Most near-death experiencers say
that they have trouble speaking about it
because there just aren't words to describe it.
It's like trying to draw an odor with a crayon.
Either the visions they saw
or the feelings they felt
or the entities they encountered,
there just aren't words to describe them.
A sense of connectedness to other people,
to nature, to the Universe, to the divine.
And that changes how they see everything.
It makes them much less invested
in things of the physical world:
Experiencers almost always say,
"This is the most important thing
that's ever happened to me.
And nothing else in my life compares to it."
I'm Bruce Greyson.
I'm a professor emeritus
of psychiatry
and neurobehavioral sciences,
and I've recently come out with a book
called "After: A Doctor Explores
What Near-Death Experiences Reveal
About Life and Beyond."
Near-death experiences are profound, subjective experiences
that many people have
when they come close to death,
or sometimes when they are in fact pronounced dead.
And they include such difficult-to-explain phenomena
as a sense of leaving the physical body,
reviewing one's entire life,
encountering some other entities
that aren't physically present
that they sometimes interpret as deities
or deceased loved ones.
When they return, they often are profoundly changed
by this experience.
The most common change we hear
from near-death experiencers
is that they are no longer afraid of death.
They describe having existed
without their physical bodies,
when their physical bodies were essentially dead,
and yet, they were feeling better than ever.
Most near-death experiencers say they are more spiritual,
but not more religious.
They tend to look on organized religions
as being simplifications
of what the spiritual world really is.
That what's important to them
is the interconnections,
not the dogma that goes along with it,
and they think that the type of deity they encountered,
if they did, is not as limited
as the God they were taught about in church.
It's much bigger than that, much more inclusive.
It leads them eventually to the 'Golden rule,'
which is actually part of every religion we have:
But they feel that this is not for them anymore
a guideline we're supposed to follow
but a law of nature.
The vast majority of near-death experiences
that we hear are pleasant, if not outright blissful.
That sounds like a wonderful thing to happen
but it can create a lot of problems in your life.
[Projector sound]
I've talked to lots of people
who were concerned that their loved one, now,
is not the same person that they married.
Lives were based previously on something
that they thought they shared that they no longer shared,
that can really disrupt the marriage
and there have been reports
of a high rate of divorces among near-death experiencers.
Furthermore, a lot of the families
will say when a crisis happens,
the experiencer may just take off
and go see if they can help
without concern of just leaving the family behind.
So they often feel, "Why do you love other people
as much as you love me?
I'm your family,"
which is often very hard for the children
of the near-death experiencers.
[Projector sound]
One fellow I knew was a sergeant in the Marines
in Vietnam, and was shot in the chest.
[Heart beat monitor]
And during that operation,
he had an elaborate near-death experience.
When he came back from that,
the idea of shooting someone else
was totally unthinkable to him.
He felt that he was no different
from the people he was shooting at.
And he had to eventually leave the Marines,
which had been his lifelong goal to be a Marine,
ended up coming back to the States,
and retraining as a medical technician.
And I've heard this again and again and again
from police officers and military officers
who retrained in social work, medical care, clergy,
teaching, so forth.
Being a psychiatrist, you know, I've worked with people
for about 50 years now —
I know how difficult it is
to help them make changes in their lives.
And here you have an experience
that takes place in a matter of seconds
or a fraction of a second
that totally transforms their attitudes, values
and beliefs and behavior.
People have thought about ways
of trying to induce an NDE-like experience safely
through guided meditation,
hypnotherapy, psychedelic drug use,
and these attempts have pretty much not been successful.
And when I talk with near-death experiencers about this,
they say that one of the most therapeutic things
about the experience
was the complete lack of control you have.
So much of our lives are spent
on trying to maintain control of our lives,
which is tremendously anxiety-provoking
and in a near-death experience,
no matter what happens to you,
you are totally out of control.
Something else is in control
of what's happening to you
and yet, you feel better than ever.
It often helps people deal with their anxieties,
certainly their anxiety about death and dying,
which often boils over
into other areas of being anxious about other things
in life as well.
[Woman gasps]
And when they come back,
they realize you don't need to be in control all the time,
and that giving up control,
stop being so obsessional about being in control,
makes life much more enjoyable for you.
And it may help the rest of us in learning
how to make our lives more meaningful and fulfilling.