What happens after we die? Is there any part of us that lives on?
"I remember one minute being in this world and the next minute being like I died.
All of a sudden I feel like life was sort of returned to me meaning that I understood
how sacred it is. There was a welcoming voice that said because you are my child
this is your home, welcome home." There are no shortage of skeptics. "Nothing you're just
just nothing. You're just gone, that's it. We have brains. It's brains that do the thinking,
our brains are going to decay that'll be that." Some of the most compelling clues to this question
can be found in near-death experiences where people find themselves brought to the brink
of death and yet somehow they come back with amazingly detailed visions of another world,
profoundly changing them in ways we can't explain. "And many of them have reported actually
anecdotally that they've been able to see and hear things going on even though from our perspective
they should have been dead and their brain should not be functioning at all." Their experiences
are remarkably similar. Many of them describe things like being outside of their bodies and
being outside of time, seeing their whole lives flash in front of them in a life review, meeting
lost loved ones and celestial beings, overwhelming them with a sense of joy and unconditional love.
And they're not new. One of the earliest known descriptions can be found in Plato's myth of Er
written around 380 BC which includes an account of the soul's journey through the afterlife.
And they can happen to anyone. Even atheists have reported having Near Death Experiences.
"We have lots of examples of people who are atheists who had no belief in a deity or in
an afterlife who have the same type of profound near-death experiences everyone else does."
Dr. Bruce Greyson is a psychiatrist and a professor emeritus of Psychiatry and
neurobehavioral Sciences at the University of Virginia. He co-founded the International
Association for Near Death studies reviewing more than one thousand near-death experiences.
Dr. Greyson is widely considered to be one of the leading researchers in this area,
and in his work he's found common patterns and universal themes that go far beyond culture.
He presents his fascinating insights in his book "After: a doctor explores what near-death
experiences reveal about life and beyond." One of these cases comes from a 33 year old
man named Tom Sawyer. Not that Tom Sawyer. This Tom was working underneath a truck one day when
the ground shifted and everything came crashing down on him in a terrifying accident. From that
moment everything seemed to happen in extreme slow motion. Suddenly he re-lived all the events of his
life from the moment he took his first breath right up until his accident with the truck.
In a flash he was brought back to his childhood home and he was eight years old again. His father
was telling him to mow the lawn and to cut the weeds in the yard. Somehow this exact moment from
his past was happening again, with every single detail. The temperature of the air, the sights,
and the smells were all the same. Even the number of mosquitoes flying in the yard all became so
crystal clear that he could have counted them. He saw himself mowing the lawn from straight
above in a panoramic view that was hundreds of feet high as if he were looking down through a
camera. What's astonishing about Tom's experience is that he re-lived these events not only through
his own eyes but through the eyes of other people. He describes a moment in his life when he was 19
years old. He was driving his pickup truck and an angry man darted into the road and almost ran into
it. Tom shouted at him "hey next time use the crosswalk." The man ran towards Tom in a rage
he reached into the window and slapped Tom across the face with his open hand. Tom stepped out of
his truck filled with adrenaline and he hit the man over and over again. As the man fell to the
ground Tom looked up to see a group of people and now standing around him watching the fight unfold.
Tom looked at them and said "you all saw him hit me first." And then he got back in his truck and
he drove away. But now when Tom re-lived This moment in his life review somehow he was able
to feel everything that the other man experienced through his own eyes. This time he realized that
the man had been drinking heavily, he was grieving the loss of his wife who'd recently died. Tom saw
this man sitting alone at a stool at the bar where he paid for his drinks. He saw the man leave and
watched him running into the road into the path of Tom's truck. And this time, seeing this moment
again Tom felt everything from the other side. The anger, the embarrassment, and the physical
pain that this man felt as Tom was hitting him. Everything about that experience between Tom and
that man connected them inextricably. And it was so incredibly vivid and real. Tom says that "I was
in that man's eyes and I watched everything without judgment and without negativity,
I experienced it all with the unconditional love of the divine as if it were through the
eyes of God or whatever you want to call it, a spiritual and divine being. I wish I could tell
you how it really felt but I could never explain it accurately through words." This sense that it's
impossible to capture the true nature of Near Death Experiences through language is another
common theme in people who've had them. It would be like trying to draw the taste of ice cream
with crayons to explain it to someone who's never tasted ice cream before. And Tom isn't the only
one. Many people who've had near-death experiences come back with a powerful realization that all
of us form part of the Divine. The author Anita Moorjani describes her own near-death experience
as a feeling of total clarity, a sense that at our core we all come from one unity, and while
our lives might seem separate and isolated there's an underlying connectedness between us. And at
the end of our lives when we leave this physical world we return to that same sense of wholeness,
some might call it God or Source or Brahman but whatever name you give it it's the same. A single
unitary state of Oneness and it feels like coming home. Skeptics tend to dismiss these experiences
as wishful thinking or as hallucinations caused by chemical changes in the brain, but for Dr.
Greyson who was himself a skeptic, he points out that there are cases you can't dismiss so easily.
One of these cases is the story of Jack Bybee who went to the hospital with severe pneumonia when
he was 26 years old. During his time there Jack had a nurse, a woman named Anita. She would do
her rounds in the hospital and fluff the pillows in Jack's room. They got to know each other and
one day nurse Anita told Jack that she was going away for the long weekend to celebrate her 21st
birthday with her parents. Jack held her hand to wish her a happy birthday and then she left. But
then a little while later Jack suddenly stopped breathing. Medical staff rushed into his room
to try to revive him but he became unconscious. Jack had a near-death experience where he found
himself in another world in a beautiful pasture under a wide open sky feeling completely at peace.
Suddenly he saw nurse Anita standing next to him which surprised him. "Anita what are you
doing here?" "I came by to check up on you to make sure you're all right, but Jack you must return,
tell my parents I'm sorry I wrecked the red MGB, tell them I love them." Anita went over a
beautiful green valley where there was a fence and she said to Jack: "there's a garden on the
other side but you can't see it now, you have to go back while I continue through the gate."
And just as suddenly she was gone. Jack woke up in his hospital bed and he saw that a new
nurse was helping him. Jack told her the astonishing things he'd just seen and the
nurse burst into tears and ran out of the ward. Jack would later learn that this nurse had been
close friends with Anita. As it turns out that weekend Anita's parents surprised her with a red
MGB sports car which thrilled her. She drove the car down the highway, lost control of it
and crashed into a concrete telephone pole, ending her life. Jack was absolutely stunned
by this. What's remarkable about this case is that unlike other near-death experiencers who
reunite with deceased loved ones knowing that their loved ones have already died Jack had no
idea that Anita had passed on. He had no way of knowing any of the details of her car accident,
and what's more he's not the only one with a story like this. There are others who've
met people during near-death experiences who were not known to have died. Counselling Professor Jan
Holden who reviewed 93 reports of out-of-body perceptions that took place during near-death
experiences found that 92 percent of their accounts were completely accurate. If these
were really hallucinations like skeptics say they are then how do we explain such high rates
of accuracy? To answer this we have to consider a very different view of the brain than we're
usually taught. One that goes to the very heart of who we are and the nature of consciousness itself.
What's the difference between the mind and the brain? Traditionally we think of the mind as the
sum total of all your conscious thoughts, feelings, and memories. It's the complete
awareness you have of who you are and the world around you. But your brain on the other hand is
a physical object. It's a collection of pink gray matter and tissue that sits inside the
skull. If you believe in the materialist story of the mind then consciousness is something
that gradually evolves out of matter from single-celled organisms, to complex animals,
and eventually humans. Materialists believe that consciousness comes out of chemical and biological
processes inside the brain, and so everything about who you are, your dreams, your hopes,
and your emotions all of it is located somewhere within the structure of your brain. And so when
the brain dies everything about who you are dies along with it. But is this really true?
Materialists tend to believe this because they point to a relationship between the mind and
brain functions. For example studies show that if you were to damage certain brain areas like the
occipital lobe which is responsible for processing vision then you wouldn't be able to see anymore,
even if your eyes were working perfectly fine. This association between the mind and the brain
is a scientific fact. But here's the problem: the interpretation that the brain creates the mind is
not a scientific fact. It's just one possible theory used to explain the relationship we find
between them. We can see this in cases where people have had near-death experiences even
after they've been found to be clinically dead, where there's no detectable electrical activity
in the brain. Dr. Greyson writes that out of all the people who survive these situations most don't
have any memories about what happened to them between the time they were unconscious and the
time they were revived. And yet around 20 percent of them will have near-death
experiences where they give incredibly vivid and detailed accounts of the afterlife even though
our scientific understanding of the brain tells us that they shouldn't have been able
to perceive anything at all. If the brain really creates consciousness then near-death experience
that happen when the brain is shut down should be impossible. So how do we explain what's happening?
One clue to this question can be found in the story of Steve Luiting. Steve was swimming in
a lake on a beautiful sunny day when he was eight years old. Without realizing it he was
getting a serious sunburn as he swam in the water. When he got up and dove into
the lake he instantly felt the waves crashing hard against his sunburned back. He felt the
sharp pain that knocked the breath out of his lungs. Unable to move he began to sink
deeper and deeper into the water. Everything felt cold and then a part of him realized
that he was about to die. You might expect an eight-year-old to panic in a situation like this,
but Steve describes an astonishing shift in his mind as his near-death experience began to take
hold. "I seemed to change points of view as if I was changing location in a room, one moment I
was a terrified child but in another moment I was a calm person watching the terrified one,
I both was and yet wasn't. My mind suddenly expanded to an adult capacity and then beyond.
Without the limitation of a child's brain my true nature began to express itself. It made me think
that our understanding of the brain is actually backwards. It's not that the brain creates
consciousness it's that the brain filters our experiences focusing it and narrowing it to give
us a sense of being in the physical world." Dr. Greyson uses an analogy. Think of the brain like a
radio receiver that can pick up on many different frequencies but tunes in only to the signal of the
channel it wants to listen to. It does that by blocking out every other frequency. If it didn't
do that our ears would be overwhelmed trying to listen to hundreds of radio stations all at the
same time, which would make it impossible to hear any of them clearly. That's essentially what the
brain does. It tunes in only to the perceptions into the information that it needs to survive in
the physical world. This might seem like a wild idea but is it really that far-fetched? Because
we already know that the brain acts as a filter in many ways. For example when you're sitting in your
kitchen even if it seems quiet there's a ton of ambient sound happening all around you, the hum
of the refrigerator, the electrical fan on your computer, or the noise from the traffic outside.
But once you've been in the room for a while your brain tunes out all of these noises and the
low-level sounds fade away so you can focus your attention on the things that are more important.
You don't even notice your brain is doing this but if you recorded the sounds of your kitchen with a
microphone it would pick up all of these noises in detail. And so while the materialist view is that
the brain is primary in creating consciousness, more and more people are beginning to wonder:
what if it's the other way around? What if consciousness is what's primary and our brains act
as a filter to create a limited sense of human perception as we go about our everyday lives?
This idea isn't new. The French philosopher Henri Bergson said that "the brain maintains
consciousness fixed on the world in which we live, it is the organ of attention to life."
Implied in this is the idea that the brain doesn't create the mind the brain is a receiver
of thoughts from your mind choosing only the ones that are important for your physical survival and
then converting them into chemical and biological signals that your body can understand. Most of the
time the brain works just fine but when it begins to break down like in near-death experiences,
it's only then that we realize that there's a mind outside of the brain. A wider consciousness that's
hugely expansive and suddenly we can access the very things that people describe when they're
on the brink of dying, like seeing deceased loved ones, meeting guides, or visiting other
worlds. Our minds open up to the Oneness of the universe. It just so happens that this expanded
consciousness doesn't help us survive in the physical world and it might even get in the way,
and so the brain filters it blocking out all the information it doesn't need, creating the illusion
that we're isolated and separate from each other. Dr. Greyson says that we find support for this in
psychedelic studies. Neuroimaging experiments show that when people take psychedelics and
have elaborate mystical experiences their brains actually show decreased activity this is exactly
the opposite of what you'd expect if you believe that psychedelics trigger hallucinations in the
brain. But on the other hand it makes perfect sense if you consider the filtering theory of
the brain because in Theory psychedelics may reduce the brain's filtering function in much the
same way that near-death experiences do, opening up our consciousness to all sorts of spiritual
insights. If this is what's happening then it also explains why so many ancient traditions
all around the world have long used techniques like breath holding and sensory deprivation to
induce mystical experiences and to commune with the divine. All of these things may be reducing
the brain's filter enabling us to access higher levels of consciousness. And the mysteries don't
end there. In the next video we'll look at one of the most astonishing real life accounts of
near-death experience. He shouldn't have been able to perceive anything at all and yet somehow he
survived and came back with Incredible visions of the afterlife. Once this video is available you'll
see it appearing on the left side of the screen. And let me know: what do you think about all this?
Have you or someone you've known had a near-death experience? I'd love to read about it in the
comments. And if you liked this video please show your support by pressing the like button.
As always thanks so much for watching, take care of yourselves, and I'll see you in the next one.