Dr. Bruce Greyson on What Near-Death Experiences Reveal About Life and Beyond - Intersections Ep. 30

[Music] [Music] greetings and welcome back to inner sections one of the things that has really struck me is how we in humanity are inherently a super curious species you know think about it right uh from time immemorial we've always wanted to know what lies what lies beyond you know we've lived in a certain part of the world we wanted to know what lies beyond and that led to a whole range of explorers on the earth's surface you know we want to know what lies beyond the horizon and once we understood our own planet we wanted to know what lies beyond our planet and then we sent out these you know these astronauts into into outer space and then we wanted to know what lies beyond our solar system and these advanced you know telescopes etc have allowed us to kind of understand you know the universe at a much bigger and broader level and that same curiosity could also be brought to bear on the edge of life what lies in a sense beyond beyond life and so um i couldn't feel more blessed than to have in our midst today someone uh dr bruce grayson who has dedicated his career his intellect his strivings towards seeking to understand that that edge that intersection between life and what lies beyond let me offer up a couple of elements of uh you know dr grayson's background and then have you um you know invite and welcome him into our midst as i'm doing that i want to invite you also to use chat to just say hello get you know get to connect with each other share where you are calling in from today let's get connected so dr grayson is one of the world's leading medical experts on near-death experiences he has a bachelor's in psychology from cornell an md from the sunny upstate college of medicine and has had a range of positions across a range of universities in the medical and psychiatry profession as an assistant professor at the university of virginia school of medicine then at the university of michigan school of medicine then a professor of psychiatry at the university of connecticut and the professor meredith psychiatry and neurobehavioral sciences at the university of virginia school of medicine for the last 25 years he has been a pioneer in this movement of science-based research on something that we call near-death experiences and we will ask him to come and introduce that you know that subject to us um has been a founding force in the institute for the advancement of near-death studies and you know of the journal of near-death studies um he has had international recognition for his work including addressing symposia on consciousness at the united nations and also at the american psychiatric association he has been recognized as a distinguished life fellow the highest owner that is bestowed by this organization he's been a distinguished speaker and thought leader on these near-death experiences and has has written about it in a book that came out some time ago which he collaborated with a number of other leading researchers on the handbook of near death experiences but also one that has just come out recently which we are going to highlight and talk about because i think this is just an incredible contribution to the advancement of our understanding of something really profound and we will talk about that he's been featured on a number of leading media as well for his work and on that note let me invite uh dr grayson into our midst well thank you andrew i'm delighted to be joining you today uh you know it's it's a real real real pleasure um you know the show is called intersections because we are seeking to really dissolve some of those those boundaries that sometimes limit us and confine us to just um you know some ways of thinking and not others and and you and your work just uh so beautifully represents um that point of intersection you know we've talked about life and beyond but also of like science and spirituality i mean your book yes um has such profound statements and ideas in it about your own you know quest towards um bringing these two worlds together and i know that's going to be a topic i'm going to really enjoy in a short while as we get into into that part of the discussion so so thank you for joining us today thank you thank you yeah um can i ask you to uh since the theme of today's conversation is near-death experiences if you could you know just maybe define that for us what you know what is a near-death experience a near-death experience is a profound primarily spiritual event that many people have when they come close to death or in fact are pronounced dead that may include things like a sense of leaving the physical body a sense of overwhelming peace and well-being uh often finding themselves in some apparently otherworldly realm that's not the physical world that they may then encounter other beings uh usually a warm loving being of light that they interpret as a deity sometimes they see other entities they interpret as deceased loved ones they often have a review of their entire lives and at some point they may come to a point where they make a decision to return to life or are told to return against their will and for me as a psychiatrist one of the most interesting parts of the experience is not the experience itself but how it transforms people's lives afterwards and i've been able to follow some of these people now for many decades and the changes in their attitudes beliefs values and behavior are quite marked and long lasting you know dr grayson what strikes me is that here you are someone very steeped in the you know rigorous world of science and medicine uh with all the right qualifications and the right positions that you held throughout your career you're not um you know you're not a renegade you know in in the world of science you know for the paths that you have taken on and for the recognition that you've received and so for someone who is um you know so scientific you know in your in your temperament um was there was there any kind of challenge in taking on a discipline that uh one doesn't really you know by happenstance stumble into in in college like science courses yeah of course of course and it continues to be a challenge for me because it it raises questions about our very beliefs about the mind and the brain and about how we fit into the universe you know i started out life as a scientist as a materialist my father was a chemist and in my family as we grew up we never talked about anything that was non-physical uh you know the idea of anything spiritual anything religious was just never never talked about in our family um you know we assume that that what you see is what you get the physical world is all there is and that when you die that's that's the end and that was fine with us you know there's no reason to complain about that that's just the way it was so i went through a college and medical school with that materialistic mindset that we are physical beings like other animals and then after i finished medical school in my first months of my psychiatric training i was asked to evaluate a patient in the emergency room who had overdosed and i went to see her and she was unconscious i tried to arouse her spoke to her moved her limbs around she has no response at all but her roommate who had brought her in was waiting to talk to me in another room 50 yards down the hall so i talked to the roommate and got information about the patient what was going on in her life and what she might have taken in the overdose and we talked about 15 minutes then i went back to the patient and she was still unconscious so she was admitted to the intensive care unit overnight and i managed to see her the following morning after she awoke when i went to see her she was barely awake she could barely open her eyes i introduced myself and she said to me i know who you are i remember you from last night well that kind of startled me because i i thought she was totally unaware of me last night so i i said to her just that i said i thought you were asleep i didn't realize you knew you could see me and then she opened her eyes and said to me not in my room i saw you talking to my roommate susan down the hall well that just made no sense to me at all the only way she could have done that is she had left her body and come down the hall with me in it and i couldn't understand that as far as i could tell i was my body how can you leave it so she sensed my confusion and went on to tell me about the conversation i had with her roommate where we were sitting what we were wearing the questions i asked her her answers and it just blew me back i couldn't understand this but you know i couldn't deal with my confusion and my job was to help her with her confusion so i had to kind of stuff my feelings aside and try to work with her in my psychiatric role and as the days passed and i tried to reflect on what happened here i just couldn't accept it it didn't make any sense to me it didn't fit my world view i tried to tell myself i misheard what she said i misinterpreted it they were playing a trick on me i don't know how but i just kind of stuffed it away and it wasn't until several years later in 1975 when raymond moody published a book called life after life in which he gave us the name for these phenomena near-death experiences and describe what they were like and fortunately he was working at the university of virginia with me at the time so i was able to read this book and talk with him and i realized that this what this one patient had told me was not just one event from one psychiatric patient but part of a huge phenomenon that millions of people all over the world were talking about i still couldn't understand it but i couldn't deny that it was happening and as a scientist i thought it's my responsibility to look into this you know you can't be a skeptic if you don't become skeptical of your own viewpoints as well so because it challenged everything i thought i had to devote my life to or at least some of it to trying to understand it and here 50 years later i'm still trying to understand it in in in doing that work to try to understand it uh the creation you have made certain seminal contributions to this discipline isn't it um and um you know i wanted to ask if you could perhaps for those of us who are in some ways let's say you know skeptics who are still perhaps um like you have been you know raised uh with this view of life is purely physical who may um hold that view right i want to just kind of like invite if you're listening to this conversation between dr grayson and me for you to you know for a moment just uh open ourselves up right you know in in the spirit of curiosity and then one can go back right to uh whatever belief it is that one you know holds there but you just open oneself up for exploration right and as part of that exploration dr grayson in the journey you made how you know how have we been able to bring a sense of scientific rigor to what otherwise sounds um quite otherworldly well i i first i appreciate your asking people to be skeptical because i think that's the way to learn things and i feel like i'm still a skeptic i'm still challenging my own beliefs every day but when we first started looking into this we collected stories that individual people told us and of course i realized that one story does not prove anything um but when you collect a lot of stories and i'm talking about hundreds or thousands of stories then you can start looking at patterns that consistently emerge in these accounts and you can statistically analyze what they say and find out what are the current uh currents that that go across cultures across religions and what are the consistent commonalities in these experiences and then you can develop hypotheses about them that you can test for example most of these things happen when people are either pronounced dead or very very close to death so being a materialist i thought about what are the things that go on in the body or in the brain that may be related to this and the first thing that comes to mind is that you've got a lack of oxygen going to the brain because no matter how you come close to death that's the final pathway that usually happens but we were able to look at the data and it turns out that when you're close to death if you have a near-death experience you actually have more oxygen to the brain than if you don't report on your death experience and it was the same way with with drugs that were given to patients many patients are given drugs of course as they're nearing death but it turns out that the more drugs you're given the less likely you are to report a near-death experience so drugs and lack of oxygen do not seem to be causing the experience if anything they're inhibiting the experience and we've tested theory after theory about this about brain surges of electricity maybe chemicals produced in the brain and every time we've been able to collect data they've been contradicting these theories now of course some of them we can't test one of the prominent theories is that there's some sort of hallucinogenic drug produced in the brain at the point of death like dmt and that's a nice theory it's it's plausible but there's really no way to test it because you're talking about a chemical that's released in tiny amounts for a short period of time and we don't even know where in the brain to look for it and how are you going to do that when someone's in a near-death crisis are you trying to resuscitate them um yeah yeah so um i'm drawn to you know having you like help us um at a you know i kind of like a popular science level at a kind of like a level that we can consume and understand what you see as the most significant and notable findings from this research and uh having you know gone through gone through uh after um yeah which is a tremendously compelling read um i was struck in particular by um you know by this notion of the life review you know we can talk about other effects as well but i don't know if would it make sense to start there and talk about sort of that as one of the seminal findings of this research sure sure many many people have a life review of some sort in the near-death experience and by that i mean they come to a point where they relive um sometimes their entire lives sometimes just highlights from their life and it's not just like watching a movie it's actually feeling like you're reliving the experience and they often feel like as they go through this uh event they judge themselves so what things they did right what things they might have not not done quite right they usually don't report feeling judged by some other entity but it's a self-judgment um and from that they learn about mistakes they've made and things they want to change if they come back and of course the ones we talked to always did what's striking is that in a good number of these life reviews the experiencer relives the event not only through their own eyes but through the eyes of someone else as well and let me give you an example of this a tom sawyer that was his real name uh had a near-death experience in his thirties when a truck he was working under fell down and crushed his chest and as part of his new death experience he had a very elaborate life review in which he relived many many things in his life but one thing that stands out to me is that as an event when he was 17 years old a hot-tempered um teenager he was driving his truck downtown and a drunk man happened to walk out in front of his truck and tom almost hit him he was furious so he rolled down stopped his truck rolled down the window and started yelling at the man and the man unfortunately being drunk reached his hand in the window of the truck and slapped tom across the face well that was too much for tom uh so he opened the car door the truck the door got out and started pounding the guy mercilessly with his fists until he left him a bloody mess in the median strip and then he calmly got back in his truck and drove away well in his life review he really lived that not only through his own eyes but from the eyes of the drunk man and he saw his face tom's face getting redder and redder and then felt tom's fists coming into his face 32 blows he said and he felt his nose getting bloodier and bloodier and he felt his his teeth going through his lower lip and he felt the humiliation of being beaten by this young kid and tom came away from this experience realizing that we're all in this together and that we are not ultimately separate individuals but we're all interconnected and he said it's like if you look at your hand if you look at just the fingers it looks like they're all separate if you look at the whole thing you see that they're all interconnected and that what you do to somebody else you're ultimately doing to yourself and i've heard this from experiencer after experiencer that they come back from the life review realizing that we're all the same and that the way to really get through life is by basically following the golden rule do unto others as you would have them do unto you and that's a precept of almost every religion we have and there's a reason for that and i think that's because most religions were influenced by experiences like near-death experiences mystical experiences in which this basic truth is told to them but the experiences say to me that for them the golden rule is no longer just a guideline we're supposed to follow they realize it's a law of the universe like gravity you know you can't avoid it this is the way things are period so if you want to get along in the world you need to live according to that there are just so many incredibly profound things you just shared with us there by the way i'm getting an echo um let me see if we can uh do something about it um yeah i mean let's talk about the live review first and then let's come back to the golden rule um so the idea that at that moment when we are departing from the stage of life our whole life flashes in front of us are you seeing things that we have consciously remembered and repeatedly revisited in our minds you know those experiences and moments or are you are you saying even even things that we may not be consciously you know holding on in our memories right there are often things that you haven't thought about in decades some things you have totally forgotten about that come back to you and they also report that when they relive these events they are aware of so many more things that they didn't become aware of when they're actually going through it for example i've been told that when i remember the scene i can count the mosquitoes that were hovering around me i couldn't do that when i was living it but going through the life review it slowed down and i had time to perceive all the things i didn't perceive as i was living through it it's as if time seems to expand or stop existing in the life review and they can take all the time in the world to to relive this experience wow um it almost seems to me that you know when in the spiritual world we talk about something like judgment day i mean i mean maybe it's not like uh something where one day at some point you know we will magically come out you know from our graves and be uh be you know be you know kind of like try it in some court of uh divine law maybe that is like a moment of almost like judgement day happening where it is we ourselves who are the jury yeah it is and it's sometimes they're the they're very surprised by the things that they remember for example george richie who was a psychiatrist actually uh had a near-death experience with a heart attack and he had um a life review in which he thought he would be he thought that if he had life he would remember the highlights in his life like becoming an eagle scout in the boy scouts and graduating from medical school and he said those things weren't important at all and the things that were highlighted in his in his life review were simple day-to-day events where he was helping somebody do this or that trivial things that we thought at the time but in his life review these were the important things the way he treated other people wow yeah um you know from from instinctually from from a young age i've been kind of like drawn to this visualization of what would what would i be feeling at that moment that i'm you know passing on from this light what would i be feeling in that moment as i look back at the arc of my life however long or short it was and what you've done with the life review is giving me a tangible feeling of what we may actually experience in that moment i don't know personally i found it to be um something that really grounds me you know more closer to my core uh knowing and imagining that moment that may lie ahead have you have you have you seen anything like that where uh with these uh folks that you're calling experiencers right those who've um experienced a near-death experience right yeah that when they emerge from this that it kind of like has a defining impact on the rest of their life definitely definitely um uh barbara harris had an experience when she was she had a respiratory arrest when she was in in the hospital and she had a life review and she remembered vividly having been abused as a child by her mother and this was not something she repressed she remembered it but in the life review she did it in much greater detail and she also remembered through her mother's eyes and she saw that her mother was suffering as much as she was and sort of reliving the abuse she her mother had had as a child and was caught in this pattern she didn't know how else to relate to to mothers and children and what robert got from this was that this was a pattern she and her mother and probably her mother's mother had been trapped in and was repeating through the generations and coming out of that she made a determination not to continue that with her own children and that really changed how she related as a mother so many people learned from the near death experience what things they were doing that were called mistakes interestingly they never they never talk about the concept of sins they always say i was doing this wrong and now i know how to do it right oh wow that's uh that's really special to hear here it's interesting because we're living at a period and for example in management history in business history where um there is a kind of like almost a similar discipline and an ethos that uh you know organizational experts are striving to bring into business consciousness which is uh not to make failure you know something that uh permanently you know is a scar on a team or on an individual uh to recognize that the only way we will evolve and you know come anywhere closer to our fullest potential is going to be by you know stumbling and failing but then having that discipline of learning from each of those failures yes moving forward and it's kind of like what you've just done is you know as i come from a business school with that like management thinking behind me you you've told me like actually that's what you know that experiences tend to make people reframe you know some of their past um you know acts of uh omission and commission yeah yeah and it's not it's not just the life of you but other parts of the experience as well uh help help you reassess what you've been doing in your life um and they are people often change their careers uh relationships break up after a near-death experience because people are so transformed by it and let me give you an example of that one fellow i knew steve price he was a uh kind of a rough guy he had been a high school bully and his life goal was to be in the marines and he got to join the marines and he became a sergeant in in vietnam and he was leading splatoon in battle and he was shot in the chest and he had shrapnel throughout his lungs and he was air evacuated to a hospital in the philippines for surgery and during the surgery he had a near-death experience in which he had a confrontation with deceased loved ones with a deity and came back with this feeling again that we're all in this together we're all part of something greater than ourselves we have divinity within ourselves and it's the same as the divine and when he came back from his near-death experience after he finished rehabilitation he was sent back into vietnam and found that he couldn't fire his rifle the idea of hurting someone else was just unthinkable to him now so he ended up having to leave the marines uh he ended up coming back to the states and and training to be a medical technician but i've heard similar stories from people who were police officers who after a near-death experience couldn't go back into the field and fire the guns i've heard from cutthroat businessmen who used to get ahead at other people's expense come back from a native experience saying that that just makes no sense to me anymore and they tend to run their businesses in a much more compassionate way i've known people who are in organized crime in the same way and i've known people who were addicts who just totally transformed their lives after this near-death experience so it's a it's a really transformative event and as you can imagine it often creates a lot of havoc in their lives if if their families and friends don't particularly like these changes um yeah i mean that's incredible the the range of uh characters that you have spoken about in terms of the paths they were on and then what kind of a shake-up and wake-up call they received um there's so much to unpack there i want to come back to this um you know this question about how does this how does this kind of more permanently change or shift the perspective and attitudes of those who've gone through it uh and then and then what does it mean for for the rest of us who haven't you know been been going through it i mean one of the things i want to maybe qualify for our audience here um i know this is you know quite quite obvious to you uh dr grayson because because you've shared this in your book uh is that um look i mean many of the conversations we have here in intersections are with people who have pursued a certain kind of peak performance a certain kind of well-lived life kind of you know kind of like path and and and part of our quest is to unpack from them what's that secret you know to pursuing that and to gaining that kind of like success and and this one is a little different in the following sense that uh our conversation dr grayson is is not as much about saying like wow this nde sounds like such an amazing experience i want to have it how do i get it how do i get it because perhaps we are really fortunate and not having to face yeah in any of those moments you know that um that experience of being at the brink you know something that uh most of us you know are not necessarily you know keen or looking forward to so so so the purpose of this conversation to dissect and unpack near death experiences and the impact they have is not as much to help us figure out like how to get there but uh but i want to maybe just hold the audience in a space of just curiosity right now and intrigue about well then what's the purpose of this conversation for the rest of us right hopefully hopefully a little bit of that is happening because when we understand something like the life review and the experience of i think you've shared dr grayson that it's not just from like how you were feeling in that moment but you know as you mentioned in the case of tom sawyer um you also in those life reviews tend to experience it in terms of what you were doing to others in the feelings that you were making other people experience i mean that is powerful and so there clearly there are lessons here for us for all of us so we want to come back to that but i hope in the meanwhile our audience is freely drawing their own conclusions about hey this is this insight from here that i want to take into my life right sure but before we we we talk about kind of the long-term uh growth and impact it has on the uh the experiences um what is the um you know let's look at the nge first there is a question here from from one of our uh you know uh friends in the audience henry is henry's asking how long does an nd typically last in terms of real real-time physical time yeah well in terms of our time uh your earthly time it often seems to last just a matter of seconds or minutes uh it's usually when the person is unconscious and you know their hearts and their usually the brain activity is stopped for a while and it's a very short amount of time but when you ask them what happened it takes them hours and hours to tell you about it so how can they how can this be and they say they say quite frequently that there is no time in the near-death experience they say that time didn't exist or that they they were aware that there was earth time but it didn't apply to them that time seemed to dilate and and it was all the time in the world things were all happening at once and you know that that doesn't quite make sense to me living in earth time so i put that to them i say look when you're describing your near-death experience you're describing it as a sequence of events this happened then this happened and this happened and yet you say there's no time how can you have a sequence of events without time and they just shrug and say well i know it's a paradox here now that we're back on the earth in our brains but it wasn't a paradox there everything made perfect sense there and you know this change between the way you think in the near death experience and the way you think here on earth it extends way beyond that they often say that what happened to me is indescribable i can't put it into words there are no words to describe it and one person said it's like trying to draw an odor with a crayon you can you can't do it and then we say to them sure great that's great tell me all about it you know so we make them distorted by putting into words and by doing that it sometimes doesn't make sense in words they say there's just so many words that don't come close to conveying what really happened so we know we're not getting a literal description of what happened we're getting a metaphoric description we're getting the feelings but not the actual facts if there are facts um on the other side yeah you know my my daughter um uh has a strong fondness for poetry and you know at one point i was i was asking her what does poetry mean to her both in appreciating works of you know uh literature and poetry and and doing some of her own and she says that you know poetry uh to her is a mechanism through which to express the inexpressible yeah and i found that to be very eye-opening for me because i come from a very logical logical kind of grounding having started math and logic as my core passions and and i started to realize how how true her statement was i think you're agreeing with it uh dr grayson that um you know language is such in some ways a finite construct a limiting construct for the ethereal for the ephemeral for the things that maybe lie beyond the common mass experiences of humanity which doesn't mean that those experiences are inaccessible to all of us some of us have experienced those things some perhaps might experience them commonly and all of us might experience them in some fleeting moments here or there but we just never as society come together to codify those in certain shared you know forms of language and words and semantics and all of that right and so um what you just said just struck a chord with me when you said that these people sometimes struggle to put into words what has been a very profound experience for them and many of them give up trying to use words and they will try to put it into into art paint it or try to draw it or try to write music that would convey that the sense but they just don't feel words can do it wow that is uh that is so incredibly powerful um there is one of those metaphors that you have shared in your book which i would love for you to share with our community today um and it was about when you're walking on a dark uh rainy uh you know kind of uh just yeah road right could you could you share that metaphor sure that one particular one was um someone described walking down a door in a dark road uh dark in a dark night and it's you know raining and you can't see very much and all of a sudden there's a flash of lightning and the whole world gets illuminated and you see what's on the side of the rose you can see the trees you can see everything around you and then when the lightning flashes over you're left in the dark again and you can't see it anymore but you remember what was there you remember what you saw and many people have used an analogy like this anita morgani who had a near-death experience when she was her body was ravished with with tumors and they didn't think she was going to survive she has a beautiful analogy of us living in a huge warehouse with the lights out and you have a little flashlight that you can hold and pointed at different things but you don't have any idea of what's really in the warehouse and suddenly someone turns the light on and you see that it goes on for row after row after row hundreds of feet long and all these wonderful things you never dreamt were there and the light goes out again and you're left back with your flashlight and you can shine it around but you can't see everything but you remember what's there and you come back with that knowledge wow that is uh that is so beautiful um i want to kind of probe that um in in just a couple of minutes around what is that knowledge what is the um substantive kind of ahas that again beyond the life review uh before we do that there are a couple of comments and thoughts here from our friends in the audience i'm going to just kind of read them here for a minute and and put them up here for us as well um you know pranita is asking um why do nds happen to some people and not to others um boy that's a great question you know when we do studies to try to quantify how often they happen we find generally that people who have a documented cardiac arrest where their heart stop between 10 and 20 percent of people like that will report on your death experience which means 80 to 90 don't um so why is that we've looked at all the different physiological things that are going on during the heart attack we looked at personality traits and we can't really find anything that will tell us who's going to have a near-death experience or what kind they're going to have when they come close to death so we don't really know why some people have them and some people don't now i've asked near-death experiencers the same question why do you think some people have them and some people don't and actually many of them will have more than one close brush with death and they all have a near-death experience at one of those but not with the others and they struggle with that and what they say is often something to the effect of you get what you need at the time or you get what you can handle at the time um so it's kind of a it's they put it in terms of someone out there knows what you need or what you can handle and they give it to you when you need it uh not when you're not ready for it and not when you already know it but just when you need it you get it so i mean that i have no way of testing that's not a scientific hypothesis that's just what they tell me yeah that's uh that's powerful um i'm you know scrolling through some of the chat here and there's another beautiful uh thought here which might might help us you know uh make make peace with who who gets it and who doesn't because me are saying it so beautifully that blessed are those who accept and learn from this without needing to experience it themselves yeah yeah yeah so of course you know most of our religions teach the same thing that it's all about love and it's all about compassion and it's all about altruism um but you know there are actually been studies now of people who learn about near-death experiences and looking at whether they absorb some of these same lessons and there have been several studies now four studies of college students who are going giving a course in new death experience ken ring did this at the university of connecticut chuck flynn at miami university and they test students for their attitudes at the beginning of the course and then after the course and then often a year later and they find that just taking a class in near death experiences makes these students more compassionate and more altruistic in their behavior they end up volunteering more doing more and this has been repeated with nursing students and there was actually one study in ohio with high school students who were given a class in near-death experiences and they too became much more altruistic in their behavior as a result of learning about near-death experiences so it does seem to be able to be something you can learn from without actually having to go through the experience itself wow that is that is so powerful i mean that of course in part is the purpose of uh our conversation today to help spark some of that growth in us from all of that you know rich work and beautiful work that you have done dr grayson but the idea that you can actually impart that in a very structured way as part of a curriculum for people in high school and in college at the very formative you know early stage of their lives and careers i mean is is beautiful it's remarkable very nice you mentioned dr ken ring and i i wanted to just do a shout out and thank thank uh ken i i hope um there's a chance for him to watch our conversation because he's brought us together and he um has been a very formative figure and in my investigation of these experiences from several decades ago when i first started to kind of like just stumble into some of this work and start to read it and you of course taken it to a beautiful place with uh with your work and with this book but um but it's so great to have you be part of a whole community of researchers including dr rink right who yes yes investing ken ring and i were two of the four co-founders of the international association for near-death studies and he started the journal of near-death studies and did some pioneering work um in the early 1980s on outlining what these experiences are and how they affect people yeah yeah amazing um the question here from from from gilbert right i mean do the majority of these experiences tend to focus on like here's what i didn't do right and you know where i feel or or you know or is it more than just that a great question gilbert now they do more than that um they do highlight mostly your interactions with people um but the good and the bad so to speak you know the think times you were very helpful to people and the times when you were not very helpful to people but usually your relationships rather than um achievements and awards you've gotten you know but it's how you treated other people i see i see um so this to me is the um you know the the flagship moment the capstone moment in our conversation we're about 20 odd minutes away from from wrapping up and dr grayson i i'm so struck with the the clarity the thoughtfulness the sensitivity with which you in your book profile the wide range of ways in which this experience has a lasting impact on the experiencer so could you talk a little bit about that could you talk about in what ways you know is there life impacted you've shared a little bit on you know on the physical side of like the fact that people in you know relationships with them sometimes are you know taken aback by the yes you know by the large you know shift that is happening in them you know quite instantly but could you talk about sort of like is it mostly positive or or more negative in terms of um yeah the shift in changes they go through after this well most people who have this experience talk about the positive benefits of the after effects how it set them on the quote right track in life it's like they were sent back to get to get a second chance to do it right this time um and they talk about reshaping their lives so they can do that and sometimes that means changing your profession sometimes it means just doing your profession differently and being more compassionate and how you treat your co-workers and your clients and so forth but people also talk about the challenges that this poses for them and often a spouse will not appreciate the changes um you know and it's often a mixed picture you know i mentioned tom sawyer before he was kind of a a rough guy and and his wife i got to know him very well and his wife and his kids um and his wife said well you know he he doesn't care about material things anymore we desperately need a new car he couldn't care less you know uh on the other hand he's never beaten it beaten me since he had his new death experience and he's been just so much more compassionate so it's kind of a mixed blessing for her but i do know that a lot of marriages do break up after a new death experience it's it's as if one partner has had a religious conversion the other one hasn't you know it's it's hard to deal with that often getting into couples therapy has been very helpful there are support groups for near-death experiences about 50 of them in this country and and they're all over the world many of them are sponsored by the international association for near-death studies and often families will come to those support groups and talk with other families who've gone through the same thing and figure out how they dealt with these changes but there are they're very challenging for the experience themselves to figure out how am i going to live this new life and be true to myself and still be in the physical world and it's hard for sometimes to figure it out it causes a lot of distress for them internally some you know are very unhappy about being back here if those who didn't choose to come back um they may feel depressed about it or or angry about being brought back and may take them a while to learn how to integrate the things they've learned in their experience into this life learning to integrate the things they've experienced into this life that uh sounds like a really important um responsibility you know for them to pursue isn't it um i'm i'm um picking up your book and um you know just kind of like reading a couple of sections here which um i thought were incredibly powerful you talk about the wide-ranging and long-lasting effects of the uh you know of the ndes um and you you talk about how as a psychiatrist you know how hard it is to get people to make even modest changes in their lives often requiring weeks months or years of intensive work and i know that too because i i'm a teacher around this team of personal leadership right like how to kind of approach your full potential right and yet you're saying experiences you know feel like the ndes like overhauled their lives in a matter of seconds yeah yeah that's true and you know now that i've been doing this work for so many years um i can do long-term studies and i can go back and interview people again that i interviewed in the late 1970s and early 1980s and see whether their accounts of the experience has changed over time and the after effects and what we have found is that neither one has changed what they tell us now about the experience is the same as what they told us 30 40 years ago absolutely no differences and similarly the after effects are basically the same they feel as driven to to pursue these new goals now as they did when they just first had the experience it doesn't fade over time yeah yeah and i just for you know our audiences benefit want to recount a few things that you said about some of these changes and then perhaps you can react to that uh dr grayson um you're saying that people see a different reality um you know they um they they continue to regard the world of the nde as more real than an everyday physical world yeah uh that is uh that is eye opening i i actually you know it reminds me of a moment i was uh at a film theater uh with uh with a friend of mine and for some reason you know uh we were having a conversation before the film started and um you know she was asking me a little bit about my meditation practice uh and i was just you know offering her some some some guidance and inspiration about you know how intangible but but powerful that journey is and uh and at some point she said yeah but it sounds it sounds so hard to really concretize i mean how how do you know it's how do you know it's real you know those feelings and experiences whatever it is that you're experiencing right and i instinctively not not from any kind like forethought i i just happened to share with you i said listen so and so i want you to know that i feel that experience for me is more real yeah and i believe more in it than i believe and i feel real about the fact that you and i are sitting here going to watch this movie yes and heis popped out and he said what do you mean i said well look you and i will watch this movie and it'll it'll wrap up and then we'll go back into our lives and then a few years later it'll be like a faded memory and i may not even recall what movie it was and i you know may not even recall which year we watched it and maybe at some point i'll even forget that we watched this movie and you might remind me so that way how real is it you know when the memory over time but i said but what i experienced there it's consistent and it keeps growing and building on itself and it's never it you know it's never different from what it was you know so so to that end i find that there's a sense of stability and just um yeah just uh timelessness to whatever it is that you know one experience in there so i have two questions for you one is um yeah i mean is that is that sort of like what you meant when you talk about these folks uh looking at that world is more real for them and also i'm i guess drawing a connection here between you know the pursuits that you know some people have taken on in in more mystical traditions to study consciousness from a deeper lens uh perhaps through paths for meditation and uh you know what connection opinion do you find between that and the experiences engineers go through yeah yeah jeff long who's a radiation oncologist who runs the near death experience research foundation um has found that in his sample which is several thousand near death experiences that 97 percent instance that the near death experience is more real than this physical world and i have heard that from one experience here after another one fellow i worked with um he was a college student who was uh schizophrenic his hearing voices he heard the voice of satan telling him uh that he was satan's spawn and you need to kill himself so he climbed up to the roof of his dorm and jumped off the roof and he said to me that halfway down as he was falling god spoke to him and reassured him that he was not the devil spawn he was the child of god and god was not going to let him die like this and he actually ended up breaking several bones but not not dying and when i talked to him in the hospital after that um i said no wait a minute you're telling me that you heard two voices that no one heard except you and you're saying that the voice of satan was a hallucination from your schizophrenia and the voice of god was real how can you tell them apart and what he said to me was i can't explain to you but except to say that god's voice was more real than yours is right now the way years was more real than the devil's is and i've heard that from experiencer after experiencer that they say that what happened in the nde had a noetic realist to it that this world just doesn't have wow yeah yeah thank you for sharing thank you for sharing i want to keep uh sorry go ahead did you want to well you also asked about the connection with with uh yes with uh meditation and other phrases of course the near-death experience is not the only way of reaching this um mystical state if you want to call it that um this otherworldly realm and that there have been mystical traditions throughout the ages from different religions different spiritual traditions to get to this other state so i think the near-death experience is just one of the most reliable ways we have now of getting there but i questions the most traumatic way as well you know but you can certainly get the same experience the same message from other means as well one difference though is that when you engage in a spiritual tradition to get there you usually have training to do it and you have um you have the intent to get there you're trying to do it and you have guides either in person or in writing to help you understand and integrate that into your life whereas the near-death experience comes to you unexpected and unbidden you don't look for it it just comes upon you you're totally unprepared for it and you don't have a guide to help you understand it when you come back so i think for that reason some of the after effects may be different because it was so unexpected and something you didn't prepare for it may have more profound impact for that reason because you weren't trying to get it sometimes when you like try to take psychedelic drugs to have an experience when you come back you may say well it wasn't really real i was taking the drugs and with the near-death experience you don't have that excuse to say no it wasn't real because i did this or that it was just there it was an experience you had that you weren't trying to have um thank you for that thank you for that i i love that connection i love that connection um i want to read a couple of other quotes from your book and and part of it is because i i want to really encourage our audience to um to go out and get it i i think that you know there's there's so much richness to this conversation dr grayson and you're you're very gracious to have made the time for us today and at the same time there is so much additional richness you know to the stories and thoughts that you have in your book that for me it's going to be a a reference source you know for a long time to come for a long time to come so just a couple of things which i i by the way you you write beautifully you write deeply so thank you for integrating so much sensitivity and spirituality and just um just a kind of like a higher kind of level of consciousness even in the way you talk about higher consciousness you know i i love it so here you're saying you're saying people who've experienced an nge they seem to have increased compassion and concern for others and a sense of connection to and desire to serve other people which often leads to more altruistic behavior experiences tend to see themselves as integral parts of a benevolent and purposeful universe in which personal gain particularly at someone else's expense is no longer relevant they also report feeding greater understanding acceptance and tolerance of others aren't those the kinds of qualities that we are really hurting for right now in humanity oh yes to experience and practice more yeah yeah indeed they are and uh you know it's kind of our hope that that as word gets out about these near-death experiences that may eventually affect uh our culture and our society and people in power who are directing our society you know there have been major uh world figures who have had near-death experiences often as a result of a heart attack and led them to change their their uh behavior and change their their policies and one good example of that was anwar sadat um the president of egypt who after his near-death experience engaged in the the peace talks that jimmy carter orchestrated between israel and egypt another was mikhail gorbachev of the soviet union who after his near-death experience worked with uh with ronald reagan and then did tear down the berlin wall and stop being as belligerent as he had been before so there aren't examples of this but often it comes not from the top but from below from the common people enough of them having enough of a change becoming more enlightened and that brings about a change in society that is incredible i did not know those stories about animals gorbachev of course one knows about what they did in that moment but one hadn't really linked it to certain you know trigger events like that um of course they didn't say it was linked to that i'm just drawing it because it did happen right after their near-death experience yeah yeah wow how incredible how incredible um and radha has a beautiful thought she says when the opportunity of being born as a human is taken away one realizes you know what a gift one had and perhaps uh you know may not have used it you know for the right realization and so you know she's on a you know a trail of thoughts here and and there are some universal perhaps right ways of living as human beings and most might shut out that inner voice that may may be guiding us but instead be guided by influences of society and desires and ambitions and when one is losing that gift of the human body maybe things become a lot clearer yeah yeah that raises another point in my mind that um some people said that this is just the effect of coming of almost losing your life and that makes you re-evaluate what happens and and that's true but people who almost lose their life and don't have a new death experience don't have all the same range of after effects as near-death experiences do they tend to value life more dearly after they've almost lost it but that often makes them more cautious more frightened of losing their lives and more conservative in that in their behavior whereas near-death experiencers lose their fear of death and dying and they come back having an increased uh joy of life because they're not afraid of losing it so they end up engaging more fully in life living more in the present and taking more chances because they're not afraid of losing it they end up leaving a leading life that's more meaningful and fulfilling than otherwise okay just out of my mathematical bend i want to just pause here for a second just to help our audience and me connect between uh these two different kind of contrasting states that you've talked about so one is where somebody's had a near-death experience and the other is where somebody has nearly lost their life and i know at the very beginning of our conversation you define what a near-death experience is but it might be helpful for our audience to recognize the difference between those two so we don't conflate them so if you could just um you know for a moment just tell us when somebody is just uh you know uh going through an experience where they've almost lost their life you know why may that not be a near-death experience yeah well many people do come close to death or front may be pronounced dead but don't have any conscious experience that they can remember so we can't call that a near-death experience it's no near-death event but they didn't experience anything whereas people have a new death experience when they have this close brush with death they actually have this experience of being in another realm or leaving their bodies or having the life review and engaging in active thought which alone is is amazing that they can have this complex experience when their brains are not really functioning very well we have no explanation for how that could be yeah yeah beautiful um there's another piece i want to read from your writings about the impact this has on on people and um you say that those who have near death experiences show a greater zest for life have a more intense appreciation for nature and friendship yes and live more fully in the moment without concern for the impression that they might make yes yes yeah they you know they feel that in this other realm they still existed and felt wonderful without the usual labels that we put on ourselves here you know i'm a male i'm a certain age i'm an american you know i've got a certain political affiliation a religious familiation maybe and those things were not part of who they were in the afterlife and yet they felt better without them so they come back no longer really valuing all those distinctions that make us different from other people and what they value are the things that make us the same as every other one every other person the same universal feelings everyone has the same sense of connection to everyone else and they feel that they come back realizing that they are part of something greater than themselves you know this was driven home to me as a as a psychiatrist when i heard knee death experiences say that they're no longer afraid of death i started worrying if i was going to make people more suicidal because i know people who are tired of this life are often deterred from taking their lives because they're afraid of something that's going to happen if they die so i did a study of people who made suicide attempts and i compared those who had a near-death experience as a result of the attempt with those who didn't and what we found was that people who had a near-death experience after their suicide attempt were far less suicidal after it than people who didn't have a need of experience and again ken ring repeated that study with another population that found the same thing and when i asked the experiencers why this was they said again when you lose your fear of dying you lose your fear of living and you come back with a sense of the purpose of everything that goes on here and even my suffering becomes something i'm supposed to learn from not something to run away from and you can gain from every experience you have so they tend to dig into life and explore everything they're doing in great detail and getting the most out of it and they live their lives much more intently intensively much more mindfully and they get more fully involved and feel find it much more fulfilling and that makes them their life seem so much more worth living than it was before yeah when you lose your fear of dying you lose your fear of living yes what a powerful idea what a possible idea um dr grayson um you know there's one last piece that i want to invite you to kind of weigh in on um and again i'm quoting from you from your book um you say many experiences like this one that you're profiling in this chapter christine they report that the most meaningful change after an nd is an increase in the sense of spirituality yes and you also talk there about what spirituality means which i thought was quite beautiful he said it is the aspect of the personal lives that includes something beyond the usual senses and a personal search for inspiration meaning and purpose a quest to connect with something greater than themselves yeah yeah this is something that i grew up without any type of religious or spiritual background and and i didn't have any of that and as far as i could tell i wasn't missing anything and i didn't see the need for that but i've seen from the near death experiences how important that aspect of life is to enriching your life and making it as full as it can possibly be and i think other people have this experience or have this sense of spirituality without realizing it it's just a sense of there being something greater than the physical world and the fact that you are something more than just this physical body there's more to you than just that and that what there is that's beyond this physical body is the same that everyone else has and the same that divinity is made of and if you realize that and live that then you see the divinity in everyone else as well and that makes you become more compassionate towards other people who may seem on the surface to be very different from you but you know now that they are the same as you hmm that is so special that is so beautiful um you know i it struck me as we come to the end of this hour and there's one last question i want to pose to you before we before we wrap up would you be open to that just a few moments yeah thank you um is that often in these conversations i am you know inviting the audience to like pose questions and to share comments and all of this and this time i've been like so spellbound by the conversation we've been having that i've forgotten to do that and on the other hand the irony and the paradox is that when i look at the chat window it is replete you know with so much um conversational questions that are happening anyways so it's so you got us both in your grip you know the audience and me and i think there's there's just so much engagement yeah and uh stirring that you've caused yeah so thank you um and uh and i guess you know a two-part kind of like last little you know kind of piece you know to inquire from you what one is i really like you know in your book the um conversation that you you know invite us to have about the relationship between science and spirituality to actually um you know take these two disciplines that in in the past may you know have been at odds you know with each other but you actually see them as ultimately pursuing the same end and um you know disciplines that can be very complementary to each other yes yes yeah yeah i i grew up in a scientific tradition and that's still what i feel is me and i can't not think in those terms but i've come to appreciate the spiritual approach also as i've gone through the decades of this research and i i feel that both science and spirituality are both trying to get at the truth using a different set of tools and i've come to appreciate that using one alone does not give you a full picture of the universe you need to actually see both sides and what i find is that great scientists like albert einstein and great spiritual leaders like the dalai lama also say the same thing that science and spirituality are complementary they're not conflicting at all they're both different ways of helping us understand ourselves and our role in the universe and you need to appreciate both approaches to understand what's really going on dr grayson i i see you as an exemplary um story uh of uh what a scientist uh truly you know should be um this this capacity in you to zoom out to inquire to ask the hardest questions to pursue what otherwise might be considered to be immeasurable and to do it you know with a long-term intent of just helping advance the discipline in slow but very tangible steps um and to be able to through that bring about some amount of i'm guessing and i'm sensing from our conversation some personal transformation as well yes yes um could you talk about that as a last part of a conversation which is um you know how how has this pursuit you know changed you well of course as i said you know i started out without any sense of what the spiritual world was like anyway um and i had serious doubts when i first started doing this work that that was real that it wasn't just imaginary and we did several studies to differentiate this mystical experience from mental illness and we found there was actually no overlap at all when you look at what's really going on with these two and i've published several papers that are referenced in my book documenting the differences between fantasies and dreams and hallucinations and these near-death experiences so i've come to appreciate over the decades that we need to understand spirituality and be open to this when i started off i was a hardcore materialist scientist i thought we're going to have all the answers before too long and now i'm very comfortable with the idea that we're not going to have the answers and that's fine you know it we don't have to understand it because our brains are too simple to understand it and maybe when we leave leave our brains we will understand it fully you know i don't know what's going to happen when we die because people who have been there and back tell me that there are no words for it so how can i possibly understand it um and i i believe that um i'm still i'm still a skeptic at heart and i there's part of me that says you're misinterpreting this whole thing there's really a very simple explanation for it i can't imagine what it is but i have those doubts of course but i think the preponderance of the evidence suggests to me that death is not the end and that even though i don't know what happens afterwards i'm fairly confident that something is waiting for us out there and it's not something to be feared yeah thank you so much this has been incredibly illuminating and inspiring as you might be seeing from some of the uh guests reactions as well dr grayson i um you know it reminds me this last piece of what you've shared um you know um about a quote from from einstein one of the figures you mentioned who was clearly a very renowned scientist and a path breaker but also deeply spiritual you know and he said once i'm sure you know this uh thought from him he said there are two ways you know by which you can live one is as though nothing is a miracle and the other is as though like everything is miracle yes yeah so beautiful well um i want to wish you god speed and that you continue to advance the you know very very important you know uh discipline of near death studies um what is your what is your next big dream in life as you uh continue to add and contribute to this to this work uh and maybe we'll end with that last word from you where are you going to take this discipline well i i think i feel very good that this the next step will not be mine um that in fact there is a new generation of near-death researchers all over the world a large group in belgium a large group in new zealand you know they're all over the world who are pursuing this with different areas of expertise than i have and different outlooks than i have so that i can't imagine what the next steps are going to be because they're beyond my level of expertise but i feel confident that the work is is going to go on for a long period of time yes that's wonderful so folks uh on that note let us um you know thank dr grayson and and uh billy madue and wish him well on that journey in helping nurture and develop the next generation of near-death experience researchers and uh the book after a doctor explores what near-death experiences reveal about life and beyond is now available at amazon or your you know neighborhood bookstore so thank you so much dr grayson for for joining us for this and we you know wish you all the best in both life and in your work thank you atendra i've enjoyed this very much [Music] thank you folks and we will be seeing you soon for another episode of intersections uh thank you for bringing an openness and a curiosity and so much heart and you know your own stories as well to our conversation today keep it going uh have a great next couple of weeks and we'll be in touch [Music] so [Music] you

Channel: Hitendra Wadhwa

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Length: 68min 40sec (4120 seconds)

Published: Thu Mar 11 2021