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 … - Bruce Greyson

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.

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

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.