterns in these stories become apparent, and then from those patterns emerge hypotheses, which can then be tested and refined. Collections of anecdotes, if they are investigated rigorously, are of immense value in medical research. They were critical, for example, in the discovery of AIDS and Lyme disease, and in discovering unexpected drug effects. As political scientist Raymond Wolfinger said a half century ago, ‘The plural of anecdote is data.’”

Greyson adds: “Some of my medical colleagues dismiss near-death experiences as pure fantasy and for that reason regard any research on near-death experiences as unscientific. But what makes an investigation scientific is not the topic being studied. What makes an investigation scientific is whether it’s based on rigorous observations, on evidence, and on sound reasoning.” For instance, Greyson argues researcher Jan Holden: “reviewed ninety-three reports of out-of-body perceptions during near-death experiences and found that 92 percent were verified by outside sources as completely accurate, while 6 percent contained some error, and only 1 percent was completely wrong.” 

In Holden's study anecdotal accounts were confirmed and thus became objective evidence.

Bruce Greyson, After: A Doctor Explores What Near-Death Experiences Reveal about Life and Beyond (2021), 45-46 .

Farmer sees his father during his NDE

Greyson’s research also included interviews over a two-and-a-half-year period with almost 1,600 patients who “were admitted to the inpatient cardiac service, of whom 116 had had a cardiac arrest, in which their hearts stopped completely, documented in their medical records. Claude, a seventy-two-year-old farmer, was one of those whose heart had stopped. The day after he was admitted, I made my way to his hospital room, introduced myself, and asked if he’d be willing to talk with me about what happened to him. He gave me a puzzled look, as if it was perfectly obvious what had happened to him. But he agreed to talk.

“I told him I understood that his heart had stopped, and I asked him, as I ask every patient, “What was the last thing you remember before you blacked out?” “I was slopping the hogs,” Claude began slowly, “and I started feeling dizzy, so I walked back to the barn and sat down on a bale of hay.” He paused, and then added, “And that’s the last thing I knew.” “And what was the next thing you remember after that?” I asked. “I woke up in this bed, with wires on my chest and a tube in my arm, and I don’t know how the heck I got here.”

“Trying to sound matter-of-fact,” Greyson says, “I asked a third question that I put to all these patients: “And what do you remember in between those two times?” Claude hesitated, as if he was sizing me up, and then said, just as matter-of-factly, “I thought I was going to meet my maker, but my paw—he’s been gone maybe fifteen years now—stopped me and said I had to go back.” Greyson kept his voice calm and professional, although he was eager to hear a near-death account from an unbiased source. “Tell me about meeting your paw.” Claude looked at me patiently, and after a very brief pause, he said, “I just did.” I nodded and tried to figure out how to word a follow-up question. But Claude closed his eyes and said, “I’m tired. That’s all I have to say.”

Bruce Greyson, After: A Doctor Explores What Near-Death Experiences Reveal about Life and Beyond (2021), 45-46.