I have done two articles on Dr. Michael Guillen’s treatment of near-death experiences (NDEs) based on his podcast (Science + God with Dr. G}. Guillen is an astrophysicist who taught physics at Harvard and earned his degrees from Cornell University under the tutelage of men like Carl Sagan and Fred Hoyle.

He is no slouch when it comes to science, and it was his “beloved science” led him to question the materialistic worldview he assumed to be true. As his worldview expanded with the quantum entanglement of scientific discoveries that pushed those once fixed boundaries out of his comfort zone, he began a journey that eventually led him to faith in a Creator, God.

Dr. Guillen’s current interest in NDEs is understandable. It didn’t take much convincing for Dr. Guillen to determine that NDEs are real. His interviewee in episode #48 of the podcast, Dr. Bruce Greyson, on the other hand, was puzzled, but initially dismissive, when he encountered an NDE in patient. He didn’t have room in his materialistic worldview for NDEs, but the curiosity of his scientific mind propelled him forward.

Greyson is the Chester Carlson Professor Emeritus of Psychiatry and Neurobehavioral Sciences at the University of Virginia. You can listen to the interview here on the story behind the study of NDE’s, which became Dr. Greyson’s academic pursuit.

Dr. Greyson has studied NDEs, now, for about 50 years, and the data he has accumulated is significant. In this second article on the interview of Dr. Greyson, I want to begin with the question posed by Dr. Guillen to Greyson: whether the near-death stories people tell are “all over the map”? Greyson did not hesitate with his response:

“They are not all over the map. There are similarities in what people tell us, not only between different individuals but between different cultures and religions. A lot of people tell the same stories. We find near-death experiences from people in Ancient Greece and Rome that sound like they could have happened yesterday.”

These consistencies have been categorized over many years by researchers like Greyson.

As a scientific study, researchers have tried to correlate NDE’s with physical, environmental factors, such as oxygen deprivation and over-stimulation by drugs. Greyson says, however, “We don’t find any correlations at all.” His current conclusion after 50 years of research is that environmental factors don’t appear to explain NDEs.

The consistencies from person to person and culture to culture over the span of time leads Greyson and other NDE researchers to view them as a singular phenomenon. Greyson says the same characteristics of NDEs reoccur over and again regardless of who has experienced them. Gender, ethnicity, cultural background and religiosity (or the lack thereof) don’t seem to factor into NDEs. “Atheists describe the same things as Catholics do,” says Greyson.

Commonalities in the NDE experience, however, may not be as intriguing to Dr. Greyson, the psychiatrist, as the common outcomes. The most interesting outcome to him, he says, is the effect NDEs have on the people who experience them.

Dr. Greyson says, “I make my living trying to help people change their lives, and it’s very difficult to do.” The NDE experiences that take a few seconds or a few minutes at most “totally transform someone’s attitudes, beliefs, values, and behavior,” which leads Greyson to conclude, “That’s a powerful experience!”

The data shows that NDEs are a universal phenomenon. Greyson won’t speculate whether NDEs indicate some universal reality, something universally going on with physical bodies, or something that is a universal psychological trait. He is cautious to say, “We don’t know the answer to that.”

As Greyson continues with the interview, I am impressed that his scientific training and skepticism familiar to his materialistic worldview guide him forward in this field that might tempt another person to run wild with imagination. He is careful not to speculate, but he is candid about the things that appear to be evident from the volume of data, even if they cannot be explained by his worldview.

Dr. Greyson described a particular case in which a patient, who was under deep anesthesia with his eyes taped shut, described highly unusual things the operating surgeon did in the operating room. When Greyson interviewed the surgeon, the patient’s observations about the Surgeon’s idiosyncratic movements were corroborated by the doctor.

The patient described accurately the peculiar things the surgeon did, but the patient couldn’t have gained that knowledge by conventional means – under anesthesia with his eyes tapped shut. The patient offered his recollections during recovery from surgery, and the circumstances offered no apparent explanation for his knowledge of those details apart from his own “observation”. You can hear the details of this example if you listen to the interview at about the 15-minute mark.

Dr. Greyson says he has documented case after case after case of similar stories with no apparent explanations for the details “observed” by patients in moments of clinical death. Other researchers have documented the same kind of evidence.

One doctor in Texas, for instanced, examined 100 similar incidents in which people described details under circumstances that offer no conventional explanations for their knowledge. Those details proved to be accurate in 92% of the cases; only six percent (6%) involved some errors; and only one percent (1%) were patently wrong about the details.

Dr. Greyson says, “Any one story is an anecdote and isn’t proof of anything.” Large amounts of data are necessary to establish evidence, and only then the data has evidential value if it demonstrates a high degree of consistency among the experiences.

“Once you have a large enough database”, says Greyson, “you can start developing hypotheses.” You can explore whether NDEs are related to a lack of oxygen in the brain or to drugs given to patients, and so forth.

The hypotheses developed on a materialistic worldview, however, do not bear out. Dr. Greyson and his fellow researches have developed and tested many such hypotheses, but the data contradict every one of them, he says.

For instance, the more oxygen people are given, the more likely people are to report NDEs. Thus, oxygen deprivation does not explain them. The more drugs people are given, the less likely they are to report NDEs. Drug inducement, therefore, does not appear to trigger them.

Greyson also notes that most people who have NDEs have difficulty expressing what they have experienced. They can’t put it into words. They use metaphors that come readily to their minds, which often seem to be influenced by culture or religion, but they commonly find those metaphors inadequate.

People might use the word, “heaven”, to describe what they experienced, but they are quick to say, “I don’t mean the heaven I was taught about in church.” They might describe an encounter with a “living” entity they call God, but they will say it was different and greater and more transcendent than the God they imagined based on what they were taught.

The vast majority of people describe a blissful experience. About one percent (1%) to five percent (5%) of the people relate an unpleasant experience. Only a very small percentage of those negative experiences are described like the prototypical view of hell with fire and brimstone. Greyson observes that those prototypical experiences are usually described by people raised in a culture that might expect them, but not from anyone else.

A larger percentage of the negative experiences are described as a black void. No light. No sound. Nothing to relate to for eternity.

This is a terrifying experience to many people, but some Hindus and Buddhists experience a void and consider it a blissful experience. Interestingly, Dr Greyson says, “The vast majority of these unpleasant experiences sound just like the blissful ones, but they experience them in a terrifying way.”

Dr. Greyson observes that many people who experience NDEs unpleasantly are people who have a hard time letting go of control. They fight against it and try to get back into their bodies. They often describe getting exhausted until they finally surrender. Greyson says, “As soon as they surrender, it becomes a blissful experience for them.”

Dr. Greyson finds no correlation at all between “good” people having pleasant experiences and “bad” people having unpleasant experiences. Greyson says that people in prison serving long sentences for horrible crimes are more likely to have pleasant experiences, just like most other people. Some people who lead seemingly exemplary lives, on the other hand, have frightening experiences.

The white light that people commonly recall is most usually described as “living”, not a static light like a lightbulb. The vast majority of NDEs do not happen in an operating room (which might explain the experience of a white light). People describe the white light as a living being that radiates light, warmth, acceptance, and unconditional love, and they feel protected by the light, says Greyson.

Dr. Greyson grew up in a nonreligious household with a materialistic view of the world. Dr. Greyson now says that NDEs seem to suggest that some part of us lives on after the death of our bodies and the cessation of our brains, but he doesn’t know how to make sense of that. He adds,

“We usually think that the mind is what the brain does. All of our thoughts, and feelings, and perceptions are created by the brain. In a near-death experience, that doesn’t seem to the case.”

Greyson says, “The brain and perception seem to separate in NDEs.”

Amazingly, researchers have catalogued people in end-stage dementia who seem to defy their condition with an NDE experience. People who haven’t been able to recognize family or communicate for years suddenly become lucid in the hours or days before they die. Inexplicably, they recognize family and carry on conversations.

The findings like the ones described in this brief article cause Greyson to wonder about the consensus view of the brain and the mind. He says:

Dr. Greyson says he repeatedly hears stories from people who seem to have experienced a separation of their minds from their brains. Frequently, people say they encounter deceased loved ones in the near-death experience.

Greyson acknowledges that these stories are easy to dismiss as wishful thinking triggered by a desire to see loved ones at the point of death. Greyson adds, however, that we have many documented cases in which people “met” deceased people in their near-death experiences who were not known at the time to be deceased. In these cases, there would be no expectation to meet them at the point of death.

As an example, Dr. Greyson referenced a 25-year old technical writer suffering from severe pneumonia in the hospital. He had been resuscitated from repeated respiratory arrests. One of the young nurses who worked with him was his favorite, Anita. She told him she was taking several days off and would see him when she returned.

Not long after she left, he had another respiratory arrest, was resuscitated, and had a near-death experience in the process. The experience included a beautiful pastoral scene where he encountered Anita walking toward hm.

He asked, “What are you doing here?” She said, “This is where I am now, but you can’t stay here. You have to go back, but I want you to tell my parents, ‘I am sorry I wrecked the red MGB.'”

He had complete recall of the experience after being resuscitated, and he asked the attending nurse about it. She became very upset, started crying, and left the room.

It turns out that Anita had taken the weekend off to celebrate her 21st birthday. Her parents surprised her with a red MGB as a birthday gift. While driving it for the first time, she lost control of the vehicle going down a hill, crashed into a telephone pole, and died instantly.

Greyson says, “There is no way he could have known that. There is no way he could have expected her to die, and certainly not how she died, and yet he did.” He says, “We have story after story like it that we just can’t wish away, and we can’t explain.” From this story and the many other stories that he has studied, Dr. Greyson concludes,

“There is something about us that continues after we die.”

Greyson says we would expect memories of NDEs to change and become muddled over time like many memories do, especially of traumatic experiences. He has tested the clarity of the memory of NDEs by going back to people he interviewed in the 1970’s and 1980’s and comparing notes of their current memories with the notes from the initial interviews.

Greyson surprisingly found “absolutely no difference” in the clarity of the memories decades later. Unintuitively, the details of near-death experiences do not seem to change in the memories of people who experienced them, even over long periods of times.

Greyson has also tested memories of NDEs on a scale developed by Marcia K. Johnson to distinguish memories of real events from fanciful memories. (See, for example, Memory and Reality) Dr. Greyson had people recall the memories of their near-death experiences, memories a real event from that same time, and a fantasy. He found that the memories of NDEs rated like the memories of real events, not fantasies.

Similar studies were conducted by a team in Belgium and a team in Italy, and they came to the same conclusions. The Italian team also measured the brain waves of the people remembering NDEs, real events and fantasies. The brain waves of people remembering NDES looked exactly like the brain waves of people remembering real events, but they did not look like the brain waves of people remembering fantasies

When put to the question, Dr. Greyson says he cannot conclude whether heaven and hell actually exist. He says most people who have NDEs experience something more akin to heaven. Some will even say that this life is hell compared to what they experienced.

He is quick to say that these descriptions are only metaphors, and not facts that can be tested. Greyson adds, however, “The vast majority of people who have a near-death experience say that there is something after death, and and it is something that is not to be afraid of.”

At the same time, Greyson admits that he is not certain, himself, that there is life after death:

“I am still a skeptic. I am not totally convinced of anything, but I think the evidence suggests that we do survive, something about us survives death and experiences something that is pleasant, something that is not to be afraid of.”

As a psychologist, Dr. Greyson naturally has had a concern that learning about the pleasantness of NDEs may cause people to want to commit suicide. The concern led him to study whether any correlation exists between NDEs and suicide attempts.

When he compared people who had NDEs resulting from a suicide attempt to people who has NDEs under other circumstances, he found that a clear correlation exists. That correlation, however, isn’t what he feared. The people who had near-death experiences were much less suicidal after the NDA than the people who didn’t have a near-death experience.

This finding seemed counterintuitive to him, so he interviewed people who had a near-death experience resulting from a suicide attempt. “Basically what they said is that, if you lose your fear of dying, you also lose your fear of living.”

if you lose your fear of dying you also lose your fear of living.

People who have had a near-death experience are likely to lose their fear of taking chances. They are more likely to adopt a new, positive attitude of living as fully as they can because they are no longer afraid of losing their life. NDE’s appear to free people to enjoy life, to see the meaning and purpose in their lives, and to be fulfilled even in the mundane aspects of their lives.

Dr. Greyson has documents these things in “experiencer after experiencer” over the 50 years he has been studying NDEs. Greyson is quick to say, however, that he believes he has “only scratched the surface”. Future researchers are highly likely to gain more expertise and more complete understanding of the phenomenon of NDEs.

Though Dr. Greyson remains skeptical of making speculative statements about NDEs, he is clear at the same time that the evidence suggests at least two things:

• 1) the mind seems to be more than simply projections from a physical brain; and
• 2) life seems to continue in some aspect, and some aspect of people seems to continue beyond the death of the physical body.

Without background or familiarity with religion or metaphysical things, Dr. Greyson is unwilling to go much further than those conclusions.

As a Christian who believes in a supreme spiritual being and life after death, I find NDEs interesting, though the data doesn’t necessarily corroborate all that the Christian faith suggests. Perhaps, God is larger than what we are able or willing to grasp. Perhaps, we just don’t understand what is going on. I will leave you with one Scripture, though, that I read in my daily reading today:

For just as the body without the spirit is dead, so also faith without works is dead.

James 2:26 CSB

The Bible suggests that the body does not live without “the spirit”. The “spirit” apparently, animates the body. According to the Bible, the spirit is, perhaps, what lives on without the body.

In this light, I think of 1 Corinthians 15 in which Paul discusses physical bodies and spiritual bodies. I don’t have time to get into those things now, but I have written about them before. (See God’s Order for Living Beings, Human Beings and His Grand Design; At the Curve of a Waterfall: Matter Flowing Through Us; and The First Fruits of Another World for examples.)

I believe that many of my fellow Christians will be disappointed where I end here, but I have to conclude this article. It’s already long in the tooth. I am also ending where the interview ends.

I appreciate the scientific, skeptical orientation of Dr. Greyson. Doing science demands a skeptical orientation. Science is also limited, by definition, to discovering the facts pertaining to the natural world.

Science may be incapable, therefore, of telling us much beyond the parameters of the natural world. The best it can do, perhaps, is to suggest what lies beyond it.

I write this more for my friends who are dogmatically wedded to naturalism and materialism, who believe that the universe consists of nothing other than matter and energy, who don’t allow for the possibility of reality other than the natural world.

There is much that we do not know, and the things we do know have a way of pushing the boundaries back on our assumptions. If we are honest, we see that science does not have all the answers, which is why a good scientist should remain open to what the facts bear out – even if they defy some basic assumptions.

“A person of faith”, on the other hand, should be just as candid and just as honest. We don’t know what we don’t know. We don’t know anything about God and the reality of what we call “God’s kingdom” and “spiritual things” other than what God chooses to reveal to us (in the Bible, for instance).

I believe I can say this, however: NDEs make no sense on a purely naturalistic and materialistic worldview based on the accumulation of research to the present point in time. They fit much more comfortably in a worldview that holds that assumes some transcendence beyond matter and energy.

Perhaps, we aren’t even capable of knowing much more in our finite state. We all have good reason to remain humble and open. I will end with this statement that I heard someone say today about people who have encountered Christ:

“I see changes in people that are so radical that it couldn’t be anything other than God.”

For Dr. Greyson, the psychiatrist, he makes a similar statement about NDEs:

He knows they are powerful because of the way they change people.