Latest / Destination Unlimited with Victor Fuhrman / Raymond A. Moody Jr. and Paul Perry - Proof of Life After Life

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Raymond A. Moody Jr. and Paul Perry - Proof of Life After Life · Destination Unlimited with Victor Fuhrman

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My name is Victor Furman. Some call me the Voice. I've always been
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fascinated with human nature, spirituality, science and the crossroads at which they meet.
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Join me now and we will explore these topics and so much more with
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fascinating guests, authors and experts who will guide us to Destination Unlimited. In
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two thousand and one, doctor Raymond Moody published the groundbreaking best selling book Life
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After Life, after coining the term NDE near death experience. Now he partners
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with New York Times bestselling author Paul Perry in their latest book, Proof of
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Life After Life. In Proof of Life After Life, Moody and Perry reveal
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that consciousness survives after the death of the body, featuring in depth case studies,
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the latest research, and i opening interviews with experts. Proof explores everything
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from common paranormal signs to share death experiences and much more. Their websites are
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Lifeafterlife dot com and Paul Perry Productions dot com, and they joined me this
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week on Destination Unlimited to share their amazing research and findings proving there is no
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death. Please join me in welcoming to Destination Unlimited. Doctor Raymond Moody and
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Paul Perry. Welcome, gentlemen. Well, thank you, Victor. Yeah,
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Victor, thank you so much for having us on your program. It's
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a true joy for me to have you both and share your wisdom and experience
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and all of the lessons that you've brought to the table on this very very
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special subject. So let's begin by introducing each of you to our listeners.
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Doctor Moody, please tell us about the path that led you to research this
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phenomenon and coined the term NDE near death experience and your groundbreaking book Life After
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Life. Well, I was an astronomy buff and Lewis Carroll and doctor Seuss
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buff since the age of seven, and fortunately for me, I escaped religion.
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My dad was a medic in World War Two and a surgeon. I
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think he probably saw some terrible stuff, but the way it manifested was I
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just I had no religious background, fortunately for me, and when I was
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a kid, I really thought that the idea of an afterlife was only something
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that was in a Jack Benny movie I remember, or a cartoon. I
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mean, I literally didn't know anybody took it serious. So I went off
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to the University of Virginia at age eighteen to intent on studying astronomy, but
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took a philosophy course, and my first day in class, I decided I
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was going to major in philosophy. And we read Plato's Republic, and at
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the very beginning of that book, there's something that's going that is happening to
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a lot of people in our age range Victor right now, which is they
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are, you know, spent their life in a very busy situation and doing
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their business and so on. And then you get to a certain age and
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you, as the character in Plato's Republic says, you know, I've gotten
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to this age, and now all those stories I heard about the after life
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when I was a kid start coming back. So and then this book,
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The Republic continued and at the end it came into this near death experience,
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very dramatic story of a warrior who had been believed dead on the battlefield,
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and that was startling to me, and Plato took it seriously and he said,
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you know, this guy got out of his body and went through a
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passage right it's on. And I was genuinely puzzled by this. So I
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asked my professor, professor Ammond, and he said, yeah, these early
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Greek philosophers studied cases of people who won't were believed dead and revived, and
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he said Plato thought that they were real, but his rough contemporary Democratus,
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who had figured out that things are consistent atoms, said no, this is
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just the invisible biological activity in the body, even after the body appears dead.
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He said, there's no such thing as a moment and a death.
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Now today we call that, you know, oxygen deprivation, and the debate
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goes on. But I had no idea that was still going on. But
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three years later, in sixty five, I met doctor George Ritchie, who
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was the first living person who had this experience. Since that time, I've
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talked with literally thousands of people from all over the world who came to the
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brink of death and were revived and had very life changing experiences, which are
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you know, very similar experiences from people all over the world. Thank you
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for sharing that, Paul, This concept, I believe was something unfamiliar to
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you. How did you come to work with doctor Moody and begin your path
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of understanding and collaboration. Well, it was far less dramatic than Raymond's.
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But I was working as an editor as the editor of American Health magazine in
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New York. And this was in the eighties and both Raymond and I share
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the same book agent, Nat Soble, but we didn't know each other.
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And Nat took me out to lunch one day and he says, well,
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would you like to write a book with Raymond Moody? And I said,
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I don't know who Raymond Moody is. And Nat said, well, he's
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the man who named and defined the near death experience. And I said,
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I don't know what that is. And he said, look, Paul,
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as the editor of a major health magazine, you really need to get educated.
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Why didn't you go down and see Raymond and Georgia And that's what I
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did, and we hit it off. We both worked on this book called
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The Light Beyond, which is a book about all the research done in the
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ten years since Life after Life had come out. And in writing that book,
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I thought that would be the only book I ever wrote. But in
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writing it, I realized that there was a blank space in the research,
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and that was that there was nothing in There was nothing about children and near
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death experiences. So I asked Raymond if anyone was doing research on that,
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and he said, yeah, there's a pediatrician in Seattle who is Melvin Morse,
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and so I went to see Melvin in Seattle and we wrote the book
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Closer to the Light, which is a book about essentially about children and near
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death experiences. And in the course of putting that together, I wrote a
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proposal and book proposal, and we sent it out to twenty publishers. Nineteen
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of them rejected it. The rejections were a variety of things. Some people
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thought that people didn't care that much about their children, or their children couldn't
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remember, or would make up stories. One person rejected my proposal because I
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had a typo on page two. And finally, a woman named Dian Reverend,
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who was an editor at Random House, bought it and she said,
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you know, if you handle this book right, it's going to be an
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enormous bestseller. And I was thankful that she didn't see the nineteen rejection slips
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I was looking at. But that's then what happened is we wrote this book
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on children and near death experiences. It was a huge success, as well
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as The Light Beyond was. And that's the path I've chosen since then,
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is whenever I write a book, as I written I've written fifteen books on
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near death experiences. This is our st Raymond in my sixth one. I
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always looked for the gap in the book, the gap that needs to be
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filled by another book, and that's what's led me on my path essentially.
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Please tell us about your collaboration with Daniel Brinkley Saved by the Light. You
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know, when I was in Seattle, and I think Raymond was with me
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and Melvin Morris, and we went to a conference, and after the conference,
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a number of people came over and I was standing around Melvin and they
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came over and they said, I'm just so intrigued by near death experiences.
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I just can't wait to die. And there were a lot of people who
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said that, and it was disturbing to me because I don't think that's what
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this whole field is about. And so I decided to find what I considered
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to be the best near death experience I could find, and at the time,
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Danion fit into that category, and so that's how I connected with him.
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A number of people mentioned his experience to me, and I went in
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pursuit of him and found him in Alabama, and he didn't like me very
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much. In the beginning, but actually he well, he was kind of
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an uptight guy, and he calmed down and we agreed to co author this
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book. The two of you, as you mentioned, have co authored several
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amazing books, Doctor Moody, What inspired Glimpses of Eternity? You know,
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Victor them. The standard way we have thinking about this experience in our culture
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is we divide it between people who take this seriously as an indicator of an
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afterlife and other people who say, oh, this is just the oxygen deprivation
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to the brain, right, and everybody knows that form of argument. The
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trouble with that is that it's the same experience. All of these elements of
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the out of experience, or of the near death experience, getting out of
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one's body and going upward toward a light, seeing the light fill with the
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room filled with white, seeing apparitions of the dying person's loved ones who've died
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come into the room. All of those elements of near death experiences also occur
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quite commonly to people who are not themselves still are injured, but rather who
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are there at the bedside of somebody who is passing away. And I knew
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about this and medical school I didn't put it in my Life After lifebook.
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The reason I only had one case at that time, and it was one
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of my own medical school professors who, as she was trying unsuccessfully to resuscitate
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her mother herself position got out of her body and saw her mother there with
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her in spirit for him. And she says, saw her mother received away
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into this tunnel, and saw apparitions of her mother's deceased relatives coming forward to
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meet her, and so on. And so I didn't write about that in
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Life After Life. I only had one case. Plus I couldn't figure out
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anyway, you know, I didn't want to identify my professor, right,
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But also I only had one case. But then over the years, more
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cases accumulated, and so back in nineteen ninety four, Paul and I were
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actually thinking about writing something on shared death experiences. I'm sorry, this is
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yeah, nineteen ninety four and I was out in a Western state, so
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working with some other researchers on how to study this. I called it was
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my It was mother's day, so I called my mom, and how are
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you doing? Oh, I'm doing great, she said. I remember that
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cheerfulness in her voice. Yesterday she said, I had a rash. Brothers
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and sisters took her to the doctor. Oh there's probably nothing. Come in
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monday, we'll do more test. Anyway, on Mother's day she was fine.
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Next day she went into the doctor and he said, you have non
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knowledge against lymphoma, and you have two days to two weeks to live.
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And so my family and I will gather there at the bedside of my mother
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as she passed away. And I myself, I mean, anybody who knows
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you've had this, you know that there are not any words. But I
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the room kind of changed configuration. There was this extremely pure, for one
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of the better term energy in the room. I heard my mother's voice,
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but not from within her body. And so what happened to me at that
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point, Victor, was, you know what drives me is curiosity, and
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I had been curious about these things, but once it happened to me,
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it puts it on a different level, right, I mean, my mind
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went on a different shift. But then as time went on, you know,
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Paul and I got rallied about that again, and so we did the
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Glimpses of Eternity, which is we also talk about it in our new book,
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which is Proof of Life After life, and we also talk about this
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same thing, these shared depth experiences, and of course what they show is
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that the traditional way of debating about this this question is in coherent, right
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because if the if the bystanders have the same experience as people who almost die
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in or resuscitated, then that means it's not oxygen deprivation to the brain.
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That said, I predict that that will do absolutely nothing to change the way
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that people debate about this because you know, this is a very scary topic
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for many people victory as you know, I mean, many people just don't
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want to talk about death, so that rather have rather than having this question
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remain open, see, people have to have some sort of rigid structure to
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contain it. And the structure we've selected is the you know, the debate
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between the oxygen deprivation afterli thing. But people are not going to surrender that
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because you know, it's other it's terrifying otherwise. But in reality, there's
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something going on here that doesn't you know, it's not very illuminated by talking
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about the oxygen deprivation to the grime. And so that's really what proof of
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life after life is about. More than anything else, This one Moves has
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come out with we sort of explore the implication of what is going on here,
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and the subtitle to Proof of Life after Life is Seven Reasons to Believe
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in the Afterlife. It's a groundbreaking book that explores humanity's most pressing question,
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what happens when we die? With all of the collective work that you presented
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to the world, what led to this journey of proving whether there is life
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after death? Well, for me, I guess maybe that one should go
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to me because I was a professor of logic, right and one of before
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I went to medical school, and one of my specialties in that was talking
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with students about this whole notion of proof. And so when I think of
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proof, I think of people like Pittckenstein and Alfred North Whitehead and bertrand Russels.
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See. But over the years, people have asked me, you know,
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people ask me, Reman, is there any kind of proof? People
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ask almost in a way of desperation. They want to They hang on to
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this word a proof. And so you know, what I tried to do
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over the last ten or fifteen years is rather than just sort of judge with
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my logical framework and just to try to understand from people what they are looking
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for. I mean, they're obviously not looking for what I had as a
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logic professor when they think about proof. So where I've come on this is
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I say this, I think what people are looking for is and many of
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them are facing death or or wrong or having lost a love or just you
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know, in the life development phase where you get interested in this. But
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what they really want know this, is it a rational thing to anticipate confidently
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that there's an afterlife based on knowledge, based on what we've learned about these
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things. And I say, yeah, yeah, I mean with all of
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my strictures about logic and stuff, I say, it's an okay situation in
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twenty twenty three to say to people who are concerned on that level that yeah,
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we you know, it's a rational thing to sort of anticipate that when
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you die there's something else. Well, would you like to add to that?
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I would. I think what people are looking for is objective proof or
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objective belief. Objective proof really of a life after life. And as powerful
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as near death experiences are, you don't really get that from a near death
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experience because they're an experience that's had by one person, and under usual circumstances,
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they're there had by one person, and only they can talk about it
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and interpret it. There's no one who can actually prove that what they've had
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is this magnificent experience share. Death experiences are different because they take place when
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a person who is well shares the death experience of a person who's dying.
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And if you look at if you look at that, you realize that means
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that at least two maybe more are are experiencing something that is deeply metaphysical.
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And that adds objective proof. That is objective proof that something like that actually
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took place. That's important for people to have an objective, objective proof of
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something as important as life after death. Having worked together on this topic for
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more than thirty years, what are the some of the most phenomenal observations or
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reflections either of you have discovered along the way. You know that is a
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very instructive question for me, Victor, because I just tell you the truth.
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I have remaining baffled by this. You know, I'm my coming to
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intellectual awareness to place when I was about seven years old and I was looking
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through a telescope and realizing that I would never know much of anything and being
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content with that, I mean, that's just the way it is, and
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at the same time discovering the wonder of consciousness. This has been a kind
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of struggle with myself as much as anything else, because ye know, I
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think the most fun way of proceeding, because it's the accurate way, is
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to is to try to think of all the objections to things, rather than
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to try to find the reasons for them. Like I've spent my whole career
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trying to say that you know, figure out that these experiences are not the
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afterlife, and you know the fact that it is not oxygen deprivation to the
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brain. Okay, that does not imply that therefore it is life after death.
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See, there's other options, and those are the other options. But
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I'll tell you where in response your question, the phenomenal things that just kind
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of brought me into a situation of not drawing a logical conclusion that there's an
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afterlife. I understand fully the alogical difficulties are doing that, but rather to
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the state of I just give up. I can't think my way out of
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it. I mean, you want to think of other ways of thinking about
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it, But let me give you a couple of things that I have experienced,
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phenomenal things that have led me to give up. I have about,
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oh gosh, probably at least a dozen good friends who are medical doctors,
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who've had new death experiences, and whose medical judgment I would completely trust.
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As an illustration, I am a fanatical walker at not virtue addiction. I
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have to get out. I mean, it's all my life exercise. I
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got to do it every day. It's not virtuous that it's If I don't
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do it, my legs just move up them on accord. Okay, Now,
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I asked myself, if Heaven forbid something should happen to my foot,
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would I go to doctor Anthony Chikoria, who's a friend of mine, who
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was a PhD in physiology an MD, and is a professor of orthopedic surgery
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at NYU. And in nineteen ninety four, Anthony got struck in the neck
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by a bolt of lightning, had a cardiac arrest. There was a nurse
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right there who brought him back, but in the interim he went all around
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this resort center where his family was heaven Union, and was able to see
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people and to tell them what they were doing, and had this experience,
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he says, it's more real than real. All right, now, Anthony
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was okay. Then after this, unaccountably, he started getting interested in the
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piano and started having a recurrent dream in which he would be playing the same
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piece on a stage and with never any interest in the piano before. To
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make a long story shortening, he learned how to transcribe music, He transcribed
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the piece, learned how to play the piano, and now, in addition
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to an orthopedic surgency, he is a concert pianist. And that sequence of
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events, Victor, doesn't make sense within the common sense framework that we live
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in, right, I mean, that is something outward. Now here's another
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you might know. Jeff O'Driscoll was a very well known emergency room doctor.
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He was one of the early people in the field. And Jeff Olsen is
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the owner of a graphic design for and Jeff Olsen was in a horrible car
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crash which his leg was smashed off and his wife was killed instantly, and
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one of his kids lived and the other died, and he was brought to
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the hospital and while he was being surrounded by the tubes and wires and all,
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Jeff O'Driscoll, the er doctor, came into the room and had an
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extensive conversation with Jeff Olsen's dead wife. Now, I mean, I could
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go on and on and see, but what I'm getting that here is this
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kind of stuff. This doesn't fit into the framework we have set up for
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ourselves. So I give up. I literally can't think my way out of
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what I get is the case. And this is still very counterit to it
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to me, And well, you know, if you're not exposed to this
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very bizarre idea when you're a kid, it's hard to come. But but
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I give up. I mean, I just can't think my way out of
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what I gathered to be the reality that when we die, we slip over
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into other phase of existence. Absolutely. My guests doctor Raymond Moody and Paul
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Perry. They're a new book, Proof of Life After Life, Seven Reasons
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to Believe in the Afterlife. Gentlemen, Where is this book available and where
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can listeners find out more about your work? Well, they can find it
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on Amazon, of course, which is the prime source of books these days.
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Are at any bookstore or in within any bookstore around their neighborhood, their
27:07
favorite bookstore, and We'll be back with more of doctor Raymond Moody and Paul
27:12
Perry after these words. On the Old Times Radio Network, the best of
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the holistic, spiritual and conscious world Own Times Radio IOWMFM. Ome Times Magazine
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is one of the leading online content providers of positivity, wellness and personal empowerment.
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A philanthropic organization, their net proceeds are finaled to support worldwide charity initiatives
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via Humanity Healing International. Through their commitment to creating community and providing conscious content,
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they aspire to uplift humanity on a global scale. Home Times co creating
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a more conscious lifestyle. Back on Destination Unlimited. My guest this week,
27:52
Doctor Raymond Moody and Paul Perry. We're talking about their new book Proof of
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Life After Life Oven Reasons to Believe in the After Life. Are there any
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specific interviews that remain vividly memorable to either of you and have further inspired your
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continued work. Well, there's definitely a few incidents that inspire our work.
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One was that I had a shared death experience myself, years before they had
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been named or defined, and it happened when my mother was dying of dementia.
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I was preparing to leave the house. It was on a Sunday,
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and I was going to the care facility where she was a patient when I
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received a call from Vernon NEPI. Vernon was the head of neuropharmacology, University
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of Washington. We had worked on a book project maybe five years earlier,
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and when we finished that we had not communicated since then. But he called
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and he said, I can quote him almost exactly. He said. I
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was sitting at the kitchen table reading the Sunday paper when I heard a voice
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say call Paul Perry, and I ignored it, And within a couple of
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minutes I heard the voice again say call Paul Perry. So here I am
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calling as ordered, and I don't know why, So you know, I
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thought about it a minute. I thought, well, his medical field matched
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perfectly with my mother's affliction. She had Alzheimer's. And I immediately told him
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what her condition was and told him what was going on, and asked if
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there was anything new on the market that, you know, could possibly help
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her. And he told me of a couple of elderly patients he had achieved
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improvement with by giving them electro shops there and he said it was like rebooting
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their brain. But he offered to discuss the case with her physic and to
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make sure that that she was healthy enough for the procedure. But as we
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talked, another telephone call came in and I told Vernon I had to answer
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the call and found out that it was from the care facility telling me my
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mother had died. And to me, that was a shared death experience that
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went from my mother to communicate with a stranger to her, which is Vernon
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NEPI. So that to me was an amazing thing. That's really inspired me
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because it's so unexplainable. Let me ask you a quick question. The voice,
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that voice that he heard, did he describe the voice? All he
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said was a female voice told me to call a Paul parent. But he
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heard it, he heard it in his head, and it was extremely odd
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for Vernon, not a death related or a near death related situation. But
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in nineteen seventy five, I was in the Air Force. I was stationed
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in Korea and my mother was here in New York, six thousand miles away,
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and one morning I had a voice in my head say call your mother.
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She needs to hear from you. And I called and in those days,
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we had the extension wired telephones, and my mother and sister picked up
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the phone simultaneously and I said, Mom, what's wrong, And my sister
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exclaimed, oh my god, how did he find out? And it turned
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out that she was scheduled for major surgery the next day. And the voice
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told me to tell her immediately, you're going to have a completely successful operation.
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Everything's going to be fine. You're going to be completely well. Don't
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worry about it. And that was reassuring to her and helped her go into
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that situation. See that's interesting because we have a similar case study to that
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in the book, and that was of a woman named Olga Gearhart. She
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was his she's Hispanic. She lives in San Diego, and she had to
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she found out she had to have a heart transplant, so she wait.
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You had to wait for the heart. Waited, waited, waited, and
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then finally, when she was very weak, finally a matching heart came through.
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So her entire family gathered together at the hospital and she went in surgery
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to get her heart replaced. The entire family waits for in the hospital,
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except her son in law, who couldn't stand to be in hospitals. So
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he stayed at home and he went to bed, and meanwhile, she had
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the transplant, and she was having difficulty with her heart. It kept stopping
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starting, stopping starting, and it took them they almost gave up. It
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took them hours to finally get it regular. But in the course of that
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time, her son in law woke up and standing at the foot of his
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bed was Olga and he thought he initially thought that she hadn't had the transplant
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and had just come home. Said she said, she was that real,
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But then she said to him, I just want you to know everything was
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okay, you know, tell people that every thing's going to be fine,
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And so that's what he did. He immediately got up, drove to the
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hospital and told them that he had had this experience, and she said to
33:08
tell them everything was going to be okay. The additional the additional punchline on
33:15
this one is that when the family could go in to visit her, she
33:20
pointed to him and said, do you remember I went and saw you in
33:23
bed and told you I was going to be okay. So I don't know
33:28
what that would be called. It sounds like it would be a double or
33:30
triple shared death experience, but that was an amazing story to me. Carl
33:37
Sagan has famously said, extraordinary claims require an extraordinary proof, Doctor Moody,
33:45
what is proof? There you go and you know something. I think,
33:49
Carl Satan is room, and I think that that prescription is nonsense, because
34:00
you get into trouble precisely when you start going into some extraordinary mindset to prove
34:10
something apparently extraordinary. The rule of all kinds of inquiry is that you apply
34:16
the rules vigorously and rigorously. But I just think that's incoherent. I've said
34:22
that to my logic extuments many times. But what proof is? Proof is
34:30
a rational means of driving everyone to the same logical conclusion. And proof was
34:42
developed in mathematics, but it was quickly taken over taken into philosophy early on,
34:49
and philosophers began to devise proofs for things other than mathematical concepts. But
34:59
is there are kind of proof that will that could lead us to a rigorous
35:05
proof of life after death? Yes? I do think so. However,
35:08
I think Victor, that it would be something that would be of interest maybe
35:13
to a few thousand people on earth, because what most of the folks who
35:17
are interested in these near death experiences and so on. What appeals to them
35:23
is the narrative aspect, right, like the stories which we you know,
35:29
I've heard thousands of these stories. I can't wait to hear the next one.
35:34
But as Playtol pointed out, even if you had a bazillion stories,
35:37
that wouldn't add up to a proof of it. Afterlife, you need some
35:40
set of concepts, and the great thinkers of history like David Hume, I'm
35:45
sure, And David Hume was the archetype of the skeptic, the eighteenth century
35:52
philosopher who defined that calorified the notion of causation and who influenced Einstein, for
36:00
example, said, by the mere light of reason, it seems difficult to
36:04
prove the immortality of the soul. Some new species of logic is required for
36:09
that purpose, and some new faculties of the mind that they may enable us
36:15
to comprehend that logic. And that has always been regarded as to death.
36:21
Now right that you know it's and he's right in what he says that the
36:24
logic we have don't won't work for this question. And also our minds are
36:30
not in shape to do it. What I say, Victor, is that
36:36
in reality, those logical problems have been solved because you can think through ways
36:44
of how to think about things that don't make sense. You can think logically
36:47
about things that don't make sense. But like I said, it's something that
36:51
will only be of interest to a very few people, whereas the question of
36:57
an afterlife is something you know that lies to a lot of different people.
37:00
So when I talk about this, I have to say, look, there's
37:05
technicalities in this that nobody would want to hear. But but that because of
37:13
my interest in the technicalities, I feel completely confident at saying to people,
37:20
yeah, I mean there is proof of life after death in the sense that
37:24
it's a rational proposition that it's it's a rational thing that you can point to
37:31
reasons to be confident that when you die, you'll shift over to another realm
37:38
of existence. Proof of life after life provides readers with seven reasons to believe
37:45
in the afterlife. However, many of us are familiar with the near death
37:50
experience. Why is an NDE alone not proof of life after life? My
37:57
take on that is that inherent in the experience itself with what people tell us
38:02
that it's not rational proof. And the reason is that almost everybody says,
38:08
no matter how articulate, You've heard this victor from many people, no matter
38:14
how many languages they speak, no matter how many degrees they have, they
38:19
say, I just can't describe it to you, and that there are there
38:23
are no words for this. Plus in ordinary language, the very expressions that
38:30
we use to say life after life, technically they don't mean anything. You
38:38
know, life after there is life after death if you unpack the meaning of
38:44
that sentence is there is life after the final irreversible cessation of life, which
38:50
is a self contradiction sye. So these are real problems that people have to
38:58
get around, and that's not what most people want. You know, most
39:04
people would come to me. They're concerned. It's the mostly it's my they
39:08
lost their love to death, and they want to know if there's a what
39:15
I think about the prospects of reunion right, or they want to want or
39:22
they're facing a terminal illness, or they're just growing up like your mid life
39:27
crisis and my mid life crisis, and so you know, you have to
39:32
serve that group. We're not interested in the technicalities of logic. But see
39:38
the reason I feel fine, is the logic is okay? I mean,
39:42
it's just it's where the Western thought came to the end on it said,
39:47
well, there's since the proposition doesn't make any sense, it's not verifiable that
39:54
it's meaningless. And I see that position, but it's wrong. Can reformat
40:00
your mind to think about this in a whole new way. And when that
40:05
happened, then so if you learn how to think about things that don't make
40:09
sense while you're still alive, and then you happen to have a near death
40:15
experience, then when you come back for a reason, I won't go into
40:19
this, it worked, it works out, but you would come back and
40:22
you you would see a whole new way of articulating this. And it's happened
40:30
once a really wonderful sculptor and scientist that took one of my seminars. And
40:36
then some years later, at h one and one was in the hospital for
40:39
sixty days, lost his leg to gangreen three cardiac arrest, and yeah,
40:46
and called me and told me, you know, he's had a near death
40:51
experience during his ordeal and was telling me that while he was there on the
40:57
other side, he said, his mind went back to this seminar are,
41:00
and he said, I saw what you're saying is true, that you can't
41:05
comprehend how that world can connect with this world unless you take the unintelligibility access
41:12
into account. Now what that means, facture is, let's contemplate a future
41:19
situation where we have said fifty or one hundred people like that who have have
41:28
logic on board for processing things that don't make sense, that are ineffable or
41:34
indescribable. Well, their accounts will be different from those of people that we
41:40
know already these day. It's like a travel narrative. I got out of
41:45
my body and went through a tunnel, I saw my life interview, came
41:49
back to my body, and returned to life. Right, that's a travel
41:52
narrative. But in the future we're going to have another set of accounts of
41:59
it, different point of view. Now, what this gives is what astronomer's
42:04
called parallax. We all know it's four point three light years to Alpha centauri,
42:09
but very few people have to sit back and think, well, how
42:12
do they know that? I mean, you know, you can't send a
42:15
flock of homing pigeons out there with those doometers on their legs. So,
42:21
but the way they know it is that by the late nineteenth century the measurements
42:25
were accurate enough. They realized that since it's one hundred and eighty six million
42:30
miles across the orbit of the Earth around the Sun, then you wait when
42:37
you measured the art the angle to the star, when it's one place,
42:40
then you wait exactly six months later, measure the angle again. You'd see
42:45
there's a little difference and you can triangulate. That's called parolax. Now we
42:52
have an equivalent method with the near death experience, but it is not going
42:58
to take off in the near death community. This is you know, really
43:02
frankly, as you may have noticed, Hey, there's a certain element of
43:07
this near that thing. It has become a kind of religion, you know.
43:12
It's they have their way of looking at it. That they have their
43:15
way do it things, and it's kind of an organization and so on.
43:20
But I think the change is coming in this but it will it will take
43:23
a different set of circumstances that we're in now. My guests are doctor Raymond
43:30
Moody and Paul Perry their new book Proof of Life After Life, Seven Reasons
43:36
to Believe in the After Life. We'll be back with more after these words
43:39
on the Old Times Radio Network. Humanity Healing International is a small nonprofit with
43:45
a big dream. Since two thousand and seven, HHI has been working tirelessly
43:51
to bring help to communities with little or no oh. Our projects are not
43:55
broad mandates, nor are they overnight solutions, but they bring the reassurance then
44:01
no one is alone and that someone cares. To learn more, please visit
44:07
Humanity Healing dot org. Humanity Healing is where your Heart is back on Destination
44:13
Unlimited. My guest this week doctor Raymond Moody and Paul Perry their new book
44:17
Proof of Life After Life, Seven Reasons to Believe in the Afterlife. Earlier,
44:24
we discussed the shared death experience. Tell us a little bit more about
44:29
the SDE and how does it differ from the NDE. Well. A shared
44:37
death experience is when a person who is well shares the death experience of a
44:43
person who's dying. For example, there's cases reported in which medical doctors,
44:49
nurses, other hospital personnel see the spirit of a patient leaving their body at
44:54
the point of death, and they aren't related to the patient, they aren't
45:00
family members, yet somehow they've made this connection necessary to witness this incredible event.
45:07
That's a shared death experience. A near death experience can have many of
45:15
the standard elements that we know about out of body experiences life review, seeing
45:20
a bright light speaking to some people feel like they're speaking to God or Jesus
45:24
or a powerful more powerful being. But it's subjective. And that's by subjective,
45:31
I mean that it takes place with one person and only that one person
45:37
sees it and experiences those elements, and therefore it's subjective. So that's the
45:44
main difference between a shared death experience and a near death experience. Of the
45:49
seven reasons outlined in the book, Terminal lucidity is defined. How is this
45:54
the opposite of an ND Doctor Moody, Well, you know this is I
46:01
obviously, in my medical career, I spent a lot of time with the
46:05
terminally ill, right, that was kind of one of my specialties. And
46:09
Victor, when I say this, many of the people listening in may conclude
46:15
that, OK, for doctor Mudy's been working too hard or whatever. But
46:21
you just ask among anybody who's worked in hospice or the terminally ill for a
46:27
long time and have been there with a lot of people as they die,
46:30
they're going to tell you, yeah, this happens. It is very common
46:36
for people in the death process, even if they have been abtundant and unresponsive
46:42
for weeks, that just in the death process, it's it's like there's an
46:49
awakening, but it's it's very hard to descrum. It's like they light up
46:57
with the light and the light doesn't come from the on or from the light
47:00
bulb and the ground, it's coming from within. When then them, you
47:06
look at them and there's this clear light and it's all of a sudden,
47:12
they become Some of the people who say they say it's like Grandma was more
47:16
than grandma, that it was like she was at a functioning, at a
47:23
higher level of being. And a very typical thing they do at this point
47:29
is that they go around the room and they'll tell a message to everybody there
47:34
in the groom. My uncle died this way and his family was there as
47:39
he'd been abtunded, just woke up, gave a message to everybody and to
47:45
all of the rest of us. Send the family, and then very often
47:52
the patients' families interpret this to be a turnaround. They say, oh,
47:59
oh, Grandma's find out she's going home. But you quickly learn in that
48:02
setting that you have to say to the family, well, notic, this
48:07
really means that this is the end. And I mean, it's just an
48:13
uncanny thing to experience, and I have experienced it many times myself, and
48:20
I know that many people listening to this will have experienced it with their own
48:24
relatives or especially if they work in hospital with the terminally ill. You've seen
48:30
it. But the rest of the folks listening, you're just going to think
48:32
I'm imagining things. You know. I had this great Carnie on collegist who
48:39
was telling me one time. He said, you know, had this patient.
48:43
It had for a long time, and the guy died, and so
48:46
they covered him up with the sheet and all the family were all standing around
48:51
the bed, and all of a sudden, the sheep moved and this patient
48:57
sat up, and again it was more here than normal, and you know,
49:01
Hope and friend was telling me, he said, you know, unless
49:07
all those other people were standing there, I would have concluded I was having
49:10
an all incination. It's just that weird. I remember a guy came all
49:16
the way from Australia to see me, I don't know, a long time
49:22
ago, and the look on his face when he was describing. He said
49:25
he his wife had been crying for the ill for a long time. She
49:29
was under down process, and so he said he was going out to the
49:34
store for a minute. So he went into her room and he said there
49:37
she was sitting, not fine, and they had a very extended conversation.
49:45
He said she was well again and he's and so naturally he's thinking, oh,
49:50
she's going to turn around. So, as you can imagine, he
49:52
goes to the store and he comes back she was dead. And I wish
49:57
I could convey that look on his that he looked at me, and he
50:00
said, as he was trying to put this into words, he said,
50:05
it was like that she already had one foot on the other side. And
50:10
this is a you know, anybody who deals with terminally ill people are going
50:17
to be able to tell you this, and man, yet you can't really
50:22
believe it until you see it. One of the things described by many is
50:28
having a life review. What does that life review do when they return?
50:35
Hey, I want to talk about this one because I you know, this
50:37
is making inferences in this is hard, you know what this all means.
50:44
But when these life reviews, we can make absolutely an inference from this one
50:51
that is mind bottling in its implications. Okay, now what a life review
50:59
is. And people in the dying process they say that everything else kind of
51:04
disappears and they are surrounded by a panorama consisting of every single thing they've ever
51:12
done, and time stands still, there's no time for this. But everything
51:16
they've ever done they review not just from the perspective they had when they were
51:22
doing the action, but they also are empathically identified in the consciousness of the
51:29
person with whom they've interacted. So when you see yourself doing something unkind to
51:35
somebody, then you feel directly the hurt that you brought about it that Christmas
51:40
life. Or if you see yourself doing a kind art of action, you
51:45
feel the good feelings. Now what people and it's often in the presence of
51:51
the being of sheer life and compassion who sort of helps people through this review.
51:59
Now, this is a common feature of near death experiences. Now,
52:05
what I want to suggest is that we can draw an inference from this that
52:10
is startling. And this is what logically follows that, at least for some
52:17
of us, life is a two phase process. You live life forward as
52:25
the actor or protagonist. Then time stands still and you relive all those same
52:35
events from the perspective of the other characters. Now, to me, that
52:40
is just mind boggling in its implication, and there's no way around it is
52:47
true. And the lessons learned, the lessons learned by everybody is the same
52:55
I learned in my psychiatric or victory. Everybody seems to be chasing something.
53:01
I've spent my life chasing knowledge. Some people chase power or fame or money
53:07
or all these other things. But whatever people were chasing. After this,
53:12
they say that what this thing we're in it's all about is learning to love,
53:17
because they said that's what came forward in this review and the question not
53:22
posting words, but that people say, it's as though the thought comes from
53:29
this being you're with, how have you learned to love? That's beautiful,
53:32
think you, well, what does the future of this research look like to
53:37
you? It looks like a collection of stories for one thing, which is
53:44
one of the best ways to deal I think the best ways to deal with
53:46
near death experiences, as well as share death experiences and confirmation of the stories.
53:52
Particularly in share death experiences, it might involve physiological reasons that's something like
54:00
this could happen, and it would certainly involve spiritual reasons why somebody like this
54:05
could happen. So those are very general terms, but I think that's where
54:09
things have to go to begin with. Later on they get honed down,
54:15
and where can listeners learn more or even share their own related experiences with you
54:20
both? Well, my website is life Afterlife dot com and I'm I mean,
54:29
yeah, I'm happy to talk with people and always enjoy getting communications.
54:35
And Paul has a different website, right, yeah, mine is I I
54:39
have two, actually mine is Paul Perryproductions dot com and the other one is
54:45
Glimpses of Eternity dot com. And what final message would you share with your
54:50
listeners? Are listeners about your book? Well, what I'd say is,
54:54
you know, my take on the society right now is there's a lot of
54:58
great More than a million people died from COVID. It's a lot of people
55:05
are growing up now into that midlife period where all these issues naturally come up.
55:13
And you know, I'm seventy nine. I'm sure you have the same
55:15
thought, Victor. You know, by your time, you're our age,
55:20
you realize that when you're a kid. You hear that phrase the happiest life
55:25
is a life of service to others, and it sounds like an ideal.
55:30
Then you get to midlife and it's an aspiration. By the time you get
55:34
to our age, it's just a fact of experience because whenever you're trying to
55:39
do for yourself, you're always miserable. So only when you get out and
55:44
try it. And that's really my object in this book. I see there's
55:47
a lot of people out there who've lost loved once to death or in my
55:52
case, I lost my first child at the age of thirty six hours,
55:58
which I've never gotten over. And you know, I think that these findings
56:04
do. I mean, it's it's obvious that they do help people who are
56:08
worrying about terminal illness or loss of the loved one. So that's my object.
56:16
Doctor Raymond Moody and Paul Perry, thank you so much for joining us
56:21
and sharing these very very important messages with our listeners. Well, thank you,
56:24
Victory, thank you so much, and thank you for joining us on
56:30
Destination Unlimited. I'm Victor the Voice Herman have a wonderful reason