NPR: How a near-death experience could change the way you live

NPR: How a near-death experience could change the way you live

Lee Hale

For Schiefer, death was a black wall, a question mark. That is, until he faced it himself.

He had what's known as a near-death experience — which have been documented around the world and can lead people to change the way they live their lives.

When he first described the city to his daughter Lisa, he said it was like Paris, but more beautiful, more pristine. He says the grass in the parks was a deeper green than anything on earth.

"And I've been to the highlands of Scotland," Schiefer says.

Most surprising to Greyson is that people can see things in their near-death experiences that will later be corroborated as accurate. Like certain tools used during open heart surgery or conversations that happened when they were unconscious, or pronounced dead during.

But most significant to Greyson is what comes after a near-death experience....

"I was raised in a scientific household, and I didn't believe any of this stuff before I started encountering it," Greyson says. "But after 50 years of studying thousands of cases, I can't deny that they happen and that they profoundly affect people's lives and present us with things that we don't have materialistic explanations for."

Trying to articulate my feelings that the article doesn't feel the need to get the pseudo-skeptical perspective. Looking at this, the varied streaming documentaries that mention the paranormal, the Vice article on the "Hard Science of Reincarnation", and various other things we've seen published...

Can't tell if I'm just being too optimistic but it really seems like there is a shift happening...

[Ninshub]

It's certainly encouraging. 

I was just telling myself that I'm lucky to be living now rather than 40 years ago, when "consciousness" wasn't even a field of study in philosophy, and now, on top of that, in the past 15 years or whatever we've had all these scientists and philosophers opening up to panpsychism, idealism, models of reality where consciousness is not only a field of study but deemed fundamental. (Plus all of the developments and attention to NDE science in the last decade or two as well). It's still a minority but it's a move in an encouraging direction.

Trying to articulate my feelings that the article doesn't feel the need to get the pseudo-skeptical perspective. Looking at this, the varied streaming documentaries that mention the paranormal, the Vice article on the "Hard Science of Reincarnation", and various other things we've seen published...

Can't tell if I'm just being too optimistic but it really seems like there is a shift happening...

Would be great to see that "day". In fact of course, as you know as well as I do, it won't happen like that. And they won't "eat any crow", they'll just withdraw and die off. I do believe that some of them have done a great deal of damage by influencing the masses to believe they have no soul, though.

Would be great to see that "day". In fact of course, as you know as well as I do, it won't happen like that. And they won't "eat any crow", they'll just withdraw and die off. I do believe that some of them have done a great deal of damage by influencing the masses to believe they have no soul, though.

Oh yeah, I don't think we'll see any admissions of guilt just a slow growth in the acceptance of parapsychology and its findings.

But things seem to be moving at a faster place than I'd have guessed in, say, 2013.