LIAM CHAI

Near Death Experiences (NDEs) are badly named. As I understand it, the individuals who experience NDEs are dead. They are not “nearly dead”, they are dead. But somehow or another, they return to life after having died.

This short post is about the fascinating benefits that come from being dead.. and then returning to life.

Prof. Bruce Greyson is the former director of The Division of Perceptual Studies (DPOS) at the University of Virginia. This division is one of the few places in the world doing research that really fascinates me.

Some of their research headlines are Children Who Report Memories of Previous Lives, Studies of Psi and Altered States of Consciousness.

While doing research for the second part of my On Death series, I watched this lecture called, “Is Consciousness Produced by the Brain?” by Bruce Greyson where he gives a great overview of the research being done at DPOS.

The Fascinating Benefits of Being Dead

In one slide, Greyson shares how almost every individual who goes through a near death experience reports very similar changes in their life:

• More spiritual: 81%
• More compassionate, greater desire to help: 78%
• More appreciation of life: 77%
• More meaning, purpose in life: 78%
• Greater belief in survival of death of the body: 82%
• Less fear of death: 86%

These results were collected from 1,000 cases of NDEs investigated by Bruce Greyson. A lower percentage also report:

• Less interest in material objects: 53%
• Less interest in status, personal prestige, competing: 37%

These are incredible changes. In the Q&A of that lecture someone joked about having all of these effects in a pill – the ‘death pill’.

“One of the things about near-death experiences that interest me most as a psychiatrist is the profound after effects people reliably report – a consistent pattern of changes in attitudes beliefs and values that do not seem to fade over time.”

The key distinction that makes these benefits unique is that they persist. I know many people who have expressed profound religious, spiritual or even psychedelic experiences that overtime became a nice memory rather than something that radically transformed their lives in a lasting way. Or perhaps there was some initial change but it faded overtime.

Greyson continues:

“Almost everyone who has a near-death experience will be profoundly affected by that change and they will be transformed in their attitudes, beliefs and values. People who have the same type of unusual experience in a dream do not necessarily change their lives around and in fact if you ask them 10 years later they may not remember the dream but they will remember their near-death experience.”