Proof of life after life, p.1
Proof of Life after Life, page 1
Advanced Praise for Raymond Moody and Paul Perry’s PROOF of LIFE after LIFE
“If you’ve been on the fence wondering about the afterlife, you won’t be there much longer after you read Proof of Life after Life. Raymond Moody and Paul Perry have presented a convincing presentation that we go on after our physical existence.”
—George Noory, author of New York Times bestsellers Journey to the Light and Talking to the Dead
“The authors amass an impressively broad and vivid array of firsthand accounts… plenty of fodder for the curious to chew on.”
—Publishers Weekly (06/06/2023)
“What happens when we die is one of humankind’s most enduring questions. Proof of Life after Life brings a new and exciting perspective to this age-old question. Dr. Raymond Moody and Paul Perry are exceptionally qualified to write about life after death, coauthoring more than a dozen books on NDEs, including five New York Times bestsellers. Combined they have created this book, a groundbreaking sentinel event in providing proof for an afterlife. This vitally important book is profoundly informative and inspirational. Proof of Life after Life is exceptionally well written, easy to read, and enthusiastically recommended.”
—Jeffrey Long, MD, author of the New York Times bestseller Evidence of the Afterlife
“I thought the study of near-death experiences (NDEs) was as far as afterlife studies could go, but this book far exceeds the study of NDEs with its exploration of shared death experiences, those rare but profound paranormal events that prove separation of body and mind. With Proof of Life after Life, Raymond Moody and Paul Perry have taken death studies to a new and more exciting level.”
—Rajiv Parti, MD, author of Dying to Wake Up
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Dedicated with love to my wife, Cheryl, and the children in our lives, Carter, Carol, Avery, Samuel, and Ray Junior.
—Raymond A. Moody, MD, PhD
To my wife, Darlene, and the children and grandchildren who make our world.
—Paul Perry
Foreword
Humanity received a tremendous gift when Dr. Raymond Moody published his world-changing book Life After Life, in 1975. As a professor of philosophy fascinated by the ancient Greeks, he was inspired by such brilliant minds as Plato who documented human reports suggestive of life after death.
It was a series of remarkable stories from over 100 patients who shared their experiences of almost dying that led Professor Moody to publish his research, providing an intriguing glimpse into the modern reality of an afterlife suggested by those early Greek philosophers. And yet, he realized that these were by their very nature subjective reports by the dying themselves, and what the rational world would ultimately require would be some confirmatory body of quantifiable, objective evidence.
Although he has written several books over the ensuing decades that are directly relevant to the afterlife question, the book you are holding is his first direct effort at consolidating numerous overlapping lines of evidence to bolster the objective support of the reality of the afterlife.
Millions around the world are aware of Dr. Moody’s contributions as the father of the field by coining the term near-death experiences (NDEs) in 1975, but far fewer are aware of his remarkable book Glimpses of Eternity, published in 2010. This work was entirely devoted to shared death experiences, which consist of many of the same extraordinary ingredients of the NDE but occur in normal, healthy bystanders, either at the bedside of or at some distance from a person who is dying.
In the current work, he expands greatly on the concept of the shared death experience, elaborating the myriad ways in which they offer objective proof to claims of consciousness beyond the confines of the brain and body, and confirms our notions of soul and of the ability of loving relationships to exist beyond the death of a physical body.
This expansion incorporates major new fields of work in afterlife studies, such as modern documentation of out-of-body experiences and precognitive experiences involving spiritual events (including some deeply personal to Dr. Moody and his family and friends). In addition, he discusses terminal (or paradoxical) lucidity, the apparent brief coming back to life with full cognitive, emotional, and communicative skills of people thought to have irreversible brain damage that would not have allowed such lucidity, and yet these cases are not uncommon.
He discusses specific cases of the transformative power of light, as well as inexplicable healing and new abilities enabled by near-death experiences. Especially fascinating are the details he shares of his use of the psychomanteum, an ancient Greek technique of mirror gazing that he has found remarkably effective in opening doors of communication with departed loved ones.
All in all, this book provides a rich compendium of case reports and comprehensive analysis to allow Dr. Moody to offer a career-summarizing work that fully supports and brings to fruition the promise of his 1975 book Life After Life. This book does indeed provide robust proof of life after life! Enjoy!
—Eben Alexander, MD, former Harvard neurosurgeon and author of Proof of Heaven, The Map of Heaven, and Living in a Mindful Universe
Preface
The Body of Proof
It was 1987 when my literary agent, Nat Sobel, asked me to coauthor a book with Dr. Raymond Moody. That presented a problem for me. Despite being the executive editor of American Health magazine, a flourishing general health publication, I had no idea of who Raymond Moody was, let alone what a near-death experience (NDE) was all about.
My agent was shocked when he heard that. “Haven’t you ever heard of Life After Life?” he asked. “Don’t you ever watch Oprah?”
We were halfway through lunch, and my lack of knowledge about Dr. Moody and his field of study cast a silence over the table. I felt, well, ignorant.
Nat changed the subject, and I thought discussion of Dr. Moody’s unwritten book had evaporated. But it hadn’t. Nat finished his burger and dropped a note from his jacket pocket into the middle of the table.
“Here’s Moody’s phone number; give him a call,” he said. “You need to know this guy and this subject. It’ll be an education.”
I called Dr. Moody that night and found him to be relaxed and friendly, not the stiff doctor I had expected. He told me to call him Raymond and was actually thrilled to discover that I had never heard of him and knew nothing about near-death experiences. “We can start with a blank slate,” he said. The next week I flew to see him in Georgia, and he picked me up from the airport. He lived more than an hour west of the airport, which gave us a chance to talk about a wide variety of subjects: buried gold; criminal behavior (Raymond is a psychiatrist, after all); politics; and, oh yes, near-death experiences (NDEs). By the time we arrived at his home, I had agreed to cowrite what would become our first book. The subject was new and fascinating to me, and while writing The Light Beyond, I learned the basics of what makes up an NDE: that many who almost die leave their body during that time, that they often see departed loved ones, and that most are exposed to a light that emanates kindness and wisdom. I was hooked. I decided then and there to devote myself to creating a library of wisdom dedicated to Raymond and his expertise in the field of NDEs.
To a great extent, that library has now been accomplished. Counting Proof of Life after Life, we have now coauthored six books, along with creating two films and maintaining an audio collection of several hundred interviews. These recordings are truly special, combining the rush of the creek passing by Raymond’s home in rural Alabama and the rolling sound of his rocking chair to make his impromptu lectures that much more hypnotic. Every time I listen to one of these recordings, I am projected back to the day of the interview and the feeling of gratitude I had at being there.
What astounds me when I listen to these recordings is the profound change Raymond has made in his own belief of an afterlife. When we first began working together, he shunned the idea that near-death experiences are proof of an afterlife. His reasoning for skepticism was clear: NDEs are subjective experiences that can only be perceived by the person who has them. So, to present proof of such a bold belief as consciousness surviving bodily death, the event itself would have to be witnessed by at least one other person. And I don’t mean watching somebody as they die but in some way objectively joining them in their actual death experience. This type of witness is called a shared death experience (SDE), which, as you will see in this book, is when a living person somehow participates in the events of a dying person.
SDEs come in a variety of forms: seeing mist leave a person’s dying body is one such form; communicating psychically with a dying person from a distance would be another; and so on.
Raymond and I began earnestly researching SDEs around the year 2005, but we had been aware of them for more than a decade prior, reading about events that had happened hundreds of years earlier and listening to contemporary ones. We even mentioned them in our first book, including some very descriptive SDEs that are included in this book as well. Then one day in our rocking chairs it came to us: SDEs are proof of an afterlif
We feel the information collected within these pages proves that consciousness survives bodily death. To go a step further, Raymond feels the mass of objective evidence afforded by SDEs means that it is no longer necessary to prove an afterlife—rather, disbelievers should have to prove there isn’t an afterlife.
“For people to anticipate life after death is a fully rational thing to do,” says Raymond. “I can’t think of any way around the evidence. I’ve tried but I can’t. So I say, yes, belief in life after death is rational.”
The pages ahead contain the body of that rational proof.
—Paul Perry
Introduction
Beyond Near-Death Experiences
No one knows whether death is really the greatest blessing a man can have, but they fear it is the greatest curse, as if they knew well.
—Plato
It’s hard to imagine that the near-death experience (NDE) by itself doesn’t represent proof positive of life after death.
I am not a doubter of NDEs. After all, I named and defined the near-death experience in 1975.1 I personally believe NDEs to be partial evidence of an afterlife. I have listened to enough people tell of leaving their bodies, seeing dead relatives, and witnessing a bright and intelligent light that I have come to agree with William James, the nineteenth-century psychologist and philosopher whose own NDE led him to say: “He sees, but cannot define the light which bathes him and by means of which he sees the objects which excite his wonder. If we cannot explain physical light, how can we explain the light which is the truth itself?… But do you wish, Lord, that I should inclose [sic] in poor and barren words sentiments which the heart alone can understand?”2
Still, when I completed my initial NDE research for Life After Life, I realized that my work still did not answer the question of many readers, the one that Plato considered to be the most important question in the world: What happens when we die?
The NDE itself is a subjective event that is not experienced by any but the single person who has it. And although NDE stories alone might be considered proof of an afterlife by many, it’s the subjective nature of the experience that would keep it from standing up in court as proof positive of an afterlife. In other words, it’s difficult to believe a near-death experience and the afterlife it portends, until you have had one.
Limits of the NDE
I believe NDEs to be true evidence of the afterlife, but I know, too, that they are subjective events, without objective proof, leaving myself and other believers to speak with a subjective heart and not an objective brain.
In my early research, I was interpreting my own material with objective intent—I was analyzing an interesting medical phenomenon and felt a sense of scientific duty in naming and defining it. After speaking to so many enthusiastic experiencers, I felt in my subjective heart there was life after life, but my objectivity didn’t go beyond intent; I didn’t have solid proof that would stand up to what I myself had been taught in graduate school. And anyway, I am not comfortable telling people what to believe, especially about such an important topic. So, I kept my opinion to myself and let readers make up their own minds based on the “evidence” I could provide.
I examined all the case studies I had compiled, and in the summer of 1975, I derived fourteen common traits that summarized what I came to name the near-death experience, or NDE.
Ineffability: These experiences have been virtually inexpressible because there are no words in our community of language to express consciousness at the point of death. In fact, many people who’ve had NDEs say things like “There are just no words to express what I am trying to say.” This presents a problem, of course, because if someone can’t describe what’s happened, they can’t give to or gain from another person an understanding of their NDE.
Hearing the Death Pronouncement: Numerous people in the course of my research told of hearing their doctors or others pronounce them dead.
Feelings of Peace and Quiet: Many people described pleasant feelings and sensations during their experience, even after being pronounced dead. One man with a severe head injury and no detectable vital signs said that all pain vanished as he floated in a dark space and realized “I must be dead.”
Noise: In many of the cases, people reported unusual auditory sensations, like a loud buzzing noise or a loud ring. Some found this noise to be quite pleasant while others found it to be extremely annoying.
A Dark Tunnel: People reported the sensation of being pulled rapidly through a dark space, most often described as a tunnel. For instance, a man who died during burns and fall injuries said that he escaped into a “dark void” in which he floated and tumbled through space.
Out-of-Body: During these experiences, usually after the tunnel experience, most people had the sense of leaving their body and looking at themselves from a physical point outside of it. Some described it as being “the third person in the room” or like being “on stage in a play.” The experiences they had out-of-body were quite detailed. Many of the people described medical procedures and activity with such detail that there was little doubt on the part of attending physicians interviewed later that the usually comatose patient had actually witnessed events that happened during the NDE.
Meeting Others: Out-of-body experiences were then often followed by the meeting of other “spiritual beings” in their vicinity, beings who were there to ease them through the transition and into death or to tell them that it wasn’t their time to die.
A Being of Light: The most incredible common element I found and the one with the greatest effect on the individual was the encounter with a very bright light, one that was most often described as a “being of light.” Time and again in the accounts, this being first appeared as a dim light and then became rapidly brighter until it reached an unearthly brilliance. Often described as “Jesus,” “God,” or an “angel” by those with religious training, the light communicated with the individual (sometimes in a language they had never even heard), often asking them if they were “ready to die” or what their accomplishments were. The being of light did not ask these questions in a judgmental way. Rather it asked Socratic questions, ones aimed at acquiring information that could help the person proceed along a path of truth and self-realization.
A Review: The probing questions by the being of light often led to a review of one’s life, a moment of startling power during which a person’s entire life was displayed before them in panoramic intensity. The review was extraordinarily rapid and in chronological order, incredibly vivid and real. Sometimes it was even described as “three-dimensional.” Others describe it as “highly charged” with emotions and even multiple dimensions in a way that the individual could understand the thoughts of everyone in the review.
A Border or Limit: In some of these cases, the person described approaching a “border” or “limit” beyond which they would not return. This border was described variously as being water, a gray mist, a door, a fence across a field, or even a line or an imaginary line. In one case, the person was escorted to the line by the being of light and asked if he wanted to die. When he said he knew nothing about death, the being told him, “Come over this line, and you will learn.” When he did, he experienced “the most wonderful feeling” of peace and tranquility and a vanishing of all worries.
Coming Back: Obviously, the individuals I’ve interviewed came back to their physical lives. Some resisted their return and wanted to stay in this afterlife state. Some reported return trips through the tunnel and back to their physical bodies. But when they did return, they had moods and positive feelings that lingered for a long time. Many were so positively transformed that their pre-NDE personalities disappeared, and they became almost unrecognizable from their old selves.
Not Telling Others: The people I spoke with were normal, with functioning, well-balanced personalities. Yet because they were afraid of being labeled as delusional or mentally ill, these people often chose to remain silent about their experience or only related it to someone very close to them. Because there was no common language in which to express their experience, they chose to keep it to themselves so no one would think they had become mentally unbalanced as a result of their brush with death. It wasn’t until many individuals heard of the research I was doing that they felt comfortable enough to relate their experience to others. I was frequently thanked by these long-silent near-death experiencers (NDErs), who would say things like, “Thank you for your work. Now I know I’m not crazy.”
