EA #4. Atheism After Near Death Experiences - Dr. Alex Fry

Near-death experiences (NDEs) are common amongst those coming close to death and profoundly impact how they make sense of the world. Dr. Alex Fry of the University of Bournemouth draws on interviews with atheists who have had a NDE to explore whether death anxiety motivates attempts to make sense of the world and the extent to which the dominant belief systems in the UK shape their attempts to do so.

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Welcome everybody to the Smooth Brain Society. This is another explaining atheism episode. So Farrell is back here. And today we have Dr. Alex Frye on. So Dr. Alex Frye is a senior lecturer in sociology of health and illness at Bournemouth University in the UK. And he is the personal, he's the, what's it called, primary investigator for a project which explores the causes of atheism of those who have had near-death experiences, which is really interesting. Personally, I would have thought that after near-death experience, people tend to become more religious. Hopefully, Dr. Fry can get into that in more detail as well. So welcome, Alex. Thank you for having me. It's great to be here. Great. We should just start. with a little bit of a background. So how did you get interested in this? I know you've done your Masters and PhD all in the UK at different universities and on different projects. So if you could give the listeners a little bit of a background into how you got into your current research. Sure, so my background, my academic background started off in theology and religious studies. So I've always been interested in those sorts of questions around meaning and purpose and so on, you know, metaphysics, are there deities and so on? Are there spiritual realms? But always from a kind of critical academic perspective. So that was my bachelor's and master's degree. I then did a PhD in the sociology of religion because I wanted to focus on how different social phenomena you know, whether that's kind of cultural influences, psychological influences and so on, how they come to really influence what we believe and how we believe as well, our behaviors related to our beliefs. And so that really opened up some avenues in the area of health and wellbeing. After my PhD, I did two postdoctoral fellowships. One was in religion and wellbeing, so how belonging to religious communities comes to impact wellbeing for those who live in more deprived parts of the UK. And then after that, I did a postdoc in public policy for the Church of England. So the Church of England is intertwined with the political establishment in England. So during the COVID-19 pandemic, they were, some of their bishops were in the House of Lords, in those legislative debates, you know, do we close churches, etc. And so I did public policy work there. And so there's been a gradual, unplanned interest in religion and health, or belief and health, I should say, because belief is obviously more than just religion. And then I was appointed to this role of lecturer in the sociology of health and illness at Bournemouth, with specialties in belief and health and wellbeing. And I wanted to do something on near-death experiences because I was aware from some documentaries that this was becoming something people were more interested in, but also it was becoming very obvious to me as a sociologist. that people weren't that interested in the whole person or the person's whole context and how that might impact either the near-death experience itself or the impact of the near-death experience on their lives subsequently. A lot of the interest, particularly in the media, but this is true of academic research to some extent as well, has been very much on the experience itself. And, you know, what can that tell us maybe about spiritual realities or non physical realities and so on. And whilst I find that absolutely fascinating, as a sociologist, I am just very aware that there are lived implications for such life changing experiences and what are often going to be challenging experiences because obviously the things that lead up to a near-death experience are often at least physically traumatic, if not also psychologically so. So it was just about realizing that this was a really important phenomenon for a lot of people. And it was apparently it was going to be impacting a lot more people because of the coronavirus pandemic. But at the same time, there wasn't really much being done. on seeing the person who's had a near-death experience or an NDE in a more kind of holistic way. Cool. I think the best place to jump in and ask is what do you mean by a near death experience? Because I feel you discussed it more in terms of COVID a little bit. Yeah. So what are your kind of definitions of near death experience? What are your, yeah, some of the key concepts someone would need to know if we're trying to understand your work. A near-death experience is generally defined in quite broad terms as an experience of death or impending death that can be subjectively positive or negative. Now, that's a fair definition. The slight issue with that is, let's say someone steps out. onto the road for just a second, they realize a car is coming and they steps back. Is that a near death experience? Well, you could say that under the definition I've just given. But that's very different to someone who, like someone I've interviewed, was pulled under a train, right, and then died on the operating table later. Can we really class those two events? and explode them in similar ways. I'm a little skeptical. And so most of the people that I've spoken to, who've had a near death experience, have had something far more concretely nearing death. So for a number of people that is in a hospital context, actually just, you know, just about pulling through and surviving. For other people, actually, they were medically dead and were revived. So when I talk about near-death experiences, I mean much more the impending death and actual death, rather than the sort of person who, you know, takes a step out onto the road and then quickly steps back again. So it's, if you think of it as a spectrum, I'm more interested in the kind of the more extreme side of that, purely because I think that's going to be far more impactful on people's lives and shape their lives moving forward. So that's what I mean by a near death experience. I mean, if not being, you know, medically dead and coming back alive, as some were, it's just being on the cusp of death as a minimum. So in some cases it is literally near death, in others actually it is death. It is a death experience and then you know revival or resuscitation. I wanted to ask what about people like you mentioned someone dying on the operation table being actually dead for a few minutes, but they have been, you know, and they've been given anesthesia, they don't actually know that they've died. So an unconscious near that experience rather than a conscious near that experience, would you classify them as the same thing? Would you consider someone? That's that's a really interesting question. So I've only spoken to one person. could be said as having an unconscious near-death experience. Everyone else has had a conscious one and the difference in experience seems to be whether or not one has an out-of-body experience. So out-of-body experiences are literally that, it's the ability to see things outside of your body. So In many of those cases, people are then looking down because there's this association with being kind of up above what's happening below you in a room, say, and you can see your own body, which is partly how they know it's an out of body experience. Now, these are sometimes classed as discrete phenomena to near-death experiences. So one can have the near-death experience without an out of body experience and vice versa. But nearly everyone I've spoken to who's had a near-death experience, they have had an out-of-body experience, which means it's been a conscious experience. So the lived experience of that, if that's the right way of putting it, and I suppose language is failing us to some extent when we're talking about this. But the lived experience of someone who has the out of body experience is very different to someone who has the unconscious near-death experience, because as you've hinted at, they don't know at that point in time that that's what's happened to them. They don't know they've died because they're unconscious. Now, something that's worth mentioning in this is that actually the participant pool is somewhat self-selective. I suspect, because you're probably not going to be as likely to want to discuss an unconscious near-death experience because you have less to talk about. That's not to say that there aren't very real-world ramifications. If you've died, you might well have significant periods of recovery afterwards, and it might well alter the way you look at the world. The experience of those who have had a conscious near-death experience, who have had an outer body experience, is so profound and in some respects completely shatters the belief system they had before. And we don't have the same mechanisms in place to help people to make sense of that. Okay, you know, therapists often don't know what to do with something like that sort of near-death experience in a way that they might do with someone who's had an unconscious near-death experience. Because that might not be paradigm shifting, the unconscious one. Whereas with the conscious one, there are so many things that happen in that experience that are so out of the ordinary, it's hard to know how to assist people to make sense of that. And so people who have had that more conscious near-death experience are more likely to come forward to talk about it because they don't get the opportunity to talk about it with other people, and they've struggled with therapists and so on, and certainly with medical staff, who can be particularly dismissive of those sorts of things as well. So I just still want to wrap my head around what we're talking about here in terms of near-death. So of course the car example was one, just walking on, maybe just moving away from an accident, but what if we up the ante a bit? Suppose you had a knife pointed at you or a gun pointed at you, or you were shot but it hit your arm or something, so probably did die but you were certainly were going to. Does that affect things as well? Is that somewhere else on the scale but not as far as what you're talking about? Yeah, so under the definition I gave earlier that could well be classed as a near-death experience because it is a broad definition. However, it's not really the end of the spectrum that I'm looking at. I'm looking at very much people who have been or just about to be medically dead. But interestingly, I decided not to be too specific with how I was defining it in my recruitment material. I didn't want to preempt too much what I might find, but those who have come forward are those who have been at the other end, the more extreme end of that spectrum. So I would suspect, but cannot say for sure. that someone who has been shot in the arm and was to all intents and purposes fine, I suspect they would have a very different experience after their hospital care than someone who, in one case was hit by a van and died before the ambulance got to them, but then was resuscitated. or the person I mentioned who was pulled under by a train and died on the operating table later. Someone else who was, in fact two people who had been poisoned, once under medical care quite accidentally, the other in a slightly different context. So the sorts of things that I'm looking at are very varied. pulled under by a train, only one person hit by a van. But they're all much clearer, you know, much more clearly heading towards death or actually being medically dead and then resuscitated. So everyone I've spoken to is at that more extreme end of the of the scale. Can I also ask, with all these people, because you said one unfortunately passed away on the operating table, when are you interviewing them? So at what point are these interviews happening post the experience? So it changes significantly depending on the person. For some of them, it's decades after. For others, it's only been a few years. Now, it has to be at least a few years really ethically, just because people have to be at the point where they're not going to kind of harm themselves by talking about these quite literally traumatic experiences. I think in kind of idiomatic speech, we've lost the significance and the seriousness of the word trauma, but these people have really had trauma, proper trauma. So they need to be able to talk to me without, you know, falling into perhaps a re-traumatized state, shall we say. So as a minimum, it's been a few years, or at least a couple of years anyway. For some people, they've actually had multiple near-death experiences. Some people have been quite unfortunate in that respect. And so they might be talking about one that happened 20 years but it really varies for the person. Some of them happened in childhood, although that's a minority. Most of them have happened in their adult lives, but that space between the experience and the interview with me, very significant. Awesome. I kind of want to get into more about the near death experience and the phenomena itself, because I think you've given us a few hints about it. Like, what can you give us an insight into what happens when someone experiences near death? Like, what are some things that they experience? Out of body being one of them, what else do they experience? And why is it such a significant paradigm for them? Sure. So there's a lot more on this. in academic research because as I said that's what so many people are interested in understandably and there's a debate about how much of this is universal, how much of the experience is universal and how much of it seems to be shaped by culture and it seems to be a bit of both in my view but common features are the bright light, perhaps a tunnel leading to the bright light from a place certainly an out-of-body experience and a weightlessness, a real sense of peace. People have said to me that coming back into their body felt like a bereavement because they loved where they were. Now there's something interesting about that which I should say in a moment and if I forget please do remind me. because I think there's something self-selecting about that again, which is worth highlighting. But to go back to your question, the facets also include seeing other beings. You might say celestial beings, you might say spiritual beings, you might say relatives, but not always relatives and not always unknown beings, but contact with others. often the imparting of what I would call esoteric knowledge. So knowledge that is perhaps secret and that people forget when they come back to Earth in some cases, but remember later. Other common features amongst the people I've spoken to have included phenomena like... intuition, that's quite a significant one as well actually. So they often talk about, and the limits of language again are present when my participants recount their experiences, but they talk about having a conversation with someone or talking to someone, but they say, except we weren't actually talking, you know, it was intuition, they felt something, they could These are quite common amongst my participants and really are quite typical of other near-death experiences as well. Interestingly, for one person... Years later, they were looking into Celtic history, and they found that actually some of the Celtic symbols that they were looking at in this book were what they saw when they had their near-death experience. So that's less common. It's worth saying that's a less common one, where people actually figure out later on, retrospectively, what they saw. For most people, it was a vivid remembering. but it's those sorts of things. But the ones that kind of stuck out the most were this sense of peace and enjoyment and everything was fine. They knew they were dead, but they weren't bothered by it. Occasionally, when people were told or given the option, and some people are told, others are given the option of coming back to Earth, even though they really want to stay, sometimes they felt like they should go if they had other people under their care back on Earth. If back on Earth is the right way of putting it, again, the limitations of language here. So I would say those are the most common features. How universal are they? Well, on the one hand, they're very universal. On the other hand, obviously, some of the people they see, the language they use to describe it is going to be shaped by their own life experience. And of course, if you are using language familiar to you, as you're going to be inevitably, that will then to some extent, I would think, color or influence how other people understand that experience as well, as well as how you kind of rehearse that experience in your own mind, just because of the way memory works. So I would say those are the very common features of the near-death experience amongst those I've interviewed, but like I say they seem to be common across the board, which is a really interesting phenomenon, the fact that there seem to be these universal qualities. But going back to the thing I was going to say earlier, I think that sense of peace and real enjoyment of being there is self-selecting. Occasionally researchers come across people who've had a negative near-death experience. I encountered one person in an informal conversation, and it was decided not to take that conversation forward. They weren't comfortable with it, and that's fine. And one or two other researchers have noted this as well. And the assumption, which I think is fair, is... the knowledge we have on near-death experiences is disproportionately in favour of the more positive ones because those who have a really negative one are even less likely to want to talk about it than those who've had positive ones. And those who've had positive ones, like I say, often take a while to get into the space where they can feel that they can talk about it in a positive or helpful way. And again, that's probably self-selecting because you might well have those who, you have positive experiences, but the impact on that subsequently is so significant that they don't want to talk about it. A number of my participants were quite apprehensive about the possibility of talking to me initially. So we had, you know, informal conversations first just so they can suss who I am, what I'm about, what I'm doing. that I'm not a sort of the type of journalist who might be irresponsible, you know, because of that's been a thing in some people's experiences as well. But you also asked why it's so transformative or why it's so changing. And the reason for that is a lot of the people I've spoken to were quite materialistic, didn't really, you know, hedonistic. didn't really think much about the spiritual, not much in the way of church background, perhaps some Sunday school, that sort of thing. Not necessarily a very positive experience of institutional religion. And so we're just getting on with their lives really, as most people do, without giving too much thought to metaphysics or the meaning of life and so on, even after they'd lost loved ones. in actual fact, they said they didn't really think much about the meaning of life or would I see them again? And so it's such a shock to the system that they have to make sense of this whole new perceived reality, this whole new realm that they never even considered might exist before. But not only that, but they don't have what we might call the cultural toolkit. to really deal with it. For a lot of these people, what they experienced was very dissimilar to what they knew about Christianity or other mainstream world religions, certainly those that are more common in the UK, and my participants have been UK based primarily. So they don't really know where to start making sense of it all. So it's often a very long journey in that respect. completely disoriented. But also many of them feel they're given a mission in their near-death experience, that they have a message. It can be somewhat evangelistic or gospel-oriented, but obviously not the Christian gospel. It's a new, much broader message that, you know, around, basically around love, that actually everyone is really connected. And that which I forgot to mention earlier, it's a very common experience as well, this feeling connected. And that wouldn't the world be a better place if we understood our connection and we were able to love better. So that's a very challenging journey for many of them because they're learning afresh, they don't have the cultural resources to draw on initially to make sense of that. So there's this disorientation. And then there's the changing relationships with their loved ones as well, because their loved ones have no idea what's happened to them. They don't know what they're on about. Their personality often seems to change to at least some extent as well, and so marriages do become quite strained. It's a documented feature that some people get divorced following on from the near-death experience because of how it changes the person. Amongst those I interviewed, there were some who got divorced, but it wasn't primarily or not exclusively about the near death experience. There were other things going on prior to that. So it's transformative for all of those reasons. It's a huge paradigm shift in the way people look at the world, but one that leaves them in equipped to make sense of at least initially. I have so many follow up questions. I will probably ask in chronological order of how, what you said. So one thing which you said, one thing which you said was it's very universal, although your participants are from the UK, by universal. In this case, are you talking about participants from different ethnic and cultural backgrounds still seeing similar things? Ah, sure. So, yes, participants are from different ethnic and cultural backgrounds within the UK. But also what my participants report is also often reported in other parts of the world as well for a near-death experience. So that's primarily what I mean when I say they're universal or somewhat universal. I use that with some caution. There are at least universal elements or elements that appear to be universal. But by that, I mean people from other parts of the world report quite similar things. Cool. And the next one was you, when you first started off talking about a lot of people who you interviewed, because not all, but a lot, or didn't really associate with their religion that much, kind of living their life, and then they have this experience. But, and when you said that, I was first thinking, okay, so then this should map onto them becoming more religious, but then you turned it into them turning, what they see or what they experience being very different to what is described according to most religions. Are you comparing this based on all sorts of religions or only based on the Abrahamic ones or um sure so yes so religion it's a very thorny word and means very different things to different people so what i mean is it their experience doesn't dovetail with their experience or understanding of institutional religion. So interestingly, a lot of them do draw on elements of what we might call Eastern religion or philosophy. Although there is a question about how much Buddhism, for example, is a world religion, how much is it a philosophy and a way of life, etc. So when I when I talk about religion, really, I mean the institutional form. of religion, particularly those that are commonly found within the UK. So you might say that my participants became spiritual but not religious. Okay, that's nice. So by atheism in this context, you're kind of comparing it to, yeah, comparing it to the institutional religions to leaving that to a more spiritual or holistic kind of worldview or viewpoint. To some extent, but also there's not a belief in an independent deity amongst those I've spoken to either. So, you know, they wouldn't say there is a God as or not in the way that we tend to think about God, there is a source, they talk about source and an energy that is kind of. everything in reality is kind of a part of this source, a part of this energy. So you might say it's a sort of pantheism, potentially, but... and this is where it gets a bit tricky, because those I've spoken to have always talked about it in relatively broad or vague terms, because they themselves don't necessarily have the language to really precisely describe this. but also having the language to really nail down what it is they're talking about might well mirror too closely what institutional religions do. And in their experience, that's not a desirable thing. So there's this slight, you know, catch-22 here. They're wanting to talk about something that religious language might help us to understand to some extent whilst avoiding... the language that is often used by institutional religions to describe it. So there is a vagueness or a broadness there. But you would probably best describe them as spiritual, but not religious. So not atheists in the sense of material, you know, metaphysical naturalists. They don't believe all there is the physical world. But equally, they don't believe in an independent deity either. So let's get to it. I want to ask you what you mean by atheism, if you can actually give us a definition of atheism, especially in the near-death context, what do you mean by atheism? Yeah, just, you know, and what does sociology refer to atheism as? Because I know psychology has a different definition of atheism, maybe that's- Interesting. Yeah. So- I wasn't aware that psychology had a different definition of atheism, actually. So that is very interesting. It could be. I could be wrong. So we'll find out once you give us the definition. Well, in sociological research, the concept of atheism has broadened significantly. So there's been some really interesting research by David Herbert, Josh Bullock and others around how self describing atheists across Europe describe their faith, or belief system, I should say. And interestingly, no longer self-describing atheists are no longer purely those who are metaphysical naturalists. They are no longer those who say all there is the material world and that's it. So it's become a much less concrete term, sociologically speaking. and often it seems to be used to say, I don't belong to an institution or religion. Or it's not something I particularly thought about much, but I don't have any affiliation. So atheist is now a very broad term. If we are more of a structuralist with our language rather than a functionalist, so we have fixed definitions, you might say that the word atheist is now being used somewhat transgressively. If we're a functionalist, we might say, well, it's just an evolving and changing term. So as a sociologist, on the one hand, there is a need to categorize, there is a need to label and describe. But we also need to do that critically as well. So we're not artificially imposing things that don't really match the social reality that we're exploring. definition of atheism in my recruitment. And what I said is those who are not traditionally religious, you may or may not consider yourselves to be spiritual. I think if I had narrowed it down to the very kind of specific metaphysical naturalist definition, I would have got almost no participants. So interestingly, and to some extent, this also speaks to the self-selecting nature. And perhaps I'll talk about this in a bit in more detail. But those who have any death experience and have more to talk about or feel the need to try and make sense of it more thoroughly are probably those who've had some sort of spiritual experience. because like I say, that's a bigger paradigm shift, which isn't to say that those who, who kind of dismiss it all as you know, neurons misfiring or whatever, don't have a very significant experience they do because they died or they've nearly died. But, but the aftermath is different. And so, if you interpret it in spiritual terms rather than purely physicalist terms. you are more likely to try and find a community of people who've had this experience, so you can make sense of it. And that makes it easier to recruit people. Whereas if I had said, I only want to talk to metaphysical naturalists, they are perhaps less inclined to join those sorts of networks to make sense of it because they already know what they think about it to some extent. They think there's a psychological explanation or some sort of other scientific explanation. And so they're much harder to find and recruit for studies. So again, there's a self-selecting nature to this. There probably are more metaphysical naturalists who've had a near-death experience, but they're far more difficult to find. So going back to the question of what is an atheist, I've kept it deliberately broad. Those who are not traditionally religious, they may or may not be open to a non-physicalist reality beyond what we can see around us. And that has served the research quite well, like I say, because of the social nature of people who have near-death experiences. They either join groups or they don't, depending on whether or not they see it purely in physicalist or spiritual terms. well, bias in or the self-selection issue in such research. Yeah, because you earlier mentioned how people with negative experiences might be less likely to talk about it than people who, yeah, who might kind of describe or explain away what they saw, what happened to them, might also not want to talk about it. And then there's also the third group of people who might not want to talk about it because other people might just think they're crazy. So how have you, I know you've tried to, you said that you've kept it broad, but how in your research have you gone about collecting participants? How many did you get in your preliminary work? Cause you said that you've finished some of the preliminary data collection and interviews and how long do these interviews last? Could you take us through a little bit of, yeah, the selection and methods process? Yeah, sure. So for something like this, gatekeepers are really key. for a number of reasons. One is that if you want to recruit as many as possible, ideally you need to find some sort of community. And, you know, it tends to be an online dispersed community with near-death experiences. The second reason a gatekeeper is very important is because actually some of these people are quite vulnerable. And there needs to be that kind of layer of protection. You need to be working with gatekeepers to make sure that people are as looked after as possible. So one of my criteria for ethical reasons for selection was to say that you need to have some sort of support in place if you're going to talk to me about this experience. Let's say someone had only recently had their near-death experience. They think, oh, you know what, I just want to talk about it. And it completely re-traumatizes them and they don't have that support network. The impact of that could be just so messy and damaging. Having those gatekeepers in place gives an added layer, a bit of a safety net for those people. Although I also made clear in my recruitment material that to have this conversation, you needed to be in a place where you were very unlikely to have that kind of deeply traumatic impact. But nevertheless, as an additional safety net to have that support group was just sensible. So that also speaks into the self-selecting nature of this for ethical reasons. It's very difficult, quite rightly, very difficult to get ethical sign off for a project like this, unless you have a number of safety nets in place. But that also reduces the potential participant pool as well. So they are key factors that have, from my end, that have intentionally made this self-selecting, in addition to the self-selecting nature at participants' end as well. Excuse me. So that was one thing, gatekeepers. And then that of course begs the question of. where do you go? And there are a number of groups that both national and international, for people who've had near-death experiences. One is called IANS, the International Association for Near-Death Studies. And the reason I really liked that one and went to that one first is because it was set up by Bruce Grayson, who's a psychiatrist. who has done a lot of research into near-death experiences. And so he really knows his stuff. And it's a very credible community. They know what they're doing. I know that there is support available to members of that community if they needed it. And then another group I found was NDE UK, Near-Death Experiences UK. who was run by someone who had a near-death experience themselves with the help of someone who is a codified nurse and also a researcher, Penny Sartori, who's written a book herself on near-death experiences. So again, it just gave me confidence that is a group that knows how to support those people. So those were really important. So in- In actual fact, you could say that making sure that the research was ethical in terms of the support and reducing any possibility of harm and damage was more important than actually avoiding self-selection. So, and in that respect, this has been a very different study to those I've done in the past. Although you had certain ethical requirements, it was people who were far less vulnerable. And so you could reach more for representivity and that kind of objectiveness. Whereas in this case, actually, it's about making sure we have people who aren't going to be likely, who aren't likely to be rear harmed in this process. So like I say, and like you picked up on that does mean actually participant selection is very much there. And my sense is it's always going to be for this kind of research for it to be done safely and ethically. And so we are always going to have to do it's research into near-death experiences with the caveat that it's going to be a lot more knowledge out there that we just aren't tapping into. And of course, there are ways around that. You just, you know kind of where you can make representative claims. So I can make representative claims about the UK, about people who've had positive experiences that have ultimately, positively death experiences that is. The aftermath might not be positive, but the experience itself is. Amongst people who have interpreted their experience spiritually. I can make that sort of representative claim. But I also need to be careful to say, there's this group and that group and this other group who I haven't been able to talk to. But if we can get to a point where medically, in medical institutions, there is better aftercare for people who've had near-death experiences, it might well open up avenues of inquiry that aren't currently available. So I think there is some work to be done with medical care, health and social care to really support people better after they've had critical care. Because one possible statistic that's been suggested is around 40% of those people who are in critical care have near-death experiences. That's a lot of people, a lot of people. So there really is a significant amount of room for, in the UK context, the NHS to develop its aftercare for these people. And if it does that, it could well mean a lot more people who are initially vulnerable coming to the point where they can talk about these sorts of phenomena. But I think we're way off that. I think there's a lot of work to be done. And certainly with the political agendas being what they are at the moment with the NHS, the financial and resource pressures and so on, I don't see that happening quickly. But I think the opportunity and possibility is there. Can I then ask the importance of doing such research or the importance of, well, I guess there's the basic standard humanitarian one of after near-death experience care. And especially if you said 40% of people in particular might experience something. So it would be, it's something which we should have. But on top of that, like if you were trying to pitch this to a politician with all the agendas going on, um how what is the yeah the importance claim for this research and for why we should be doing this sure um where you, you know, the answer depends on your values to some extent. So I would say, I would argue that The wellbeing implications for people are significant. They take a real toll on people's wellbeing for extensive periods of time. And for that humanitarian reason alone, as you alluded to, it's worth doing. There's an ethical reason. If we wanted to be, and because you mentioned politicians and agendas and so on, if we wanted to be quite detached from this all, we could say, well, actually the economic impact is very much present because people often, depending on the nature of the illness that led to their near-death experience, can't work for some time and need a lot of aftercare physically as well. So you could say, well, to get people into a place where they can work again and, you know, contribute economically, it is worth investing in resources that help with aftercare to speed up that process. And of course, that helps them psychologically as well, because the psychological implications can mean that people perhaps are less effective at work or can't work for a period of time. So you could make that very detached, arguably callous economic rationale for supporting it. Like I say, I prefer the more kind of ethical humanitarian aspect. And I think most people would probably agree with that as well. But also if we're going to say that in the UK context we are a country that is proud of its national health service, people aren't happy with the fact it's under so much pressure with the conditions that so many healthcare workers have to work in, let's fund it better. Well if we're going to fund it better, resource it better, why don't we look after people better as well? Why don't we use resources to look after people better? And of course, that would mean aftercare for people who've been critically ill, who've had these near-death experiences. And something that I wasn't expecting to find, and I've not yet found anyone else who's noted this, everyone I've spoken to, who has had a kind of near-death experience, has had quite early challenging life experiences. You would legitimately say many of those have been traumatic. And so when people are dealing with the aftermath of their near-death experience, they're not just dealing with the trauma of that event, and they're not just dealing with the physical trauma, all these other things that have happened early on, neglect, physical abuse, sexual abuse, these sorts of things, they're not coming to the surface and they're dealing with that. Now it's too early for me to say what is this correlation about. I don't know if that's an impacting factor of the NDE, but certainly it's coming up afterwards when they're back to life and they're making sense of everything that's happened. These other traumatic events or challenging events are coming up and they're having to deal with that as well. So there's an additional layer for it, for certainly the people I've spoken to about childhood. trauma, childhood challenging experiences. So there's just an additional layer for people to deal with. That means they really do need that additional support after the near-death experience. That last point was very much the trope of seeing your entire life flash before your eyes. And also a lot of the other kind of things that you've mentioned, people experiencing family members that relief, those kind of things are depicted a lot in movies and TV shows. So, yeah, I think I was watching True Detective the other week. if you haven't seen it, great show. But in that, in that, he kind of describes, in like season one, one of the characters kind of describes this people who he sees dying and he sees the relief in their eyes. And then later on he has a near death experience and he says, yeah, kind of seeing family members. So I feel these are pretty common kind of tropes which you've described or common kind of, yeah, assumptions we make. Yeah, so good to know that they kind of come from somewhere, they're not just being plucked out of thin air. Sure. Yeah. And there's a really interesting question around that, that researchers I think need to be intellectually honest about and aware of. How much do those cultural occurrences come to shape how people interpret their near-death experience? And how much of those cultural elements? come directly from the New Death Experia. And it's probably somewhat circular. There's probably some reciprocity there. But we don't exist in a social vacuum. Our experiences are formed by our culture. But equally, that doesn't mean they can't be external things that come to shape our culture as well. It's a bit of both. And it's the chicken and egg question, really, what comes first? And of course, we're not really in a position to say with a great deal of confidence. So what I would say is that our culture, not least through language, but also through expectations to some extent, come to shape how we interpret near-death experiences. But that doesn't mean that the near-death experience is only about a cultural reconstruction. It is clearly a vivid, unexpected event that has some universal qualities, as I said earlier. But nonetheless, that external event is always going to be interpreted, to some extent, by what is familiar to us, by what we know, or what we think we know anyway. And so you kind of have this reciprocal relationship between external event and culturally mediated understanding of it. In In sociology, well not just sociology, in philosophy and the social sciences, we call that critical realism. You know, believing that there is such a thing as external reality to us, but that we always interpret it in a culturally mediated way. That doesn't mean that everything is entirely subjective, but it does mean there is subjectivity in how we engage with the world around us. That's really in type of, I wonder. take a slight pivot and ask a few questions that I've been sitting on for a while. The first is a very basic question, which is how is the sociology of religion and the near-death experience different to perhaps the psychology of near-death experiences and maybe atheism? That's my first question. My second question is can we more explicitly talk about the relationship between near-death experiences and atheism? We've kind of alluded to how near-death experiences drive people towards spirituality away from institutional religion, do they also drive materialists towards spirituality as well? And is that still atheism? So can we speak about that link a little bit more as well? Sure, yeah, two very big questions. So to go to the first question, sociology of religion, and I think we have to talk about the sociology of religion here. I think that is the best inroad to talking about near-death experiences sociologically. Sociologically, NDEs are pretty untapped, to be honest with you. I think psychology has spent a lot more of its resources trying to understand this, which is one reason really that motivated me to explore this as a sociologist. So sociology of religion is in a place where certainly qualitative sociology of religion especially, where it is very aware of the categories that may or may not be imposed on people. So I don't know how it might differ to the psychology of religion because I'm not trained as a psychologist, although I engage with social psychology where sociology and psychology overlap, but nevertheless I approach all of this Sociology is certainly aware that the categories should come from how people self-describe, how people make sense of their experiences and so on. And so we always have a slightly flexible labelling, I suppose. There needs to be this awareness of that language might be... evolving, transient, changing over time or different in different contexts. So that allows me to explore atheism, I suppose, by hitting home that it is a very broad term and that is one of the things that led me to use my very broad language of people who would not describe themselves as traditionally religious. but may or may not be spiritual. But I don't know how that compares to the psychological understanding of atheism. Is that quite different to the one that you might use? No, it overlaps so much that I can't tell the difference at all. Oh, great, okay, good. That's really good to hear actually, because if I were to need to be engaging a lot with the psychological literature in this research for obvious reasons. So that's helpful to know. Sorry, the second part of the question was, just remind me. Yeah, let's talk about near-death experiences and atheism. Can you paint out the link between them? And if you want to delve into any of your hypotheses that come along with it, what do you expect from the research? Anything like that. Sure, well... There are people who haven't thought about the world, and in that respect are only interested in what is physically around them. You've had near-death experiences, they do become spiritual as a result of the near-death experience. You could say that they are retrospective atheists, but they wouldn't have been, amongst those I've interviewed, they wouldn't have been ideologically committed atheists. It was kind of an atheist by default, you know, only interested in what's around them and what they can see and what they can prove and so on. So that's a different kind of atheist to an ideological atheist, to say a humanist, for example, or a type of humanist. It's not really the same back. So yes, people who are atheists can become spiritual in light of their near-death experience. So we're using the term atheist in a different way there because they're not. religious. They are more spiritual, but in a way that isn't engaging with institutional religions, not really engaging with world religions, but that's a problematic concept anyway, like I said, what do you do with something like Buddhism? Some people would say that the concept religion is a Western imposed term that doesn't really match neatly belief systems found in the East. That's debated, you know, and I'm not particularly engaging with those debates in this research, but I'm just I need to be aware of them, given that some participants do draw on Eastern spiritualities in order to help make sense of their experience. People have talked about chakras, for example. So, so that's very much there. My hypothesis so I started with a hypothesis. that death anxiety shapes meaning making. So death anxiety is a motivating factor for people to try and make sense of the world. And that a near death experience is an event that would increase that need for people. Now I found out pretty quickly that's wrong. There is no evidence prior to people's near death experience that they were scared of death. in most cases, in most cases. So a couple of people would have had some sort of death anxiety, but it didn't actually really motivate them to make sense of the world, it just meant they tried not to think about death. So actually it probably enhanced their hedonism and their materialism. Since having the near-death experience people aren't scared of death. They think they're going to a really peaceful place that they enjoy being at. As I've said, that's self-selecting. But those I've spoken to, they're not afraid of death. They don't want to leave people behind. They don't want their relationships to end. They, some aren't looking forward to the process of dying because pain is probably involved. Although some of them aren't that bothered about the process of dying, but they're not scared of death. So, So death anxiety, based on the data I've collected, does not seem to be a factor shaping the formation of belief systems amongst those I've spoken to. Would it be in a different group of people who've had near-death experiences? Possibly. But I have no evidence for that amongst the group that I've been speaking to. So my hypothesis was blown out of the water quite quickly, actually. which basically is an encouraging sign, or at least I'm telling myself it's an encouraging sign, because although my hypothesis was theoretically plausible based on what we could expect in light of previous research, it wasn't found to be the case. So what we have instead is some quite significant factors, cultural factors shaping the meaning-making process. So I've gone from a project that is exploring a very defined hypothesis to saying, okay, that's not true. What can we find that is shaping this process? And certainly the cultural turn from the mid-20th century, the late 1950s onwards, seems to be a significant shaping factor. So all of my participants would count as Nearly all of them would count as baby boomers. All the rest, and there's only a handful that are younger, this insight still applies to them because of the cultural milieu that they grew up in. But a distrust of institutions, a distrust of external authorities, a preference for personal authenticity, and a belief system that coheres with their experience. Linda Woodhead talks a lot about this kind of cult, well, not just Linda Woodhead, so many people. Callum Brown talks about it as well in his book, The Death of Christian Britain, but Linda Woodhead also in That Was the Church That Was, which she wrote with Callum Brown. And both books talk about, and Hugh McLeod as well has a book on this, they all talk about the the steep decline in Christian affiliation in the UK, and it's not just true of the UK, it's true in wider Europe as well, and other parts of the world too, to be fair. Where actually these cultural factors led to a decline in Christianity and traditional affiliation with religion, and led to a proliferation of kind of different spiritual belief systems that are more tailor-made to the person. So it's called Bricolage, to take the French term of do-it-yourself DIY spirituality, according to David Lyon. So there's all sorts of literature out there on this, but it is about a kind of self-made spirituality, fueled by frustration, distrust, negative experiences of institutions. So that is clearly a factor that is shaping the belief systems of those that I've spoken to, of my atheists, my spiritual atheists, I suppose you could say participants, spiritual atheist participants. That is a huge factor. Beyond that, I do need to explore this correlation between early challenging experiences, mostly what we might call traumatic events. Is that a shaping factor in some way or is that just a really strange coincidence? It's too early for me to say, but I need to test and explore that avenue. It's certainly a very surprising finding. It's certainly not one that I was checking for. Another factor seems to be Real independence, people were very independent from an early age that I've spoken to. And that of course, that independence is necessary to have the courage to explore what your worldview might be in light of your near-death experience, particularly if it is going to give you a completely different way of looking at the world from your loved ones. So that independence is key in that journey. And it's interesting that my participants have that from a very early age as well. So there are three things, three factors, two of which that I'm confident is shaping their worldview formation in light of the near-death experience. And the third thing, you know, the early trauma that I really need to explore further to see is this just a fluke? Is this just a correlation? Or is there something else happening there? because I've just started to analyse the transcripts. It's too early for me to say what else might be there, but I'm very much open to new possibilities and avenues of inquiry. But what I can say is taking a whole life approach has certainly opened up avenues of inquiry that wouldn't have been there otherwise. I wanted to ask about, you said something like a DIY spirituality, there is a word for it which is like new age religion and so wouldn't that, how would you differentiate between this new age religion that is being coined and DIY spirituality and would you consider that to be an institutionalized form of religion or religiosity? Sure, I wouldn't consider it to be an institutionalized form. There are what you might call neoliberal elements to it. So, you know, self-spirituality books and that sort of thing. So there are those who figured out how to make money off of this. You could say that is the influence of something like McDonaldization or, you know, some sort of institutional profit-making motive. But I would say New Age spirituality rather than New Age religion because I think it's still very It's not really, there aren't a defined set of doctrines as such that people are required to sign up to or practice. You know, you could say that people doing some forms of mindfulness meditation have elements of New Age spirituality about them. We couldn't necessarily call that an institution or religion. So I see new age spirituality as a very broad umbrella term to describe things that are very difficult to describe in very specific terms. And I think DIY spirituality is very much a part of that. I think new spirituality is another word for DIY spirituality, essentially. I think they feed into each other quite nicely, but I think they're very broad umbrella tones to describe all sorts of different kind of social or spiritual phenomena. And for one person practicing these things, they're not identical to another person. So I'd personally steer away from thinking of it as a religion, certainly not in an institutionalized form anyway. Cool, cool, cool. That was that kind of, yeah, I like, I kind of see the importance of the difference as well, because so far we've had guests on who talk about, yeah, New Age religions a lot more in terms of, yeah, when Sarah came on. And also when Hugh came on, we spoke about New Age religions a bit. So I like the difference between that and New Age spirituality. Your, I have just one question, and I think after that, we should move towards wrapping up. considering you've been going for about an hour, is you did mention a lot of these, a lot of people's experiences were informed from, as you said, they were born in the 50s or would be considered boomers, not all of them, but you, that kind of, the age that you're born in kind of experiences, influences your experience. So I would like to ask you thinking moving forward, do you think that millennials, Gen X, people born now would probably would have similar things to say about their near-death experiences or do you think they would be different? And also for what are your future plans with regards to just this project and maybe some of your future research in this line of work? Sure, yeah that's a really interesting question. It's hard to know. Certainly with millennials and Gen X, particularly millennials, it's fair to say that distrust of institutions is still there. So people like me of my generation have inherited that from the baby boomers. So in that respect, I don't think it's going to be particularly different. I wonder whether the way in which different generations use technology will be impactful. on the way they make sense of this. Whilst the internet is significant for everyone in the near-death experience community, I wonder whether social media will come to play a bigger part for younger people, whereas at the moment, it's mostly websites that are the go-to places, some Facebook groups as well, but things like TikTok don't seem to get much of a looking and... I mean, I'm not very au fait with my social media, I'm afraid. I once wrote the word TikTok up on the board, and my students laughed at me for spelling it with a K. But I'm aware there's quite a few different platforms out there that younger peoples, particularly Generation Z, are using. So I suspect that the medium is going to be... slightly different, although the internet I'm sure will retain its significance. But I think the anti-institutional feel will probably stay for a while. I don't see that changing soon. Beyond that, differences. it's really hard to know. It might be that there is less overt influence from kind of Eastern spirituality, religion, philosophy. Perhaps there might be more of an emphasis on things like mindfulness practice and those sorts of things as a way into transcendence, perhaps, as a spiritual practice, potentially. kind of core of what I'm seeing so far I think is probably here to stay for a while because there's quite a long trajectory and there are things that have happened politically that I think probably bolster those pessimistic news about institutions and so on. I was asking my students recently about their voting intentions you know and most of them don't think anyone's going to They don't necessarily have very great experiences of school and university at the moment as well. Universities are very under-resourced. There's anti-authoritarian views towards the police and so on. So these things I don't think are going away anytime soon. So I think that will continue to be a significant factor shaping how people make sense of NDEs. In terms of my explaining atheism work. It will be coming to an end at the end of June. So this year I will be interviewing people from the US and doing some sort of comparison between UK and US near-death experiences. I will be writing up an article that will be open access as well and submitting that. Of course, the peer review process might take a while. There seems to be a dearth of reviewers at the moment because everyone is so stretched in academia. unfortunately, owing to the issue of resources I mentioned a moment ago. But nevertheless, that's on the cards, as well as I'm talking to NDE UK about running a seminar workshop as well to feedback the research to the community and hopefully offer some things that will be useful for them moving forward, particularly in the pursuit of wellbeing. So that is one of my interests and concerns as a researcher. really does take a hit if you have a near-death experience for obvious reasons and for reasons I've mentioned as well. So that's on the cards. Moving forward, I would like to write a book. I would like to do some archival work. There's a couple of libraries, one in Cambridge, one in Edinburgh, where people have deposited lots of work on near-death experiences and kind of similar you know, paranormal experiences and so on, anomalous experiences. So I'd like to do some archival work and just really delve into the historical backdrop from the mid 20th century and bring that into dialogue with the way that participants are making sense of their near-death experiences and have a kind of extended project, a book-based project, looking at that kind of historical arc and how that's come into shape, influence. how people make sense of near-death experiences in the present time as well. So that's on the cards. And I've got a lot of data, a lot of avenues of inquiry from the interviews that I've done so far that go well beyond my question for explaining atheism. So I'll certainly be taking this forward and obviously keeping the explaining atheism team very much in the loop as I do that. But that's certainly The funding that they've given me has acted as a significant springboard for a lot of rich data and a lot of research for the next few years. Exciting. So then we will definitely have you back once you collect this part of the US part of the data so then we can get to more information and then hopefully by then this podcast blows up and you can come on for your book tour as well. Perfect, that would be amazing. Yeah, that would be fantastic. Awesome. Farrell, there was, I know you want to do some of the final clip things before we Okay, Alex, can you give us a 30-second to one-minute verbal abstract of your work that we can clip and put on Instagram as a whole? So tell us... Great. Go from, like, yeah, go for an abstract, yeah. Okay. So my research explores the near-death experiences of people who are not traditionally religious. most of whom are spiritual in some way, but not affiliated with institutional religion, and I explore the factors, the social factors that come to shape how they make sense of that near-death experience by taking a whole life approach to understanding what sort of significant events might have led up to the near-death experience and what sort of events might shape or colour. how they interpret that later on, and how that comes to impact their wellbeing as well in the longer term. That was awesome. Awesome. That was well under a minute as well. That was good. I was just saying we can move on to wrap up. Cool. And the last question which we just ask everyone is if you had one piece of advice to give all our listeners asked to leave with, what would it be? Take time to make sense of the world and to question your own assumptions and to try and think through how your own belief systems might be colored by different life experiences and events. in order to consider whether actually there might be more truth out there than you've considered in the past. That's very profound. Thank you. I'm glad you think so. At least it sounds very profound. Maybe if I look back on it, I'll be like, what was this? But awesome. That was that. So thank you so much for coming on. I look forward to having you on and again. Thank you for having me. It's been a pleasure. Farah was nodding along, but because of the lag, I don't know if she wants to say anything. I'm good. We can wrap because my internet is awful. Awesome. Take care, everyone. Thanks, everyone, for listening. And yeah, until the next episode. Bye.