Bruce Greyson Quotes

Interestingly enough, these claims by experiencers that they no longer feel addicted to worldly things doesn’t mean that they give them up. In fact, many of them say that because they no longer feel driven to accumulate possessions, they paradoxically feel freer to enjoy material pleasures more fully. They don’t renounce worldly possessions, but they feel less attached to them. They no longer define themselves by what they own.

MRI scans of the brain show that meditation, a mental practice of focusing the nonphysical mind, changes your physical brain over time by decreasing the size of brain areas that react to stress.

Respecting things that are difficult to measure, rather than dismissing them as unreal, is not rejecting science. It’s embracing science.

I hope to show that science and spirituality are compatible, that being spiritual doesn’t require you to abandon science

As physician Larry Dossey put it, “We are conscious not because of the brain but in spite of it.

The medical literature did not encourage that idea. Decades of clinical experience and research have established that brain activity decreases within six to seven seconds of the heart stopping. And after ten to twenty seconds, the electroencephalogram (EEG) goes flat, indicating no activity in the cerebral cortex — the part of the brain responsible for thoughts, perceptions, memory, and language. Analysis of the EEGs of people after life support is withdrawn show that the brain’s electrical activity in such cases actually stops before the heartbeat stops and before blood pressure ends — and after the heart stops there is no well-defined EEG activity. That seemed to answer my question about whether NDEs could be related to electrical activity in the brain.

Actually, very few topics of scientific research can be studied with controlled experiments. There are many fields that everyone accepts as science, even though laboratory experiments are difficult if not impossible — fields like astronomy, evolutionary biology, geology, and paleontology. The prestigious British Medical Journal published a tongue-in-cheek article claiming to examine whether parachutes help prevent deaths in people who jump out of airplanes. The authors had eliminated anecdotal evidence from consideration, including in their review only randomized controlled trials. Of course, they couldn’t find a single experiment in which people were randomly assigned to jump out of an airplane either with or without a parachute. They concluded: “The perception that parachutes are a successful intervention is based largely on anecdotal evidence.

As science historian Thomas Kuhn pointed out, scientific advances often come about when a new fact is discovered that can’t be explained.

In addition, recent neuroimaging studies of people under the influence of psychedelic drugs have shown that the elaborate mystical experiences associated with these drugs are accompanied by decreased brain activity.

Try to draw an odor using crayons. You can’t even begin to try, no matter how many crayons you have in your box. That’s what it’s like describing NDEs with words. No matter how many words you use, you can’t really describe what an NDE is like. Lying awake in the dark, I tried forming sounds that would explain. Maybe music would do what speech could not. After all, no one can describe the beauty of certain sounds, sounds that move us to action or to tears. Yes, maybe music was the only form of communication that could explain the feelings of peace that never left.

More important to me, however, was a comment by the Dalai Lama himself about the difference between Western science and Buddhism. Both disciplines, he argued, are based on observation and logical deduction, and both give experience precedence over belief in their quest for the truth. But, he added, Western scientists seem to seek understanding about how the world works in order to change and control the natural world. That is, the goal of most scientists is to gain mastery over our environment. Buddhists, on the other hand, seek understanding about how the world works in order to live more harmoniously with it.

As writer Dinty Moore put it: “If there is a God, I should live my life according to principles of kindness, compassion, and awareness, and if there is no God, well then I should live my life according to principles of kindness, compassion, and awareness anyway. How wonderfully simple.

The work will wait while you show the child the rainbow, but the rainbow won’t wait while you do the work.

My understanding of ‘reality’ was turned 180 degrees when I learned that at our deepest level of consciousness we are energy beings of pure love and light who are temporarily residing in physical bodies.

There are many paths up the mountain to reach God and it really doesn’t matter which one you take, because when you get there to that mountaintop it is all the same love, light, peace, harmony, gratitude, wisdom, truth, and victory for everybody. There are no religions in heaven, just ‘jelly.