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Dr. Raymond Moody and Paul Perry · Postcards to the Universe

0:09
Welcome to Postcards to the Universe with Melissa Caprio. Do you believe in magic?
0:15
What if you were told that all you had to do was get a
0:18
little creative and work a magic spell to bring anything you can imagine into your
0:23
life. Here on Postcards to the Universe, we will share manifesting tips,
0:29
postcards, creativity, abundance, and prosperity. Here is your host, Melissa
0:36
Capria. Hey everybody, and welcome to Postcards to the Universe with Melissa creating
0:42
the life you crave. How are you guys doing today? I hope you're
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doing well. I have a really, really special show today. I have
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the authors of Proof of Life After Life, doctor Raymond Moody and Paul Perry
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as my guests, and they're going to join me in just a minute.
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I've been fascinated with this subject of near death experiences, and we're going to
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learn today about share death experiences. I think my whole life, actually,
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since I was a kid, I've always been fascinated. So yeah, I'm
1:15
really excited. Just a little bit about me. For you guys who are
1:21
joining me for the first time, I just want to give you a big,
1:25
warm welcome. I usually share a lot about me, but you can
1:30
find out so much about me at Postcards to the Universe dot com. I
1:33
have a book. I talk all about it every show, but today I
1:37
want to jump in because I have two guests with me today and I don't
1:40
want to spend a lot of time talking about that. But you can always
1:42
listen to the replays on my website Postcards to the Universe dot com. And
1:47
also we always put the show up on the archives at ome Times Radio,
1:52
so you can always listen to previous shows. So my book is titled Postcards
1:57
to the Universe, Harness the Universe's power and manifest your dreams. And I
2:00
talk all about manifesting in the book, and I share my photographs of manifesting
2:07
stories along with the persons. Whatever they put down on their postcard when it
2:12
became the reality. We share their story along with the photos. And I
2:16
do want to mention also that I'm doing two workshops. One is titled Manifesting
2:21
through Gratitude, a Visual Journey. It's five weeks, it's online, and
2:25
I teach people how to create more abundance in their life using gratitude. And
2:32
we're going to use our camera phones for that. As a little tool which
2:36
makes it extra fun. And I also have one on January sixth. It's
2:40
called put your Wishes to work and manifest the life you desire. And we're
2:45
going to be making a manifesting postcard together and that's really cool to do in
2:50
the beginning of the year. So, like I said, you can check
2:53
that out on postcards to theuniverse dot com. I have all the information there
2:58
all right, so let me read you therebio and bring them out. So
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I have doctor Raymond Moody and Paul Perry. Raymond A. Moody Junior,
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MD, PhD is the leading authority of near death experiences and the author of
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several books, including The Seminole Life After Life. The founder of the Life
3:16
After Life Institute, Moody has lectured on the topic throughout the world and is
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a counselor in private practice. He has appeared on many programs, including Today
3:27
and Turning Point. Paul Perry has co written several New York Times bestsellers,
3:31
including The Light Beyond and Evidence of the Afterlife. He is also a documentary
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filmmaker, and for his film and the book about Salvador Dolly, he has
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been knighted in Portugal, Oh that's interesting. A groundbreaking book this is that
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combines nearly fifty years of after life and near death experience research to provide proof
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of the existence of the soul and life after death from psych hiatrist and best
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selling author of Life After Life doctor Raymond Moody and New York Times bestselling author
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Paul Perry. After spending nearly five decades studying near death experiences, Moody finally
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has the answer to humanity's most pressing question, what happens when we die?
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And in this book, Proof of Life after Life, both authors reveal that
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consciousness survives after the death of the body. Featuring in depth case studies,
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the latest research, and eye opening interviews with experts. Proof explores everything from
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common paranormal signs to shared death experiences and much more. And you can learn
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more about each of these authors if you go to Life Afterlife dot com or
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Paul Perryproductions dot com. Welcome, gentlemen, thank you so much for being
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with me today. Hi, thank you nice and question thank you very much.
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So. First of all, okay, so Raven, you've been doing
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this since the seventies, Am I correct in that? Well, I'll just
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each ask you each you've been doing this work since the seventies, and what
5:19
got you into wanting to explore near death experiences. Well, fortunately, I
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was not exposed to religion when I was a kid, except very minimally,
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and so I grew up with no idea of an afterlife. And so I
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went to the University of Virginia at age eighteen with intending to study astronomy,
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but took the philosophy course and immediately got hooked. And the particular book was
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Plato's Republic, which is oddly about a near death experience. It culminates in
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a near death experience of a warrior, and not just having no idea that
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anybody took the notion of an afterlife seriously. I asked my professor and he
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said that early Greek philosophers knew about cases of people who were believed in and
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resuscitated, but I didn't, you know, I had no idea. It
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still applied. But in nineteen sixty five in Charlotte, still I met a
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man who had such an experience. He was a professor of psychiatry there,
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and that really got me hooked. And I was subsequent to that time,
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through my PhD in philosophy and then three years of teaching philosophy at a university
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and then going to medical school and ultimately going into forensic psychiatry. But throughout
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that career, I've just I've interviewed thousands and thousands of people who came to
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the brink of death and had these astonishing experiences. So that's how I got
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into amazing. It's really interesting. I can't imagine. It is a long
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process. And Paul, I'm going to ask you the same question, what
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made you interested in exploring this? Well? I I was editing an American
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health magazine in New York City. This was in nineteen eighty eight, and
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Raymond and I share the same agent, same book agent. And one day
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our agent, nat Sobel, called me and he said, would you like
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to write a book with doctor Raymond Moody? And I said, I have
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no idea who Raymond is and he said he said, well, he's a
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man who named and defined the near death experience. And I said, I'm
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sorry, I don't know what that is. And he said, well,
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you know, for a guy who's the editor of a major health magazine,
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you really need to get educated on things like new death distory, which was
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a lot and insults, but it's an agent. They talk like that.
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And so I said, sure, okay, I'll go meet Raymond. And
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Raymond was living in George at the time, and I flew down to meet
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him. And you know, Raymond is an amazing person from the first time
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you meet him. And so we started writing this book called The Light Beyond,
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and I just got entranced by Raymond's account of near death experiences and the
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stories we would hear. People would come by his house and tell their stories,
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and it just got amazing. So anyway, we wrapped up the book
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The Light Beyond, and there was a in my estimation of peace missing and
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that was there was nothing in the book about children and near death experiences.
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And Raymond said, well, nobody's done much research on that yet except for
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one guy pediatrician in Seattle, Melvin Morris. And he connected me with Melvin
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and I did a book with him called Closer to the Life and all it's
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all about children and your death experiences. And after that I wrote that book
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and then I thought, well, there's something missing here. There needs to
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be a larger study about people who have had near death experiences and how they
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affect them during their life. So we wrote a book about that, and
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on and on every book I would write, I would find a gap that
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needed to be filled, and that's gone now through I think fifteen books on
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near death experiences. Wow, well, so being this book because I've read
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both of your other books previously, not knowing I was going to get to
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interview you one day. That's pretty cool. But I had never heard of
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a share death experience until I was introduced in this book. And I see
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now that I've heard of these experiences where there have been situations and I didn't
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know that you termed it as shared death experience. I know people who have
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had experience, and I may have had one myself. I'll tell you quickly.
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My best friend's mother was in hospice and she was dying and they were
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very closed. Her father had died years ago. And I was in the
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room in the hospice room, and I was laying at the foot of the
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bed on the cot that was brought in the room, and I had fallen
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asleep, and my friend was in bed with her mom, and it was
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at that time like it was happening at any moment, and her husband was
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in the next room and I felt this all of a sudden, like this
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overwhelming, Like I woke up and I felt this overwhelming thing, and I
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said, I have to get out of here. I got to get out
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of here. And I don't know what it was. I felt like like
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I just needed to leave. And then I was feeling guilty because I was
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leaving her, but I just felt like I couldn't be there. And an
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hour after I left, she called. I went back to her house that
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her mother had passed, and I really believed that it was her mom who
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wanted me to leave because she wanted it personal. She wanted to be with
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her daughter alone, and I was there. So when I was reading your
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book, I was thinking, hmm, maybe that is kind of an example
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because I was a witness to it, and I really believe it was her
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telling me get out because it was so strong and I was in a I've
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had fallen asleep. You know. It was very very interesting, and it
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was really interesting, and it stuck with me. This is many years ago,
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and it stuck with me. Yeah, And you know, the Melissa,
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what you're describing there is I'm sure lots of people listening to this will
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know exactly what you're talking about, because this is very, very common.
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And the one one remarkable thing about it is that our society from the time
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of the ancient Greek has had a dred way to talk about these experiences.
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And some people like Plato look at this and they take it at face value
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and they say this indicates an afterlife. The other strain of thought, which
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goes back to the ancient Greek Democratus who lived about the same time, and
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he studied these things, and he said, oh, this is just the
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biological activity. The body appears dead, but there's no such thing as a
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moment of death. And so this is the residual biological activity and the body
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that accounts for these things. Nowadays we call it oxygen deprivation to the brain,
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right. And so the trouble, what creates the difficulty with these shared
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death experiences is that the bystanders have identically the same experience that the person who
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is dying has, including often saying they leave their body. They leave their
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body as Grandma dies and goes up part way towards this light with Grandma,
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and people say, the room changes configuration, it fills with light. They
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see the relatives and friends of the dying person who's already passed away coming into
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the room, and some people actually have concurrently with the dying person. They
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empathically co live the dying life review of the person who's passing away. And
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the trouble with these things, Melissa, from the point of view of the
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standard way of thinking about it is that the bystanders are not ill or injured.
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There's no question of oxygen deprivation to their brains, but they have the
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same experience. And you mention that you had not heard of this. Well,
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I think this has been out in the public domain for a long time.
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But I think the reason why it's remained hidden is that people are scared
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of this. You know, it's at least when it's the person with a
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near death experience, we can kind of distance ourselves from that. You know,
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it's like this other person had a close call with death, but when
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it gets to its people can more easily imagine that maybe when their grandma dies,
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they could be there and have one of these. So it's very frightening
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to people, I think, and also that it just shatters our common way
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of thinking about it. You know, if it's not oxygen deprivation to the
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brain. Then we're out of ways to argue about it, right, I
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mean, what do you think That's where I am. I give up.
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I can't think my way out of this. And so you know to me,
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to me, there you know this, I say that to my utter
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astonishment. Still very counterintuitive to me, but I gather, yeah, there
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isn't afterlife. Yeah, yeah, well I would think after so many years
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of the stories that you both have heard, that you do believe in an
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afterlife, and you're giving us in your I mean, you know, you're
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giving us as much proof as you can gather, right, because physically we
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can't. We can't really measure it yet in scientific terms, right, with
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mathematics or whatever. Yet maybe one day we will be able to. But
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as much as people's experiences. So with you, Paul, have you have
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there been? I mean because in your book both of you talk about some
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personal experiences that you've actually had. So, Paul, do you have any
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that you want to share, any like some amazing observations or that you've discovered
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in your research over the past so many years working on this. Sure?
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Yeah, several years ago. I remember the exact year, shame on me
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when my mother was dying. My mother was dying of Alzheimer's. And the
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morning she died, which I hadn't known she died yet, I got a
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phone call from Vernon Nepi, who Vernon and I had worked on a book
16:30
project at one time, was the head of neuropharmacology University of Washington Medical School,
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and I hadn't spoken to him in five years. And he called me
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and he said, you know, I was sitting here. It was a
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Sunday morning. He said, I was sitting here reading the newspaper and a
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voice told me Paul Paul Parrot. And I ignored the voice and I kept
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reading. And about an hour later, this voice said, call Paul Perry.
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So I'm calling you, and I don't know why and what. He
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said, what's going on in your life? And I said, well,
17:08
my mother's dying right now and she has Alzheimer's and that was you know,
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that's his specialty, and so he said, he said, that's my specialty.
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I know we've started using a number of experimental medications and treatments, and
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he told me about some of them. And in the course of this conversation,
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my phone was beeping with another call coming in, and so I said,
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I've got to answer this call. I'll call you back later. And
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it was the the rest home where my mother was, and they said,
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she's your mother's just died. And so when I spoke later to Vernon Nappy,
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he felt that that was some kind of an odd communication between him and
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my mother and that would be defined in this book as a shared death experience,
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right right, Yeah, yeah, Raymonds also had one. Yeah,
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I'd love to hear it, Raymond. You know, in nineteen ninety three,
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I was working with a group of people to set up a big study
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of this and I was out west and it was on a Mother's Day.
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We finished the conference and I called my mom just to check on her.
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How you doing. Oh, I'm doing great, but yesterday I developed a
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rash. My brothers and sisters took her to the ar. The doctor said,
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I don't think this is anything but like just he gave her an appointment
18:45
to see another doctor on Monday, the next day after I was talking to
18:48
her. So when she went to the doctor, he said, you had
18:52
non Hodgkins lymphoma. You have two days through years two weeks to live.
19:00
So two weeks later to the day, she did die, but while it
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was going on, my me and my wife, and my sister who saw
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my father who was there, you know, who had died eighteen months before,
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and my brother in law. We all had this sort of empathic co
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living of her experience. So that sort of that sort of put my curiosity
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about it in a different direction. So we backed away from that for a
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while so I could study my sort of process my experience. So you know,
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it's and I continue to be curious, as I mentioned earlier, Melissa,
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as to why why people are resistant to this. See it's been your
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death experienced. People are all have all come to to accept. But I
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think that either even more important phenomenon I think of the fair death experience.
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It's people have a harder time with this because it's harder to distance from it.
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And also because what do you say, I mean, you can't say
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that it's the oxygen deprivation to the frame because the people are not sick,
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So what is it? And I fear? Right, don't you think it's
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fear? And then religious dogma, A lot of the religious dogmas like it's
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like, well you can't you can't have your own experience, you have to
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go through me because I'm the one that has the experience with God. R.
20:45
Yeah, it's religious ideology. Yeah, it's fear, fear, definitely
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fear and religious ideology. But it's also when it happens, it's like the
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impossibility that something like this can happen. Right then all of a sudden,
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you've kind of you've kind of tripped into somebody else's uh, perhaps the most
21:10
intimate moment and uh and it's it's just a very strange feeling. I mean,
21:15
for the for years with this, with this particular subject, in all
21:21
the in all the books we had ever written, we always had a couple
21:25
of shared death experiences in the books. Yeah, but we didn't didn't for
21:29
some reason, give them too much attention. And you read them all down
21:33
through history and shared death experiences all the way back to Plato and uh uh.
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But having having our own and then talking about the shared death experiences we
21:45
had written about was was a totally different experience. We realized at that point
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that these that these are objective experiences, that if more than one person is
21:56
able to witness something like this, then it it objectively happen. A near
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death experience is subjective, you know, only really one person has it and
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then only they can describe it. But a shared death experience takes that an
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enormous step further, and that step is that it shows that the possibility that
22:17
consciousness has left the body at the point of death. M h. And
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that's yeah, and you go ahead finish your thought. I was saying,
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that's what everybody in this field is trying to prove. They're trying to identify
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what consciousness is, but also they're in honesty, trying to see if it
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survives bodily death. And then that's we think that that is the case with
22:41
the shared death experience. Yeah, yeah, because you have other people that
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are witnessing something as you call supernatural. Something has has happened, and other
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people are witnessing and the person who's having the near death experience or who is
22:57
or transitioning, I should say, and is having Because you talk about these
23:02
seven reasons to believe in the afterlife, and I will get into those.
23:06
I don't want to start that until we come back from the break because I
23:07
don't want to cut you off, but that some people will have these moments
23:15
of clarity, and you'll talk about that these moments of clarity where there's no
23:19
way scientifically that they could have these because of whatever it is that they're dying
23:25
of, maybe you know, there's parts of their brain. There's no way
23:29
that that could be happening, right, Like, it's just impossible. And
23:33
then other people are a witness to it, So that would be considered a
23:37
shared death experience because they're witnessing that miraculous insight. Correct, would that be
23:44
off? That's also considered one okay correct? Yeah? Yeah, So what
23:52
is there a story and this is for either of you that really has stuck
23:57
with you of all of the people that you've interviewed that you said, Oh,
24:02
I just need to explore this even further. I mean, I know
24:06
there's many, but obviously maybe just one you can mentioned, Well, there
24:10
are many, but you know one that comes to my mind as an elderly
24:14
woman. I was a professor of psychology at West Georgia University and in about
24:22
nineteen ninety, this elderly woman came to one of my classes and told me
24:30
about an experience she had had with her husband. It was one of these
24:34
couples who literally were childhood friends and grew up in the same little town and
24:42
never had kids. But she said that as he was dying, she empathically
24:53
experienced his life reviews. That it was the review came up up around her
25:00
of everything he had ever done, and they were talking about it. They
25:06
could both see it, and they had a conversational exchange as it was going
25:11
on. And you know, that sounds so extraordinary. And yet I've you
25:18
know, quite a number of cases I've had over the years where people say
25:22
this, that they co lived the life review. And maybe I should say
25:27
to folks that come and a near death experience, one very common element of
25:33
it is that people say time stand still and they see everything they've ever done
25:38
in a sort of panorama, and they witness it from the point of view
25:45
not just that they had when they did each action, but rather from the
25:49
impact it had on those with whom they were interacting. And so for years
25:56
I thought, well, this has to be somebody who was intimately familiar with
26:00
the person, right, it had to be a close relative or something.
26:03
But no, no, Like some years ago, my wife and I got
26:07
a communication from a er doctor who was called to the emergency room to resuscitate
26:14
a patient he had never met. But as this guy was dying, he
26:18
said the the guy's life review just sprang up right around and he was able
26:26
to. And so you know, this is this is something that this does
26:32
not fit into consensual reality as you and I appreciate it, right, this
26:37
is and yet it's a very regular thing. So what I finally come to
26:44
is that you know, like, I give up. This is apparently I
26:51
spent my whole life. I've spent my whole life trying to think my way
26:55
out of things. That's what if you try to support what you already think,
27:00
let's I can't see how that'spawned. What you got to do is you've
27:03
got to bear down and think of every possible objection. Right, So where
27:10
if common this is that I just give up. I don't know what else
27:14
to say but accept, to my utter astonishment, there is an afterlife.
27:19
I love that, and you know what love. I love the fact that
27:23
we have a life for you. I think that's awesome. I really do.
27:26
I think it's amazing. Right. It answers so many questions. But
27:30
Paul, I want to hear your story when we come back. So let's
27:33
take our break here and then we'll continue the conversation. Stay tuned, everybody,
27:38
we'll be back in just a couple of minutes. Okay, chick.
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mystics and creatives who enrich our lives. Welcome back, and if you're just
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joining me, I have Proof of Life After Life authors Raymond Moody and Paul
30:53
Perrys my guests, and we're talking about what happens when we die, NDEs
31:00
death experiences and share death experiences. So, Paul, do you want to
31:03
share a story that really stuck with you, that has made you want to
31:10
continue? I mean, this is such interesting work. I mean, you
31:12
guys really must stop. You can't stop. I started out planning to write
31:19
one book with Raymond. Now we've written six books together and we've written all
31:25
these other books with other people, and yeah, I love that. So
31:32
what do you have one that kind of stuck with you? I know,
31:36
because there's so many and I don't want to take away because for everybody that
31:40
has in this experience, it's got to be amazing to them, right,
31:42
and that's their story special. But yeah, one that's just kind of stuck
31:47
with you. Well. A Hollywood producer that I can't name, okay,
31:53
was on the was on the East Coast visiting her boyfriend, and her boyfriend
31:59
has never met her family. He was in Massachusetts and she was in Los
32:02
Angeles. But early in the morning one time in Boston, she began to
32:09
feel uneasy and kind of found it impossible to get back to sleep, and
32:15
as the feeling intensified, for she began to think about members of her family,
32:21
and then she started to think about her father, and then, for
32:25
no particular reason, because he had been healthy when she left, she began
32:29
to think that maybe he was in some kind of health distress and needed some
32:34
kind of a help. So she began to toss and turn. As she
32:37
did, her boyfriend woke up and said he was having trouble sleeping as well,
32:43
but began to talk about this. It was early in the morning,
32:45
and as they did, they suddenly saw her father hovering over the bed.
32:52
Oh wow, as she said, like a ghost, and they both saw
32:55
the father, although her boyfriend had never met her family, and they both
33:02
prosed looking at the father for several moments. Then she got a call later
33:07
that not much later, that her father had died, and her response,
33:14
her quote to me, was it was strange, but not creepy. I
33:19
looked at him for signs of distress or some other reason that he was there,
33:22
but I just couldn't figure it out. Then had dawned on me that
33:25
he had certainly died and wanted to tell me himself, and she said she
33:31
had always had a strong bond with him, that this felt perfectly natural to
33:36
her, and that was one that stuck with her. We have other ones
33:40
in the books that are like that, though, Yeah, you do,
33:44
Yeah, I mean the book is. Yeah. I love the book because
33:47
you give many stories from people who have shared with you their own experiences and
33:53
they vary greatly, which is what I really I thought was really interesting.
33:57
I love that. But I want to talk a little bit about You cover
34:01
it in seven reasons to believe in the afterlife, and I mean, for
34:07
time constraints, we probably couldn't go over all seven, but maybe you either
34:10
one wants to mention a couple of those that you offer us to believe that
34:17
there is proof of an afterlife. Whoever wants to take it, Yeah,
34:23
okay, go ahead. You know one thing I do is grief counseling,
34:30
and I still do it, and I've actually done that even before I was
34:35
a medical doctor, because people would come to me who knew I was investigating
34:40
their death experiences for that in mind. But you know, one thing I
34:46
hear from people constantly is if I only had five more minutes, you know,
34:52
after somebody dies, people have this great longing just to be able to
34:59
talk to them again, just for a brief time. And to me,
35:01
I think one of the wildest, most unbelievable facts that I know, Melissa,
35:08
is that it is actually quite easy creator an environment in which you can
35:15
go through a process during which you will seem to be and converse with an
35:24
apparently dead person. And not only that, but this fact is one of
35:31
the foundations of the whole way we think in the West, which came from
35:37
ultimately the ancient Greek philosophers. And what the average person in ancient Greece would
35:44
think that a philosopher was was the person who called up the spirits of the
35:51
deceased. And for years that was thought, oh, you know, that's
35:54
just a legend or something. But no, they had these very well document
36:00
a historical institutions called oracles of the dead, which they had various procedures where
36:06
they would bring about this experience, and one of the most common ones,
36:12
which is simply in a darkened room, after reflecting and meditating on your deceased
36:20
relative and so on, you gaze into a mirror by candle light or a
36:25
dim light in a dark room, and under those circumstances, it's a very
36:30
common thing that people will have an experience during which they take to be an
36:37
actual contact. It's not regarded as a fantasy or they are in the full
36:43
state of waking awareness. They say that the apparition of the deceased appears in
36:49
the mirror. A lot of people say that the apparition then steps out of
36:52
the mirror, comes into the room fully three dimensional, or other people say
36:59
that their experience is that their consciousness goes through the mirror and they come out
37:05
on the other side into this other realm when that's where the engagement with their
37:10
loved ones occurs. About thirty percent of the people who go through this report
37:16
hearing an audible voice. They actually hear the person. Almost all the rest
37:22
of them say it's a heart to heart or mind to mind communion with the
37:27
person, and not only The reason we don't know about this is I suspect
37:32
you can gather this was in early Christianity up to about the three hundreds,
37:39
but then they realized that, oh, people may be finding out their own
37:45
things here, so we may plant down on it. It was outlawed,
37:52
but nonetheless it keeps cropping up. Everybody knows the character of John of everybody
38:00
knows the character of who was the Seven, the James James Bond Well,
38:09
but yeah, but not many people know that he was an actual character.
38:14
That Fleming based him on a character named John Dee fifteen twenty seven to sixteen
38:23
eight and who found out about this himself? And who did it? And
38:31
that, and this was very well known even to our great great grandparents.
38:37
It was until the radio age. This was something that people did, and
38:40
it was very well known in England and Britain and America that you could do
38:45
this. But with the advent of radio where people stopped interacting but rather just
38:51
sort of listening to radio and then the TV, this dropped out. But
38:55
the amazing thing is, and I'm saying this based on the fact that not
39:00
just of my work, but multiple different investigators have tested this and they get
39:07
the same results, So you know, you really there is part of our
39:14
common collective cultural heritage of humankind. Is this very easy procedure actually for calling
39:23
up the of your beast relatives? Well you you call it the psychomantium?
39:30
Is that it psychomantium? Am I pronouncing? That was the great word for
39:36
it? Yeah? Right? And that you had one, Raymond, You
39:39
had one in your home and you were doing them so much you got burnt
39:43
out because everybody's knocking on your door. But I had heard about this with
39:47
the Greeks, and I wanted to talk about this, and I heard about
39:51
this, but I never really fully you know, I heard about it many
39:53
years ago and never really investigated it. But it's really interesting now because a
39:58
year and a half ago I us my sister and she was special needs,
40:02
and my mom is I've had a couple of visitation dreams, Like I know,
40:07
there were visitations. At the moment she died, a cardinal showed up
40:10
at the window and my mom said, oh, she passed, so that
40:14
could have been a shared death experience. But this would be great. And
40:19
I love that you teach us how to build one, because I'm going to
40:22
show my mom how to do it so she can see my sister, you
40:25
know, because I think that it's so much easier than you would think that
40:30
to do it the way you describe it. Yeah, people just can't believe
40:37
this, even though it's been known since remote antiquity all over and so,
40:45
you know, it's why do we block it? Well, one thing that
40:51
occurs to me is that maybe, you know, it's a lot of effort
40:58
had we have to expend a lot of effort to maintain the illusion that things
41:02
are as they seen, you know, to get along in the practical world.
41:08
We have to not think of this so much, right, so,
41:13
but we you know, it is something that is there, and it's part
41:16
of being a human being. What I've seen since nineteen seventy five, when
41:22
my book was published, is that due to the advent of cardiopulmonary resuscitation making
41:31
you know, your death experiences available. They were always around, but in
41:36
the sixties and seventies, when the CPR got perfected, then all of a
41:42
sudden, an experience that was what always existed but was very rare, suddenly
41:47
became very common. So what I think is happening in our society, Melissa,
41:55
is that the afterlife is becoming infused with this life. Yeah, everybody
42:02
you know knows somebody who has been to the other side. And yeah,
42:08
I think when that occurs, there's a I think has got to come pretty
42:15
quickly to some sort of peace with this notion of an afterlife, because it's
42:21
it's gotten to where it's everybody knows somebody who's been. Yeah, and with
42:27
the internet now on YouTube, you can watch a million videos I wanted to
42:30
talk about, which maybe Paul, you can share what terminal lucidity is,
42:36
because this is I mean, I've heard of it before, but you really
42:39
describe it well in the book. Both of you really describe it. It's
42:44
very easy to understand. But for those who don't know what it is,
42:46
if you could share with us, well, Terminal lucidity is defined as a
42:52
flash of life. It takes place shortly before one's death. Okay, so
42:59
it can be quite dramatic because it takes place in people who are essentially dead.
43:04
I mean, there's a lot of people who have no brain weights when
43:07
they have internal experiences are there in in stage Alzheimer's and they're kind of gone.
43:15
I've seen one, and then there's another one that really stands out in
43:20
history. But I had a son who broke his leg and he was in
43:24
the hospital, and I would go in every day and sit with him.
43:28
And one day they brought in a gentleman who was in stage Alzheimer's. So
43:35
they were, you know, just laid in bed all day and he didn't
43:38
move much attempt to communicate. And one day his family came in. They
43:44
would come in every day as well, and one day they were all there
43:47
and he suddenly popped out of it. He became perfectly lucid. He made
43:53
sense, and he talked about their lives together and how he felt about each
43:58
of the individual people who were there, stood up on his bed and kind
44:02
of dominated the room with a nice, lucid, coherent conversation. And his
44:08
family was shocked because they'd seen him for a week or so just going out
44:14
the door, and so they started to say, you know, we're going
44:17
to be able to take dad home now he's okay. And then they came
44:23
back the next day and he was dead. He had died. Wow.
44:27
And that typical of terminal lucidity is that it's generally an end stage presentation that
44:35
as a person starts to die, they then some people will then pop out
44:39
of it and become very lucive. Another example of that as a woman in
44:45
Katrina Emmer. They lived in a middle institution in Germany. This is in
44:52
the thirties, and she'd had been ingitis in her childhood and she never had
44:57
never spoken her entire life followed us else I couldn't speak, would kind of,
45:01
as they put it, would make animal sounds to speak. And as
45:08
she began to die, she started with great lucidity sing a song to herself.
45:19
And the song that the line she repeated was where does the soul find
45:24
its home? It's peace. And the people in this institution all knew who
45:30
she was. They'd taken care of her for years, so they all came
45:32
in and gathered around her, and she continued to sing and to act very
45:37
normal, and doctors wrote about it. One of the doctors presented the story
45:45
of Katherine Emmer to the National Socialist Party in Germany. The party was previous
45:52
to the Nazi Party as an advocation for not euthanizing people with mental deffict.
46:00
Wow, but it was a very powerful story, and that's typical of what
46:07
happens with terminal lucidity. Yeah, it's interesting and that's considered one of the
46:15
seven reasons of because there's so many cases of this, right, that's one
46:19
of the reasons. There's a lot of Yeah. Yeah, and when you
46:25
see this in the hospital, which happened all the time. You know,
46:30
people in hospice or who deal with the terminally ill, all of them will
46:34
have experiences like this. And a man flew from Australia that twenty something years
46:42
ago to the need to tell about this experience he had with his wife who
46:46
she had been terminally ill, just going downhill. Then one day she just
46:51
rallied and and you know, he thought she was going to be finned,
46:54
but then she quickly died. And when he was trying to describe him,
47:00
I wish I could convey the look on his face when he said that.
47:04
He said, I felt that she already had one foot on the other side.
47:08
Yeah, And that's definitely how it feels. It's like when you don't
47:13
deal with the termina ill for a long period of time, you eventually get
47:17
feeling like you're just like you're sort of halfway there already. Yeah, that's
47:24
how I felt with my friend's mom that she was halfway on the other side.
47:28
And I feel like I described like she kicked me in the ass to
47:30
get the hell out of there because she wanted to be with her daughter alone,
47:35
you know, like get out of here. But you talk about which
47:38
I thought was really cool. People who have witnessed, you say, missed,
47:43
and they hear music, and some people have actually seen with their own
47:47
eyes the looks like the soul leaving the body. It's just fascinating to me
47:53
that how many stories that people have been a witness to that one thing that
48:00
you hear from doctors. Yeah, I mean, whether it's like as the
48:05
patient was dying, I saw this mist or cloud come out and one guy
48:09
told me it disappeared through the ceiling or you know people say that and why
48:15
is it? Well, I give up, I give up, But it's
48:19
you know, it occurs. I mean I've seen it myself. You know,
48:23
I don't know what. And the mystical light has been reported for hundreds
48:32
of years. But we found some really great We found some really great case
48:37
studies from a large nineteenth century study UH that involved we did involve all of
48:45
these actually light, mist and music and in some cases, in some cases,
48:51
people who were standing around the deathbed would would hear music, like a
48:57
beautiful music. They didn't have radio, and it was a beautiful music and
49:01
they couldn't find it. And then other people who were there didn't hear it.
49:07
And sometimes the music would last in a couple of cases more than one
49:12
day that they would hear this music. It just seemed to come out of
49:15
the air, but they couldn't find its origin. Yeah, you know this.
49:23
Yeah again, this goes back literally to the foundation of Western civilization.
49:29
The Christians based their theory of the afterlife on Plato's books the Fato, which
49:37
it's the long story, but the Christians, you know, that's where their
49:40
theology of the afterlife came from. And that's about this very topic. It's
49:45
about the relationship of music to the afterlife. And it's not as common as
49:52
near death experiences, but you find plenty of cases of people who say that
49:58
grandma never had any entry in poetry or music whatever, but just before she
50:04
died, she started singing or reciting poetry or sometimes making up poetry on the
50:09
spot. Yeah, it's interesting. That is interesting because I noticed two things
50:15
that caught my eye. One that many people who have had a witness to
50:19
it. When there's a group are the atheists where the believers don't, which
50:22
I think that's interesting. And then the second thing is is a lot of
50:27
the nds when they come back, and I obviously, of course it changes.
50:30
You come back with these abilities and they're always in the artistic realm.
50:35
And I just thought it hm really interesting too, mm hmm yeah, yep.
50:40
Creativity, artist, creativity. What is that word? Well, you
50:45
know, if you trace the origins of it back to the Greeks, creativity
50:52
was what we would think of as a paranormal experience. It consisted of these
50:57
entities, the muses, and so that the people would to have a poetic
51:04
inspiration, they would go to these places called museions and you would consort with
51:08
your spirit music. And you know that sounds antique until you start talking to
51:15
artists. They say, yeah, you know, it's like this doesn't come
51:20
from me. They say they went up and that. Yeah, I just
51:23
opened myself to it and it so creativity is you know, it's interesting,
51:29
why don't we call that a paranormal experience? So to me, it's not
51:34
so surprising that people who come back from in your death experience sometimes are seized
51:40
with a musical or an art The most amazing one I know from recent years
51:46
Melissa's doctor Anthony Chikoria, who's a HD in physiology and MD and was a
51:55
very eminent professor of neurosurgery I'm sorry, of orthopedic surgery, who was struck
52:04
in the neck by lightning and had a near death experience. But afterward,
52:09
although he had never had any interest in music, he's developed a strange fascination
52:15
with the piano and started having this recurrent dream in which he was playing the
52:22
same piece on the piano on a concert stage. To make a long story
52:27
short, he learned how to transcribe music and learn the piano, and now,
52:30
in addition to being an imminent orthopedic surgeon, he's also a concert pianist.
52:38
And you know that series of events doesn't make sense within consensual realities we
52:47
have it. It doesn't, No, it doesn't. I love his stories,
52:52
though, Paul, what are you going to say? One thing that's
52:55
kind of funny is if you go to a near death experienced conference, which
53:00
there are many, undoubtedly somebody shows up with five or six or ten paintings
53:07
that they've made as a results of having their experience, and you see tuttle
53:12
experiences and different types of light and on and on, right, Raymond,
53:17
A lot of mean. I just, I just I've heard this repeatedly.
53:22
It's oh decades ago. I met in Toronto, this elderly woman who came
53:29
to one of my lectures and brought her paintings that she said she had known
53:32
she was an award winning artist in Toronto and she had never had any interest
53:38
in painting until her near death experience. And then, yeah, you know
53:43
it, So that is I mean, it's just something really extraordinary that m
53:49
M. I mean, it makes sense to me as a creative person.
53:52
I'm an artist, a photographer. I feel like everything and writer, everything's
53:57
downloaded. I can't explain it, just right, just I just feel like
54:00
it's just down I just get these downloads and yeah, so it makes sense
54:06
to me. Artist, artist say that, you know, and that's what
54:10
artists say, and yeah, it's amazing. So mirror gazing too access.
54:20
Yeah, I'm going to try that now, definitely try that. Now that
54:25
I see how easy it is to make a lot to create this pace,
54:29
I'm definitely going to try that. Yeah. Well, can we go back
54:32
to the psychomantia for a minute, sure? Please? Yeah, when when
54:37
you first read about these and hear people talk about them. They sound like
54:44
subjective experiences, but they sound like in a way, they sound like waking
54:49
dreams. But Raymond had a patient who came from Argentina and she came to
54:59
see her who had died of cancer, and she sewed up at his cyclomanthium.
55:06
She was really pushy. She just wanted to go right in without any
55:08
preparation and try to see her daughter. And with that attitude, she went
55:15
in and saw nothing. But later in the day, and it was about
55:20
three point thirty in the afternoon. She had come with her sister and they
55:24
were sitting in the room talking about the experience that she did not have,
55:30
and all of a sudden, these orbs came into the room. Yeah,
55:34
and to me, this makes this an objective experience because her sister photographed the
55:38
orbs and what you can see is these orbs moving around the world, and
55:45
the one that stopped in front of her, and she said that her daughter
55:51
was in there, and she spoke to the orb for a period of time
55:54
they right in. Oh my god, I love that that story is in
55:59
the book. I don't need to cut you guys off, but we're out
56:02
of time. I could talk to you forever. Thank you so much,
56:07
Raymond Moody and Pop Perry. Guys, look them up, get their book.
56:13
Thank you God. That was such a pleasure. Thank you everyone for
56:17
listening to Postcards to the Universe with Melissa creating life you crave and I'm wishing
56:22
everyone a wonderful week filled with joy, abundance and love peace. See you
56:27
next week.