#350 - Dr. Raymond Moody (Part 2) - Proof of Life After Life

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 back to Round Trip Death and part two of our interview with Dr. Raymond Moody and Paul Perry.

0:46 We ended episode one with the question, what proof is there of life after death? And we'll pick it up from there. I love that term and I've heard it so many times that their experience was more real than real. 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? Well I think that many of the skeptics, I still have to use that word because I'm trained to use it. Many of the skeptics start at this, some other subjects, they start at this subject with disbelief.

1:30 And what I always say to them is, if you turn that around and started studying this subject from a point of view of belief instead of disbelief, you would arrive at completely different summation for yourself. And I think that's really true. I think a lot of people just, they get this, well, the skeptics have a certain way of believing. Sorry about that. Yeah, it is true. I mean, they're ossified. They're ossified. If you can break that and say, well, you know, read this as a believer as opposed to someone who doesn't believe. And then if you don't believe it at the end, that's fine. But you're not given it a chance if you start with disbelief. And that works so that the people can do it.

2:11 I would rather take that just a step further and say, please start with, I don't know. Try to get rid of your preconceived notion of either I either believe or I don't believe. And I'm sure of it because some of us are just so hardheaded and so stubborn. It doesn't matter what you say. You're not going to change our belief because that somehow puts me down. So instead, let's be humble enough to say, I don't know. Now I'm going to study it and I'm going to read and learn and listen. Some people do they're believing by the numbers. You know, it's like a instruction book. You got to think and these unrelected skeptics who don't even know what the word means.

2:53 If they really penetrated what their theory is, it's called the technical term for that is humanism is what they are. And it's the so-called skeptics are part of the American humanist society and humanism not in the sense of the Thomas Moore and Erasmus and so on backfruit. The modern humanist movement is a religion that was formed because there were a lot of atheists who had had church and they they had decided there's no God, but they still work next into that social. And they have to have they thought they had to have some rituals for marriage or funerals or whatever.

3:37 So it's a religion. And it's the religion is that there is no God, but that church is good thing. And so that's why humanism is and you know, it's it's it's a horrible thing that these people are perpetrating on the minds of the young people because it's a very important thing to learn about the history of Western thought and where all these things came from. And if you misrepresent one of the foundational intellectual movements of Western thought, then you're spoiling minds of all these kids. And that's what those skeptics actually humanists are doing.

4:20 And the guy who founded this was a great guy. I want to take this in a little bit more personal direction now. So Paul and Raymond, all of the things that you've learned through your studies and your interviews and everything else, how has it affected your life? Has it changed the way you view things? Tell me about what it's done for you. Well, it's a long process because I found out about this when I was 18 years old and now I'm 79. And so I can't separate it very well. I do know that, say I was my dad was a medic surgeon in World War II, the Pacific Theater.

5:02 I'm sure he saw gosh awful, terrible, horrible stuff. But they didn't talk about it that group. But the way it manifested in my life was he was very hostile to religion. And so I just didn't have any experience there. And my astronomy was my thing. And the idea of an afterlife, I remember specifically, when my awakening to the notion of the afterlife was reading Plato's Republic because Plato became my hero after page three of the Republic when I was 18 years old. And so the fact that Plato took this question of an afterlife seriously was what woke me up to it because the guy like that thinks there's something to this.

5:53 Maybe I should start thinking about it. But all through this, I just I didn't know what to think. My process, like I said, has ended up as I give up. It's not the nictontological conclusion. But then I can't think my way out of this. That in that context, I just don't know to what degree it's affected the way I am because I was 18 years old. And I don't know. It's hard. I can't really imagine how my life might have unfolded without that. How about you, Paul? Yeah, it has made me, which is very important in my profession, it has made me far more curious about really everything in the world because you start to realize that the person who's next to you, based on our research and based on other people's research, as a spirit, are spiritual beings as well as physical beings.

6:57 And I think that has changed my view toward mankind a lot. Is that people have a spirit, they have a spiritual life. Oftentimes, you know, I just said this happened this week. Someone started talking to me, a guy who's 80 years old, and he said, I've never thought about my spiritual life. And it's only recently through, he's a good friend and through two books that I've given him and then other events that have taken place. He said it's, and I realize I'm way behind in studying my spiritual life. And I feel like I'm not way behind, but I also feel like there's so much more to know.

7:37 And it's that need to know that really drives me on. So that's how it's changing. That's interesting. Another thing just on that line that I'm sure you've heard as many times more than I have is people say that they now realize we're all connected. Explain what you think they're talking about with that statement. I've had it explained a whole bunch of different ways to me. I've got a thought. And the way it's come to me is I am not religious still, but I have a relationship with God. And like I say, I just talked to God all the time. He's never said a word to me about religion.

8:19 So I'm not interested in religion, but I have a personal relationship with God. In those terms, this is hard to say, but the ultimate object of skepticism, okay, in addition to the intellectual side of it, was calmness. And even David Hume said, you know, he even challenged the notion of the you know, that he said, as to the impressions which arise from the senses. He said, in my opinion, it is other than beyond reason, like the rational capacity of the rational method to determine whether these impressions arise from the object or from the creative power of our mind or from the author of our being.

9:19 And that is always, even before I met Hume, it's been obvious to me that you can't really know what is happening in our society. See, Hume said, even with that profound skepticism, he said, see that, but I go to the dinner party just like everybody else. Right? He said, and he was very social. You know, he says, I go through the, I do like anybody else, even though the skepticism goes on, that I live my life. And so that in puro too, said that same thing. See, it's about this life we're living is it makes you calm in this life.

10:00 And what I think is happening in our society is that now something that was outrageous in 1970. Now in 2023 is just a reversal of common sense. And the older you get is the older you get, the more percentage of the people you know your age have had some sort of experience of stepping over to another world. So that oddly, Sylvie, what was extraordinary in 1970 has now kind of settled in to common sense because, you know, if somebody hasn't had a near death experience, they know somebody who has.

10:44 So this has been integrated into the world in a way so that it's just part of the social world that the skeptic is in bed and bedding. Any other thoughts on that, Paul, on how we're all connected? I had this thing that I did called the Denny's experiment. Okay. And Denny's is a restaurant. I don't know if there's, they're still around. And I went to a Denny's late at night. I was out with friends. We went to a movie. We stopped at Denny's for the usual late night meal. And I was working out a book with Raymond at the time and they said, well, what are you working on? I told them what I was doing, a book on near death experiences.

11:24 And a good majority of the people at the table said, I don't, they don't, that doesn't believe, they're very skeptical about it. That doesn't happen. I don't believe that. So it was late at night and I'm in this Denny's, there's probably 20 people in there. So I stood up and said, Hey, here's what I'm working on right now. I'm a writer. I'm working on a book on near death experiences. I described the near death experience. How many people have had this? And about 15 of the people had, I said they had either had it or they had witnessed it or they had witnessed some similar phenomenon in their family. Yeah, their grandmother passing over and having a terminal lucidity moment.

12:07 Some people had had heart attacks and had gone up tunnels, things like that. They'd never been really willing to talk about that. But once they're given, once they're given the door to go through and an opportunity to speak about it, they realize that these are far more common than they ever believed. I think it's that commonality of the spirit that brings people together. And that's part of the reason, that commonality of the spirit is part of the reason that we all say that we're all made of the same thing. We're all tied together. I think that's very true.

12:48 I think that's realization to many people. I've come to realize, talking with thousands of people who've had these life reviews, in terms of your question, Eric, in terms of are we all connected? Well, obviously we are in this life review because you see that in the life review, you see that you are the person and you are in the consciousness of the person within you. And I just love that saying by the master Eckhart who said, the eyes with which I see God are the same eyes with which God sees me.

13:31 I think of that often, that it's like, what I'm experiencing right now, God is experiencing too and he's watching all of these infinite number, almost of life narratives interweave. I can see my own life from the first person perspective. In the life review, you realize that everybody you meet, you're connected with. That's interesting. Okay, I have a question that I ask the experiencers that I talked to. Let's get a perspective from your personal, this is personal about you guys again. How much fear of death do you have on a scale of one to 10?

14:13 How much fear? I have to say first, see, I don't as a clinician with a lot of people because of their fear of death. Okay, so what the first thing I ask them is, what is your fear of death? See, I'll tell you where mine is, is, I've had kidney stones and gallstones, please, no more. Then other people are afraid, for example, of oblivion. And I'm not afraid of that. And then other people are afraid of the separation from their loved ones, count me in. I'd love to be able to stay with my kids a while longer, because they're still coming along.

15:00 Other people are afraid of hell because of their severe religious background, whatever. It's different people are, and many people are afraid of the unknown. And the unknown has never been scary to me as the known that scares me. And so I think that it's just a panoply of different emotions people identify as the fear of death. And you first have to identify which one, a particular one, or once a particular person is suffering with. And to me, the residual was still pain. Okay, I'm going to take out of this equation, leading up to death.

15:43 All the pain and misery that someone may go through leading up to death, the actual time when my heart stops and there's either oblivion or there's something else, do you have fear of what's beyond that? I don't think it's reasonable to tell people that you shouldn't have a fear of death. Something that is so totally new in a person's life. They hear about it, but when it finally happens to them, it's an old different animal. I think everyone greets it in their own way where they greets us in the right word. And I'm nervous about it because it's a totally new experience.

16:27 But afraid of death, I don't know if I really think I'm totally afraid of it. Other than it finally, we finally get to answer the question that we've been trying to answer all these years with all the books we've done and all the research we've done is we finally get the answer. So it'll be refreshing in that way, but I'm still nervous and I'll admittedly say I'm fearful of death. Thank you. There's also on your theory of personal identity. And that's a big question in this whole thing of life after life. If there's survival, what is it that survives?

17:09 And where we came in was with Alcmaeon, actually, and Pythagoras came up with the notion of the immaterial immortal soul. And then Plato made that official and the church, the Christian church, took the Plato's phato as the basis of their theology of the afterlife, which may seem startling to some. But I found out that in Bertrand Russell's history of Western philosophy when I read it in 1964, but he's not an expert. So when I started teaching philosophy, I asked experts on religious studies whether that's true.

17:51 And they said, yeah, the Christian theology of the afterlife and the immortal soul comes from Plato's phato. And so you could be burned alive for questioning that for hundreds of years. But then once things started loosening up, like Thomas Hobbes and the 1500s, he pointed out that it doesn't make any sense to talk about immaterial objects. And so then Locke, who had to do with the formation of our constitution, as you know, Locke said, well, our personal identity consists of our consciousness and our memories. Then a little while later, the great skeptic David Hume, looking inside himself said, when I look inside myself, all I see is the impression of the moment.

18:43 There's never anything statement. So his idea was that, which is in some modern psychologists now, it's like the self is a kind of illusion or doesn't really exist. But where I've come to that is, I think that your personal identity is your story. Right? What am I? I am the story of a guy who was born in Porterdale, Georgia, June 30th, 1944, who did this and that, this bearstilk name of Raymond Udy. And so I think that the nature of personal identity has to do with narrative. But you know, think about it, whenever anything new happens to you, what you do is your mind automatically integrates that event into your continuing life story.

19:34 Right? And cinematographer said that. It's called the Kulikoff effect, I think. But if you present any two random objects to people like a Coke can and a pair of glasses, and you present those in sequence to somebody, then the mind automatically starts weaving the story to connect the two. So consciousness itself is narrative based. And that's why I think that David Hume and his great skeptical essay about the nature of the afterlife, in which he pointed out that it's logically incomprehensible. But then he went on to say that he felt that the only kind of afterlife that a rational person could entertain would be reincarnation.

20:26 And he doesn't elaborate why, but I suspect that, you know, Hume was mainly a historian. So he understood the relevance and importance of narrative in human affairs. So it would make sense that of all the afterlife, reincarnation is the most story. That's one thing that people thinking about the afterlife have not really adequately accounted for is the narrative nature of consciousness. Okay. You guys being researchers, you're going to hate the next question. The last time I asked one of these, you called it the million dollar question. I'm just going to throw out something that I sometimes ponder on just to see if you have any opinions from all of the research that you've done.

21:12 And that is that some people tell us during their NDEs, I was given a choice of whether I wanted to come back and stay. Other people are just told, you're going back. Okay. There's, I'm sure there's a lot of reasons for both that we don't understand. What I ponder is how many people are given the choice. You can stay here or you can go back, but those people choose to stay and those we don't ever hear from. That's right. Yeah. Any thoughts on that topic? It's hard to, hard to come up with an analysis of that. It is. And it's, you know, if some people say, how did you get back?

21:52 I don't know. One moment I was in this light, the next moment I was back on the operating room table with no sense of transition. Some people say that this light or a relative friend who's died there says, it's not your time yet. You've got to go back. Others are given a choice. You can either stay in the experience, you're having to go back. And obviously all the ones I've talked to made that, you know, chose to come back. And so as you say, it's, you know, it's, there's no basis to contemplate or to think about what happens to somebody who chose to stay.

22:32 Yeah. I mean, let me put it this way though. And when you do, when you do interviews with people who've had near death experiences, they frequently say, I wanted to stay, but I couldn't. I didn't. And whether they were given the option or not, they came back and they maybe didn't like that they came back because it was so wonderful over there. I had not seen a study on that. That would be an interesting study to post in your death experience, ask people if they would rather be there than here. I haven't seen that, but I think the vast majority really liked it. I hear all the giant people say, there's a kind of nostalgia that, and, and my friend George Richie talked about this with respect to his patients.

23:24 And he said often when he was some, you know, interviewing a patient or whatever, he would have this kind of flash and a kind of nostalgia and a sort of momentary connection. It's kind of like going your, your first trip to Italy. You always want to go back because it's so beautiful and different. Yeah. Well, and you might miss it. Yeah. A lot of people say it felt so much like home that they really miss it very much. A couple other things. As a host of this podcast where I'm mostly interviewing people that have had near death experiences, what other questions should I be asking? Any thoughts that would help me and help our audience?

24:07 I would ask them, uh, how is having a near death experience affected your, your social life if you want to, you know, nail it down to specifics? I think that's one thing I would do. I think that's somehow it's affected their relationship with their spouse. That's a good one. Really to bring it into a hard perspective. Yeah. A question I often ask people, I don't know if you know this, Eric, but I was a forensic psychiatrist that worked in a maximum security unit for the criminal insane. I've probably interviewed as a minimum 300 people who committed homicide, more realistically, probably about 400 because you lose track, right?

24:50 And so, um, I always ask people, well, how has this done to your, your unloving side? Is what people say is that even after this experience where you see the importance of love, that then you come back to your life as a human being and it's still very difficult to negotiate anger and stuff like that. George Richie said to me, he said, Raymond, he said, this experience makes your humanity even more of a burden in a way because you see the ideal, but then in the reality, you fly off the handle as George did sometimes.

25:34 And so, you know, that is something I ask people like, how has it affected the fact that you're a human being who still has all these outbursts and stuff? Yeah. So, here's a topic of shared death experiences we had on this podcast a while back, Hadley Valajos, known as Nurse Hadley. I don't know if you guys know her. Oh, you're right. Here. Mm-hmm. She's a hospice nurse, young hospice nurse, and she told some really interesting, amazing stories that experiences that she had being with people as they died, as they passed on.

26:15 They didn't seem to fit so much into your definition of a shared death experience, but she was there and she observed them very often, seeing loved ones, talking to loved ones, things like that. I don't know if you consider that part of a shared death experience also. Yeah. Well, I wasn't thinking in those terms, but you see this all the time. I remember the first time I saw her, an elderly woman, I think she was about 80, and I went into the room and she was talking to someone. So I went in the room, sat down beside her.

26:56 She said, oh, Dr. Riddie, I know what you're thinking. So you think this old woman is just crazy. And I said, no, no, I'm beginning to get it. You know, I knew that she was talking to her relatives. Well, and for Hadley, she had been an atheist and this made her a believer that there is something more because she's witnessed it so many times. Well, I'll say about that too. A lot of people who have near-death experiences become less religious but more spiritual. And then there are people who become more religious. Like occasionally you run into NDEs who leave their Protestant church and they go into a Catholic church because they like the structure.

27:42 So it's sort of all over the place sometimes, what these experiences do to people. Okay. Lastly, before we sign off here, I try to leave at the end of these discussions people with some kind of a message of hope. You know, we live in a tough world and it's sometimes it's hard to believe. As you have met with so many people, I'm sure one of the commonalities that you've also come across is their feeling of extreme love. Many describe it as God's love. Can you think of a couple of times that people have described that to you? Could you describe it to us? Well, well, one interesting thing about it is they say you can't describe it.

28:26 It's, you know, is so far beyond anything we've experienced as law in this world. And one way I think about it is, you know, love is there's so many different types of it. In America, the romantic love seems to be in most people's minds, the sort of the core. And what I think about romantic love is, I mean, I haven't really studied it. I've just in books, but I've observed it. I don't know that anemology, but I do know that romantic love in the French anyway, Romain is a novel. And so what I think that romantic love is, it's, I've heard it described as a religion of two people.

29:15 What the people in romantic love are focused on is their story, right? Like how they met. And so the role, and that's how I think of romantic love. It's focused on the story of how they met and the adventures and so on. And then there's all kinds of other loves as well. But I think everybody's tried to describe this love for me, you know, for, to me that they experienced that they say there isn't any love. Paul, do you remember any specific ones? Well, I've heard a lot of people who, when they say after my near death experience, I realize that it's all about love. The world's all made of love. And they're embarrassed to say it.

29:57 And I think in part because it's indescribable and they'll say, well, you know, but I don't know what I really mean. You know, I can just, I just know that the world is about love for one another and unity. But I don't really know why it's like that. I don't know what I really mean when I say that. So I think it's the thing I would give to people is it's so wonderful, it's ineffable. You know, I think that's, we have to be honest with that. It's so wonderful that it's ineffable. Yeah. And what I've really come to out of all of this is that, you know, life necessarily has troubles and turmoil. Yet the general, the message I get from everybody I've talked with, we've had these profound near death experiences, is that all that troubling aspect and the agony and so on, as soon as you're out of here, that it has a whole different prospect to it, that you see those things, not as terrible things, but as learning events and so on.

31:02 Eric in 1960, Saturday night was 68. I was a graduate student in philosophy at the University of Virginia. A Broadway musical comedy came through town. It was a touring company from New York. And I forgot what the musical was, but I remember that in the musical, there was this terrific comic villain, complete with the black top hat and the black cape. And he was just, you know, palpably mean. And so, all right, now the play is over, the curtain comes down and then the hero and hero and come out for their curtain call and it's, yeah.

31:49 Then the supporting actors and actors come streaming out and swoop across the stage and it's, yeah. And then the villain came out in the spotlight. And I was sitting on the front row, so this very obvious silence. Just like dead silence. And you know, it seemed like it went on for an eternity, but I had a second or two, I don't know, but it was just very palpable, that silence. And then behind, I heard a collective, like a lot of people kind of come into the senses that once said, oh, this is a play.

32:33 And then you heard a few scattered around and then, and then he got the loudest applause of all. And I think, you know, that's kind of how it happens in your near death experience. People who in life may seem like they're, you know, the big villain that very often in the life review, people say, well, that was a necessary part of the goodness of the story to himself. It's that my point here is that the change of perspective on your life that you get in this life review is so radical, you know, that it's just, I've only known one person that I know of who had a, I knew her before her near death experience and after her.

33:21 And this was a young woman that I met when I was a resident and I was doing a rotation in ematology. So one of the people, the patients that I had in that service was this young woman who was just a wonderful young woman. She was maybe in her early twenties, just a very fine person. And so she had a platelet problem. And so they were worried that during her delivery, she was pregnant that, you know, that this would cause problems. So that's why the hematologists were there to try to get the platelet problem solved.

34:02 And so then I got off the rotation. That was the end of my rotation. So I left before she had her baby. Now flash forward about three years later and I was in the middle of the night I was sitting in the hospital, right? Cafeteria. I was on call for psychiatry that night. And this presence swept in. I mean, there's really no way to describe this. When I met her three years before her hair was blonde, this presence who swept in, it was like it was hard to describe it. But she was so light and she came down the stage.

34:44 Oh, Dr. Moody, you don't remember me. But three years ago, I was in the hospital with platelet problem. It came back and she said, and then shortly after you left, baby delivered and I had a cardiac arrest. And she said that when she told the nurses that they said, oh, that Dr. Moody was there a few weeks ago, studies this. So that was the connection. But my point here is to change this person is just indescribable. It was like a totally different person. I mean, I wasn't a racking master, she had said who she was.

35:24 It was just, it's still the same as she's to me to this day to think about that. And that, of course, would be a very difficult thing to study since we don't know who's going to have the NDEs. Prior to, we can't study them the before. Yeah, that's right. But the reason she was there in the hospital was that this experience had made, she took up nursing. Yeah, and we see that with the NDEs as well. People change professions as a result of their new death experience. And they leave very well paying professions to focus more on people who need their help. That's pretty amazing experience, pretty amazing.

36:04 Any last thoughts you would like to share? Well, let me say one thing. Okay. And I make documentary films as well as writing books. And at the end of many of my interviews, I asked the subject one, just one question, what do you think happens when we die? And I'm amazed at how quickly people answer that. They've really given it some thought. One of the people I asked that to was Prince Joseph Habsburg, who was a member of the Habsburg clan, used to rule, I guess, Northern Europe, Germany and other places, Austria. And I said, well, Joseph, what do you think is going to happen when you die?

36:46 And he just lit up and he said, it's going to be the most wonderful experience of my life. It'll be beautiful. It's like jumping out of an airplane and hoping the parachute opens. And I think that's where most people are when it comes to the end time is, gee, hope the shoot opens. I love what Ravallet said, and as he was dying, he said, I am going into the great perhaps. To me, though, it's no longer perhaps. I mean, I've just given up it. And to the folks who are listening in, thank you for listening in.

37:28 I just hope you've gotten something out of this. But it's a subject that I obviously like to talk about. And my whole life experience with this, and it really does. Ultimately, there's no reason to fret in agonizing in life, because in the end, it all works out. However, agonizing of it, as I've learned as part of it, is like you get involved in this life by the troubles, and then you die, and then the troubles take on a different demeanor. Well, thank you so much for the two men that have proof of life after life.

38:11 I appreciate your time. Raymond Moody and Paul Perry, thanks a lot for being here. Thanks a lot, Eric. Take care. Thank you. Thank you. Thanks again for listening and sharing this podcast. If you've had a roundtrip death experience, we would love to hear from you. Send an email to eric at roundtripdeath.com. Until then, I wish you everything good that you're looking for in this life and the next.