Dr. Bruce Greyson
Appearances
Otherworld
Interview with Dr. Bruce Greyson of DOPS
Not that we've found so far. That doesn't mean we never will, but we haven't found one yet.
Otherworld
Interview with Dr. Bruce Greyson of DOPS
Yeah, that's a great question, Jack, because we really don't have the answer. We have lots of accounts from people whose hearts had stopped, and we know that because we've documented it, their hearts are stopped. And we have lots of accounts from people who, as far as we know, their hearts didn't stop, people who were in a car accident and they somehow survive it, or people who nearly drowned.
Otherworld
Interview with Dr. Bruce Greyson of DOPS
We don't have any heart measures, but there's no reason to think their hearts stopped. And yet the experiences they tell us are identical. So it doesn't seem that your heart actually stopping is a necessary component to having a near-death experience. That's led some people to say that it shouldn't be a near-death, it should be fear-death experience.
Otherworld
Interview with Dr. Bruce Greyson of DOPS
And we really can't differentiate between the fear-death and the near-death. They sound the same to us.
Otherworld
Interview with Dr. Bruce Greyson of DOPS
Yeah, well, I'll tell you, the first collection of near-death experiences, which they didn't have a name for back then, but back in the 1890s, a Swiss geology professor, Albert von St. Gallenheim, fell when he was climbing in the Alps. And he fell about 60 feet. And on the way down, he had a very elaborate near-death experience. And he wrote this up in great detail.
Otherworld
Interview with Dr. Bruce Greyson of DOPS
And he said he was out of his body, watching his body repeatedly crash against the rocks, getting bloodier and bloodier. And time sort of slowed way down for him. And he was able to look around and see, well, there's snow over there. but rocks over there. So if I somehow can maneuver to get in the snow, I might survive this.
Otherworld
Interview with Dr. Bruce Greyson of DOPS
And should I take off my glasses so they don't crush my eyes or should I keep them on? And he had all this time to think about these things. Plus he had a very elaborate life review, reviewing the entire 50 years of his life in a matter of seconds it took to fall 60 feet.
Otherworld
Interview with Dr. Bruce Greyson of DOPS
He was so impressed by this experience that he started asking other climbers, and he quickly got 30 other cases, which he published in the yearbook of the Swiss Alpine Club in 1892. Huh.
Otherworld
Interview with Dr. Bruce Greyson of DOPS
Well, Haim's book in the 1890s was the first collection. But we have reports of these going back to ancient Greece and Rome. That sounds just like the near-death experiences we have today. So culture does not seem to affect it very much. And people around the world today, from Christian nations, from Hindu nations, from Shinto nations, They all report the same types of near-death experiences.
Otherworld
Interview with Dr. Bruce Greyson of DOPS
However, most near-death experiences will tell you when they start, when you ask them the experience, they'll say, I can't really describe it. There are no words for it. So let me say, you know, that's great. Tell me about it. So they end up using metaphors and whatever metaphors come to them most readily. And that's going to depend on your culture and your religion. So for example,
Otherworld
Interview with Dr. Bruce Greyson of DOPS
Most Christians will say, you know, I saw this one loving being of light that makes me feel welcomed and unconditionally loved. I knew I was in the presence of God or Jesus. If you talk to a Hindu or a Buddhist, they won't use those words. They may say, they give another name like a yam dude or something, or they just must say this warm, accepting, loving being of light.
Otherworld
Interview with Dr. Bruce Greyson of DOPS
And some may identify it as a deceased loved one that they couldn't identify. And that applies not just to the so-called deity they see. Many people describe they're here in this physical world, and then they're in this other realm, and they don't remember how they got there. So they say, well, I went through this long, dark, enclosed space. And Westerners will say, I went through a tunnel.
Otherworld
Interview with Dr. Bruce Greyson of DOPS
Now, people from third world countries where there aren't a lot of tunnels don't say that. They may say, I went through a cave or I fell into a well. And in fact, I interviewed one truck driver who said, I got sucked through this long tailpipe. So I tend to think that the tunnel is not necessarily a real thing, but something our brain constructs to explain how they got from here to there.
Otherworld
Interview with Dr. Bruce Greyson of DOPS
Well, there are some different types of groups of people. For example, people who are intoxicated when they have near-death experiences tend to have much shallower, less elaborate experiences. People who are very young children don't have the elaborate life review that adults do. They don't have as much life to review, I guess.
Otherworld
Interview with Dr. Bruce Greyson of DOPS
They also tend not to report as many deceased relatives coming back to greet them because they don't know enough deceased relatives. They're more likely to say that they met a deceased pet that they had. So there are some differences according to what type of person is giving you the answer. And some of that involves culture as well.
Otherworld
Interview with Dr. Bruce Greyson of DOPS
For example, many people report coming to a border or point of no return. And if they go beyond that, they won't be able to come back. And in the Western world, that's often a wall or a barrier of some kind. or being sent back by a deity or by a deceased relative. Whereas in a lot of Asian countries, they'll say it's a river. I came to this river that I couldn't cross.
Otherworld
Interview with Dr. Bruce Greyson of DOPS
So they're describing the same phenomenon, but using different metaphors for it. And in fact, they will tell you it's a metaphor. I've had many people say to me, and then I was in the presence of God. Now I'm using God because I don't know what else to call it that you'll understand me, but it wasn't the God I was taught about in church. It was much bigger than that.
Otherworld
Interview with Dr. Bruce Greyson of DOPS
Right, right. Well, you know, many people report... a sort of an afterlife or a different environment that contradicts what they were taught to believe. You know, if they were in a religion that teaches about a typical heaven, and they describe something very different, like a featureless void, they come back very surprising. This wasn't what I was expecting at all.
Otherworld
Interview with Dr. Bruce Greyson of DOPS
We also have a lot of well-documented cases where someone claims to have left their body in a near-death experience and seen things that they shouldn't have been able to see, either because they've been totally unconscious or because it was outside of their range of vision, maybe in a different room. And we have lots of good examples of this.
Otherworld
Interview with Dr. Bruce Greyson of DOPS
Jan Holden at the University of North Texas studied almost 100 of these, and she found in 92%, their description was perfectly right. In 6%, there were some right and some wrong things in it, and only 2% were they totally wrong. So the vast majority seems to be accurate, and hallucinations can't do that. Furthermore, many, many people describe hallucinations
Otherworld
Interview with Dr. Bruce Greyson of DOPS
being encountered by deceased loved ones in a near-death experience. And that's very easy to dismiss as wishful thinking expectation. Of course, when you're dying and you want to see your deceased grandmother to greet you, you imagine her, sure. But there are a number of cases where people have encountered deceased individuals that were not yet known to be dead.
Otherworld
Interview with Dr. Bruce Greyson of DOPS
So there's no reason to think they had died and no way they could have known about it. This is not a new phenomenon. Pliny the Elder wrote about a case like this in the first century. And we have them today, quite probably 10 years ago, 12 years ago now. I published a paper with 30 recent cases like this.
Otherworld
Interview with Dr. Bruce Greyson of DOPS
Yeah. One that I investigated was a 25-year-old fellow. This was back in South Africa in the 70s. And he was hospitalized with severe pneumonia. And in the hospital, he was cared for by one particular nurse, Anita, who was about his age, in her late teens, early 20s. And he was kind of flirting with her when he could.
Otherworld
Interview with Dr. Bruce Greyson of DOPS
And one day she told him that she was going to be taking the weekend off and there'd be other nurses substituting for her. And while she was gone, he had another... period where he couldn't breathe, and they had to resuscitate him. And during that episode, he had a near-death experience. And he found himself in a beautiful pastoral scene.
Otherworld
Interview with Dr. Bruce Greyson of DOPS
And there he sees his nurse, Anita, coming, walking out of the woods toward him. And he's stunned because what's she doing there? So he asked her, and she said, Jack, I want you to go back to your body. You can't stay here with me. I want you to find my parents and tell them that I love them and I'm sorry I wrecked the red MGB.
Otherworld
Interview with Dr. Bruce Greyson of DOPS
Now, Jack tells me there weren't a lot of MGBs in the 1970s in South Africa, but when he woke up back in his hospital bed, he tried to tell this account to the first nurse that walked in and she got very upset and rushed out of the room. It turned out that his nurse, Anita, had taken the weekend off to celebrate her 21st birthday and her parents surprised her with the gift of a red MGB.
Otherworld
Interview with Dr. Bruce Greyson of DOPS
She got very excited, jumped in the car, took her for a test drive, crashed into a telephone pole and died instantly, just a few hours before Jack's near-death experience. That is crazy. There's no way he could have expected or wanted her to be dead or known how she died, and yet he did. And there are many, many cases like this.
Otherworld
Interview with Dr. Bruce Greyson of DOPS
Pim van Lummel, a Dutch cardiologist, tells about a middle-aged man who had a heart attack and a near-death experience. And he was greeted by a man he didn't know, who looked at him very lovingly. And when he came back, when he revived and he was talking to his mother about it, he described this person to his mother.
Otherworld
Interview with Dr. Bruce Greyson of DOPS
And his mother got out an old photo album, which he had never seen, and showed him the photo of that man. It was his biological father. She had married him, and then he went off to the war and was killed in Germany in the war. And Then she remarried, and her second husband raised this fellow, so he never knew his biological father.
Otherworld
Interview with Dr. Bruce Greyson of DOPS
And yet, that's who he was greeted by in his near-death experience.
Otherworld
Interview with Dr. Bruce Greyson of DOPS
Well, it's both. The things they are told are not often verifiable. They're often more general things. Sometimes they are fairly specific. You know, one fellow was told that the kid down the block from you has leukemia and his family doesn't know it yet. You need to alert them and get them to do some medical workup on him. And that was true. But those are unusual cases.
Otherworld
Interview with Dr. Bruce Greyson of DOPS
Most of the time they're told things that you can't really verify. They're subjective things. Sometimes it tells something specific, like you need to go back because your father's going to be in a very difficult situation. You need to help him through this, or you need to go back because you're going to have a child, and you have to raise that child.
Otherworld
Interview with Dr. Bruce Greyson of DOPS
And sometimes it tells just more general things, like the way you've been living your life is not very good. You need to change things around. And This happens to people who are in violent professions, such as police officers or military career, military people who, when they come back, find that they're no longer able to shoot even in self-defense and they have to change their careers.
Otherworld
Interview with Dr. Bruce Greyson of DOPS
And they often go into helping professions like medical care, clergy, social work, teaching. I've also seen this in people who are cutthroat businessmen who came back thinking, It makes no sense to get ahead at someone else's expense because we're all in this together. And when you hurt someone else, you're hurting yourself.
Otherworld
Interview with Dr. Bruce Greyson of DOPS
So, you know, they're basically told that the golden rule, which is part of every religion we have, is not just something we're supposed to follow. It's a law of the universe. When you hurt other people, you're hurting yourself too. We're all part of the same thing.
Otherworld
Interview with Dr. Bruce Greyson of DOPS
Right. And that's not true of hallucinations. People don't change their lives with hallucinations. But we hear a consistent set of after effects from near-death experiencers. And the most consistent thing we hear is that they're no longer afraid of death. Whether they were or not before, they're not afterwards.
Otherworld
Interview with Dr. Bruce Greyson of DOPS
And when I first heard that, back decades ago, I was a little concerned because as a psychiatrist working in the emergency room, I'd seen a lot of people who were considering suicide, but were deterred because they were afraid something bad would happen if they killed themselves. And here we're telling them, nothing bad will happen. Death is wonderful. Are we going to make people more suicidal?
Otherworld
Interview with Dr. Bruce Greyson of DOPS
So I did a study with people who had been admitted to the hospital with suicide attempts. And I studied those who had near-death experiences as a result of the suicide attempt, which is about 20% of them, and those who didn't. And we followed them up for month after month, and we found that those who had a near-death experience were much less suicidal, which kind of surprised me.
Otherworld
Interview with Dr. Bruce Greyson of DOPS
So I asked them to explain to me, why are you less suicidal? And they said a variety of things. They said, if you're not afraid of dying, You can take more risks. You can live time to the fullest because what's the worst that happens? You die. They tend to enjoy life a lot more.
Otherworld
Interview with Dr. Bruce Greyson of DOPS
They also say that now that they've been in this other realm, they realize that there's meaning and purpose in everything we do. And the problems I had that made me suicidal are not things to run away from. They're things they need to grow from and learn from and try to deal with. So they come back with a sense of meaning and purpose they didn't have before.
Otherworld
Interview with Dr. Bruce Greyson of DOPS
Yes, they do. Some do. When I first started studying this, I talked to a lot of other people who were studying near-death experiences in the early 80s. And they all had different ideas about what questions to ask, what's important in the near-death experience. Some thought it was primarily an out-of-body experience. Some thought it was a reunion with God. Some thought it was a feeling of bliss.
Otherworld
Interview with Dr. Bruce Greyson of DOPS
But there was no consistency. So I decided we need some consistent measure. So I surveyed all the researchers and came up with a list of 80 phenomena they thought were part of the near-death experience, which is ridiculously large. You can't ask someone about 80 different items.
Otherworld
Interview with Dr. Bruce Greyson of DOPS
So I took that list of 80, and I gave them to a large sample of near-death experiences, and I said, which ones of these are the important ones? And they whittled it down. And I took the whittled down list and sent it back to the researchers, and they whittled it down more. Then I took that back to their experiencers and they did it even more.
Otherworld
Interview with Dr. Bruce Greyson of DOPS
They went back and forth until I found 16 items that they all pretty much agreed on with the important parts. And they include changes in your thought processes, becoming faster and clearer than before. Changes in your emotions, very strong emotions, usually peace, peace and joy. Something we call paranormal for lack of any better word, sense of leaving the body,
Otherworld
Interview with Dr. Bruce Greyson of DOPS
seeing things that aren't in your range of vision, occasionally seeing visions of the future, and otherworldly experiences, feeling like you're not on this earthly plane anymore, seeing deceased loved ones, seeing what may be religious spirits, and then coming to the point of no return.
Otherworld
Interview with Dr. Bruce Greyson of DOPS
And those are the consistent things that most people report, not all of them by any means, in near-death experiences. Now, there are some people that have frightening or unpleasant experiences. And we didn't hear those back in the 80s because people were afraid to talk about them. It was hard enough to talk about a pleasant near-death experience, but that's what was publicized.
Otherworld
Interview with Dr. Bruce Greyson of DOPS
So if you had a frightening one, you think, something's wrong with me. Either my personality or just the way I've lived my life, I don't deserve to have a good one, so I'm not going to tell anybody about this. And it's only been the last 10, 20 years we started really finding these unpleasant experiences. And there were already. We don't know how many there are.
Otherworld
Interview with Dr. Bruce Greyson of DOPS
Well, for me, it really started as a research project when I read Raymond Moody's book, Life After Life, in 1975.
Otherworld
Interview with Dr. Bruce Greyson of DOPS
The highest estimate we have is around 20% of near-death experiences. But no one knows because they're still harder to talk about than the pleasant ones. So there may be more that people just don't want to share. And we found three types of unpleasant experiences. The most common type sounds just like the pleasant ones, but they're experienced in an unpleasant way. For example, people will be
Otherworld
Interview with Dr. Bruce Greyson of DOPS
rushing down a tunnel and confronted by this blinding light. And they're terrified because they're out of control. No matter what happens in an NDE, near-death experience, you're not in control. And for people who need to be in control all the time, obsessive people like myself and probably you, that's scary to be out of control. So they fight against it.
Otherworld
Interview with Dr. Bruce Greyson of DOPS
And that's the large group of unpleasant experiences. Now we find that some of these people, they fight against it and try to get back in control of their bodies. And they eventually get exhausted and just surrender to it. And as soon as they do that, it becomes a blissful experience. So it was the resistance to it that was making it unpleasant.
Otherworld
Interview with Dr. Bruce Greyson of DOPS
There's a second category where people find themselves in just a black void with nothing, no sight, no sound, just their consciousness without a body. And it feels like they're floating in that for eternity. And for most of us Westerners, that's a terrifying thought.
Otherworld
Interview with Dr. Bruce Greyson of DOPS
But I've talked to people who were raised in Hindu and Buddhist cultures where that's nirvana, that's bliss, being in this wonderful nothingness for eternity. So it's partly culturally discernment what you think is pleasant or not. The smallest group of unpleasant experiences are the ones with, frankly, hellish imagery as a Christian would try to find hell with fire and brimstone and demons.
Otherworld
Interview with Dr. Bruce Greyson of DOPS
And as I said, that's the smallest group, and I've only heard that from people who were raised in a religion that preached that, either Roman Catholics or fundamentalist Protestants. I've never heard anyone else describe those.
Otherworld
Interview with Dr. Bruce Greyson of DOPS
Yes. I will say, though, about the unpleasant experiences, we try to find what makes them unpleasant, and we really can't find anything. It's not true that nasty people have unpleasant experiences. A lot of traditional Catholic saints throughout the centuries have written about the dark night of the soul, where they had terrifying spiritual experiences.
Otherworld
Interview with Dr. Bruce Greyson of DOPS
And I've known people who were career criminals or some on death row who had blissful experiences. So it's not how you live your life necessarily. It may be related to your mental state when you go into the experience. I'm not sure about that. We don't have enough data on that yet. Most people who report a life review report both memories of good things they've done and of bad things they've done.
Otherworld
Interview with Dr. Bruce Greyson of DOPS
And remembering the bad things is not pleasant. But they do not say, for the most part, that they were being judged by someone else, by a deity or an angel or anything like that. They report being guided through the review, but the judging comes from them themselves. And they say, oh, gosh, I made a mistake that time. They don't talk about sin. They talk about making mistakes.
Otherworld
Interview with Dr. Bruce Greyson of DOPS
And when they come back, they're often determined to correct those mistakes. And they're glad they had this experience. So they have a second chance to do better this time.
Otherworld
Interview with Dr. Bruce Greyson of DOPS
No, they were not. And I wasn't either. I was raised in a scientific household and I went through college and medical school with the idea that the physical world is all there is. Anything else is imaginary and what you see is what you get. And then when I started my psychiatric training, in one of the first weeks, I was asked to see a patient who had overdosed.
Otherworld
Interview with Dr. Bruce Greyson of DOPS
Yeah, again, we're faced with the fact that people say there are no words to describe it, so they use metaphors.
Otherworld
Interview with Dr. Bruce Greyson of DOPS
And they often describe reviewing everything in their lives. And for someone who is 40, 50 years old, reviewing their entire lives in a matter of seconds sounds ludicrous. And yet they say, and in fact, Albert Heim, who fell in the Alps in the 1890s, described going through his entire life in those few seconds. Some describe it going chronologically from birth to the present.
Otherworld
Interview with Dr. Bruce Greyson of DOPS
Some describe it in reverse chronological order. Some people describe it in other ways. And for the most part, they describe how they felt in the experience, how it made me feel to do this, that I feel good about doing this, that I feel bad about myself for doing this. But in a lot of cases, they also report reliving these events from the perspective of somebody else. I'll give you an example.
Otherworld
Interview with Dr. Bruce Greyson of DOPS
A fellow named Tom, who's in his 30s, was working underneath his truck in his driveway. And the jack holding the truck up happened to be over an air hole under the pavement, and it came crashing down, and the truck crushed his chest. and he had an elaborate near-death experience. And a lot of that was life review.
Otherworld
Interview with Dr. Bruce Greyson of DOPS
And he remembered as a teenager driving his truck down the street and a drunk man ran out in front of him. He jerked on the brakes and he rolled down his window and started yelling at the guy. And the man, being quite intoxicated, reaches his hand inside the window and slapped Tom across the face. We're talking about a hot-headed teenager here.
Otherworld
Interview with Dr. Bruce Greyson of DOPS
So he gets out of the truck and starts beating the man up and leaves him just a bloody mess on the median strip and then gets back in his truck and drives away. In his life review, he said he relived that from his own perspective, feeling the rage and the adrenaline rush, but also through the eyes of the drunk man.
Otherworld
Interview with Dr. Bruce Greyson of DOPS
feeling the humiliation of being beaten up by a teenager, feeling the pain of the 32 blows on his face. Now, Tom couldn't have told you it was 32, but reliving it from the man's perspective, he counted them as 32. He described his nose getting bloodier and bloodier and his teeth going through his lower lip, all from the perspective of his victim.
Otherworld
Interview with Dr. Bruce Greyson of DOPS
And I've heard this again and again from different people, that they feel the events of the life review from the viewpoint of somebody else. And often they come back thinking, this is because we're all part of the same thing. There's no difference between you and me. It's like the fingers on your hand. If you look at the fingers, they're individual, but they're really part of the same thing.
Otherworld
Interview with Dr. Bruce Greyson of DOPS
So you can't chop off one without hurting the whole hand. I've also had people talk about getting to understand other people's motivation. For example, one woman, Barbara, talked about reliving her life and remembering as a child, her mother being very abusive. And in her life review, she re-experienced that from a mother's perspective.
Otherworld
Interview with Dr. Bruce Greyson of DOPS
I went down to the emergency room and saw her and she was totally unconscious. I could not arouse her. but I went down the hall to talk to her roommate in a different room. And I spent about 20 minutes talking to the roommate.
Otherworld
Interview with Dr. Bruce Greyson of DOPS
And so how helpless the mother felt having been abused herself. And she didn't know any other way to express herself. And she came out of that near-death experience with a lot more compassion for her mother than she had before. So I'm not sure how you explain these so-called empathic near-death experiences. And of course, we can't validate them.
Otherworld
Interview with Dr. Bruce Greyson of DOPS
We can't find the drunk man that Tom beat up and ask him what happened. So it's all relying on what they report to us.
Otherworld
Interview with Dr. Bruce Greyson of DOPS
they're often very surprised by the things that appear prominent in the near-death experience. For example, one fellow who was actually a doctor here in Charlottesville had a near-death experience and expected to be shown when he got to be an Eagle Scout in Boy Scouts, when he graduated from medical school and so forth. And that wasn't a big part of it.
Otherworld
Interview with Dr. Bruce Greyson of DOPS
The big part of it was doing tiny things to help individual people and being kind to others. And it was that type of thing, that one-to-one interaction with people, not the things we usually value in this life. As to how they experience it, that varies a lot according to the person's metaphors. Some say it was like turning pages of a book. Some say it was like watching a movie of my life.
Otherworld
Interview with Dr. Bruce Greyson of DOPS
But most say it was reliving it. I was there. I saw, felt, heard, smelled, tasted everything that was there. I could smell the fresh grass. I could count the mosquitoes in the air around me. I was there living it in slow motion. The other thing about this that's really intriguing to me and unexplainable is that the sense of time seems to stop or become non-existent in a near-death experience.
Otherworld
Interview with Dr. Bruce Greyson of DOPS
Now, just before this, I'd been in the cafeteria eating dinner and being a brand new intern, I was kind of startled by the Bieber going off and I dropped my fork and spilled some spaghetti sauce on my tie. So not wanting to make a fool of myself, I put on a white lab coat and covered it up the stain. But this was a hot late summer evening in Virginia with no air conditioning back in the 70s.
Otherworld
Interview with Dr. Bruce Greyson of DOPS
And I've heard this again and again, that there was no time. And yet when people relate their near-death experience to me, It sounds like a sequence of events. I did this, and then this happened, and then this happened, and then I had the life review play out. And I don't know how you can have a sequence of events without the linear passage of time.
Otherworld
Interview with Dr. Bruce Greyson of DOPS
And when I say that to near-death experiencers, they say, well, when I tell you about it here in our physical bodies, it's a paradox. It doesn't make any sense. But over there, it made perfect sense. It was everything happening in sequence at the same time That makes no sense to me, but that's the way they experienced it.
Otherworld
Interview with Dr. Bruce Greyson of DOPS
Let me say that the sense of time stopping is not unique to near-death experiences. People often have this when they're in a crisis situation. For example, when you're facing a car accident and time seems to slow down for you and your thoughts speed up so you can figure out how you need to maneuver to get out of the accident.
Otherworld
Interview with Dr. Bruce Greyson of DOPS
And it's fairly common among people in crisis situations to have their sense of time altered so they seem to be able to think quickly and avoid the problem. You know, one fellow I knew was on a ladder doing something on his roof, and the ladder slipped and he fell.
Otherworld
Interview with Dr. Bruce Greyson of DOPS
And he had time, and the time it took to fall about 15 feet, to figure out how we needed to maneuver to land in the bushes, not on the pavement. There's another story from the 1700s about an Italian count who was in a stagecoach and fell out and realized she was going to get run over by the rear wheel.
Otherworld
Interview with Dr. Bruce Greyson of DOPS
And he managed to figure out in the second it took to get to the bottom, to the road, how to maneuver out to get out away from under the wheel. And times just seems to stop and you have all the time in the world.
Otherworld
Interview with Dr. Bruce Greyson of DOPS
Some do describe many lives on Earth. And some, in fact, in their life review, remember events from a previous life. In most cases, we cannot verify that. But I know one example of a case who actually was able to verify it. He remembered a life where he was killed in World War II. And his description of how it happened, what type of plane it was, where it was, what his name was, all checked out.
Otherworld
Interview with Dr. Bruce Greyson of DOPS
But most cases, we can't really verify those past life events. But many people say that, in fact, most people say that this lifetime is not the whole thing for us. that we existed long before this and will long after that. It's not always in a previous lifetime on Earth.
Otherworld
Interview with Dr. Bruce Greyson of DOPS
So I unbuttoned my coat so I wouldn't sweat so much, exposing the stain inadvertently. When I finished with the roommate after about 20 minutes, I stood up to say goodbye to her and realized it was open. So I quickly closed it up again and went back to see the patient who was still unconscious.
Otherworld
Interview with Dr. Bruce Greyson of DOPS
It's like we're in this other realm, this spiritual non-physical realm, and then for some reason come to the physical realm, and then when we die, go back to the other one. And I've often asked them, why did you come here? Why did you do this? And I don't get specific answers, but often they say, There are things you can learn in the physical body that you can't learn in that other realm.
Otherworld
Interview with Dr. Bruce Greyson of DOPS
And sometimes it deals with conflict, that they feel that there's not much conflict in the other realm, but you need to deal with conflict and learn how to love despite the hateful feelings you may have and the bad situations you encounter so that when you go back, you have a pure type of love. I don't know about this.
Otherworld
Interview with Dr. Bruce Greyson of DOPS
You know, this is one of these things you can't really verify, but they describe it about something about this physical world. That's a lesson for a school for us.
Otherworld
Interview with Dr. Bruce Greyson of DOPS
I've got something I want to talk more about. Sure. That's the after effects. And I mentioned that the decreased fear of death, um, more into it. Most people have a sense of joy about death and not fear. And this makes them different from people who have close brushes with death, but not a near-death experience.
Otherworld
Interview with Dr. Bruce Greyson of DOPS
For example, people who have a heart attack and they're often very afraid of dying after that, which makes them great patients. They'll do whatever you tell them to do. Whereas near-death experiencers will not do that. They're not afraid of dying. You tell me to quit smoking. I like smoking. So what if I die? So it's harder to treat. near-death experiences than other people.
Otherworld
Interview with Dr. Bruce Greyson of DOPS
They also consistently report a greater sense of spirituality. They don't mean more religiosity. Most of them are not dedicated to the same religion. Some are, but most are not. They tend to feel that all religions are basically the same. They're different paths to the same endpoint. What they mean by spirituality is a greater sense of connection to other people, to nature,
Otherworld
Interview with Dr. Bruce Greyson of DOPS
to the universe, to the divine, and a sense of compassion for everyone. Now, I've heard this also from people who were atheists before the near-death experience. And they say, I still, I'm not sure I believe in God, but I do think we're part of something greater than ourselves and we're all interconnected.
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Interview with Dr. Bruce Greyson of DOPS
And they don't make sense of it the way a more religious person might, but they're still aware of it and they're changed. And along with the sense of spirituality goes a decreased concern with worldly matters, material goods, power, prestige, fame, and that really changes their lives. They become more altruistic. They might change their careers.
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Interview with Dr. Bruce Greyson of DOPS
They tend still to enjoy things here, but they don't become addicted to them anymore. I've known people who were severely addicted, and after a near-death experience, gave that addiction up entirely. Well, they still enjoy things. Now, it's not always benign after effects. There are some problems also, as you might imagine. Other people often have disbelief. Were they really cruel to the person?
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Interview with Dr. Bruce Greyson of DOPS
And we had arranged for her to be admitted to the intensive care unit because her heart rate was very unsteady. We didn't know quite what she had taken for an overdose. And I went in to see her the following morning. And she was very, very drowsy. She was barely awake. I went into the room and said, Holly, my name is Dr. Grayson. I'm from psychiatry.
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Interview with Dr. Bruce Greyson of DOPS
People are sometimes angry or sad about having been returned to life. They liked it better over there. So sometimes they seek help for this to adjust to a, quote, normal life. And they often seek help most often from health professionals. And often the families can't accept the change. They feel neglected. Often there are divorces after a near-death experience.
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Interview with Dr. Bruce Greyson of DOPS
When children have the NDE, the parents are often very puzzled by it. And when parents have a near-death experience, the children often feel, well, you used to love me more than anyone else. Now you love all the kids in the neighborhood. What's going on here? So it's not always unicorns and rainbows after a near-death experience.
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Interview with Dr. Bruce Greyson of DOPS
I can't say that. There are people who describe things in physical terms. But they'll say, you know, it's not like the physical things you have here. They may describe beautiful colors, beautiful sounds, but they'll say, it's not like any colors I've ever seen on earth. It's totally different from that.
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Interview with Dr. Bruce Greyson of DOPS
And I'm not sure it makes sense to talk about a place for a spiritual realm, because space involves physical things. It's like saying, if the mind is not in the brain, where is it? Well, there's no where. There's no where if it's not a physical thing. You can't say it's in a certain place.
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Interview with Dr. Bruce Greyson of DOPS
Yeah. Some people describe being in outer space. Some people describe being in a heaven-like realm. So there are various things. Most people describe just being in a beautiful nature scene. I should also say that what they're reporting to us, is what happened to them in the few seconds or minutes after their heart stopped.
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Interview with Dr. Bruce Greyson of DOPS
So we're dealing with their reports of what happens in the initial stage of being dead. Is that the same as what happens to them 10 years later after they've been dead? I don't know. How do you know that kind of thing? Now, we do have reports of people who, in a near-death experience, encountered deceased loved ones who have been dead for 10, 20 years. And they report the same types of things.
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Interview with Dr. Bruce Greyson of DOPS
So it may be that what near-death experiences tell us is not just the initial stage, but the ultimate stage. But we have no way of really verifying that.
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Interview with Dr. Bruce Greyson of DOPS
And she opened an eye and said to me, I know who you are. I remember you from last night. And that kind of threw me because she was obviously unconscious. So I said, I thought you were out cold when I saw you last night. And she said very carefully, not in my room. I saw you talking to Susan down the hall. That just blew me away. How could that happen?
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Interview with Dr. Bruce Greyson of DOPS
Yeah, it's confusing. I don't understand it myself, but the brain... It's this, you know, three pounds of mass inside your head. And we know pretty much what it's composed of. We don't understand all how it works, but we're doing better and better at that. And the mind is that part of you that thinks and feels and makes decisions and so forth, perceives.
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Interview with Dr. Bruce Greyson of DOPS
And, you know, I was taught in college and medical school that the same thing. The mind is just what the brain does. The way digestion is what the stomach does. but we know how the stomach digests food. We have no idea how the chemical and electrical changes in the brain can produce a thought or a feeling. We know what parts of the brain may be associated with different things.
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Interview with Dr. Bruce Greyson of DOPS
We have no idea how that happens. So one idea is that the brain doesn't cause our thoughts. It sort of receives them the way a radio may receive radio waves and translate them into sounds we hear. This is not a new idea. Hippocrates said this 2000 years ago, that the brain is the messenger of the mind. And it's been repeated throughout the centuries.
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Interview with Dr. Bruce Greyson of DOPS
based on what technology was available at the time. When prisms first came out in the Middle Ages, people talked about the prism being like the brain filtering out the light and breaking it into different parts. In the 19th century, when everything was run by steam engines, they talk about the brain being the reducing valve that takes all the energy and filters it out.
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Interview with Dr. Bruce Greyson of DOPS
We tend to use the filter model now, where there's all this consciousness, And the brain filters out the stuff that's, quote, irrelevant or irrelevant and just lets in the important stuff. What's important? Well, the brain, like the rest of us, evolved to survive in the physical world. So you need to be able to find food and shelter and a mate and avoid predators.
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Interview with Dr. Bruce Greyson of DOPS
And you don't need to talk to deceased loved ones to do that or see God. You just need to be aware of the physical surroundings. So your brain filters out all that, quote, irrelevant stuff and just lets in the important things.
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Interview with Dr. Bruce Greyson of DOPS
And in situations like near-death experiences, and there are others as well, where the brain starts shutting down or at least is impaired, that filtering mechanism starts to weaken and other types of consciousness come in. Now, there's various types of evidence for that from other experiences as well. And there is some research being done now on what parts of the brain
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Interview with Dr. Bruce Greyson of DOPS
may do this filtering process. And one is the default mode network, which kind of determines what you're going to pay attention to. For example, people listening to us now, they will ramp up the auditory input to their brain and down the visual input, because that's not as important. There's also a thalamocortical loop, which takes input and
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Interview with Dr. Bruce Greyson of DOPS
changes what you pay attention to, and filters out stuff that's not immediately relevant. This is like our ears only transmit to us a small range of frequencies of all the sounds that are out there, the ones that are important to us. We don't need to hear what bats hear or what elephants hear.
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Interview with Dr. Bruce Greyson of DOPS
And the visual spectrum, we just see a small amount of the light that's out there, just the visual spectrum that's relevant to the food we want to eat and so forth. We don't see the infrared or ultraviolet, which other animals do. So it's not surprising that the brain would also filter stuff out for us.
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Interview with Dr. Bruce Greyson of DOPS
The only way she could do that is if she had left her body and followed me down the hall. And you can't do that. You are your body. How can you leave it? Yep. So she saw how confused I was and she started telling me about the conversation I had with her roommate. Everything I said, everything Susan answered. And then finally said, and you had a red stain on your tie. That just really threw me.
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Interview with Dr. Bruce Greyson of DOPS
One is that when you have a near-death experience, you become very calm and very peaceful in this, and you stop wasting a lot of energy trying to escape from the situation, and that preserving energy may actually help you survive the event. Like a possum playing dead doesn't fight against things, it just sort of goes limp, and this predator loses interest and goes away.
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Interview with Dr. Bruce Greyson of DOPS
It also may not evolve for the individual. but for other people in his genetic pool. For example, they see this person being very peaceful and saying peaceful things about death, and they become more calm about dying. So maybe for their benefit, not for the experiencers. There's various ways you can play around with what is the evolutionary value of this, but it's all speculation.
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Interview with Dr. Bruce Greyson of DOPS
Right. And that leads to the question of how many consciousnesses are there? Is yours different from mine or are they actually part of the same thing? And, you know, many new death experiences use the analogy of a wave in the ocean. You know, it's made out of the same stuff the rest of the ocean is. But for a time period, it's got a separate form and location.
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Interview with Dr. Bruce Greyson of DOPS
And then eventually it'll melt back into the ocean and become indistinguishable from it. They say that our consciousness is like that. For a time being, it seems to be distinct from the rest of the ocean, but it's not going to be that way forever.
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Interview with Dr. Bruce Greyson of DOPS
Yeah. There are scholars like Greg Shushan in Wells who have studied the history of religions extensively and mystical experience. And they argue that most of our religions were started by people who had near-death experiences and tried to explain to themselves how this happened. It's not that the religion taught us what an MDE was like. It's the other way around.
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Interview with Dr. Bruce Greyson of DOPS
And one of the most consistent parts of all religions is the idea of the golden rule. That you should do unto others as you want them to do unto you. And that's part of every single religion we have. And that's the way New Death Experiences say that's what they learned when they came back.
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Interview with Dr. Bruce Greyson of DOPS
So I was stuck for a minute and I thought, well, I'm here to deal with her confusion, not mine. So I kind of stuffed it away and talked to her about why she took the overdose, what she took and so forth. And arranged for her to be admitted to the psychiatric unit as soon as she was stable. This was a very unnerving experience for me. I'd never, I couldn't put it into any box.
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Interview with Dr. Bruce Greyson of DOPS
I do, but I'm very sympathetic to that because I start out there. I understand it. I understand the skepticism. I'm still skeptical. I think I have some answers, but I'm not at all sure of them. But there are some things that I know for sure. One is that these are extremely common experiences. They occur to about 5% of the population. That's one in every 20 people.
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Interview with Dr. Bruce Greyson of DOPS
So someone in your extended family or your workplace or your school has probably had a near-death experience. And the second thing is that they are not in any way associated with mental illness. We've studied the incidence of mental illness among near-death experiencers, and we've also looked at the incidence of near-death experiences among people with mental illness.
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Interview with Dr. Bruce Greyson of DOPS
We find that there's no connection at all. People who are mentally ill have the same near-death experiences as people who aren't, and they have the same number of experiences. And people who have near-death experiences have the same rates of mental illness as other people do. So it doesn't seem to be any connection.
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Interview with Dr. Bruce Greyson of DOPS
And then another important thing to remember is that near-death experiences lead to profound after effects, both positive and negative, which people need to address. You can't just ignore them. You know, often people report to me that they start to tell their doctor about it. And the doctor said, just forget about it. It'll go away. It doesn't.
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Interview with Dr. Bruce Greyson of DOPS
I've talked to people many decades after the experience and they say, it's like it happened yesterday. It never goes away. And the after effects don't go away.
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Interview with Dr. Bruce Greyson of DOPS
Uh, well, the one I mentioned about, uh, uh, Jack who, um, saw his nurse, it really blew me away, but this, uh, one fellow in his mid fifties who was, um, he was a van driver and he was on his rounds and he had this chest pain. And he had the wherewithal to drive to the emergency room and they found he had four blood vessels to his heart that were clogged.
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Interview with Dr. Bruce Greyson of DOPS
So they rushed him to the operating room for an emergency triple, a quadruple bypass surgery. And he tells me that in the middle of the operation, he rose up out of his body and looked down and saw them separating his chest to get to his heart. And he saw his surgeon, the main surgeon who he hadn't seen before, flapping his wings like he was trying to fly. And when he said that, I laughed.
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Interview with Dr. Bruce Greyson of DOPS
I mean, I've been a doctor for 30 years at that point. I've never seen or heard of anyone doing that. That's ludicrous. Why would a doctor do that? So I said to him, you know, Jack, I mean, Al, I think that must have been a hallucination from the anesthesia. He said, it was not. I saw it clearly. You go ask my doctor. So I found a surgeon. I talked to him about it.
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Interview with Dr. Bruce Greyson of DOPS
And the surgeon said, well, yes, I did do that. I developed this habit. I'd never seen anyone else do it. I let my assistant start the procedure while I wash my hands and then put on the sterile gown and gloves that I go into the operating room. And I watch them for a while to supervise them. I don't want to risk touching anything that's not sterile. So I put my hands on.
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Interview with Dr. Bruce Greyson of DOPS
So I thought, well, there's gotta be a trick. Someone's fooling me. Maybe the nurses colluded with this green intern. I tried to push it out of my mind. I didn't dare tell anybody to think I was crazy. It was about five years ago when I was now on the faculty at the University of Virginia, when Raymond Moody started his training and he was in the emergency room with me.
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Interview with Dr. Bruce Greyson of DOPS
on my chest where I knew they wouldn't touch anything. And I point things out to them with my elbows. And he mentioned the emotion just the way Jack did, like he was trying to fly. And I don't know how Al could have known that, but he said, I watched this from above.
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Interview with Dr. Bruce Greyson of DOPS
Now, a lot of times they tell things that are even more significant. Like one person said, I saw this nurse who I hadn't seen before, and she had mismatched shoelaces on her two shoes. And turn out that was true. Now, why would you pay attention to that?
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Interview with Dr. Bruce Greyson of DOPS
You know, again, the ones where people see things, see deceased entities that they didn't know had died. One woman was driving with a car, a car, a car with a dog in the car. And she had an accident and had a near death experience where she found herself with her deceased grandmother and the dog was actually, they were sitting on a, on a porch and the dog was out in the yard playing around.
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Interview with Dr. Bruce Greyson of DOPS
And she wanted to go out and play with the dog. And the grandma said, no, you stay here with me. And she later woke up in the hospital bed, lots of broken bones, lots of gashes. And she found out several days later that her dog had died in that accident. She didn't know that at the time of her near-death experience.
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Interview with Dr. Bruce Greyson of DOPS
So we hear that again and again, that people encounter people or animals sometimes that had died, but they didn't know they had died.
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Interview with Dr. Bruce Greyson of DOPS
Usually. Sometimes they're unknown people. Okay.
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Interview with Dr. Bruce Greyson of DOPS
Yeah. Well, again, people say that I have to talk about this in metaphors. And when they say, you know, I met my mother in my near-death experience. And I'll say, well, how do you know it was your mother? And sometimes they will describe her physically. And, you know, they usually describe them as they were in the prime of life, not when they were dying.
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Interview with Dr. Bruce Greyson of DOPS
And one time we had a slow period. And he told me about a book he had written called Life After Life. And he described near-death experiences, something that was unknown in the English language before then. And I realized this is what Holly had told me years before.
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Interview with Dr. Bruce Greyson of DOPS
But occasionally they say, well, I didn't actually see a physical body. I saw this worm glowing entity. I could tell by the way it made me feel that was my mother. I felt her hugging me, but he didn't actually see the figure of his mother. So it's all people's interpretation of what they're experiencing.
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Interview with Dr. Bruce Greyson of DOPS
Oh, yeah, there's about a half dozen of us who are actively researching things now. Jim Tucker, who is currently directing the division, has been primarily working with young children who claim to remember past lives. These are preschool kids. Uh, and they often describe very detailed, uh, facts about a past life that in many cases can be verified. People they couldn't have known about.
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Interview with Dr. Bruce Greyson of DOPS
Um, uh, Marietta Pelvanova is a, uh, a PhD, uh, who studies both near death experiences and, um, children who remember past lives. And she and I have been doing a work that she is the primary researcher on, looking at near-death experiencers who need help after the experience. What about it makes them seek help? What type of people they seek help from? What type of help they're seeking?
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Interview with Dr. Bruce Greyson of DOPS
And then what types of help were helpful and which ones were not? And we're finding some very interesting results from that.
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Interview with Dr. Bruce Greyson of DOPS
We're also surveying hundreds of doctors at the University of Virginia about their attitudes and beliefs about near-death experiences and posing them the question, if you were to be confronted by a patient who wanted to talk about a near-death experience, would you be able to do that? And if not, what do you think of the barriers to your being able to do that?
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Interview with Dr. Bruce Greyson of DOPS
And we had a list of about 20 different barriers. And it was encouraging to us that the ones we might expect, like, oh, I think it's a ridiculous experience, or I think it didn't really happen, it's just their imagination, or it's just a neurological artifact. Very, very few doctors said that. What they said most was, one, I don't know enough about the experience to really talk to them about it.
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Interview with Dr. Bruce Greyson of DOPS
And number two, I don't have the time to go into that stuff with them. And both of those things are correctable. We can teach people more about it. We can rearrange their schedules and give them people to talk to. So that was very encouraging.
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Interview with Dr. Bruce Greyson of DOPS
And I still couldn't understand it, but I thought this has really happened because my patient was a psychiatric patient, so sure, now she's just crazy. But Raymond's subjects were more than 100 perfectly normal people. I thought, I have to understand that I'm a scientist. Scientists don't run away from things they don't understand. They run towards them, trying to make sense out of them.
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Interview with Dr. Bruce Greyson of DOPS
She's also doing other research with people's sense of whether they have control over the experience, especially when it comes to being sent back from this border or point of no return, or whether they're seeing back against their will. She's planning a study of women who have a near-death experience during childbirth and a variety of other things like that.
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Interview with Dr. Bruce Greyson of DOPS
We also have Marina Weiler, who studies a lot of out-of-body experiences and related experiences. And David Acunzo, who runs our neurophysiology lab, was also studying these same phenomena, out-of-body experiences and other related experiences, looking at what's going on in the brains when people claim to have these experiences. We also have Ed Kelly in the lab and Ross Dunseith.
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Interview with Dr. Bruce Greyson of DOPS
And Kim Penberthy is one of our senior researchers who studies a lot of meditation experiences. And lately she's gotten involved in after-death communications messages that seem to come from deceased individuals. And then we have finally Philip Coslino, one of our newest members.
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Interview with Dr. Bruce Greyson of DOPS
who's also working primarily with the children who remember past lives, but is also getting involved in near-death experiences and other phenomena. We're trying as much as possible to cross-pollinate each other and not have everyone being siloed into one particular thing because there's so many similarities between all these experiences.
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Interview with Dr. Bruce Greyson of DOPS
So we're trying to combine things, especially to bring more of these experiences into the lab where we can study what's going on in the brain.
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Interview with Dr. Bruce Greyson of DOPS
We don't have the vocabulary for it. Our vocabulary was built to study the physical world. And part is that we don't have the technology to study some of these things.
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Interview with Dr. Bruce Greyson of DOPS
Yeah, yeah. There have been reports for at least a century that twins have some... unexplained communication with each other. Not necessarily we're in their same area, but they'll have the same thought, they'll have the same, they often will be taking a test in different rooms and write the exact same words, but they'll often finish each other's sentences.
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Interview with Dr. Bruce Greyson of DOPS
One will have a pain and the other one will have the pain in the same spot. This happens more often with identical twins than fraternal twins. But it is not, as far as I can tell, the majority of them. Some estimates are as high as 50%. Some are a little lower. But what we want to do, this is a study that was proposed by Baruch Fishman in Israel.
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Interview with Dr. Bruce Greyson of DOPS
And he wanted to study the genetic components that may play a role in this. Since this more happens more often in identical twins, there may be some genetic components. So we're working with a group in England that has a database of the entire genome of 15,000 twin pairs. And we're giving them a survey of what types of apparently unusual experiences they have communicating with each other.
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Interview with Dr. Bruce Greyson of DOPS
So I started collecting cases, trying to make sense out of them. And now 50 years later, I'm still trying to understand them.
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Interview with Dr. Bruce Greyson of DOPS
And then looking at the genome and see what genes may be associated with these things. We also look at how close the pair are in terms of did they develop a common language when they were children, as many twins do? Do they often feel emotionally close to the other and so forth?
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Interview with Dr. Bruce Greyson of DOPS
So there are a lot of genes that are speculatively maybe involved in this, genes that relate to empathy, that relate to perceptions and so forth. So we're just sort of doing an open-ended what's out there, look at the entire genome.
Otherworld
Interview with Dr. Bruce Greyson of DOPS
The one consistent thing people keep saying to me after a near-death experience is that we're all in this together. We're all part of the same thing and that you really need to be kind to other people as you are to yourself and treat other people as if they are you.
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Interview with Dr. Bruce Greyson of DOPS
And that's the way to live a more fulfilling life and be more satisfied with your near-death, with your life review when you eventually have one.
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Interview with Dr. Bruce Greyson of DOPS
Well, I have a website, www.brucegrayson.com. My book, After, is the book I've written that is for the general public. I've tried to keep the jargon to a minimum. There are other excellent books. Pim van Lemel has a book, Consciousness After Life. There are many, many books about near-death experiences. There is no dearth of trying to find good ones.
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Interview with Dr. Bruce Greyson of DOPS
And there are new ones coming out every week, practically.
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Interview with Dr. Bruce Greyson of DOPS
Well, I have a database at the University of Virginia with people who have been describing their experiences to me, and we vetted them to make sure they were, in fact, close to death and what they said made sense. And there are a little more than 1,000 in that pool.
Otherworld
Interview with Dr. Bruce Greyson of DOPS
I've talked to many more that we did not include in the database because we didn't think we were certain enough about their qualifications.
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Interview with Dr. Bruce Greyson of DOPS
Well, sometimes it was years after. Back in the 70s and 80s, nobody would talk about these things. You'd be ridiculed or told you were crazy, so they didn't talk about it. And I talked to some people back in the 80s who had the experience 30, 40 years earlier, but I'd never talked to anybody.
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Interview with Dr. Bruce Greyson of DOPS
Yeah, I did think that, but it happened. I was there. I heard it. So I couldn't totally deny it. I didn't know what to make of it. I thought it can't be what it really seems to be on the surface. It's got to be something else. So I started doing research on all the possible things that could have been going on. Was blood oxygen falling? Were there drugs given to the patient?
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Interview with Dr. Bruce Greyson of DOPS
Was she taking drugs that made her hallucinate? And all sorts of things like that. And the more we studied these variables, the more unexplained the near-death experience seemed to be.
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Interview with Dr. Bruce Greyson of DOPS
The first thing that occurred to me was lack of oxygen, because no matter how you come close to death, that's one of the final things that happens to everybody. So we had several people actually measured the oxygen content in people's bloods. Michael Sabom did this in the U.S. Pim van Lommel did it in the Netherlands.
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Interview with Dr. Bruce Greyson of DOPS
And they reported consistently that people who have near-death experiences have better oxygen supply than people who do don't. I have to put the caveat here that they're measuring oxygen in the blood. They draw blood and measure oxygen. They're not measuring from the brain itself. So it's conceivable that there may be some local oxygen deprivation somewhere in the brain.
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Interview with Dr. Bruce Greyson of DOPS
I don't know why that would happen. We have no explanation for why that might happen. but another idea was drugs given to patients, and again, that turned out to be not the case. People have looked at electrical activity in different parts of the brain,
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Interview with Dr. Bruce Greyson of DOPS
There was a theory that a particular part of the brain in the temporal parietal area, which makes us tell where we are in space, was going off somehow when you're getting close to death. And that makes you feel you're leaving your body. But people who have that experience, they actually stimulate, electrically stimulate that part of the brain.
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Interview with Dr. Bruce Greyson of DOPS
and they have a sense of losing control of their bodies, and they report things like, I feel like I'm falling off the table, or I feel like my legs are getting shorter. Sometimes they report seeing a double of themselves, but they never report out-of-body experience that near-death experiences do, which is being outside the body, looking back at their physical body lying on the table.
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Interview with Dr. Bruce Greyson of DOPS
And they report seeing things accurately around the body, which people don't report when you stimulate their brains. People have reported that in some cases there was a burst of electricity after people die. And there have been maybe a half dozen publications of this in mainstream neuroscience journals in the past year or two. And none of them actually measured dying patients.
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Interview with Dr. Bruce Greyson of DOPS
They did, for example, studies with people who were in a coma and they were declared, they couldn't help them. So they took them off artificial ventilation and they measure what happens in the brain when they do that. And there is a small increase in electrical activity in the brain. It's not as big as it was before they did that, but it still didn't go flat immediately. It remained higher.
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Interview with Dr. Bruce Greyson of DOPS
But there was no indication that these people had actually regained consciousness. They didn't speak, they didn't move, they didn't do anything else. And in fact, they also measured the a heart activity in these people. And the hearts were still beating all this time. So the hearts had not stopped. They were not dying patients.
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Interview with Dr. Bruce Greyson of DOPS
And when they actually had the heart stopped, they also stopped the brain activity. So these aren't dying patients. They're people who are approaching death. There was a study done with rats at the University of Michigan where they sacrificed their rats and found a 30-second, quote, burst. Again, it was a burst that was a minuscule part of what their brain was showing before they sacrificed them.
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Interview with Dr. Bruce Greyson of DOPS
It happened to all the rats they did this to. Only about 20% of people have near-death experiences. They found that if they anesthetized the rats first, they didn't show this at all. And of course, many people have near-death experiences under anesthesia. And they, of course, didn't interview the rats to see what the rats were experiencing. It's all speculation.
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Interview with Dr. Bruce Greyson of DOPS
It tells me that it's too easy to jump to conclusions from data that may not be relevant at all. Now, we have about 50 years of good data from clinical situations where people's hearts stopped and the brain stopped within usually a matter of 10 seconds. It immediately falls off and drops off. And we have data from countless situations like this.
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Interview with Dr. Bruce Greyson of DOPS
So the idea that we suddenly have this burst is a quite unusual thing to say. Now, there is one cardiologist, one emergency physician in New York, Sam Parnia, who has studied people who were being resuscitated.
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Interview with Dr. Bruce Greyson of DOPS
And when you do that, you're either pounding on their chest for a while, then you stop for several seconds to see where their heart started again, and then you do it again, or you may be shocking them and then waiting to see. And in the period when they were waiting between compressions or shocks, he measured the brainwaves. And he found that in about half of them, there was some activity.
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Interview with Dr. Bruce Greyson of DOPS
Now, I'm not sure that's reliable because these brain waves he was actually measuring also are reflecting muscle jerking around, muscle activity. And when you're pounding on someone's chest or shocking them, your muscles roll jerking. And the few seconds you're taking to look at whether the body's recovering or not is not enough for it to relax.
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Interview with Dr. Bruce Greyson of DOPS
Furthermore, you reported in this study of almost 500 patients that six of them reported near-death experiences. But none of those six were the ones they found the EEG activity in. The ones that have the brain activity were not the ones that reported near-death experiences. So again, it really doesn't tell us anything.
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Oprah and a Doctor Explore What Near Death Experiences Reveal About Life and Beyond
I was told that it wasn't my time. I had to go back to Earth. I had more work to do.
The Oprah Podcast
Oprah and a Doctor Explore What Near Death Experiences Reveal About Life and Beyond
Yes. Well, first of all, thank you for having me on. And thank you for having this topic because it's really important, like Jeremy said, to None of us are aware of these experiences until someone opens our eyes. But my own experience began when I was whitewater kayaking in South America with my husband and friends of ours who own a rafting kayak company.
The Oprah Podcast
Oprah and a Doctor Explore What Near Death Experiences Reveal About Life and Beyond
And circumstances were such that I went over a waterfall or a drop that was maybe 10 or 15 feet high. And when I hit the bottom, my boat became pinned or stuck in the rocks and the underwater features. And the boat and I were then completely submerged under 8 to 10 feet of water. The weight of the water and the force of the current was such that there was no way to pull the spray skirt out.
The Oprah Podcast
Oprah and a Doctor Explore What Near Death Experiences Reveal About Life and Beyond
So I was under there for almost 30 minutes.
The Oprah Podcast
Oprah and a Doctor Explore What Near Death Experiences Reveal About Life and Beyond
And while I was there, I lost consciousness. It's a funny thing. I mean, I was never conscious and then unconscious. I felt like I was conscious and then more conscious, you know, alive and then more alive.
The Oprah Podcast
Oprah and a Doctor Explore What Near Death Experiences Reveal About Life and Beyond
And like you've already heard, you know, there was a shift in time and dimension so that I could be underwater and still feel the weight of the water. I could feel the plastic of my boat. But at the same time, I began to have this fear. inexplicable experience.
The Oprah Podcast
Oprah and a Doctor Explore What Near Death Experiences Reveal About Life and Beyond
At a certain point, asked that God's will be done, and I was immediately overcome by a very physical sensation of being held and comforted and reassured that everything would be fine, regardless of whether I lived or died. And, you know, I had four little kids, and I was told, you know, they'd be fine. And...
The Oprah Podcast
Oprah and a Doctor Explore What Near Death Experiences Reveal About Life and Beyond
I was being held kind of like a baby and reassured and taken through a life review that was nothing that I personally could have imagined. It had nothing to do with judgment and everything to do with understanding and love. Did you have a life review? Did you have a life review? I had a life review that took me through every one of the most painful, wounding, horrible experiences of my life.
The Oprah Podcast
Oprah and a Doctor Explore What Near Death Experiences Reveal About Life and Beyond
And I had an absolute understanding of everyone involved, me, the other people, not just the emotions. But as Jeremy said, I was the other people involved and I was me. And I had a complete understanding of what brought each of us to that situation.
The Oprah Podcast
Oprah and a Doctor Explore What Near Death Experiences Reveal About Life and Beyond
Yeah. I mean, the fact is, every single person who has had a profound spiritual experience would say the same thing, and that is that God is love. And the fact is, where God is present, where God's love is present, there is no room for destructive emotions of guilt and remorse and shame and Awe, anger, bitterness, all of those things.
The Oprah Podcast
Oprah and a Doctor Explore What Near Death Experiences Reveal About Life and Beyond
What I discovered is that where God is present, there is always some version of love, be it compassion or empathy or understanding.
The Oprah Podcast
Oprah and a Doctor Explore What Near Death Experiences Reveal About Life and Beyond
Kindness. All of it. All of it.
The Oprah Podcast
Oprah and a Doctor Explore What Near Death Experiences Reveal About Life and Beyond
Well, I did. I had this incredible experience of leaving my body, going to heaven, God's world, spiritual realm. I was told that it wasn't my time. I had to go back to earth. I had more work to do. And I was given a list of things that I still had to do. And one of the things on this list had to do with the coming and unexpected death of my oldest son. And he, at the time, was nine and healthy.
The Oprah Podcast
Oprah and a Doctor Explore What Near Death Experiences Reveal About Life and Beyond
And I, of course, asked why, obviously. And when I asked that, I was taken back to my life review, where I'd been shown again and again and again that beauty really does come of all things. then I was taken back to my body.
The Oprah Podcast
Oprah and a Doctor Explore What Near Death Experiences Reveal About Life and Beyond
There is no way any person could shoulder that burden without having an absolute knowledge, understanding, and trust that God is real and present, that we are really just spiritual beings living in this three-dimensional body, that there really is life after death, continuation of our consciousness, again, however you want to describe it.
The Oprah Podcast
Oprah and a Doctor Explore What Near Death Experiences Reveal About Life and Beyond
because knowing that without any shred of doubt gave me a confidence that if indeed his death came to pass, great beauty would come of it, he would have been joyfully welcomed home as I had been, and that he wasn't lost to me. The fact is, I know he'll be there waiting for me when my time is done, but until then, You know, I'm here on earth with more left to do, you know, and we're here.
The Oprah Podcast
Oprah and a Doctor Explore What Near Death Experiences Reveal About Life and Beyond
It's this great adventure, this great opportunity to learn and grow and reflect God's love to others.
The Oprah Podcast
Oprah and a Doctor Explore What Near Death Experiences Reveal About Life and Beyond
I woke up every day wondering if that would be the day.
The Oprah Podcast
Oprah and a Doctor Explore What Near Death Experiences Reveal About Life and Beyond
Again, it's not—your question is, how do you get through that day? Well, you get through that day with this absolute trust that God is real and present in my life, in my son's life, in my family, in the world. If that is part of the plan for his life and our lives— then great beauty would come of it.
The Oprah Podcast
Oprah and a Doctor Explore What Near Death Experiences Reveal About Life and Beyond
Yeah, he was doing a dry land ski training and was hit by a car. So he was killed instantly.
The Oprah Podcast
Oprah and a Doctor Explore What Near Death Experiences Reveal About Life and Beyond
Yeah. And I'm not going to say that... know i said oh hey that's great no i was as devastated as a mother could be but i will honestly tell you that even in the midst of my sorrow i experienced great joy and that joy is because of knowing trusting Spiritual truth.
The Oprah Podcast
Oprah and a Doctor Explore What Near Death Experiences Reveal About Life and Beyond
Yeah, I sure do. I mean, my concept of it is we don't live here and they live here. We live and exist within the spiritual realm. There is no... time in the spiritual world. There's no dimension. I don't have the words, but it exists within each other, and everything exists simultaneously, although independently.
The Oprah Podcast
Oprah and a Doctor Explore What Near Death Experiences Reveal About Life and Beyond
So yes, I believe we live within the spiritual world, even though our three-dimensional brains can't see it. We don't always acknowledge it. But the fact is, there is spiritual crossover between
The Oprah Podcast
Oprah and a Doctor Explore What Near Death Experiences Reveal About Life and Beyond
It's my favorite conversation.