In an article about Greyson's work in The Guardian, he's quoted as saying that,
I grew up without any kind of a spiritual background....I am convinced now, after doing this for 40, 50 years, that there is more to life than just our physical bodies. I recognise that there is a non-physical part of us.If you're interested in NDEs I recommend the entire article to you. The lede is so fascinating it's worth copying in full:
When Gregg Nome was 24 years old, he slipped into the churn beneath a waterfall and began to drown, his body pummeled against the sandy riverbed.One thing seems pretty clear. As science progresses the physicalist dogma that we're just material beings seems to be getting harder and harder to maintain.
What he saw there surprised him. Suddenly, his vision filled with crystal-clear scenes from his childhood, events he had mostly forgotten, and then moments from early adulthood. The memories, if that’s what they were, were vivid and crisp.
Was he reliving them? Not quite. They came at high speed, almost all at once, in a wave. And yet he could process each one individually. In fact, he was able to perceive everything around him: the rush of the water, the sandy bed, all of it brilliantly distinct.
He could “hear and see as never before,” he recalled later. And, despite being trapped underwater, he felt calm and at ease. He remembered thinking that prior to this moment his senses must have been dulled somehow, because only now could he fully understand the world, perhaps even the true meaning of the universe.
Eventually, the imagery faded. Next, “There was only darkness,” he said, “and a feeling of a short pause, like something was about to happen.”
Nome recounted this story at a support group in Connecticut, in 1985, four years after the experience. He had survived, but now he hoped to understand why, during a moment of extreme mortal crisis, his mind had behaved the way it did.
The meeting had been organised by Bruce Greyson, now a professor emeritus in psychiatry at the University of Virginia. (Some of the group’s members had responded to an ad Greyson placed in a local newspaper.) As Nome spoke, Greyson sat in a circle of 30 or so others, as if at an AA meeting, listening intently, nodding along.
Greyson had been hearing of events like these for years. A month into his psychiatric training, in the 1960s, he had been “confronted by a patient who claimed to have left her body” while unconscious on a hospital bed, and who later provided an accurate description of events that had taken place “in a different room”. This made no sense to him.
“I was raised in a scientific household,” he says, over Zoom. “My father was a chemist. Growing up, the physical world was all there was.” He felt certain someone had slipped the patient the information. He also thought, “What does that even mean, to leave your body?”
For years, he tried to put the account behind him, but repeatedly he faced heady stories of people experiencing other-worldly events, either when they had been pronounced clinically dead or thought they were close to it, before being wrestled back to life.
".... It occurred to me for the first time that this wasn’t just one patient,” Greyson says. “It was a common phenomenon.”
He became fascinated by the qualities of the episodes and the questions they raised, including perhaps the biggest of all: what actually happens when we die? “I plunged in,” he says. “And here I am, 50 years later, trying to understand.”
