Proof of an Afterlife: the Shared-Death Experience with Raymond Moody and Paul Perry

We have now released issue 3 of the New Thinking Allowed magazine. Download it for free at NewThinkingAllowed.org New Thinking Allowed is a non-profit endeavor. Your contributions to the New Thinking Allowed Foundation make a meaningful difference in our ability to produce new videos. Thinking Allowed Conversations on the leading edge of knowledge and discovery with psychologist Jeffrey Mishlove Hello, I'm Christopher Naughton. I'm happy to be working with Jeffrey Mishlove, longtime host of New Thinking Allowed, and his co-host, Emmy Fatness. Fifty years ago, the term near-death experience didn't even exist. That's because the first of my two guests today, Raymond Moody, had not yet published his groundbreaking book, Life After Life, in which he coined the term. In fact, Raymond originally directed this book at medical professionals, but he soon found out that it was a worldwide hit. Over 15 million copies have been sold since the 1970s. Raymond has also written extensively throughout his life on topics such as these, and has authored, or co-authored, I should say, his sixth book with our second guest today, Paul Perry, an accomplished author in his own right, a filmmaker, a documentary producer. Paul has written on diverse topics such as near-death experiences, the life review, and the shared death experience, which we're going to get into today. He's also written on esoteric topics such as Hunter S. Thompson, Ken Kesey, the life of Jesus in Egypt, and Christopher Columbus. Their book together, Proof of Life After Life, Seven Reasons to Believe There Is an Afterlife. Raymond Moody joins us from Sarasota, Florida. Paul Perry is in Phoenix, Arizona. Raymond, Paul, it's good to have you guys along today. Thanks for joining me. Obviously, this is not your first time out to the rodeo. Sixth book that you guys are writing together. And, Raymond, you've written so many books about this over the years, but this is the first time you've ever used the word proof in any title, in any subtitle. And I know you've been a real stickler for separating what you call pseudoscience from science. I know some other authors have gotten in a little, quote-unquote, trouble by putting titles like proof in their title. I mean, Eben Alexander said the publishers kind of pushed him in that direction. Why did you put it in the title of this book? I did because, as a professor of logic, I can defend it. There's a lot of different concepts of truth, ranging from strict mathematical or logical proof down to the tabloid headlines about proof. But where I'm headed for that is that I want to make this statement that for those who are concerned about the question of an afterlife, I now say that it is okay, it is rational for somebody to say, on the basis of what we have now, that they are confident that there's an afterlife. It's now the logical apparatus, or the thinking apparatus, is available so that you can think through the question of an afterlife in a new way that you don't have to get into the pseudoscience and stuff. And that's in the background. It's not something, you know, it's what most people want to hear when they hear about the afterlife. They want to hear about stories, right? And they'll listen to the stories on and on and on. But Plato pointed out you could have a bazillion stories that doesn't add up to proof of an afterlife. Because what set of concepts do you use to connect the stories to the statement that there's an afterlife? And that has always been unsolved, but I say it's solved now. And so that's why I'm confident. If somebody wants to drill down on this and test me on it, I'm ready. And Paul, I would have to think, and a central focus, of course, of the book, is the shared death experience. And I think that takes us one step closer, as Raymond was talking about, logical conclusions that life after death, that life after life, that consciousness is not relegated to the brain, is supported by the shared death experience. What is it and why does that hold water? Well, a shared death experience is when a living person who is well experiences the death experience of a person who's dying. And by virtue of two people or more experiencing a death experience, that makes it an objective experience that has independent witness. So let me give you a couple of examples. If you wake up, say, if you wake up in the middle of the night and a relative is standing at the foot of your bed, and the relative gives you the news that they have unexpectedly died, and in the morning you find out that they have died, then that is a shared death experience. In other cases in this book, if you see a mist rising from a dying person's body, which, oddly enough, many people have, that is a shared death experience, because they have seen something dramatic that takes place concurrent with death. Another example would be a person who's on an operating table and they've had a cardiac arrest, their heart has stopped. That's the gold standard that we've always used as being a gold standard of a near-death experience, because you can't argue that they're actually near death if their heart has stopped. But if they're able to recount accurately later what occurred in the operating room or maybe what occurred out in a waiting room, they leave their body and they travel, then that would be a shared death experience. That's the type of evidence that proves that consciousness has left the body. Right, so you've got an objective observer. And again, it's not a double-blind study with men with white lab coats in a laboratory somewhere. But these stories are common throughout cultures, throughout countries, throughout history. And Raymond, when you first wrote Life After Life in the 1970s, and again, you said, look, I'm not stating that this is science. These are stories that I'm sharing. But you weren't hearing a whole lot about shared death experiences at that time, right? You really were writing on near-death experiences. When did that start becoming a thing, if you will? Well, when I wrote Life After Life, I already had one shared death experience. You did personally? I did. It was from one of my own medical professors. And when I went to medical school, the faculty knew I was investigating these things. So very shortly after I entered, this wonderful woman, the psychiatry professor, approached me in the bookstore and she said, her exact words, Dr. Moody, I've been wanting to talk to you about some mentation I had while I was resuscitating my mother. And she took me across to her office and told me about when, as she was trying to resuscitate her mother, that she herself got out of her body and rose up and she saw her mother there in spirit form. She saw a passageway with a light and saw apparitions of relatives and friends of her mother's coming forward to meet her. But that was only one case. Plus, I didn't want to put it in there because I just couldn't figure out, because I only had one case and also I couldn't figure out any way to make sure that Dr. McCraney was identified. And I mean, you were already dealing with something, you know, relatively bizarre, certainly off the mainstream. So maybe the shared death experience was even a step into a greater unknown. Well, it was. But, you know, I just was kind of waiting to see what happened. I didn't know. You know, it's hard to make a judgment about one case. And I didn't know it was, so I just remained silent on it, mainly because, like I said, I would have to put in some details that I was afraid might identify my professor. Yeah. So, Paul, I guess Raymond remained curious, which seems to be the gold standard in this area. That is definitely what Raymond says goes. But, you know, we've worked together now for 33 years, and we started with the book, The Light Beyond, and then we've moved on to other books. But through all of these books, I mean, there's even reference in The Light Beyond to shared death experience. We had a couple of them in that book. And over the years, we just collected them and collected them and collected them. And then Raymond and I happened to have shared death experiences of our own. Tell us a little bit about, Paul, share your story, and then, Raymond, I want to hear about your mom, too. Well, my shared death experience involves my mother as well. She had, well, I was working, I'd worked for about, for several years with a doctor named Vernon Nepe. Vernon was the head of neuropharmacology at University of Washington. And we were working on a book on deja vu, which is an area that he explores. And we went as far as we could on that book. Then we both got busy with other things. So I didn't talk to Vernon for at least five years. And he wasn't in my mind at all. And I don't think I was in his mind at all. But my mother was dying of Alzheimer's. And the day that she died, before she died, I got a phone call from Vernon. And Vernon says, you know, I was sitting here this morning reading the newspaper. And a voice, a female voice said, call Paul Perry. And I ignored it. And he said about an hour later, I was still reading the sports section at that point. And the female voice again said, call Paul Perry. So I'm calling you and I want to know why I'm supposed to call you. And I said, well, Vernon, you know, my mother's dying of Alzheimer's. You have like the perfect expertise to discuss Alzheimer's. And so we did. He talked about some things that they had done experimentally with Alzheimer's patients. And in the middle of this, I started getting, this is before I had iPhones. I was starting to get phone calls, that beeping system that told me a phone call was coming through. And I said, Vernon, I've got to take this call. And I took it and it was people at the care facility saying that my mother had just died. And that easily is defined as a shared death experience. Raymond's is a little bit different. He had a lot more people involved with his. He should tell the story. You were right in the room, Raymond, right when your mom was passing, correct? Give us the context. And the context is just, again, bizarre. But I was out in the West. This was in May of 1994. And preparing with a group of scholars to figure out some way to study shared death experiences. Okay. Because we had a lot. And Paul and I were talking about this. We were just assembling a lot of them. And that morning after the conference, it was a Sunday morning, it was Mother's Day. I called my mother in Macon, Georgia just to wish her happy Mother's Day. And I remember, hello, and I said, how are you doing? I'm doing great. Her voice was so uplifted and cheerful. And then she said, but yesterday I developed a rash. And then my brothers and sisters had taken her to the ER, but the ER doctor looked her up. And I don't think this is anything serious. But he gave her an appointment to see another doctor on Monday, the day after I was talking to her. But on Sunday, the picture was good, just a rash. Well, anyway, then the next day when she went to the doctor, the doctor said, you have non-Hodgkin's lymphoma and you have two days to two weeks to live. And two weeks later, indeed, after she had been abundant a couple of days and unconscious, but my sisters, my brother-in-law, and my wife and I there. I mean, you know, people say it's ineffable, and it is. I don't know exactly how to describe it, except that to me it's like the room, a hospital room is like a cubicle, right? But I was no longer in a cubicle. It was like a space that was like an inverted funnel, like tube going down like this. And it wasn't, you didn't feel dizzy, but you could tell the spinning of it was like the energy, I guess. And the light turned quality. It wasn't like from a light bulb or from the sun. I don't know how to describe it. And I felt I was looking at the room from an impossible angle. And my sister, for example, felt the presence of my father who had died 18 months before. And my brother-in-law felt something. And it was just like there was a little opening into something. You could feel like some other system or place. And my mother said twice, I love you. She had been unconscious for a couple of days, but all of a sudden. And when I said I love you, it was obviously coming from her, but I didn't hear it through my ears is the best way I can describe it. It was very insistent. I love you twice. We all heard it. But it wasn't coming from her vocal cords, in my opinion. I'm always amazed at the number of people who have had these experiences, whether it's a near-death experience or a shared death experience. And I did a thing early on when we first started writing books together that I called the Denny's experiment. And that would be that I would go into a Denny's and I would announce, hey, I'm working on a book on near-death experiences. I'm curious to know how many people have had them. And I would describe them. And I've done the same with shared death experiences. And I'm amazed at the number of people. The first time I did it, I'd gone to a movie late at night with friends. We went into a Denny's afterwards, and there were like 20 people in there. And we talked about what I was working on. The people I was with denied that they meant anything. So I stood up in Denny's, and I announced what I was working on and asked how many people had had these experiences. And out of 20 people, there were 12 people who said they had had the experience or their grandparents had had it when they died, or they had talked to other people who had similar experiences to this. And it intrigued me that right away people connected with it, and right away they openly spoke about it because someone gave them permission to speak. I can only think that that was the case. And that's one of the hallmarks of the shared death experience or the near-death experience, that people have generally been reticent to talk about it. I mean, Raymond, you know, they may commit you, right? Or they may just completely dismiss you. Well, yes, there was some of that, and it makes me sound like a hero, which is nice. But in reality, there was very little of that. I had been doing this research for a long time before I went to medical school, and my friends who were ahead of me had circulated word among the medical faculty that this student was coming in who had studied this. And within just two weeks of when I got to the medical school, eight of my professors called me and said, Dr. Moody, thank you for doing this, a get-together. And about half of them, because it happened to me, the other half of them, because they had heard it from their patients. Where I got into the trouble with me was never from medicine, because, you know, the medical doctors realized this happens, and so what do you do for the patient clinically, right? But where I got into trouble was the fundamentalist religionists. That was, you know, I'm off the devil and all like that. You know, Raymond, one of the cases that really pulled you into this whole area was the story of George Ritchie. George Ritchie. And I want you to tell that story, but here's what's intriguing. I'll tee it up this way, because you said you had more problems with the fundamentalists than with the scientists, although you can get scientific materialist who are fundamentalists, right? But George Ritchie, who had that near-death experience in the 1940s, right around the time you were in utero there in Texas, he hadn't written a book yet, but he was sharing his story, and he says he saw Jesus in the near-death experience. Again, NDEs weren't even a thing then, or at least the terminology wasn't a thing, because you hadn't come down the road yet. But when he started sharing the stories, Pat Robertson over at 700 Club said, Hey, bring this guy on. He talked to Jesus. We want to have him in the studio. Until he found out that he had already given a talk at the Edgar Cayce Association across town here in Virginia Beach, and they disinvited him. Yeah, well, I'm sorry. I just, you know, Pat had his amusement value, but, you know, I'm glad his show was over. Well, no, I think it's still going. It's his son's. But I guess, you know, it's interesting. I went to the IANS Conference in Washington, D.C. recently. Yeah, that's the International Association of Near-Death Studies, which I know you helped, you know, create, Raymond. And Paul, you were probably in on that as well. But what's interesting is that there are various workshops and sessions, and one session was of a woman who was in an evangelical church, and she had a near-death experience, and her entire life changed. And I asked her, what's your relationship now like with your church? She says, well, I really couldn't go back to my church, but my pastor did endorse my book. So there's changes taking place everywhere. There are changes because it's, see, what has happened is, Raymond Moody was no hero. It's what happened once. These things have always been known. Plato and the Greek philosophers wrote about them. Where I came in was the period where there had developed CPR, cardiopulmonary resuscitation. And so all of a sudden, from a very rare phenomenon, this became in a matter of years a very common phenomenon. And so I just observed it, and I wrote about it, and I knew full well that any doctor or psychologist who read that book, who would simply take the move of asking among his own patients, would confirm it. I knew that would happen. It wasn't anything like courage. Oh, you were so courageous. No. I knew what would happen. But you were a pioneer. You were at the very, just like our own Jeffrey Mishlove, when you're a pioneer and you're one of the first ones out there, what's the old adage? First they laugh at you, then they violently oppose you, and then they accept what you have to say as self-evident. It is. It is like that. I mean, so at the outset, and I'll ask you after this, Paul, because you were there at the beginning as well, did you find that there was real pushback and was some of it personal? Raymond, I'll go to you first, Raymond. Well, yeah, there was some personal, yeah, yeah, yeah. It's just now human psychology is so fascinating to me. I just thank God every day that I studied forensic psychiatry because it sure does give you an insight. Well, yeah, I got some. You know, one of the things that is amazing to me, Christopher, is like in academe, for example, when I was working at a department and my new, and one of my colleagues published a paper, I would just say terrific, you know, this is so wonderful. I mean, this is a great paper and so on. But I quickly found that for the most people in that profession, oh, he published a paper and my paper is better than his. You know, it's so creepy. And so, I mean, it's just like a job is a way of avoiding work is what I say. It's like people want to form factions and hate each other or have meetings because they just love to talk, to, you know, hear themselves talk or to play at the computer. If you want to work, you work for yourself. So, to me, I just, you know, that stuff exists, but I'm just not interested in it. I've never been competitive. I just, what is the point of competition? You know, working together, it works so much better. You learn a lot more. Paul, what of it, your experience? What kind of perspective did you experience? When I first started out, which was really the book we did, Light Beyond, I was also writing a book on reversing heart disease with a doctor at Case Western University, Herman Hellerstein, cardiologist. And he asked me one day, we were at the hospital, standing by a nurse's station, and he said, what else are you working on besides this book on heart disease? And I told him about near-death experiences. And he shook his head and he said, you know, I've resuscitated hundreds of people. They always say hundreds or thousands. I've heard that a lot. But I've resuscitated hundreds of people and never have I heard a near-death experience. And then he got called away from the station, and all the nurses came over to the day in which I was, and they said, we hear them all the time. And the problem is that most doctors, Hellerstein included, they don't talk to their patients, or they don't really dig in on what happened when they had a cardiac arrest. And that was the persistent view for a long time. Now it's changed, I think substantially changed. So with this book, I'm amazed at how many doctors we have talking about, I'll just call them paranormal experiences. Well, they now have the freedom to speak about it as well. It's not as out there anymore. And again, I have to thank you. We have to thank you, Raymond. You say, okay, I'm not a hero. Okay. But you're a pioneer. You were there at the outset. You know what's interesting? My wife and I were my life partner for many years, Valerie and I. One night we decided, okay, let's watch some TV before we go to bed. So Valerie suggests, why don't we go back to one of those early unsolved mystery programs from the 1980s? You know, Robert Stack, the old gumshoe, very serious about stuff. And it was on NDAs. And of course, there's Raymond, which I kind of expected to see you there. But also there was Melvin Morris, who, Paul, I know you've written a book with. And also there was a very young-looking, several books, there you go. And there was a very young-looking Bruce Grayson, who was with the University of Virginia's DOPS program, the Division of Perceptual Studies, which is, again, where you met Bruce at the University of Virginia, when after being a student of philosophy for many years, you actually ended up being taught by him in the realm of psychiatry. Sounds like your souls were destined to meet, huh, Raymond? Oh, I think so. Bruce, you know, as you know, I mean, how can you describe Bruce? He's just so real and so good. He is. And a co-founder of IANS with you, correct? And Kenneth Ring and some others as well. But when you were writing the book, okay, you weren't in the School of Psychiatry yet, correct? You were still collecting stories. No, I was in my third year of medical school. So you were, okay. Okay, all right. And that's when you were collecting the stories. I was collecting the stories. I first heard George in 1965. I heard one other person while I was an undergraduate at UVA, Gleb Botkin by the name. But in September of 1969, I started being a philosophy professor. And Plato's Theta was one of my favorite works, so that's one I taught a lot. And students would just naturally come, oh, this is really interesting. And I remember a kid said, you know, when my grandma almost died, she had this experience. One of my students told me, I started talking about it in class. Pretty soon, faculty members, you know, who would hear about it would come and they would say, yeah, that happened to me. And then every little civic club needs a speaker on Wednesday or Tuesday, right? So, oh, this guy. And so pretty soon, and every place I went, I've never told anybody this, but so that's how it developed. And anybody who looks into this sympathetically is going to find the same thing. It's just no big deal to find cases of this. What you have to do, I mean, they're not going to tell somebody who's brusque or you have to convey that you're willing to listen, you know? You know what's interesting is that not long after your book, Life After Life came out, even though, again, I think you were being pushed back against by fundamentalists who didn't like what they were hearing by scientific materialists. Now I greatly enjoy it. Well, of course, all these years later. But at first, there was that great push against us. This can't possibly be real. But here's what's interesting. It started to seep into the zeitgeist anyway. And I love looking at popular culture. Absolutely. Three movies within 10 years. So the 1980s, we think of, you know, Ronald Reagan and New Wave. It was also the same decade where Shirley MacLaine's Out on a Limb came out. But that movie Resurrection with Ellen Burstyn that came out in 1980, and correct me if I'm wrong, I think Bruce thinks, Grayson thinks that there are a lot of NDE movies a lot earlier before that. But growing up as a young man in 1980, that movie Resurrection with Ellen Burstyn took people through death, off the operating table, looking down, seeing their body, seeing the light, seeing friends and family that had already passed before them. So your work, because before that, people experienced what hadn't been popularized. Nobody had distilled it into a book yet. That had to be greatly gratifying to see movies and even television series that emulated your work. I think to somebody with Asperger's syndrome, such as myself, I just didn't even relate to that type of it. I'm interested in facts and things. I wasn't even socially apt enough to be able to respond to the kind of thing you're talking to. I don't know. Did you ever see those movies? Did you ever see Ghost or Defending My Life? You never did. Your handiwork's all over that, but go ahead. Well, like I said, I'm a book person. I recently started putting books up on my shelf in a new place, a new room. I figured out that I read 185 academic books in the last year. I never kept track before because of no injury, but now that I've changed my... And my kids. My kids and my wife and my friends and then my work, and I'm not so interested in the social side of things. Got you. Paul, any feedback from you in this arena? Well, I was just going to say, just the other day, I picked up a copy, a DVD of that movie. Resurrection? Yes. Yeah, I just picked that one up. Gotcha. But there is still kickback. I mean, it's not... Everyone doesn't buy near-death experiences. And on Sunday, it was an example for me. I was invited to speak at a church about our upcoming book, and then I was disinvited in the same day. Because, quote, all we need is Jesus. We don't need that stuff. All we need is Jesus. Or it's actually Jesus. Maybe I'm Jesus. When they ask me if I'm a Christian, I say, do you mean Jesus or Jaysus? It's a big difference there. I'm glad you said that rather than me, Raymond. But, you know, on the other side of the coin, as you know, Jeff Long has done a lot of research on who has what when they have a near-death experience. I mean, he's gone through hundreds. He literally has gone through thousands of case studies. And one of the things he's found that he hasn't totally written about yet is that a very high percentage of people, regardless of their religious background, see Jesus. It's a very high percentage. I'm not a Bible thumper, but I find that intriguing. I've had three Muslims over the years who had near-death experiences who told me they saw Jesus. Now, even at the time when this was going on years ago, I was wondering whether, you know, there is the prohibition of seeing an image of Muhammad, right? So I didn't know whether that was part of the... But anyway, they did say seeing Jesus. Yeah, there's a lot of them that are very open to Jesus. He's supposed to come in on a white horse with Muhammad in the end times. So he's part of the team. But I went to Egypt several years ago, and I followed the trail of Jesus through Egypt. And I was amazed at a couple of things. One is that the trail was created by both Muslims and Christians because the Muslims considered Jesus to be a part of their religion. And how many Muslims helped me find what I was looking for because it wasn't a distinct trail. You see, and some of the things you gentlemen are talking about intrigue me too because I've written about polarization, political polarization, religious polarization of every stripe, but especially right here in the United States right now. But it's really all around the world. But one of the things or some of the things that I'm finding that you're creating common ground are things such as UAPs, near-death experiences, all of these, what Jeffrey has talked about on this program, kind of on a continuum of psi-related experiences. And although I hear you, Paul, that there are still some churches that say, you know, don't come in. I mean, Jeffrey was disinvited to, you know, a scientific group, I believe, in Nevada recently. He was invited, then disinvited because it's still a little too woo for them. But there are people who consider themselves to be dyed-in-the-wool Christians who say, yeah, when my grandmother died, this happened. I had a shared death experience. So these are common experiences, regardless of your political persuasions, your color, your race, your religion, et cetera. In some ways, it's a great galvanizer, isn't it? Yeah. Well, it is. It is because it's non-political, for one thing. Although, you know, people can make anything out of politics. They make politics out of anything. But for the most part, it's not political. Another thing is it goes right to the heart of spirituality. And a lot of people can't kick back against that, or don't. Yeah. And I would like to think, again, in a polarized age, and we find that a lot of young people are stepping away from churches and mosques and synagogues, and the largest religious group now are the nuns, N-O-N-E-S. That near-death experiences and studying of consciousness is giving them something to sink their teeth into, something that is real, something that speaks to their sacred curiosity, or curiosity of the sacred. What does this do? The study and the work and the writing that you guys have been involved in, and right now are involved in with the new book, again, Proof of Life After Life, what does that say to millennials? What does it say to people of Generation Z? That generation, those young folks are coming up, see? They don't know about this yet. And this is a cyclic phenomenon. Every few years, some new event occurs. What Paul and I have been thinking about is, it looks to us like, number one, at least a million Americans died from COVID. That is actually an understatement, because it's only epidemiologically in retrospect that they can calculate the true number. But for now, it's over a million. So you think of all the grief out there, and then you think of so many people now getting into the midlife period, where it's just natural. Plato pointed out that when people, particularly successful people, get a certain age, and they've spent their whole life connected to their business or their work, it's 50, 60, 70, people suddenly start, as Plato described, one of his people he was talking about saying that, Socrates, you know, it's like, when I've done my business very well, I've been preoccupied by my business all my life, but now I'm this age, I suddenly remember all those stories I heard about the afterlife when I was a kid, and I develop a sense of urgency. I heard that constantly in my psychiatric. It's like, just like clockwork. And, you know, people get to a certain age. Life after death is a developmental question. It comes on at certain periods of life development. One is when you lose a loved one to death, or when you're facing death yourself, or perhaps the most common one is older people. When they get to a certain age, they start naturally being curious about this. That's true. Although it's funny, I'll still get some pushback as well from people who are even in their 70s. I mean, they'll ask me what I'm up to, and, you know, I tell them. It's easier to tell them you're involved in law. That's simple, right? When you start talking about near-death experiences. I actually had one friend of mine who's an atheist who said, are you trying to turn me into a believer? And I'm not here to sell anything, Raymond. Neither are you and Paul. But again, it's our curiosity and it's our willingness to share some stories, right? I have no interest in trying to persuade anybody else that there's an afterlife. People have to go through their own process on that. But in terms of where I am, I give up. I just, you know, I have a good friend. His name is Anthony Cicoria Christopher. And Anthony has a PhD in physiology and an MD, and he's an orthopedic surgeon and professor of orthopedic surgeon at NYU. And I am a fanatical walker. Every day I have to do it. It's an addiction. And I ask myself, if heaven forbid something were to happen to my foot, would I surrender my foot to Anthony? Sure. Okay. Now, here's another fact about Anthony. In 1994, Anthony was hit in the neck by a bolt of lightning, had a cardiac arrest, was resuscitated by a nurse on the scene. But from his point of view, was out of his body, going all around this resort center where his family was having a family reunion, saw people and what they were doing. Said, not only, Raymond, was this real, he said, but it was more real than this thing we're in. That's what people say. Now, after this, Anthony, who had never had any interest in music whatsoever, suddenly became interested in the piano and started having a recurrent dream in which he's playing the same piece on a concert stage. Learned how to transcribe music. Learned how to play the piano. And now, in addition to being an eminent orthopedic surgeon, is also a concert pianist. Things like that just don't fit into this common sense system we have of the world. That is the reality. And I could sit here and list a dozen other medical colleagues of mine. Eben, and all of these medical people I know who've had these experiences, are absolutely sure, yeah, this was real. How can I deny their unanimous judgment that their experience was real? And still, yet, we'd be, you know, would turn myself over to them for medical treatment if, heaven forbid, I had an illness. So, you know, I mean, it's gone to where, see, the afterlife is kind of penetrating this life. It's the older you get, you will see more. And this is addressed more to young people, right? The older you get, you're going to find, the older you get, the greater percentage of your friends your age have had some sort of experience of stepping over to some other sphere of existence. And it's gotten to where there's lots of people who can talk about this subject, just like, oh, yeah, I've been there. You know, so there is a collective way that people who've been there can talk about it. So what that means to me simply is that the awareness of this other sphere of existence is kind of sinking into this world we're in. And what we're relying upon is quite a bit of science. I mean, this is a book that has a scientific basis. And we've been able to meld science and spirituality together through this, which, again, is something that's greatly needed. People have problems with religion for a variety of reasons. But they have, I think, less problems with science than they do with religion because people have come to accept that science is the exploration, sometimes, of the mystical. And that's what we've done here with this book. Well, true scientists are. I mean, again, it should be an open-minded inquiry as to the nature of life. Unfortunately, as you gentlemen have seen over the years, some people are wed to their scientific materialism. They're wed to their job. They're wed to having tenure, et cetera. So maybe those folks can break out of it. But I would agree with you, Paul, that we're starting to see, at least if we could look at the data and look at the analysis and look at the research, like the work they're doing at IONS, the Institute of Noetic Sciences, where, and again, some people may argue that's not all science. Dean Radin would disagree with you, that they're really putting bones to something that appears to be gelatinous but actually has some body to it. And that's what you gentlemen have done as well. I see it as maybe the end of fundamentalism, that maybe near-death experiences is starting to erase religious fundamentalism, scientific fundamentalism. What do you guys think about that? Well, let me tell you one thing that I think, and I've thought this for some time now, almost since we started working on this, and then I spent a lot of time in Egypt studying Egyptian religion, and Raymond has spent a lot of time studying the Greek view on the afterlife. And that's this, is that I think religion sprang out of experiences like near-death experiences. I don't think it's the other way around. I think near-death experiences are as old as mankind, and there's a lot of proof behind that. You see it all over the walls in Egypt, and you see it in other archaeological digs where people are buried as though they are going to the afterlife. And so there's a lot that's there, and that needs to be accounted for as well. That is, there's a reason this sprang up. There's a basis in fact that near-death experiences and other things have gone to the fore like they have. Do you buy that, Raymond? Yeah, yeah. You know, there's a shift here, and we can't be exactly sure of what it is while it's going on, but I sure see it coming. Yeah, this is, and it stands to reason this is a part of life if we've gotten our medical technology to the point where we can bring back people from a state that for eons was considered death. And they're telling us that, you know, not only did they lose consciousness, but their consciousness is enhanced and amplified. And that I think is sinking in with people. I see it all the time. Before I let you gentlemen go today, I mean to me the most fascinating aspect of all of the near-death experiences, shared death experiences that your research has and your writings have shared over time is the whole notion of a life review, which to me even goes beyond, you know, these are experiences that people have. Not all the people have gone through NDEs, I understand, and you guys are going to tell me what the percentage is in a second here. But to me it's the most fascinating for several reasons. But one is that, of course, it goes beyond the light and seeing your relatives, etc. Now you've got this panoramic view of your life and you relive every second down to the most minute detail. And the telltale sign of this is you get to step into the shoes of the people you've interacted with that you've even either have hurt or that you've loved. Tell us a little bit about the life review, why this is such an important part of it and why it's not fantasy but actually makes some karmic sense, if you will. Raymond, you first. I think this is probably the part of the near-death experience that has most impact on people. I mean it's basically what time stands still and a panorama appears around them consisting of everything they've ever thought or done. And they often review it in the presence of a being of absolute compassion in the form of a light that sort of helps you through it. And, you know, it's difficult now to make the logical... I think that we will soon be able to make a logical inference that there is an afterlife. I can see how it's coming, but not yet. But I think that there is an airtight inference that we can make about these life reviews that nobody... I can't see how anybody could quarrel with this. And it's startling. And it is that, at least for some of us, life is a two-phase process. First, you live it forward as the actor or protagonist. Then, time stands still. There's a 180 degree turnaround. And you see the same action through the eyes and feelings of the other character. Now that, to me, is indubitable. I mean it happens, at least for some of us. And the implications of that, to me, are just absolutely profound. Yeah, we're all one, right? You talk about the oneness. There's an ultimate unity. That's right. It all connects up. Paul, what are the percentages of the cases, would you say, that you guys have studied where the life review is part of the near-death experience? And then maybe share a story or two about the life review itself. Now, Raymond, I'm going to say, what do you think, 30 to 40 percent of the people have a life review? It's very hard to say. I would say probably in that range. Wow, that high, that high. But it's also very hard to say. It depends on how you gather the information. And I know you, Paul, you co-wrote with the, sorry, I know that you co-wrote with Daniel Brinkley, Paul, and of course his life review, that was one of the first big books on just a life review. Right. Yeah, it was pretty amazing. I mean, the one thing about life reviews is that they're like great psychotherapy and they only take a few seconds. And you see that across the board. Yeah. In one of my forensic psychiatry seminars I went to in my training, there was this guy, I think he was from the University of Nebraska Medical School, who at that time was the expert on sociopaths. And he said that he felt the only thing that would cure a sociopath was that if they saw everything they had ever done in their lives directly from the point of view of another person, that the people with whom they had, he said that would be curative. But otherwise he didn't know of anything. Interesting. Paul, what of that? Tell us a little bit more from your work dealing with the life review that maybe startled you, perhaps made you sit up and take notice. Is there anything that you can go back to and say, wow, this is a story that the world should know? I did do a book on the transforming effects of near-death experiences with Melvin Morse. And what Melvin did was he collected a number of people who had had near-death experiences. And then we examined with traditional psychology stuff, questionnaires and the like, to see how much the near-death experience had affected them in their lives. And the two things that affected them the most, they were all affected for their lifetime. We would examine people who had had near-death experiences when they were 10 or 15 or 20 years old and then look at them later and see how their lives had changed. I felt that the light was the most transforming aspect of the near-death experience. And there's something about that light that completely changes people. The life review, of course, is very closely tied into the light because it seems to come out of the light. That was also very transformative as well. But one of the amazing things that hit me in that study was that people who have had near-death experiences are four times as likely to have verifiable psychic experiences. Have you run into that, Raymond? Well, yeah, I've heard a lot of people who tell me they became more intuitive after this. Yeah, there's a lot of intuition increase. But he was actually able to find people who had had verifiable psychic experiences. A verifiable psychic experience would be, you know, if you had a dream that the plane you were going to take the next day crashed and you got up in the morning and you told your partner, I think this plane is going to crash, and it does. That's an extreme example of a verifiable psychic experience. But there's a lot more of those with people who have had NDEs than have not. And that surprised me and intrigued me very much. Well, at this recent conference here, here was a young evangelical woman who, after her near-death experience, started to channel. So, you know, and she started getting pictures of what a new Earth will look like. I never heard of Eckhart Tolle's book, but there it was in her title. But I was just fascinated. Just fascinated that the work that you gentlemen have been doing for decades now. And, Raymond, I've got to ask you this question again before we go. If you could have peered into the future 50 years ago when you're writing this book, and look 50 years hence, would you be satisfied with the degree of awareness and receptivity to those ideas when you were first putting them to pen in 1974? Well, yeah. Yeah. I mean, it's trying to look. I don't think I ever would have imagined that it is penetrated to this depth. But then in another way, I'm not surprised, because the information is riveting. You know, I mean, it's just, there is a structure in this kind of story that you just can't stop listening to them. And so I'm not really surprised. I would not have anticipated that it would have this degree of impact, but I'm not really surprised that it did. Yeah. Interesting answer. Paul, what do you think? How far have we come since those first books were written, some of which you co-authored, and where we are today, and maybe where we're going next? Well, I think the acceptance is wonderful, and I think that's an indication of where we're going next. I think people's view of an afterlife, their view of religion, their view of spirituality, has all been greatly affected by the study of near-death experiences. I don't know where it's going first. My claim about where it's going toward is that we now have methods, very simple methods where we can reformat people's rational mind and logical system, so that subsequently, when they have a near-death experience, they will be able to overcome the ineffability problem. And it's already been done. It's just that this is conceptual work rather than narrative work. But it will happen. It's already happened that we can take people through exercises and teach them how to think in new ways, so that when they subsequently have a near-death experience, they'll be able to describe it in a new way. And what this will give us is what astronomers call parallax, right? How do we know it's 4.3 light years to Alpha Centauri? Because when the sun is here, measure the angle, wait six months later when it's 186 million miles away, measure the angle again, and that's parallax. And so now we have a method where we'll be able to hone in on the afterlife in a new way. So, in the next 50 years, this will be self-evident? Yes, absolutely. Do you think we'll be visiting the afterlife? I think people are already visiting the afterlife. It's like I've known a lot of people who had, say, numerous cardiac arrests and near-death experiences, most commonly from heart disease over a period of time, or people who are very open to see apparitions of the departed or whatever. There's a lot of people who are kind of both here and there. And the older you get, the more people there are like that, who just sort of don't see an absolute divide between here and there, but rather say that it's kind of integrated through consciousness. Paul, do you mean that people will do it volitionally? Is that what you're suggesting, Paul? Yeah, I would say that's possible. If he can hone in on where it is and how to get there, that's sort of what I thought he was getting at. Yeah. If you look at some of the research, like Erlander Haraldson, the apparition research, he found that 60% of widows are visited or visit their husbands after their husbands have passed. And that's like 60%. If you can conjure up a way, excuse the use of that word, to actually visit them at will, that's sort of what you were talking about, correct? And in some ways you've done that with the psychomantium. Yeah, you can do it. It's just the difficulty here is not the fact, which is the fact is it's relatively easy to go through a process during which you will have a lifelike apparition of a departed loved one. The difficulty is that it's the psychological people. It's people just can't compute this. They used to be able to. People in ancient Greece could. Even in the Victorian era, people could. But now it's against the temper of the times. But nonetheless, the fact is that it's fairly easy to, oddly, to visit with a deceased relative. Gentlemen, I hope that our next conversation will not necessarily warrant a near-death experience. May we continue to do this in the physical. And, Raymond, I'll try not to wait another 30 years before we have a conversation because it's been that while. And, Paul, I know there are plenty of things that I know we can talk about. But I do want to remind the folks who are watching that the latest book by Raymond Moody and co-authored by Paul Perry is this book, Proof of Life After Life, Seven Reasons to Believe There Is an Afterlife. Gentlemen, thank you so much for joining me today. I greatly appreciate it. For Jeffrey Mishlove, Emmy Vadniss, all the great volunteers at New Thinking Allowed, I'm Christopher Naughton. Thank you for joining us. You are the reason that we're here. I imagine that by now, many of you already realize that in conjunction with White Crow Books, we've just launched the New Thinking Allowed Dialogues book imprint. And our first title is, Is There Life After Death? New Thinking Allowed is a nonprofit endeavor. Your contributions to the New Thinking Allowed Foundation make a meaningful difference in our ability to produce new videos.