Alchemist of the Month: Dr Raymond Moody on Near Death Experiences and Life Beyond Life
By Alexandra Wenman
Back in 2013, I had the absolute pleasure of interviewing Dr Raymond Moody about his research on Near and Shared Death Experiences and the life after life.
Having had my own personal and mystical experiences of the after life and interlife spaces over the years, I have always been fascinated by the afterlife and other interdimensional realties. I am especially intrigued by any scientific research that backs up the existence of life beyond the physical plane.
World-renowned scholar, lecturer, and researcher, Dr Moody is a researcher and international bestselling author who coined the term "near death experience." He is also the bestselling author of many books, including Life After Life, Glimpses of Eternity, The Light Beyond, and Coming Back. Dr. Moody’s work profoundly illuminates our understanding of death, dying and grief.
Read on to find out more about his incredible research and his take on life beyond death…
“I grew up in a really tiny town of 2000 people. My whole outlook was shaped by that place – I like a very placid life. As a kid, I really just liked sitting around on the porch and rocking chairs and talking, and reading lots and lots of books. At about age 7, I became fascinated with astronomy – which is still one of my very favourite subjects. I also wanted to be a comedian when I was a child. I got to do it a little later too – I was a semi-professional comedian for a while. I am fascinated by humour and what makes people laugh.
“I was never a religious person. My father must have had some god-awful experiences as a medic in WWII, but, at any rate, he always dismissed religion. I had a grandmother who wasn't religious either and she was quite humorous about it – not in a mocking way, but in a gently humorous way about religious people. I remember deciding very early on in my life that death was just the obliteration of the body and the vanishing of consciousness. That's pretty much what I always assumed.
“Then when I was 18 years old, I went to the University of Virginia with the idea of getting my PHD in astronomy. When I got there, it was a different story – I had been interested in philosophy in high school and so I took a philosophy course and literally within the first couple of days of that class, reading Plato's Republic, I was hooked! Why do you think it's been in print for more than 2,000 years? It's powerful stuff. The Republic is really about the afterlife and the whole thing is structured around near death experiences (NDEs) and other ways that had of – in their minds – going to 'the next world.' The fact that Plato took it seriously – and that he offered this very persuasive argument that this is the most important question – that woke me up to it.
“One of the standard activities of the early great philosophers was to collect these stories of people who had died and come back. It happened in antiquity as it does now, but in the past few decades, the advent of CPR has enabled us to have a lot more people like that. Even in antiquity people knew about it – and they had the same arguments that people have about it now. Some people believe it's just the brain acting up and so on.
“Then in 1965, I was a third year philosophy student at the university of Virginia and I heard from one of my philosophy professors that a psychiatry professor there – a Doctor George Richie – had actually been pronounced dead some years before. George was very open to talking with students about it. He was very impressive. So that's where I began with this and, since that time, I've talked with literally thousands of people all over the world who've had these extraordinary events occur in their lives.
“I've come close to death once or twice, and I did experience a dramatic alteration in consciousness. But I didn't have what people interpret to be a NDE in terms of leaving my body or seeing a light at the end of a tunnel. But I did get to that point where I could tell something was about to happen – it's as though that realm of consciousness i was in was beginning to surrender it's links to the physical world. People say they have no real of describing it, and that's true. It was a kind of expansion in the sense that you realise that reality is layered. Apparently this thing we're in here is enfolded within some more complex order of reality. That's the only sense I got. The question arises, what does it feel like to experience a change of dimension and I'm beginning to think that's what near death experiences are.
“I think this dimension we're in is a vast education and entertainment medium – Elie Wiesel said 'God made man because He loves stories…' I think there's something to that. I've noticed the older people get, as they look back on their life, they develop the almost uncanny sense that it had been like a script or a drama. Some people might look at that and say 'that's just a metaphor' but I think there's more to it. As Shakespeare said: 'All the world's a stage'. A play is just life with the boring bits taken out. I think that's the best analogy I can come up with about this world – that we're living through these stories, searching out these different ways of living or doing or whatever… for some purpose that we can't divine.
“I find that many people fear death, but there's always a little difference – like, some people fear the physical pain, some fear separation from their loved ones, some fear the idea of non-existence or obliteration, and some fear hell. It's just such a vast thing. I think people are highly variable in the way they think about death. But one thing we can say pretty clearly is that people who have near death experiences come back and they don't fear death anymore.
“The idea of past lives is great food for thought – both my adopted children have relayed very vivid memories about what they were doing before they 'came here' and that they 'chose' to come to us. We don't talk about life after death all day in my house, by the way. I don't talk to my kids about this stuff – this is my profession. We don't go to church – and yet both these kids have relayed very intricate details about their previous lives. My 15-year-old recently reminded me of it again. So I am sympathetic to the idea of reincarnation. One little glitch about it for me, though, is how or why it should be set up on a time scale. When people have near death experiences, they tell me that in their NDE all time dissolves.
“When people come back from an NDE, no matter what they were chasing – whether that was fame or power or money – when they come back, they say they found out that what this [life] is all about, or seems to have to do with is love, or about learning to love. So they come back inspired to do that. Secondly, they no longer fear death – they see it as just a transition into another reality. And, lastly, it motivates them to study and to learn. Some NDE people have said they had a sense that even after you die, this process of learning goes on.
“I flirted with the idea of using hypnosis to take people back to the time of their NDE to get clearer information about what they experienced. But then I realised that you can, for example, raise a welt on somebody's arm just by giving them the suggestion, while they're in a deep trance, that something is burning their skin and so I thought, what if I precipitated a cardiac arrest? So I thought I'd better not do that.
“A shared death experience is when all of the elements that we think of as making up an NDE – for example: the experience of leaving one's body, becoming aware of a passage way, going toward a light, seeing apparitions of one's deceased loved ones, and even including seeing a panoramic review of one's life – have been reported, not just by people who have died and come back, but by some other person who happened to be in the same vicinity at the time. In a shared death experience, the bystander seems to empathically go with the dying person on part of their journey. For example, bystanders may say they see something leave the body of the deceased person – often described as a sort of transparent replica of the person. Or bystanders say they may themselves leave their body and go part way towards this light with their relative or loved one who dies. Bystanders have also reported seeing the spirits of the dying person's relatives surrounding them. The room may fill with light, or people may hear beautiful music, up to an including (incredibly), cases where the bystander actually co-lives the dying person's life review – that, to me, is just shocking… Embarrassing as it may be… I am not even looking forward to sitting in on my own life review, let alone having some kind of spectator there! But people tell me that it's not as strange as you might think and that it is actually completely natural in that context.
“The significance of shared death experiences is that, if – as we are told by some people – these experiences are just the artefact of the dying brain, as the flow of oxygen to the brain is cut off, bringing about an electrochemical discharge in the brain… Well, why then would bystanders, who are not ill or dying, be able to experience this phenomenon, too?
“You can think of all the plausible, upfront, and I think superficial objections, but I don't know any simple way of just erasing these near death and shared death experiences from the agenda. They're something that's just going to keep on happening. It's getting more pronounced because we're bringing people back from closer and closer approaches to death. I started medical school in 1972 – that's 41 years ago. And the medical progress has been immense. People are regularly rescued from the brink of death. And the experiences are getting correspondingly more complex. It seems that the longer a person's cardiac arrest, the deeper they get into the experience and the more detailed – which is the opposite of what you would think if it had anything to do with the brain winding down.
“On mother's day in 1994, I called my mum and found out she had a rash. The next day she went to the doctor and found out she had non-Hodgkins lymphoma, and had two days to two weeks to live. Two weeks later, to the day, she did die and my wife and I were at her bedside this whole time. When she died, my wife and I, and my brother-in-law and my sister had this shared death experience. I am driven so much by curiosity, but at that point, I just sort of stopped investigating. I wasn't interested in writing about it because I guess I was processing or integrating my own experience.
“I don't know much of what to say about negative NDEs because, first of all, they tend to be relatively fewer and, secondly, they seem to be less homogenous. Positive NDEs seem to cluster around common features, whereas the negative ones are spread out all over the place. I can easily imagine that negative NDEs might be under reported. Personally, I think people would have a harder time saying to their doctor, 'You know, Doc, when I died I went to hell.' I'd probably want to keep that to myself. Sometimes people describe what I would call a delirium. Delirious patients tend to have these surrealistically distorted visions and I think sometimes those leak in and get called a negative NDE. But I really don't know…
“I'm not sure what I think about psychics and mediums. I have definitely seen things in my life that have been extraordinary and I do believe people can have these 'episodes'. But in terms of the people who go on TV and the stage – I think they can use something studied by psychologists called the 'Barnum' effect, where people take general information and apply uniquely to themselves. So I guess I don't really have an opinion about mediums because I can see how that effect can be achieved without the help of anything supernatural.
“I have seen people come back to a heightened state of awareness – known as 'Fey' – just before they die. People can be non-responsive for long periods of time. Relatives may have said they are just waiting around for the heart to stop, when all of a sudden grandma comes back to vibrant existence – if you've seen this, you know what I mean when I say they look more alive than alive! There's a glow on their face like all of their neuroses have dropped away and they may give a very coherent message to everybody present and then they just turn over and die. People say, oh you know it's a flood of adrenaline or whatever and I say that's a ridiculous idea to have to fall back on because actually it's just an incredible thing! I've seen a lot of patients have adrenaline surges in various states but I have never seen anybody light up quite like that. Not from an adrenaline surge anyway. When that happens, you definitely get the feeling that they are sort of half way here and half way into the afterlife. It's remarkable to see.
“The one question that I would like answered is not really about NDEs or the afterlife. What I would really like to know is – well, let's put it this way, I can't really imagine that we are the only sentient and intelligent creatures in the universe. Like I said, I keep up with astronomy and I recently read that the most accurate account of the number of stars in the non-universe is 150 billion trillion! Now, lots and lots of stars have planets but let's just assume that the solar system we're in is an exception and it has many more planets than that. The average system has only four planets but we have eight. If you multiply four by 150, that's 600 billion trillion stars and the latest estimate says that about one out of a thousand planets apparently is earth born. So that's a big enough number for me to figure: they're out there!
“I'd really just like to know of even one other planet – one other civilisation of sentient entities – out there. That would be great. I know that's probably unrealistic but it's a lot more realistic now than it was when I was a kid. Incidentally, I'm not into UFOs. I mean, as an amateur astronomer, I have seen a lot of things – you see all kinds of things when you study the skies – but, unfortunately, I hope I'm wrong, but I don't think they're here yet!
“I have wondered about whether there are beings existing in other dimensions. In 2013, when we think of the question of 'Is there life after death?' and 'Is there life on other worlds?', we tend to think of those as two distinct questions but it hasn't always been so and if you went back to even the early 19th century, or the 18th century, people tended to collapse those questions. When astronomers looked at the Milky Way, they believed they were looking through the rim of the galaxy and they could see these smudges through their telescopes, and correctly surmised that they were looking at other galaxies. We now know them to be just that. And so the question then was: 'What does the bible say about this?' How do you fit that into the bible? There was an astronomer called Chalmers [spelling?], who was also into theology and he decided to solve it by saying that those other planets were the abode of our own departed relatives. His books were very popular. But I like to believe the question: 'Is there life on other planets?' is now solvable.”
Watch the full interview on The Alexandra Wenman Show…
‘Raymond Moody: Near Death/Shared Death Experiences & the existence of life in other dimensions-2013’
Through his research, Dr Moody has concluded that there are nine experiences common to most people who have had a near death experience. These are:
Hearing sounds such as buzzing
A feeling of peace and painlessness
Having an out of body experience
A feeling of travelling through a tunnel
A feeling of rising into the heavens
Seeing people, often dead relatives
Meeting a spiritual being such as God
Seeing a review of one's life
Feeling a reluctance to return to life
'I'm not good at giving advice and I don't guide my own life by a set of rules. Still, here are the things I do that make me the happiest…'
1. Be with my family
2. Pray,in the morning ,evening and a few times spontaneously in between.
3. I take long walks every day for exercise.
4. I eat what I like.
5. I keep up with the news.
6. I spend time day dreaming every day.
7. I really enjoy humor.
8. Think, read and write everyday.
9. Stay our of big cities and avoid cocktail parties.
10. I am constantly aware of my own ignorance
For more information on Dr Raymond Moody and his work, visit www.lifeafterlife.com
Alexandra Wenman is the author of ‘Archangel Alchemy Healing’, Archangel Fire Oracle’ and ‘Water Alchemy Oracle’ (all Findhorn Press).
For more information on Alexandra, visit alexandrawenman.com, watch ‘The Alexandra Wenman Show’ on YouTube or follow her on Instagram @alexandracwenman.