Most near-death experiences say they are more spiritual, but not more religious.

They insist, it's real, it's happened to me.

They do tell us something about the possibility of surviving bodily death.

As a scientist, I knew I had to study this.

It didn't make any sense to me.

Near-death experiences are profound, subjective experiences that many people have when they come close to death, or sometimes when they are in fact pronounced dead.

And they include such difficult-to-explain phenomena as a sense of leaving the physical body, reviewing one's entire life, encountering some other entities that aren't physically present.

When I first started looking into near-death experiences back in the late 1970s, I assumed that there would be some physiological explanation for that.

What I found over the decades was that the various simple explanations we could think of, like lack of oxygen, drugs given to people, and so forth, don't pan out.

The data do not support them.

When we first started presenting this material in medical conferences, there would be a polite silence in the audience.

And now, in the 21st century when we do this, it's rare that doctors don't stand up in the audience and say, let me share my experience with you.

So it's pretty well accepted now that these are common experiences that people have all the time and that have profound effects.

There's still, of course, a lot of controversy about what causes them, but not about the fact that they exist and are fairly common.

As I started my psychiatric training, I started being confronted by patients' reports of things that I couldn't explain.

One happened to me when I was just a few weeks into my training.

I was asked to see a patient who had overdosed in the emergency room.

And I was in the cafeteria when the page came in, and I was eating dinner, and the page startled me, and I dropped my fork, spilling spaghetti sauce on my tie.

Couldn't wipe it off, so I just covered it over with a lab coat so no one would see it.

And then I went down to the emergency room to see the patient, and she was completely unconscious.

I could not revive her.

But her roommate was waiting to see me down the hall in another room.

So I went down to the other room, talked to the roommate for about 15 or 20 minutes, and there was no air conditioning back in the 70s, so I unbuttoned my lab coat so I wouldn't sweat so much, exposing the stain for about 10 minutes or so.

And then went back to see the patient.

She was still unconscious.

When I went to see her in the morning, I introduced myself, and she stopped me and said, I know who you are.

I remember you from last night.

That puzzled me, so I said something like, well, I'm surprised.

I thought you were unconscious when I saw you last night.

She looked at me and said, not in my room.

I saw you talking to my roommate down the hall.

She sensed my confusion and started to tell me about the conversation I had with her roommate, where we were sitting, what we were talking about.

And finally, she said, and you had a striped tie-on with a red stain on it.

That just blew me away.

I didn't know how to deal with that.

I couldn't think of any logical reason, any explanation for how she could have known about that spaghetti stain.

Nobody had seen it except her roommate, and she hadn't talked to her roommate since she came into the hospital.

As a scientist, I knew I had to study this.

It didn't make any sense to me.

But scientists don't run away from things they don't understand.

They run towards them.

I collected about 1,000 cases that people had sent to me about their own near-death experiences.

I quickly realized that the stories I was getting from people who volunteered their stories to me were the same as the ones from people I interviewed in the hospital.

The vast majority of near-death experiences that we hear are pleasant, if not outright blissful.

Most near-death experiences say that in the near-death experience, their senses were incredibly heightened.

And they often report hearing sounds they'd never heard on Earth and seeing colors they'd never seen before.

And when they come back, they don't know how to describe these things because there aren't words for them to describe them.

One person said to me, it's like trying to draw an odor with a crayon.

But they talk about their senses being so much more vivid in the NDE, and that gives the experience a sense of being more real than real, more real than this world is.

Most near-death experiences are pretty much the same around the world and through the centuries.

We've gotten examples of near-death experiences from Western Europe, from the Middle East, from Asian cultures, Hindu-Buddhist cultures, and from early cultures, Australian aborigines and Native American societies, that sound just like the stories we have today.

However, how they describe these phenomena is influenced by their cultural background.

For example, people all around the world will talk about encountering a warm, loving being of light that radiates unconditional love towards them.

And if you're talking to someone who is raised in the United States, they may identify this as God or sometimes Jesus.

Whereas someone who is in a Hindu or Buddhist culture will not use those terms.

It's natural for people to think that near-death experiences are kind of like dreams or hallucinations.

No two people have the same type of hallucination.

Whereas near-death experiences are basically the same across people, across cultures, across centuries.

Near-death experiences often have accurate out-of-body perceptions, whereas dreams and hallucinations do not.

And that to me is probably one of the best ways of distinguishing between a dream and a near-death experience.

Many near-death experiences report things that other people can't verify right away.

So we assume that they were just imagination or fantasy.

And yet they insist, it's real, it's happened to me, I know it.

And that's the way near-death experiences relate to their NDE.

They feel like there's no doubt in my mind, this is a real experience I had.

More real than this world is.

Most near-death experiences say that they have trouble speaking about it because there just aren't words to describe it.

A sense of connectedness to other people, to nature, to the universe, to the divine.

And that changes how they see everything.

It makes them much less invested in things of the physical world.

Power, prestige, fame, competition.

Experiences almost always say this is the most important thing that's ever happened to me.

And nothing else in my life compares to it.

The most common change we hear from near-death experiences is that they are no longer afraid of death.

They describe having existed without their physical bodies.

When their physical bodies were essentially dead and yet they were feeling better than ever.

Most near-death experiences say they are more spiritual but not more religious.

They tend to look on organized religions as being simplifications of what the spiritual world really is.

That what's important to them is the interconnections, not the dogma that goes along with it.

And they think that the type of deity they encountered, if they did, is not as limited as the God they were taught about in church.

It's much bigger than that, much more inclusive.

It leads them eventually to the golden rule, which is actually part of every religion we have.

Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.

But they feel that this is not for them anymore, a guideline we're supposed to follow, but a law of nature.

And when I talk with near-death experiences about this, they say that one of the most therapeutic things about the experience was the complete lack of control you have.

So much of our lives is spent on trying to maintain control of our lives, which is tremendously anxiety provoking.

And in a near-death experience, no matter what happens to you, you are totally out of control.

Something else is in control of what's happening to you.

And yet, you feel better than ever.

It often helps people deal with their anxieties, certainly their anxiety about death and dying, which often boils over into other areas of being anxious about other things in life as well.

And when they come back, they realize you don't need to be in control all the time.

And that giving up control, stop being so obsessional about being in control, makes life much more enjoyable for you.

Being a psychiatrist, and I've worked with people for about 50 years now, I know how difficult it is to help them make changes in their lives.

And here you have an experience that takes place in a matter of seconds, or a fraction of a second, that totally transforms their attitudes, values, and beliefs, and behavior.

I think the ultimate question raised by near-death experiences is, what are we as human beings?

Are we just physical machines?

Are we spiritual beings?

Are we some amalgam of both?

I think a reason many people find near-death experiences interesting is because they hold up the promise that will explain to us what the soul is, whether there is an afterlife after our bodies decompose.

And I think those are good questions.

I don't think that's the most important part of the near-death experience.

I think they do tell us something about the possibility of surviving bodily death.

But I think the important part of near-death experiences is what they tell us about this life we're in now, that we're all interconnected.

That we aren't individual people, but we're part of something greater.

And it may help the rest of us in learning how to make our lives more meaningful and fulfilling. www.mooji.org