Dr. Bruce Greyson on Near-Death Experiences (Transcript)
The transcript of our 2021 interview.
In 2022, I interviewed Dr. Bruce Greyson, Professor Emeritus of Psychiatry at the University of Virginia and author of After: A Doctor Explores What Near-Death Experiences Reveal About Life and Beyond. This is a transcript of our hour-long interview.
Dr. Greyson has spent nearly 50 years researching near-death experiences—the profound events many people report when they come close to death or are pronounced clinically dead.
Back then, I was doing “Understandably Live” interviews where I’d invite readers to join via Zoom. Many of the questions you’ll see below came directly from readers who were participating in real-time.
The transcript is AI-generated, and it’s pretty good! But it’s not 100% perfect, so please forgive any odd phrasings or minor errors.
Introduction and Housekeeping
Bill Murphy Jr.: All right, I’ve got one o’clock by my watch Eastern time. So we’re going to get started here a bit. Hello, everybody. I’m Bill Murphy. I am very happy to have with me today, Dr. Bruce Greyson, who’s the author of a really interesting book, called After: A Doctor Explores What Near Death Experiences Reveal about Life and Beyond.
For those of you who are new, this is understandably.com. This time, I’m going to remember to plug the newsletter at the beginning of the video, which I haven’t always done. It’s not just videos, it’s not just YouTube, it’s a daily newsletter at understandably.com and I hope you’ll sign up for that if you haven’t already.
We have close to 100 people who signed up for this today, we’ve got 37 of us in here now, probably more will join as we go along. The way this works. First off, if you want to say hello in the chat, you’re welcome to let people know where you are.
And as we go here, I know a lot of people have actually read Dr. Greyson’s book and have a real interest in this whole topic of near death experiences. So, if you have questions you’d like to suggest we’re going to do is we’re going to ask you put them in the chat function. And I’ll just ask them again, so we don’t bounce around from one person to the other.
We’re still working out the kinks of this new series, as you know, but I think it’s going pretty well. And I wanted to plug we have another of these coming up on Monday. Actually, it’s kind of serendipitous that this worked out, this is going to be Peter Zheutlin.
I’m probably mispronouncing his name, but we can all make fun of how badly I did that next week. He’s a New York Times bestselling author, and he’s got a new book out called spin. It’s wildly serendipitous that I met him because I was actually planning to write about an explore what he wrote an entire book about, and then we connected and it’s in the book has just come out.
So I’m going to explain that whole story tomorrow and have a sign up link again, and the video interview itself will be Monday. And finally, there is a sign over my desk that says understandably is not a newsletter. It has a newsletter.
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We keep the camera pointed this way and not over there and all the boxes. With that, let me just let a couple more people join the room here. Just as a quick recap, you’re going to say hello in the chat, if you like and if you have questions as we go along, just put them in the chat.
And that’s where we’ll, I’ll take a look at them. And go ahead. So Dr. Greyson, thank you so much for being here.
Dr. Bruce Greyson: My pleasure Bill, great to be with you.
Bill Murphy Jr.: Dr. Greyson is the author of after a doctor explores with near death experiences reveal about life and beyond. He is Professor Emeritus in psychology at the University of Virginia, and he has spent decades studying near death experiences.
Defining Near-Death Experiences
Bill Murphy Jr.: Can you tell us to begin with what’s the near death experience?
Dr. Bruce Greyson: A near death experience or NDE is a profound experience that many people have when they are close to death or sometimes pronounced dead. And they include such features as leaving the physical body, encountering some other realm or dimension that seems to be not the physical world, encountering a little loving being of light, maybe reviewing your life, meeting deceased loved ones, and at some point coming to a decision to return to the body or being sent back against your will.
And for me, as a psychiatrist, the most interesting part of it is not the experience itself. But What happens afterwards is a profound set of after effects that are typical after any death experience.
Bill Murphy Jr.: See, I want to ask you what those are. But I also want to ask you to begin with.
Dr. Greyson’s Personal Journey Into NDE Research
Bill Murphy Jr.: How did... this is such an interesting topic, but you’re the first psychiatrist I’ve ever met who studied them. How did you get interested in this and how did you develop an expertise in it?
Dr. Bruce Greyson: Well, it was kind of strange. I was raised in a scientific household. My father was a chemist. There was never a talk about anything spiritual or religious in my family.
We just was a physical world we lived and we didn’t know Is there anything else and when you died, you died and that was the end of it. And that was fine with us. That’s the way the world was.
So I went through college and medical school with that materialistic mindset. And when I was starting my psychiatric training the first few weeks, I was asked to see a patient in the emergency room who had overdosed. As it happened I was in the cafeteria having my dinner when my pager went off.
And I was a green intern and I didn’t know what I was doing and the pager scared the dickens out of me. So I dropped my fork and spilled a little spaghetti on my tie. So I didn’t, I couldn’t really take it off, I didn’t have time.
So I just put on a white lab coat and buttoned it up so you couldn’t see it. And I went down to the emergency room to see the patient and she was totally unconscious. I could not arouse her no matter what I did.
But her roommate was waiting to see me; her roommate had brought her in. So I went down the hall to another room where her roommate was and I talked to her for about 15, 20 minutes. This was a swelteringly, hot Virginia evening, and there was no air conditioning back in the 70s.
So, I sort of unbuttoned my coat so I wouldn’t sweat so much. exposing the stain without knowing it. Talked about 15 minutes and then finished with her.
When I went to shake her hand, I realized that my stain was showing us a button that up again quickly, went back to see the patient and she was still unconscious. So she was admitted to the intensive care unit overnight. And I went to see her the following morning when she was awake.
And she was just barely, she could barely open her eyes. And I started to introduce myself when she stopped me and said, I know who you are. I remember you from last night.
Well, that kind of stunned me because I didn’t know how that could be. So I said to her. I’m surprised I thought you were out cold when I saw you.
And then she opened her eyes and looked at me and said, not in my room. I saw you talking to Susan down the hall. I didn’t know what to make of that.
As far as I could tell. The only way she could have done that as if she had left her body and followed me down the hall and leaving your body made no sense. As far as I could tell I was my body.
How do you leave it? So I sort of fumbling around what to say next. And she realized how confused I was.
So then she spoke up and told me about the conversation I had with her roommate. What I said, what the roommate answered, where we were sitting What the rooms like, and finally she said, and you have a red stain on your tie. Blew me away.
I don’t know what to make of this.
Bill Murphy Jr.: Wow.
Dr. Bruce Greyson: But I realized I had a job to do there.
Bill Murphy Jr.: I want to interrupt you real quick. So this is when you just first started practicing. Right, a doctor?
Dr. Bruce Greyson: a few weeks into my internship in psychiatry.
Bill Murphy Jr.: I think I read this is like the 1970s or so
Dr. Bruce Greyson: Yeah, About 1970.
Bill Murphy Jr.: This is what you conclude... it was a near death experience. I assume her condition was...
Dr. Bruce Greyson: Well, we didn’t have the word Near Death Experience. I don’t know what to make of it. I have no box to put it in.
So it was just sort of a stunning thing I couldn’t make any sense out of it. But I had to push my feelings out of the way and deal with her confusion. Now she was there because she attempted suicide.
So I dealt with that with her suicidal thoughts, what was going on her life and so forth, and tried to push my confusion into the back of my mind. And then in the next few days, as I tried to process this, I figured this couldn’t have happened. It had to be a trick of some kind.
Maybe the nurses were playing a trick on me colluding with her they told her about I didn’t know how to understand it.
Bill Murphy Jr.: Yeah. And so
Dr. Bruce Greyson: I didn’t dare tell anybody. If I told my colleagues, they’d think I was crazy.
Bill Murphy Jr.: That was my next question. What do you tell people? Whether you thought this is something to study right away? Or this is just an experiment?
Dr. Bruce Greyson: No, it scared the dickens out of me. I don’t know what I didn’t want to deal with it.
Bill Murphy Jr.: So what was it I took it from this personal experience you had as a clinician to something study?
Dr. Bruce Greyson: About five years later, one of my colleagues at the University of Virginia, Raymond Moody, wrote a book called life after life, in which he gave us the name near death experiences, and describe what they were like. And I realized for the first time that this thing that my patient told me about years earlier, was not just one crazy patient talking about things. It was a worldwide phenomenon that was quite common.
I still couldn’t make any sense of it. I didn’t know how to explain it. But as a scientist, that meant I should study it.
It’s not scientific to pretend things don’t happen, because you can’t understand them. So I moved towards it. I started collecting other cases.
And I started writing about it. And the more I wrote, the more cases I collected, people sent sent their, letters to me phone calls to me, this was long before the days of email. We didn’t have an intranet, but they wrote to me.
And they, they wanted to share their experiences. And that started my process of trying to understand it. And now, here I am almost 50 years later, still trying to understand it.
Founding the International Association for Near-Death Studies
Bill Murphy Jr.: Yeah, I saw you. You discussed setting up. I don’t want to like group therapy or group meetings of people that have had these experiences. When was that? And what did they learn from that?
Dr Bruce Greyson: Well, there were a group of scholars at different universities who wrote to Raymond Moody at that time saying, I’d like to study this phenomenon. So he brought them all together at the University of Virginia and we had a big meeting. And four of us decided to start an organization to support each other because we were all in isolation at different universities working on our own and we figured we need some help.
So we formed this organization which became the International Association for near death studies, and still going now 50 years later. But we quickly realized that the real need was not to help the researchers that were thought of originally. But it was a need with experiencers themselves, who were having tremendous trouble trying to understand what happened to them, and trying to figure out how I go back to my normal life after this.
Bill Murphy Jr.: Yeah.
Dr. Bruce Greyson: So we started organizing, basically support groups for near death experiencers where we lived. And at the time I was in, I had moved to Connecticut. So I started a group up there.
And we met once a month for a couple of hours in the evening. And we had about 30 or 40 people coming every time. And quickly, there were 30, 40, 50 groups like this all over the country.
Now they’re all over the world sponsored by the International Association for Near Death Studies. And they form, they function sort of like an AA group where someone will talk about the problems they’re having with this, and also chime in with how they dealt with a problem. And it’s really helpful for them.
Common Reactions: Dreams vs. Reality
Bill Murphy Jr.: I can imagine. So, you know, Exhibit A, would be the number of people that responded when I said, I was going to interview you that there’s a lot of interest and interest in this now maybe a little bit less skepticism than there once was. But I’m wondering, especially early on, did people come and think this was a dream or something they didn’t want to tell their family and friends about? Or were they talking about it non stop, and they couldn’t stop? And now somebody said, Oh, you know, there are other people? Well,
Dr. Bruce Greyson: Yeah.
Bill Murphy Jr.: What was that dynamic?
Dr. Bruce Greyson: Well, the people who have the experience, had no doubt that this is a real experience. They say almost invariably, it’s realer than real. What happened in this other realm, or the dimension, whatever you want to call it was more real than this world is.
But they don’t know how to explain it. It didn’t really fit what their religion told them was going to happen when you die. But once we put them together with other experiencers, they realized, I’m not the only crazy person here.
We’ve all had this experience. And it’s real. It’s not just something my mind made up.
This is something that really happens to people. And that’s been very helpful for them.
Bill Murphy Jr.: We’ve had a couple of people join here, just want to remind everybody we have Dr. Bruce Greyson, author of After: A Doctor Explorers What Near Death Experiences Reveal about Life and Beyond. It’s funny how those of you who’ve been with me since the beginning of this, you know, I’m trying to internalize, is this, I’m just letting a bunch of people sit in as I interview people, I normally would, or it’s funny to me how it changes a little bit to like a radio interview where I have to remind people to have joined what we’re doing here.
But I just want to do that. And I want to say, if you have questions you’d like to ask, drop them in the chat here. And we’ll kind of get to them as we go on here.
Returning to the Body
Bill Murphy Jr.: You mentioned, I wanted to ask you more about the people’s experiences. And I want to drill on one thing that actually you said twice here, one, the notion that this experience in the near death experience almost seemed more real than the real world to them. And then the second piece, this just hit me, where you said they returned to the body returned to their bodies against their will at least sometimes.
I just found that really interesting. If you want to talk about that a little bit.
Dr. Bruce Greyson: Yeah. Many people say that. They made a decision during this experience, that they had to come back for some particular reason they had a child to raise, or they had an elderly parent to take care of, or something like this.
And they chose to come back. Or they went through a life review and decided, I haven’t been living the way I should; I want a chance to go back and do it again, right this time. But a number of them say, I was given a choice to stay there or come back to life.
And I chose to stay there. And I was told, No, you can’t. It’s not your time yet.
You’ve got more work to do, you’re going back. And some of them were very angry about that. When they came back, they found that they were very sad or angry at being back in this world again, if they happen to be on an operating table, they were furious at the doctors for bringing them back.
And I found that when I tried to talk with them about this and tried to help them through it. They just would shake their head and say you don’t understand. And this is where I found the support groups to be tremendously helpful.
Because talking to other experiencers who have the same feelings and dealt with them themselves was very helpful in helping them get over these initial feelings of sadness and anger.
The Al Sullivan Case: Out-of-Body Verification
Bill Murphy Jr.: You, in the newsletter where I said we’d be talking I quoted one of the stories I believe a truck driver from Connecticut named Al Sullivan
Dr. Bruce Greyson: Yeah.
Bill Murphy Jr.: And what it was striking about it was just it was such an unusual thing he saw.
Dr. Bruce Greyson: Yeah
Bill Murphy Jr.: I was wondering you know, you can tell that wonder if there are other just unusual or even funny, there must be humor that comes through in some of these experiences.
Dr. Bruce Greyson: A lot of people have a sense of leaving the body in the near death experience, and many of them will be able to look down and see their bodies. Some are surprised to see their by some a surprise to they don’t recognize them at first, until they see off my class ring on my finger. They realize oh yeah, that’s me.
But Al was a huge unusual case because he was a 55 year old truck driver. started having this tremendous chest pain as was on his rounds. And he actually worked for the hospital, you know, bringing x-rays around from one hospital to another.
So he drove to the nearest hospital and right to the emergency room and walked in. And they did a quick evaluation and found that for the vessels going through his heart were blocked. So they rushed him to the operating room for an emergency quadruple bypass surgery, quite a long operation.
And he said, after he was anesthetized, and was unconscious, and was laying there on the table, he woke up, and he left his physical body. And he rose up above the table, and looked down to see his body with the drapes over it, and people starting to cut through his chest. And he said, he saw his surgeon, flapping the elbows like he was trying to fly.
Now, at this point, when I met out, I’ve been a doctor for about 30 years. I’ve never seen anything like this. Never heard anything about this, you know, you don’t see doctors on TV doing things like that.
So I assumed that this wasn’t real, this is a hallucination Al was having during his operation. But he insisted it was true. So he urged me to ask his doctor about it.
So a few days after the operation, I approached his surgeon, and I said, you know, this is what Al told me what about it? And he sheepishly told me Yeah, that’s true. I developed a strange habit, I’ve never seen anyone else do it.
I let my assistant start the operation, while I put on my sterile gown and gloves. And then I walk into the operating room. And I watched them start the procedure.
And while I’m doing that, I don’t want to risk touching anything that’s not sterile. So I put my palms where I know they won’t touch anything, flat against my sterile gown. And then I point things out to them with my elbows, so I don’t touch anything with my fingers.
And he demonstrated just what Al did flapping his arms just trying to fly. I don’t think there’s any way that l could have known that.
Bill Murphy Jr.: Sure.
Dr. Bruce Greyson: Unless you’ve been watching it.
Life-Altering After-Effects
Bill Murphy Jr.: You also talked about, well, actually, you alluded to here, but in some of the things I read in preparation for this, you talk about people coming out and having major life changes, like police officers and soldiers who say I can’t be around anything that may require violence. Can you talk a little bit about that?
Dr. Bruce Greyson: Sure, there’s a consistent pattern of After Effects that people have, when they come back from a near death experience, they become typically become much more spiritual than they were before. They become, they have a sense of strong connection to other people, to the natural world to the divine. They feel like they’re still in contact with the divine somehow when they come back here, they’re much more compassionate because of that much more caring, their behavior becomes much more altruistic.
And they become much more interested in relationships and things. They tend to devalue things of this world, material possessions and physical objects. Things like power, prestige, fame, competition, these are no longer important to them.
And that sounds like it might be a good change, but it can actually wreak havoc in their lives. I’ve seen marriages fall apart, because of these sudden changes. And as you mentioned, their are careers that fell apart well and fell alone.
Will was a fellow I knew. He was he was a police officer, and he bled out during a surgical operation and had a near death experience. And when he came back from that, he was totally transformed.
He tried to go back into his job and found that he just couldn’t shoot his gun. The idea of shooting someone else was just unthinkable. So he had to change careers and he actually went back to school and trained to become a teacher.
Well, I knew his family pretty well also, and they said that he can’t watch television because there’s too much violence on TV. So they send him to the bedroom while they watch TV.
Encountering the Deceased
Bill Murphy Jr.: How about...
Dr. Bruce Greyson: Yeah, go ahead.
Bill Murphy Jr.: No, I was gonna say How about I think you mentioned this or maybe it’s what I read but the notion of encountering people that have deceased you know, pre deceased you that were loved ones and whatnot.
Dr. Bruce Greyson: Right. This is fairly common in near death experience that you encounter deceased loved ones or family members friends. And this is often dismissed by debunkers by saying, well, that’s just expectation, wishful thinking, you know, you think you’re dying.
So of course, you want to be greeted by your parents or grandparents. So you imagine meeting them. And that might explain some of these encounters with deceased people.
But there are a number of cases where the near death experiencer will l meet people who are dead but who no one knew had died yet. Which kind of takes expectation off the table. And we have, about 10 years ago, I published a paper in a medical journal with about 30 or 40 of these cases, and the earliest one I found was published by Pliny the Elder in the first century story about some Roman nobleman.
But one that I knew personally was a fellow who was a 25 year old, technical writer, who was admitted to the hospital with severe pneumonia. And he had repeated respiratory arrest for he couldn’t breathe. And he had one primary nurse in the hospital, who was about his age, who was very friendly with him and worked with them every day.
And one day she told him, she was taking the long weekend off, and he would have other nurses substituting during that weekend. So he wished her well and sent her off. And over that weekend, while she was gone, he had another respiratory arrest, where he had to be resuscitated.
And during that arrest, he had a near death experience. And he found himself in another world in a beautiful pastoral scene. And they’re coming towards him was his nurse, Anita.
So he does a double take and says, I need to what are you doing here? And she said, You can’t stay here, Jack, you need to go back to your body. And I want you to find my parents and tell them, I’m sorry that I wrecked the red MGB.
then she turned and walked away. He then woke up back in his body, in his hospital bed with a vivid memory of this experience. And the first time a nurse walked into his room, he started to tell her about this.
She got very upset and rushed out of the room. Well, it turned out that his nurse, Anita, had taken the weekend off to celebrate her 21st birthday. And her parents had surprised her with the gift of a red MGB.
Bill Murphy Jr.: Oh, wow
Dr. Bruce Greyson: She got very excited, jumped in the car, took off for a drive, lost control of the car, crashed into a telephone pole and died instantly. A few hours before he had his near death experience.
Bill Murphy Jr.: Wow.
Dr. Bruce Greyson: There’s no way he could have expected her to die.
Bill Murphy Jr.: yeah.
Dr. Bruce Greyson: And certainly no way you could have known how she died. And yet he did.
The Question of Reality and Evidence
Bill Murphy Jr.: So that story kind of illustrates a point that I was thinking, which is that, and this must be your entire life. Maybe I’m wrong about this. And but in terms of people asking about this, which is, on the one hand, that’s somewhat comforting to think there are other things.
On the other hand, it’s almost impossible to prove empirically, right? I mean, you can’t set up a control group of some people who have near death experiences and some who won’t, or some who will come right, close to dying. So but I also hear you saying that, as a psychiatrist, that you might look at this originally as like, Let’s investigate if this is real.
Dr. Bruce Greyson: yeah.
Bill Murphy Jr.: But then secondarily and maybe it becomes the primary thing is, whether or not it’s real. Let’s look at how it affects people’s lives after.
Dr. Bruce Greyson: Exactly
Bill Murphy Jr.: I see.
Dr. Bruce Greyson: Now, I do want to say, though, we can corroborate some of these, such as you know, as seeing the searcher flag, we can talk to the surgeon and see that is exactly right. And we have many, many cases of this. Jan Holden, a professor at University of North Texas, looked at more than 100 cases in which people reported seeing things from an out of body perspective that were potentially verifiable.
And she found that 92% of them were verified by third parties as completely accurate. 6% had some mistakes in it, and only 1% was wrong. So it’s not just the rare one that’s accurate.
The vast majority, almost all of them are completely accurate perceptions.
Bill Murphy Jr.: Interesting. I’m going to share a couple of questions here. Now, this is how this works
Audience Questions: The Sixth Sense, Tibetan Book of the Dead, and Proof of Heaven
Bill Murphy Jr.: sometimes where one person asks, Let me read it here. Can you please share your thoughts about the sixth sense and the Tibetan Book of the Dead? And also, can you comment on the book Proof of Heaven? Now? I think I saw the movie The Sixth Sense. I’m not familiar with Tibetan Book of the Dead, and I have not read the book Proof of Heaven. But this is it, now I’m a conduit to kind of, and if we don’t have a specific thing about those maybe it’s just a broader question about how this is portrayed in art and history and fiction and whatnot.
Dr. Bruce Greyson: Well, The Tibetan Book of the Dead, laid out what happens to you after you die. And it has a lot of things in common with near death experiences. But it’s kind of a rigid.
On day one, this happens and on day two, this happens on day three, this happens for seven day course of what happens to the body to the soul after you die. And near death experiences don’t exactly follow that. And furthermore, the ones we know about, didn’t go on for seven days.
They went on for just a matter of minutes or seconds in our time. However, near Death Experiencers almost unanimously say there was no sense of time over there. Time something we have in the physical world is Not true over there, there’s no time over there.
So, you know, when he asked them how long it took, if they say, well, could have been seconds could have been eternity, who knows, you know, just doesn’t matter. So one of the things that the Tibetan Book of the Dead says is that all these visions you see in your journey, are not real. There are things that are there like thought forms that are there to distract you from your concentration, you need to just go through those and kind of ignore them, and proceed to where you’re going.
Of course they also think all of this physical world is an illusion as well. So it’s kind of the same thing.
Bill Murphy Jr.: I don’t want to go pontificating about something I haven’t read. But it’s interesting to explain that I see so many analogies to, you know, more ancient cultures that have the notion of a physical journey you have to travel through to get into an afterworld.
Dr. Bruce Greyson: Right.
Bill Murphy Jr.: And the last thing you said made me think of Elon Musk, and these people that say, basically prove to me we’re not all in a computer simulation.
Dr. Bruce Greyson: Yeah,
Bill Murphy Jr.: Let me pass along another couple of questions here that I want to come back to a couple of mine. But one is from somebody just a little bit of skepticism, I read an article about a doctor who put specific markings in the operating room like markings in a ceiling light and said the patients who said they had these experiences could not identify them. Do you have any knowledge about that? or thoughts?
The AWARE Study: Hidden Targets Experiment
Dr. Bruce Greyson: Right, I was actually part of that study. There have been six studies like that have been published. But the one he’s talking about was spearheaded by Sam Parnia, who’s originally from England.
But now he’s working at NYU in New York. And he put together a consortium of 30 different hospitals. Most of them were in England and in Europe.
Interestingly, only one in the entire US got permission from the hospital staff to do the study. And that was mine at the University of Virginia. Even Sam’s own hospital wouldn’t let him do it.
But what they did was, they put hidden targets on shelves on the on the high end in the corner of the room, where they could only be seen by looking down from above. And we put them in hospital rooms where people were likely to have a cardiac arrest. And then when that happened, they would go and ask the people what happened when your heart stopped did you see anything unusual, and so forth.
And about 10% to 20% of people whose heart stop will report having a near death experience. And about 30% or 40% of those will report leaving their bodies. This study that Sam started, it’s called the aware study ended up studying 2000 patients over the 30 hospitals.
And in those, of those, he found nine people out of the 2000, who said they had something that was at least vaguely like a near death experience. Only two reported leaving their bodies. And neither one happened to be in a room that had one of these targets placed.
So it’s true that no one identified the target no one saw the target.
Bill Murphy Jr.: I see
Dr. Bruce Greyson: No one misidentified it either. So it didn’t provide any evidence one way or the other about whether people can accurately see from an out of body perspective.
Bill Murphy Jr.: Interesting.
Dr. Bruce Greyson: Now I should say that I mentioned that there were six studies published of this, the six studies came up with a total of 12 patients who claimed to have left their bodies not a big number. And not one of them saw the target. So they didn’t identify it or misidentify.
When I talked to near death experiencers about this study, I’ve given lectures about this to groups of near death experiencers and I mentioned this study, they just laugh at it. You say How can you be so naive? When you find yourself out of your body for the first time in your life and you see your body lying down on the operating table or in the hospital bed?
Are you going to look around the room for some irrelevant target you didn’t even know was there?
Bill Murphy Jr.: Right
Dr. Bruce Greyson: and then try to remember for the researcher?
Bill Murphy Jr.: Maybe you have to put jokes up there next time something that’ll be a very memorable you know, you know, there’s some other good questions here. But actually, as a housekeeping thing, first off, if you joined us in the middle here, you probably already know that I’m talking with Dr. Bruce Greyson, author of after a doctor explores what near death experiences reveal about life and beyond. He studied near death experiences for 50 years we’re having a great conversation.
If you have a question, feel free to drop it in the chat and I’ve seen this a couple of people mentioned or texted me that they’re having difficulty hearing that should be on your end. I think I’ve done everything I can’t hear if somebody is better at zoom than I am let me know but I think that’s it. In signing up for this I had a, I just want to read this.
Reader Experiences and Comments
Bill Murphy Jr.: Very briefly a reader commented and it might be the same person In the comments here, I learned of the common aspects of near death experiences from Dr. Greyson’s book and realized I have had two. This is one of our readers. The first was during a rollover car accident and the second, just five weeks later during the hospital sorry, a horseback riding accident.
landed in the hospital for eight days, I experienced a strange slow passing of time briefly being out of body and complete lack of fear, in what other possible deadly situations. I was perplexed for years before reading your book. Thank you, Dr. Greyson.
I don’t know if it’s the same person. But somebody here talked about having had a near death experience characterized by being able to see dust on the upper side of ceiling light fixtures.
Dr. Bruce Greyson: Yeah.
Bill Murphy Jr.: Just wanted to share those. Another question here from a reader, actually, this is Kate Sullivan, who some of you are going to meet she’s been working with me on understandably lately. Hello, Kate. Do you work at all with the Cussler Parapsychology unit at the University of Edinburgh? It seems as though there are precious few academic units that are actually investigate these things, as you’ve pointed out, I was curious if you have any dealings with them.
Dr. Bruce Greyson: Yeah, I have had dealings with them over the years, yeah.
Comparing NDEs to UFO Experiences
Bill Murphy Jr.: Here’s the thing that hit me as we were talking just prior to this is that the way you describe these near death experiences reminds me a lot of what we’re hearing lately about people describing UFOs. And this recent, more, you know, greater acceptance, right. But the, we seem to be landing on there something and we can’t describe what it is, and we can describe what it’s not. It seems like that’s possibly where you’re headed with this. Am I totally off base with that analogy?
Dr. Bruce Greyson: You’re not totally off base.
Bill Murphy Jr.: All right.
Dr. Bruce Greyson: I don’t particularly like it though. Kenneth Ring was one of the original near death researchers back in the late 1970s and early 1980s, wrote a book in which he compared especially the after effects of a near death experience of UFO encounter. And he found very a lot of similarities.
And he wrote a book about this. And he was then roundly criticized by the near death experience community for lumping them in with those crazy UFO people, and also by the UFO community, for lumping them in with all these crazy near death experiencers.
Bill Murphy Jr.: Got it.
Dr. Bruce Greyson: I don’t think there’s that much similarity. To some extent, any experience that challenges our current concepts of reality is going to have some of the same after effects. Let me digress to something that the last question this person you mentioned was that, when he had his near death experience, he lost his fear of dying and fear of many things.
And this is probably the most common thing you hear from near death experiences that they came back and are no longer afraid of dying, no longer afraid of death. Now, when I heard that, as a psychiatrist, my first thought was, Oh, no, this is gonna make people more suicidal. I knew a lot of people who were contemplating ending their lives, but were deterred by fear of what might happen.
If you take away that fear, what’s going to stop them. So you know, being a scientist, I did a study of this. And I interviewed everyone who admitted to my hospital with a suicide attempt, and compare those who had a near death experience as a result of the suicide attempt, and those who didn’t.
And to my surprise, I found that those who had a near death experience were much less suicidal than those who didn’t have an NDE. Now, that seemed counterintuitive. So I asked him to explain that to me.
And they said things like, now I understand that everything here has a purpose to it. And that the problems I have, are not something to be run away from, but their challenges for me to learn something from and I no longer feel like, I have the right or the need to end my life. But I need to learn by challenging myself and going through these things.
They also said that when you lose your fear of dying, you also lose your fear of living. If you’re not afraid of losing your life, because you’re not afraid of what happens next, then you’re not afraid of jumping in with both feet, taking risks, living life to the fullest, and living a life that’s much more meaningful and fulfilling because you’re participating more fully in it. And that makes them much less suicidal.
Dr. Greyson’s Personal Views on the Afterlife
Bill Murphy Jr.: How has this affected your own view or thought about what happens after death? You talk about a lot as a clinician or as a researcher, but I’m just curious.
Dr. Bruce Greyson: Yeah,
Bill Murphy Jr.: 50 years on this?
Dr. Bruce Greyson: Well, yeah, I have spent 50 years I’m still skeptical about everything I hear. Now, I’m a scientist, which means I don’t believe anything. You know, I think there’s a lot of evidence the sun’s gonna come up tomorrow.
I’m not 100% Sure. So I hear these stories about what goes on after death? And you know, when you ask a new death experiencer what happened to them, they almost always start by saying I can’t, there just aren’t any words to describe it.
So then we research to say, Great, tell me about it. So we know that we’re making them distort the experience by telling us putting it into words, and they end up using whatever metaphors they have available to them, which are usually religious or cultural metaphors. But they know they’re metaphors.
And they will say something like, I encountered this warm, loving being of light. And I’m going to call it God. So you know what I’m talking about.
But it wasn’t the god I was taught about in church it was much bigger than that. All the talk about, you know, being in a beautiful pastoral nature scene they said, it wasn’t trees, like we have here was just, I can’t describe it to you. So the using metaphors to talk about this.
So when they talk about what happened in the afterlife, I don’t take it as literally true. I believe that it’s pleasant, that they almost always describe a blissful experience there. But I don’t think I have any understanding of what it actually is going to be like.
In fact, I’m pretty convinced that it’s something beyond our brains to understand. So that whatever is going to happen to me every day, is something that I can’t even imagine at this point.
Dr. Eben Alexander’s Case
Bill Murphy Jr.: Another, book I haven’t read. But can you comment on the book by Dr. Eben Alexander?
Dr. Bruce Greyson: Yes.
Bill Murphy Jr.: who had a NDE while being clinically dead from a brain infection.
Dr. Bruce Greyson: Yeah, Eben Alexander was a neurosurgeon who had a rare bacterial infection of his brain and fell into a coma very quickly in a matter of hours, and then was in a coma for six days in the hospital. And he during that time, he had a very elaborate near death experience, in which, among other things, he was able to look down and see what was going on around his hospital bed. Or, for example, at one point, even though he was in the intensive care unit, which usually doesn’t allow anyone but family members in his wife got permission to bring prayer group into his hospital room, because the doctors have given up any hope of bringing him back alive.
This infection he got he had, has a 1% chance of survival. So he was able to describe to me later on the eight people around his bed, who they were and where they were standing, while he was in this deep coma. So he had this experience, and he then actually came to visit me two days, two years to the date after his near death experience.
That was the first time he had talked to anyone about it. He thought, I don’t want to learn anything about NDEs until I write down everything I can remember about it. And that took them two years.
Bill Murphy Jr.: wow.
Dr. Bruce Greyson: And then he came to me, he lived maybe an hour away. And we talked about it. I gave him lots of stuff to read.
And we became friends after that. Shortly after that, when he wrote his book called proof of heaven. He got a lot of criticism from other neuroscientists who were embarrassed by this, there was an article in Esquire claiming that he wasn’t really in a coma, he was in a medically induced coma, and that he was never really near death.
But none of these people who were writing about this really had any evidence to go on. It was just assuming these things. So with His permission, I got the copy of his medical records from the hospital where he was hospitalized with his comma, it wasn’t hospital I worked in.
The medical records more than 600 pages. I made three copies of this record. I looked at one and I gave the other two to two different doctors.
And all three of us independently evaluated his medical record to see whether he really was near death and so forth. And we all three came up with the same conclusion. The medical record was crystal clear.
He was in a deep coma. near death. His brain function was minimal.
They did what’s called the Glasgow Coma Scale every six hours during his during his eight day stay, and it was usually minimal, showing severe brain damage. It was clear it wasn’t a medically induced coma. He fell into the coma before he arrived at the hospital before he was given any medications at all.
He came out of the coma six days later, before they had stopped into the medication. So the medication and nothing to do with his coma, he was in a deep coma because of the bacterial infection. And during that time, yet an elaborate near death experience with accurate perceptions from outside his body.
Religious and Atheist Perspectives on NDEs
Bill Murphy Jr.: That’s just wild. I mean somebody who had had that experience to begin with, I want to share it I have two great questions here. One is do Christians who have near death experience see Jesus do Muslims see Muhammad etc. And then the flip side of that do the atheist near death. experiencers become predictably religious or spiritual afterwards. I assume there might be many different answers here. But I’m curious if you see any of this.
Dr. Bruce Greyson: There are. You know, most people come back from the NDE saying that I’m more spiritual, but not necessarily more religious. They feel that their religion they were raised in was just too small to encompass what their near death experience was like.
And they feel equally at home, in any house of worship of any denomination, or just even out in nature. They feel they don’t need the church or the Temple of the mosque to commune with God. But they still may enjoy the ritual and the ceremony and the music, of their house of worship.
But they don’t take the dogma seriously anymore. Now, when they have these visions of this divine thing in their near death experience, and they try to understand it, when they’re back in their bodies, they may use the metaphors of their religion to explain it to them, so they may call it, Jesus, or Mohammed, or something else. But it’s not the Jesus they were taught about in church, something that was much greater than that.
Atheists have the same types of near death experiences with encounters with what seems to be a divine being. And they usually very confused about it, because they don’t have any religious metaphors to put it in. Now, of course, they live in a religious country.
So they know what words can be used for it. But they say, you know, I just it doesn’t make any sense to me. I don’t know why this was there.
But I can’t deny that it happened. And they come back often with the same spiritual sense that they had, that other people have more connected to other people more compassionate, more altruistic, and not as skeptical as they had been before. Because they’ve experienced this event they can’t understand, but they can’t deny.
Bill Murphy Jr.: Somebody points out here is a Dutch physician who has been collecting indie anecdotes, whose book may answer the question of religious divisions by atheists. We don’t know the name offhand. But if he comes up with it I would love to find out more about it.
Support Group Resources
Bill Murphy Jr.: This is a funny thing to kind of lead towards the end on Do you still do these support groups? I’m just thinking we’ve had one or two people have told me that they’ve had these near death experiences to sound like people are looking for that community.
Dr. Bruce Greyson: Yes.
Bill Murphy Jr.: What are the resources that you’d suggest?
Dr. Bruce Greyson: Yeah, the groups are also for people who haven’t had near Death Experiences who just want to learn about them. In fact, a lot of people who are dealing with terminal illnesses like cancer will go to these groups and find a lot of comfort in them. they’re all sponsored by the International Association for Near Death Studies.
If you go to their website which is www.iands.org there are lists there of the support groups, they’re listed geographically so click on US or UK wherever you are, and then to the state and then it’ll give you the list of the groups in your state
Closing Remarks
Bill Murphy Jr.: Got it. all right, your book is called After: A Doctor Explores What Near Death Experiences Reveal about Life and Beyond. It’s been out for a couple of months now but I was just really interested in it and I was talking to some people and said you know Dr. Greyson might still talk with you so I appreciate that and I encourage people to check it out.
Thanks to everybody for joining today we’re gonna wrap up. Final plugs I wrote down so I’d remember to do this that we’re actually trying to run a business understandably.com is the mothership of this whole thing that’s where you can sign up for the daily email I want to thank everybody who has signed up as a member and you know as you guys know we’re just starting with ads and sponsorships I’m making mistakes every day and you get to watch them in real time. Maybe even be part of them not mistakes for advertisers though I promise just my own stepping on things so I hope you’ll check that out.
This is going to be assuming I did not completely dork up the UX here at everything. We will upload this to YouTube and a few other places so if you only got to see part of it or if future ones you want to see and you’re not able to participate that’s okay, we’re gonna put them up so you can see them. And anybody Oh yeah, purse.
important message. If you do want to sponsor or advertise. If I were really smart and totally organized, I’d have a whole website walking you through it, but I don’t so just email me at bill (at) understandably (dot) com.
That’s how we’re doing it for now and I’ll let you know about it. So thank you very much, Dr. Greyson. I really appreciated it and it was very useful.
I could tell everybody else appreciate it as well.
Dr. Bruce Greyson: Thanks, Bill. It’s been fun.
Bill Murphy Jr.: Thank you. Bye, everybody.