#349 - Dr. Raymond Moody (Godfather of Near Death Experiences) Proof of Life After Life - Part 1

0:00 From the time that they pronounced me deaf was a good 45 minutes. They cut my clothes and then they paddled my heart, my heart had stopped. And I could see people screaming and crying, but I didn't realize that was actually my physical body because I was somewhere else. The only thing that I could feel, if you could imagine, absolute love and peace, there wasn't anything else to be felt. I was greeted by people I'd known in the past. I'm back home again. Incredibly safe and felt at home. Welcome to RoundtripDeath everybody and I am so, so excited for this show today because we have Dr. Raymond Moody and Paul Perry here live with us.

0:50 Say hello. Hello. Hi. Thanks for listening in. If you are students of near-death experiences, you've heard of these two people. If you're not, let me just give you a very brief background so you realize who we're talking to here. Dr. Moody is the leading authority in the world on near-death experiences. In fact, he was the one that coined the phrase near-death experience back in 1975. Or I think. 1974. So nearly 50 years ago, authored many books, many studies on the subject and thank you for being with us, Dr. Moody.

1:33 Well, thank you, Eric. And thanks again to the folks listening in. This is so fascinating. It's you and I have already mentioned and it's just, I'm delighted with people who listen to me. Well, thank you. And Paul, what I have here about you is you are a co-author of five New York Times best sellers. Right. You've co-written dozens of books on near-death experiences, four of them was Dr. Moody and directed two popular documentary films on the subject. Right. Oh, come on. You can say more than just write. That's amazing. You know, I've really written over a dozen books on near-death experiences.

2:16 It's only that five were New York Times best sellers. And well, since you've given us the right to have bragging rights, I've also written a number of other books as well. I wrote a biography of under S. Thompson. I went to Egypt and followed the trail of Jesus through Egypt. The hits just keep coming. That's great. And we could talk to each of you for hours and hours and hours, but we're going to get right into the topic that this podcast is all about, which is near-death experiences. And I know that a lot of what's in your most recent studies is also shared death experiences. Let's start off with talking about the difference between the two, maybe a definition of the two so people understand.

3:03 Okay. Well, the interesting thing about near-death experiences, which occurred to someone who almost dies and it's revived and shared death experiences, which occurred to people who are not ill or injured, but who are present at the death of someone else, that those two kinds of experiences are actually identical. And they consist of the same phenomenon. We've known for years about the near-death experiences where people there in cardiac arrest will say they live their bodies, they watch the scene of the resuscitation from above.

3:44 They eventually realized that nobody could see them. Nobody could hear them, although they can see perfectly what's going on. They realized, oh, this has something to do with death. And they talk about from this point on, no matter how articulate, no matter how many degrees, no matter how brilliant, how brilliant they are, people say, I just keep this car for you. There are no words. But the best they can do is they say they proceed through this passageway. They come out on the other side into an incredibly bright and warm and loving light. And in that light, say that relatives or friends of theirs have already done, seem to be there as a greeting, committing almost.

4:30 Then at some point in this, everything else kind of disappears. Time stands still and they see everything they've ever done in a sort of panorama all around instantly, often in the presence of a being of complete compassion and love, who helps them review this. And in this review, they say, you see everything you've ever done, but you see it also not just from your perspective, but from the perspective of those with whom you've interacted. So if you see yourself doing something mean to somebody, then you feel the hurt. And if you feel, see yourself doing a kinder action, you feel the good feelings.

5:13 And when people come back from these, whatever they have been chasing for, knowledge, as in my case, or power or fame or money or any of these other things, people say, what, this is all about his love. It's learning to love. Now shared death experiences are the same phenomenon, except they occur not to somebody who almost dies in return, but who somebody happens to be there at the death of someone else. These occur to doctors as well as to the friends and relatives of the dying person. One of the things that people say is that as grandma or whoever died, that they see something leave the body, it's hard to describe, they try to say it's like a cloud or what, but it is very difficult for them to describe it.

6:02 They say it lifts, leaves from the body. And other people say that, yeah, as grandma died, I myself left my body and went up partway toward this light with her. Then I came back to my body. Or people say that as their loved one is dying, that apparitions of the dying person's deceased relatives come into the room, people can see them. And that people say the room fills with white and most troubling to me in a way, this is the most thought-provoking thing I know from my studies. It is common enough that it can be studied cases of where the bystander empathically co-lives the dying wife or you.

6:53 The first two of these that I really studied happened to be from women, middle-aged women who had lost their adolescent son. And then I began to hear from other groups as well, including and Carleton Georgia, this woman who had been literally the childhood friend of her husband. They had been together all of the life then. But as she was telling me that as he was dying in the hospital, he was very old at that time. But she said she was watching this life review all with and they were communicating with. Now you see, that's so troubling to me because I'm hoping to recuse myself from my own life review. Much of the idea of a spectator there is all they're troubling to me.

7:38 However, people say that it's not like that. What I learned as a psychiatrist is we all have pretty much the same secrets. And so it makes sense that to the person who's having this, it will be natural. I always assumed it had to be somebody intimate, but some years ago, Cheryl and my wife and I got a communication from a doctor who was called to the ER to resuscitate a patient who never laid an eye on us. And he said, as this guy was dying, his whole wife reviewed, sprang up a link. Those are the phenomena we're talking about. I have a dozen comments and questions already.

8:19 I'm not quite sure where to start. I guess my first one is, as you were describing, NDE's and really the same goes for these shared death experiences, SDE's. Not everybody has the same experience. Why do you think that is? Paul, do you have an idea? That's the million-dollar question. That is a million-dollar question. Another million-dollar question is why everybody doesn't have a near-death experience and why everybody doesn't have a shared-death experience. Why aren't they all the same? I think, as far as near-death experiences go, about 20% of people, maybe more, who have a cardiac arrest because that's the gold standard of studying because you can't argue that a person is actually bearing near-death at that point.

9:11 People have a cardiac arrest, only about 15% to 30%, depending on which study you want to take a look at or believe, have a near-death experience. It's not possible yet to tell how many might have a shared-death experience because it hasn't been really studied yet in that way. Is it possible that it's a lot higher than 20%? But the 20% is how many people remember it. That's correct. I wonder if nearly everybody has one, but most people just can't remember it. Many people who have a cardiac arrest are given drugs that are a side effect to them is that they make you forget.

9:54 So you end up with a lot of people who come out of the operating room and there's several people, so we've run into this several times, people come out of the operating room, they're in the waiting room, they're trying to talk to their nurse or doctor about a near-death experience, and then later when they get an opportunity to actually speak to someone at length, they forget most of it or they forget what they were talking about when they come into the waiting room, into the recovery room. So yeah, I think it's much higher than 15% to 20%. Another factor, Eric, is how you collect information. Some of these studies where it's 20% have been like a questionnaire.

10:37 Right. Well, how would you feel if you suddenly given a questionnaire? Well, I think, and yet, Dr. Fred Schoonmaker was chief of cardiovascular medicine at St. Luke's in Denver, this is the late 70s, early 80s, and concurrently Dr. Bender was chief of cardiovascular medicine at St. Vincent's Hospital in Hamburg, Germany. And both of them had found this out from just their patients, you know, and Fred had interviewed, I talked to him in the early 80s, about 1600 patients that he had resuscitated.

11:22 And he said that it's about 60% of the people. And similarly, Dr. Bender, who had the same method, said it was about 80%. Now, these two guys are both what you call oral personalities, and they tend to be sort of roundish and orally oriented, and they tend to be humorous and also tend to be oriented to service others. They often own restaurants, for example. And both of these guys, Dr. Schoonmaker and Dr. Bender were oral personalities.

12:02 And you see, it seems to me that, you know, the way they did it, they just come in after the resuscitation, and you got very close to what you remember about that. Now my guess is that that would be a much more productive way to get some information from people that handing them a questionnaire. But I don't know. And I think that's one factor that's taken. You find that numbers to be different with children? Well, I want to say one thing about the type of doctors. Years ago, we were writing our first book, The Light Beyond, and I was also working on a book on reversing heart disease. And I was working on it with a doctor in Cleveland.

12:44 And so I went to see this doctor and working on our book, and he said, what else are you working on? And I said, well, I'm working on a book on near-death experiences. And he said, you know, I've resuscitated hundreds of people, and I have to tell you that I have never, ever heard a near-death experience in hundreds of people that I've talked to. And he was called away from the nurses station where we were talking. And the nurses came up to the counter, and they said to me, he's never heard a near-death experience because he's never asked his patients what happened when they were under. And that's, as Raymond points out, it's how you get the information that is in many ways very important.

13:28 And then I had a question about children. Have there been different studies done on children? Are the numbers the same? Well, I don't know. Now, Raymond's got something to say there, but I don't know that they are because I don't think there's any studies on that with children. There's studies dealing with children and near-death experiences. I've written several books with Melvin Morris who did most of the work on this type of work. But I don't really, I've never heard a study on children and how many have you? I've never heard it. By the way, Paul, Eric interviewed Mel Morris recently. Yeah.

14:09 My memory of that interview was he made it sound like the numbers are a lot higher with children. Like the majority of people that, of kids that he interviewed with the parents permission were able to color things that they had seen while they were gone. Yeah. We have beautiful drawings that children have done of near-death experiences. They have tunnel experiences and bright lights and people of bright light and themselves looking at them. No, they're really beautiful drawings. But I think I'm going to make a guess here is that he ran into a lot of parents who didn't want their children interviewed about this because parents can be so touchy about, gee, this might damage my child or they might start believing things I don't want them to believe in.

14:57 And I just don't think anyone's really been able to crack through that wall, which is definitely, there definitely is a wall in many hospitals against interviewing people about this. Okay. Let me go back to another statement, Raymond, that you made earlier, which was about the life reviews and I find it so fascinating that people tell me about their life review that even when they saw things that had hurt others and they realized and felt that hurt, they didn't feel guilt and shame. So maybe it's not that bad to have somebody there with you watching this. And I'm not sure why it is that way. What do you think?

15:37 Well, yeah. I mean, this existence appears very differently once you cross over that line and things that seem so important and troubling here are just fate and insignificance. I think that the life review is to me a particularly fascinating part of these near death experiences because as you know, I was a professor of logic and in reality, in the real world, it's very difficult to draw entrances about this kind of thing.

16:17 But one in the case of these life reviews, if we set aside the notion of an afterlife, it is very can be very plain to us right at this moment that you can make an absolutely startling and a mind bending inference from life reviews. It is obviously now and I mean, you can't get out of this and that is for at least some of us life is a two phase process. I think we live it forward as the protagonist or the actor.

17:01 Then time stands still, there's a 180 degree turnaround and you've witnessed all of that things you've gone from the point of view of other people. And to me, I mean, that's a that is a very plain inference. You can't get around that. When you think for the mom for a moment about that significance, holy mackerel that we have a two phase life. We lead it forward as the protagonist and then we watch it from the point of view of the other people and fall. I mean, I think that's just absolutely phenomenal.

17:41 And I assume the purpose of looking back is just to learn and to be forgiven and to get a clean slate. You know, that's it. That's how I look at it. I think people really clean slate from their life review. Yeah. Yeah. That's right. It's like this man, a wonderful guy and architect and Zurich who had a profound your death experience in 1964 in the Alps when he had a car crash. And that's what he said. He said, at that phase in his life, he'd done all these things when he said, there was this life review and he said it was just solved on. And that's presents to some extent a problem at times because once you get a clean slate, you're not the same person you were.

18:32 And so you run into a significant number of divorce cases with near death experiences because the person they married is no longer the same. I've noticed that too. The divorce numbers seem to be really high. Are there any percentages on that? Has that ever been studied? Oh, there used to be percentages batted around, but I never believed them. I thought they were way too high. I don't feel like they were medical journal stuff. What do you think, Raven? Yeah. I mean, I just don't want, you know, I don't have a basis for making that assessment. And I just don't know.

19:13 But I do know the phenomenon yet it does occur, but I don't know in terms of how likely it is. But it's really kind of, we call it the Scrooge effect. Oh, I like that. Okay. Explain that more. Well, Ebenezer Scrooge from the book Charles Dickens wrote Christmas Carol saw his business partner Marley at late at night. He didn't believe in Christmas. He ran people away from his door who were asking for money for charity and on and off. But Marley came back and he had had it. He died and he had clearly had a near death experience because that's really what this whole book and TV show is about is Scrooge's near death experience.

19:59 But because he followed the advice of Marley after that, which was to, he had a life review and then as a result of his life review, he was also guided through his own life review. Scrooge was by an angelic being who of course happened to have chains all over him. When he came back, he was a totally different person. He opened the door. He bought people turkeys. He went to a Christmas dinner and started to help Tiny Tim. And that's the effect you run into with people who've had near death experiences. One of the other things that I hear quite a bit actually, and by the way, for you too, this podcast is completely non-denominational.

20:46 We're not pushing any one religion over another, anything like that. Nor are we judging or putting down any religions. But I've had quite a few people tell me, hey, I thought I should go talk to my clergy about this and that ended up being a bad experience. Yes, it does. Yes. Explain why you think that is. When I started out with this, it was back in the late 60s, early 70s. That was a very common thing I heard from people. They said, well, when this happened, I tried to tell my doctor about it. But he would either say, oh, it's just hallucination or a dream, or else would say, well, you know, you better talk to your minister about that.

21:35 So then they would go to their minister and tell the same story. And their minister would say, well, that's out of my... you better go talk to your doctor about that. So there was this kind of run around that people experienced. But I hear many that are even more negative than that, more like, hey, hey, that's not in the Bible. That's not of God. That's what it is, and I went to the wake of my brother-in-law about a year and a half ago. Half of my family is Seventh Day Adventist, and the other half is Baptist or other. I was with the Seventh Day Adventist half that were at the wake. And they asked me what I was doing.

22:16 Am I still writing those books? And I told them, yes, I am. And I told them about the book I'm working on right now, the book we finished, Proof of Life After Life. One of my cousins are... well, I don't know what the relation is, but I guess he's a cousin in law came over and he said, you have to be careful because Satan takes many forms. And that was it. But there's a lot of inference there that what happened to you was not of God, it was of Satan, right? Right. On the other hand, I have found that Mormons are very accepting of your death experiences. They have an old book from, I don't know, it must be the 19th century called The Book of Mormon Discourses, and it's full of near-death experiences.

23:05 And then recently, I was talking to a Mormon friend, this is last week, two weeks ago, maybe, whose father had died. She's Mormon and he died up in Utah. And she said that she went up there for her father's funeral, and all of her aunts were sitting around talking about experiences like shared-death experiences that they had had. I think as a culture, they tend to take care of their people who are passing much closer than other cultures do, other religious cultures do. So they're there at that time when these people are starting to pass over.

23:45 As soon as Life After Life was published in 1975, I started getting scared. I was scared of letters from Utah saying, yeah, we know about this, this is part of it. And then when I went to, I lectured at BYU in, I think it was 1977 at the Marriott, so they later gave me a, sent a thing that over 10,000 people I think had attended. And after the lecture, these kids just swarmed up with their family records, show us their own, their great-grandfather, and had such an experience or whatever.

24:26 Oh, that's awesome. There are cultures that are very open to it. For example, the Salto Indians of Canada had a full tradition of carrying these stories of near-death encounters along, and their oral culture for ages. And it's interesting when you read them, they're just like, one, when a guy was saying he got out of his body, and he said, I came into this place. He said it's hard to describe, and it was like, teat-piece of light. And you know, that's what people say is, I see cities of light, but he was saying teat-piece. From his perspective, and speaking of perspective, getting back just a little bit to the question about everybody's experience being different, have you found that their culture has something to do with it, if, for example, if they're Christian, maybe they see Jesus, or if there's something else they see Buddha or Muhammad, or is that something that's common?

25:31 To a degree, but to a degree not. You know, I've had lots and lots of people over the years who say before this thing, add just no contact with religion at all, and then all kinds of religions. And one thing also, Eric, that people say is that, I hear this often, is that, well, I tell you about this experience, I have to draw images or words from my own tradition, but that's because the only ones I have, but that it's not like that, that it's far beyond the terminology of my religion. I think Jeff Long, who has studied this a lot, he founded the near-death community.

26:14 He's a near-death experience research foundation, and he's an oncologist in Louisiana. So he's looked at thousands of near-death experiences from all over the world. He has an amazing organization. And his result on that question is that people, they see the same thing, but they interpret it differently. So if someone says, well, I saw it being of light, and it was counseling me, and it was Jesus, and they'll say, okay, what does Jesus look like? Well, in this case, I couldn't see him. He was just a being of light. So there's that cultural interpretation is like that. And as Raymond says, they have to use something from their culture to describe what they're experiencing.

26:58 How has, as you've been studying this for many years, both of you, Raymond, 50-plus years, has it changed over the years? Have you learned a lot of things recently that you didn't know before, for example? Well, I can say one way that it's changed a lot, and that is that, as you'll see in this book, we have a lot more doctors talking about experiences, their own experiences and the experiences of their patients. And then we have more doctors talking about some of the, what really edgy experiences, like seeing a mist come out of somebody who was dying back in 10 years ago or so.

27:39 You wouldn't have had that at all. There's been definitely a cultural change with doctors, that's for sure. Dr. Hagen, who was the editor of Missouri Medicine, which is one of the best state medical journals. Some years ago, did a series and the Missouri Medical Journal of doctors who had had near-death experiences or had studied them. And the series went on for about 18 months. And Dr. Hagen's a good authority on this, too. It's just became fascinated by it as a physician.

28:21 So Paul, you mentioned the book just a minute ago. It's called Proof of Life After Life. Has anyone mentioned to you yet, that is a very bold statement. It is very bold. I'm sure you knew that when you made it. But from my point of view, what you have here is, to me, the primary difference between a shared-death experience and a near-death experience is that other people experience, someone's near-death experience, are other events as well. And that makes it objective as opposed to a shared-death experience, which is subjective because only one person has it.

29:01 And therefore, only one person can really describe what happened to them. But with this shared-death experience, there's someone else who comes in and says, yeah, I went up the title, I saw the same people he did. Are there other examples? And that's the real difference between what we're doing here and what we've done in the past. And what we're doing here is that shared-death experiences have a way of proving that consciousness can leave the body. And it's evidentiary that they can based on shared-death experiences. Yeah, you couldn't have a murder trial with just subjective evidence. But what we have here is objective evidence.

29:42 I have a little bit of a different take on that, Eric, as a logician because I'm fascinated by the concept of proof. And there's all kinds of different meanings of that term, of proof. What's in my mind, Mosul, is like Bertrand Russell, Alfred North Whitehead in the Principia, Mathematica, and the notion of a mathematical proof is very fascinating to me. But there are other kinds of proofs, too, which have come through the years. And the reason I'm OK with this word now is that over the years, or 50 years, people have been coming to me and saying, often in the context of a loss of a loved one or a terminal illness.

30:31 And they say, Raymond, is there any proof of this in England? And they want that word proof, is something. So I had to sort of study, what do they want? I mean, I know it wasn't what Bertrand Russell articulated. What are they asking people? And when I would try to put it in terms of logic, people's eyes would just roll up. So I realized that's not what they want. What do people, most people want when they say they want proof of an afterlife? Well, what I finally figured out is, and what I am willing to say is, the question is, is it rational to confidently expect and anticipate that there's an afterlife?

31:20 And I say resoundingly, yes, because I can't think my way out of this era. You know, I am a skeptic in the general sense. These people falsely use that term skeptic. They don't know what they're talking about. And they make me so mad, not because anything to do with near death experiences, but because I love to teach Greek philosophy. And when I get to the skeptics, which is a Hellenistic philosophy formed by Pyrrho, yeah, I have to undo the damage that these morons have done to my students' minds by their completely false and incoherent use of this term.

32:08 They don't know what they're talking about. Let me explain what a skeptic is. The skeptical movement was launched by Pyrrho about 30 years after the Aristotle roughly. But Aristotle is the person who codified logic and Pyrrho knew logic very well. But now he asks, well, if you think about logic as a machine for generating conclusions from premises, right? So Pyrrho's saying, well, what if we don't follow the conclusion? That is, we really press down and ask every question. We're very rigorous. But in the end, we don't draw a conclusion. But why?

32:49 Because, number one, they found, as anybody who does this for any preciful time, realized, if you constantly do that, it has this amazing mind-expanding experience. You get David Hume that mentioned that, too, the great skeptic of the 18th century. And also, if you think about it, and everybody else is heading in this way to get to the conclusion, but your technique is to avoid a conclusion, then you see things along the side that everybody else admits. You see side effects. So now, run that knowledge back through these claims of these morons.

33:30 You say, oh, I'm a skeptic about these near-death experiences. I think it's just the chemistry of the brain. What that ignoramus has just said is, I'm a person who doesn't draw conclusions, and my conclusion is such and such. And that is a very annoying thing for somebody who's interested in the foundations of this whole rational system, the great philosophers. So that's why I get agitated. I don't have anything to do with near-death experiences. But in my skeptical process, Eric, trying to, every way I could, to think of what are the objections?

34:10 What do you think of the things that it, the reasons why it is not, is the way you proceed to get confident. And in that process, I just reached what were I given up. And I mean, I can't think my way out of it. I never felt with that big, oxygen deprivation to the brain because, number one, that depends on an incoherent theory of the mind called epiphenomenalism. So there's a philosophical strike against it. But also in terms of the more practical side of it, one of my own medical skill professors, my first year of medical skill, told me about having this experience when she was trying to resuscitate her own mother.

35:02 He was dying. And obviously my physician friend, I have oxygen deprivation to the brain, but she had this same experience. And so that's never been an issue for me. But the fact that it is not oxygen deprivation to the brain simply does not imply that it is life after death. See what I mean? And so this is my process. I just finally got to the point where I give up. And some of the events, I have a friend named Anthony Chakoria, who is a PhD in physiology and an MD, an orthopedic surgeon and a professor of orthopedic surgery, who in 1994 was struck in the neck by a bolt of lightning and had a cardiac arrest and got out of his body and went all through this resort center where his family was having a family reunion and saw what they were doing.

36:02 And he told me, he said, this is more real than real. This is not life to train. This is hypo reality. And so when Anthony got back from this, unaccountably, he started to think, well, I'm unaccountably, he started getting interested in the pianos, never in interest. And he started having a recurrent dream, which he was playing a piece on a piano on a concert stage. And so he learned how to transcribe music to transcribe the piece. And he learned how to play the piano. And now, in addition to being a renowned orthopedic surgeon, he's a concert pianist.

36:43 Now that series of events does not fit into consensual reality. By the way, he's been on this podcast too. Oh, really? And so if anybody wants to hear his whole story in it, it's awesome. And some of his music we put in the podcast, we'll get that one in the show notes. I forget the number off the top of my head. And now here, another one, right out where you live. An advert graphic artist, Jeff Olson, some years ago, had a car crash in which his legs smashed off. His wife was killed instantly. One of his kids, I think, and then the other one, Leah.

37:26 So he was taken to the hospital. And Jeff O'Driscoll, who's an ER doctor, was there in the hospital when Jeff came in. And as Jeff was having his near death experience surrounded by tubes and wires, Jeff O'Driscoll was talking to Jeff Olson's dead wife and the hospital. And you say, I can tell you, and does another physician, friends of mine, Eben Alexander, for example, the neurosurgeon. And all of these people, I trust their medical judgment completely. If something happens to me, I go to anyone else.

38:10 Unanimously, their judgment of their own experience was that not only was it real, it was more real, in order to awaken reality. So I am in a situation, see, I can't think my way out of how can I trust their medical judgment to the point that I would put my life in their hands. But on the other view, what does that do about their unanimous opinions that this was real? So I give up. I just can't think my way out of it. I love that term, and I've heard it so many times, that their experience was more real than real.

38:50 And those of us that have not been through it will probably never understand that, but more real than real. But for the antagonists, they're still going to say, Paul, your book says proof. What other proof do you have? Today's interview was quite a bit longer than most, so we've broken it up into two episodes. We just ended part one with the question, what other proof is there of life after life? In part two, which will be released later this week, we'll find out the answers to that question from the experts. I hope you'll come back for the conclusion. By the way, if you want an email reminder when new episodes are released, click over to roundtripdeath.com and get on our email list.

39:36 Until then, I wish you everything good that you're looking for in this life and the next.