Could You COMMUNICATE with the Spirit World? Dr. Raymond Moody's Surprising Study #death #awakening

mirror and under those circumstances about 50 to 60 percent of people on the very first attempt will have an experience which they interpret to be a visitation from the dead [Music] thank you hello this is Dr Raymond Moody and this is your Superior self man Perfection Raymond thank you so much for joining the show this truly is an honor for you for for me to have you on the show like this is it's so surreal for me because my journey kind of started out with Life After Life and then now here we are having a conversation on my podcast thank you so much for coming on oh to the contrary Trey I mean I'm just so delighted to this and uh you know I could tell from our interactions getting to know each other you're really cool guy and so I'm just honored to be with you uh in this absolutely I think the most fascinating thing about your story is like you know one I'm in Psychology I'm very much into psychology you're very much you know obviously your background in Psychology but you also have a background in philosophy so we have a like a very unique conversation whenever we speak because it's always about heavy heavy material it's always about philosophy it's about the meaning of life it's a near-death experience so it's like I'm whenever we have a conversation it's like I am just in these flow states of just like we just talked about earlier creativity but growing up you what was your background was it atheist I mean you didn't really grow I don't know if it was atheists but like you didn't have like a strong religious background no uh my dad was a surgeon number one if you know that personality and number two a professional military officer and he was in the Pacific Theater in World War II retrospectively I've put it together that probably that uh experience just turned him off on religion and when I was a kid he was kind of sarcastic about religion and um and and my grandmother meanwhile was kind of always making very humorous jokes about religion and so to me I just didn't grow up with any interest in that it was astronomy that was my favorite subject and uh concurrently with that Trey it was um I was fascinated from very early age with uh Lewis Carroll's books and Dr Seuss which I loved and um the whole idea of nonsense and an experience I had when I was about seven years old or eight really sort of set the tenor for the whole rest of my life and that was a an experience you had I'm sure like that's when I was looking through a telescope one night I realized Helena you know what side what size is this thing we're in right so your mind goes out to the wall but then you say just a minute doesn't there have to be something on the other side of a wall so you say Well it can't just come to an end in a wall but then the other option only intuitively is that it goes on forever and that doesn't make any sense either and so I remember that very night and I had this Intuition or realization that that the world we live in is kind of bounded by nonsense and yet that was okay for me because I was a fan of Dr Seuss and Dr uh and and Lewis Carroll so I've sort of carried those themes all the way through I won't wouldn't say that I was an atheist it was more than I just didn't think about God you know I mean if I'd had to articulate my position back then I would suppose it would have been that I just don't think it was possible to know whether there's a God or not but whatever my focus was on astronomy so I went to UVA at age 18 to study astronomy but quickly got taken into philosophy instead declared a philosophy major as soon as I got there and took one course and what was it Plato right I think yeah and in Reading Plato's Republic was where I found out about these near-death experiences and at that time um I had up to then I had always thought the idea of an afterlife was like a cartoonist thing or that was my only exposure to it was no seriousness to it but I remember specifically thinking well if this guy who's still my hero by the way thinks this question of an afterlife is serious and important then I'm I'm assuming it is so then about three years later I actually met a living human being who had such an experience and subsequently had the opportunity to interview thousands of people who came to the brink of death and had these experiences and um just when I got my PhD in philosophy I was a philosophy Professor for three years and went to medical school and um ultimately became a forensic psychiatrist working with um Mass murderers and paranoid schizophrenic killers and occasional serial killers at a maximum security unit which was you know just like a fulfillment of my childhood dream of traveling in space I guess and um so but all through this I've continued to be fascinated by these amazing stories of people who almost die and return so I mean you must died working in that psychiatric ward right I mean like you had a couple of experiences there that uh that were pretty uh intense right with some of your patients like well yeah but you know that sort of goes with the territory if you sign up to be a person working in a maximum security unit with psychotic Killers you kind of expect you're gonna get hurt again and I was but but you know that sort of came with the territory it was just um what I finally left was thinking well you know I'm being kind of selfish here I got kids to think of and um and so but anyway I continued it on a private basis for a while but um homicide is something that continues to just fascinate me I um talk to maybe as a minimum 300 people probably more likely 400 or so what fascinates what is fascinating about that to you I've spent a lot of thought you know getting that straight Trey and what I'm why I think that homicide Isn't So fascinating not just to me but to a lot the people look at the success of Investigation Discovery Channel right is that three things number one to be honest we've all had thoughts of killing somebody right number two it's dramatic right and number three and this is the most fascinating part of it to me is that every homicide is unique and yet every one of them conforms to one or more patterns and that combination is just I mean it's in fascinating I remember sometimes we would review 15 cases a day on that unit and I remember one specific day we were all sitting around we had been through 15 cases that day of just these horrible things like you read about in The National Enquirer and the social uh expert social worker expert on the um Ward on that he sort of folded his papers together and he said you know you never get tired of this and and you really don't it's always there's always something new and there's always something that goes by a pattern well how do all right so how do you go from there so you leave um this type of work and you go and you start teaching again right at University and I think you're teaching philosophy at this point and you you meet an individual you hear about his near-death experience that leads that leaves a lasting impression on you yep something happened you were you're teaching philosophy and maybe something came up uh Socrates or something like that I don't know what it was but a student came up to you and gave you a very graphic story or graphic picture of his near-death experience like I wouldn't say graphic but a very articulated translation of what his experience was is that what started your investigation with near-death experiences by the way you coined the term near-death experience um amazing stuff but was that was that student the one that sparked the initial initial investigations well I think the initial spark was Plato and and also Democritus who was a another philosopher about the same time and they were both interested in these things and they Plato looked at it and took it seriously as an indicator of an afterlife but Democritus the atomist said well you know this is just the residual biological activity in the brain a debate that we still have today so I was fascinated by that but it never occurred to me that it might be germane to the modern world but uh in 1965 I heard about through one of my professors I heard about Dr George Ritchie who at that time was a Psychiatry professor at University of Virginia who had had this experience and George you're the best person I ever knew actually George Ritchie and he was very generous and open to talking to students so I heard him talk then when I went to East Carolina University in 1969 to teach philosophy just very soon afterward um and I was teaching Plato and this this young man came up after um class and he said you know we were talking we were talking about Plato's dialogue Theta which is the it's kind of the origin of Western thought about um life after death I don't know much about religion but I do know from my reading that befeda was the basis of the Christian Theology of the afterlife for example and so it had enormous influence so I was really kind of talking more about the methodological aspects of this this uh dialogue and so this very nice student I remember today with his hair and kind of cut him on this bowl kind of things and he came up and he said Dr Moody I wish we could talk about life after death in this philosophy class and he kind of accentuated the word philosophy and I got his you know his import immediately which is that hey you know I thought philosophy was about the big issues and here we're talking about these logical things and I said well why do you want to talk about that and he said because about a year ago I was in a bad accident and my doctor said I died and he said and I had an experience that has totally changed my life and I haven't had anybody to talk about it with so of course invited him and then you know I just I heard the same thing from other students as I started talking about it to Civic clubs you know which are always needing a speaker on Wednesday or Tuesday afternoon and and as soon as one invites you they all invite you because they need constant speakers and this these were the movers and shakers in this little town I mean you know that was back then sadly it was an all-male institution but you know these were the people who were in charge of everything and they would come up to me after this Dr Moody I've never told anybody this but and I heard same things from some of my colleagues on the faculty and uh you know very quickly became apparent that this was something that was um studyable probably because by that time see I mean the cardio pulmonary resuscitation was really coming in at that time so there were just a lot more people who had been through this who were you know who were really wanting to talk about it because you know most of the people I talked to in those earlier years have never told anybody except me about it yeah well you can't I mean you've studied so many of them I mean over a thousand cases easily uh but you came up with like seven or eight like characteristics of a near-death experience like what are do you remember what they were yeah um if you look at thousands of cases or even hundreds of cases what you see is that they have it's like there's about 15 common elements that crop up right and one experience may have two or three or four of these things or six or seven or eight or some in extreme cases are really lengthy Cardiac Arrest may even have the entire 15. but how far they get into it seems to depend partly on how long they were out right if you have a really long Cardiac Arrest you're more likely to have the whole picture um but the the kinds of things that are most common is people say that uh to hear the doctor say oh my God he's dead or we've lost him or words to that effect and a remark I've heard all around the world in so many words is doctor I have never been so alive is when I heard that doctors say I was dead and so they say it's like an intensification of Consciousness not you know a lot of people to imagine dying is kind of like going to sleep where you're diminishing Consciousness but people say it's it's or going into a dream but people say that no it's more like waking up than it is going to sleep and that Consciousness becomes intensified and they tell us that they get out of their body and they look down below they can see their own physical body lying on the operating room table table or whatever you can imagine the confusion at first what's this all about um but there very quickly they begin to get the eye they can they can see or not see in the visual sense but there's a there's a sense analogous to seeing and and when they it's not they hear the doctor or nurse talking it's that they become aware of the thoughts of the doctor or nurse so they're trying to put all this together and eventually they come up to the idea that oh my God this is what we call death and at that point people enter into States Of Consciousness tray that no matter how smart they are or how many languages they speak or how well educated they are everybody says the same thing I just can't describe it to you there are no words right so they enter into this experience that somehow lies beyond words and in terms of the way they can express it they say that they become aware of a passageway of some sort often compared to a tunnel and they feel they go through this passageway come out on the other side into this incredibly brilliant and warm and loving light it's like very comforting and in that light may say that relatives or friends of theirs are there to meet them as a sort of greeting committee I guess and they see them not in a physical body but in this spiritual form that they find very difficult to describe and most remarkably to me I think this is the most interesting part of near-death experiences to me they say it's kind of like time comes to a standstill and all of a sudden everything else kind of disappears and they are surrounded by this holographic panorama which consists of every single thing they've ever done in their lives and and they say that when you see into this mirror chamber or whatever it is that you can see yourself doing these uh these actions that you remember but when the action has its Consequence the situation is turned around so that you are sensing it from the point of view of the person with whom you interacted so if you see yourself doing something mean to somebody you feel that hurt as though it's yours or if you see yourself doing a kind-hearted action to someone you feel the good feelings now very often this whole life review takes place in the accompaniment of a being of light as this is just like a personal being that is not a form but a sheer light of complete compassion Christians tend to say Jesus or Christ Jews tend to say an angel or God but whatever label they put on it the description is saying this completely loving being who kind of guides them through this big memories and um uh they are impressed people say that there is no judgment in this except what's coming for themselves because when you see all the things you've done and you're comparing it to this being who loves you completely then naturally that you wish you would have done it that way right so so people come out of this whatever they had been chasing in life knowledge I've chased knowledge all my life some people chase power or fame or money I wish I'd chased money a little bit more I haven't to two kids at home but um you know it was knowledge was my thing but whatever people were chasing before they say after this that you realize that the most important thing that we can do while we're here is to learn to love sure and so then at some point obviously people have to come back the ones I've talked with so they say some people say I have no idea how I got back I was in this slide and then there was no no sense of Transit mission that I found myself back in my body or others say that somebody there told them you've got to go back it's not your time to die yet um and yet others say that they're given a choice that they can either continue in the experience they were having or go back to the life they were leading so obviously all the ones I've talked with chose to come back almost invariably because of somebody else I mean it's like because most like most commonly because they had kids left to raise right so they come back on behalf of someone else they find their lives are transformed and in this way of realizing that the object of this thing we're in is to learn to love and also reassured that what we call death is a transition into another reality so they say after this is no more fear of death um so you come up with all these care similar characteristics in all these different individuals right uh what cracks me up I don't know if it's in your book I don't know if I read it in your book or not but it was like you know science some scientists say it like you were saying it's just some chemical that's released when in the brain when someone dies but how can all these individuals like I I rarely have the same dream twice how and to think about other individuals having this similar experiences during a near-death event is just I don't know what the statistic statistics are but it's like it has to be outside a chance I mean it's just yeah that part and and there is a real conceptual dilemma here I mean as to how you put this together uh Trey is the real problem the most of the debate that you hear about this is conducted on a very superficial level I think partly because there's some people are just too scared of this you know I mean they want things to to be like they already think they know and in that kind of circumstance that going back to Plato versus Democritus it's really been the same thing it's like democracy said oh this is just that residual biological activity in the body today it's oxygen deprivation to the brain right that and what does that mean well there's philosophical reasons for doubting that I mean in the real world we just don't understand what the relationship between Consciousness and the physical apparatus is I mean that's just unsolved but more practically it's a very common occurrence where the bystanders at the death of someone else that as that person into bed dies the bystanders themselves have all of these things we call a near-death experience people will tell me as grandma died I got out of my body I started going up toward this light with her and then I turned around came back or people say the room fills with light or that um that they see relatives and friends who had died of the relatives and Friends of the dying person who died coming into the room to to whisk them away and most incredibly to me I've had a number of cases I mean I think this is not you know it's it's it's common enough that anybody who wants to look for this can find it that people who are bystanders say that they empathically co-live the dying Life review of the person who's really passing away yeah now to me that's the most shocking thing I know about this really because you know when I try to imagine that myself I mean I'm trying to get myself accused recused from my own life review right much less the idea of having a spectator there and yet the Striking thing about this is that when this happens to people it seems completely natural which makes a certain amount of sense to me as a psychiatrist because you know it's like people come with their deep dark secrets and you know it may take them six weeks to get around to telling you the secret but when you do you know you've heard that secret three times this week you know I mean most of us have very similar Secrets right sure yeah and so so it's really I mean as startling as it appears that as it seems the people who experience this co-empathically co-lived the dying Life review of their loved one really find it rather natural for a long time I assumed that this had to be you had to be have some personal connection with the individual to to experience this but several years ago a physician contacted me and my wife and told us about um he was called one day to the ER to resuscitate a patient he had never seen so as he was trying unsuccessfully to resuscitate this guy he said these images of the guy's life was was all around him so you know something really weird is going along here and Collective near-death experience it's like a collective near-death experience Collective near-death experience that's absolutely didn't you have one with your your mother I think I did I did it's the funniest thing I was um in the 93-94 I was um uh kind of devising a study for how to study these empathic death experiences and Incredibly right about that same time my mother uh was passing away and so um my wife and I had this amazing sort of empathic experience with her as she was dying it that's kind of thwarted my curiosity for a while I backed away from it for all because what drives me is curiosity right so I was thinking well I've experienced this so it kind of settled my curiosity then as the years passed by I took it back up and I've written about this um you know these empathic death experiences as I call them are shared death experiences sure so you gather all these cases you come up with the data you write a book Life After Life like how nervous were you like to release that book out into the world I mean you got you have your career in front of you I mean I think you were in were you you were still were you in graduate school when this book came out I can't remember no I was just finishing up my uh m-day degree hmm and I had a PhD in philosophy already and I was finishing up my MD degree and you know in a way I got looking back on that I figure I probably should be more uh trepidatious than I was but um you know it's um number one I mean this sounds sort of maybe not a nice thing to say but it's just the way I am generally speaking I don't care what other people think as long as I uh I mean yeah of course I do in the sense that when I do a piece of new work I want to put it out for my colleagues to see their suggestions and if they find a flaw then I'm closer to truth because I've seen my mistake but if they say well yeah you're on the right track that encourages you to go on with what you're doing right so but um you know I am a social phobic so once I got into this and they were calling me from New York to be on the Today Show or whatever I mean I was I got maybe you'd call it nervousness or whatever but but it never I knew completely from my long experience that anybody who doubted this if especially if they were a doctor could just look around them on their own patients and quickly assure themselves that what I was saying was true right because there were just so many of them by then and um I guess what I was not prepared for was the journalistic approach to things I mean I was a philosophy Professor then a I taught a lot in medical school too just taught medical Humanities and such so I was interested I was sort of accustomed to the the academic way of doing things but what they wanted on the TV shows was off often something Sensational you know and I just now but but I always knew that it never worried me that I would be um uh you know the attack would be that that it's not true because I knew that inherently it was such that anybody who investigated it seriously with an open mind would came come to the same conclusions I did so that was never a worry but um you know it's I was not the social part of it was stressful how did your life change after that book got published yeah well uh you know in a way it's hard for me to put together what my wife my life might have been like without that you know what I mean because I was into the near-death experience when I was 18 years old right so sure I don't really have much of a impression of what I would have been like without that because I was so early that I uh took to it but um well did everybody start coming to you like everybody started coming to you because like oh yeah because I feel like a lot of people weren't talking about it back then like they didn't want to come out and say that they had a near-death experience because they didn't want to be looked upon as like an outcast right yeah that's right I mean most of the people I talk to up up until and shortly after the book was published and never told anybody before the most common thing to say is Dr Moody I've never told anybody this but and so I knew it was very personal but at the same time I knew it was so widespread that the and but now one thing that really did come as a surprise trade was that I was thinking that the audience for that book would be doctors and psychologists right who would pick it up and say I want I don't know about this and would ask around among their patients and so on and would say yeah he's right what I never anticipated was that the book was going to sell millions of copies I mean you know it was published in November of 1970 five and by January if 76 a few months later I had a friend who's loved shortwave radio and he was listening to people talk about this book in Europe in January after event and that's kind of freaked me out because I'm just basically a social phobic person I mean I I love people that I'm at parties I'm the one who wants to go to the dark corner and hope hopes nobody will talk to me you know yeah so um and but that was it was not frightening in the sense that I knew that it would be confirmed um I didn't realize it would be so quickly I mean I was thinking more that the that nowadays I mean there's tons of research going on I thought that that would happen often in the future but that just a couple of decades after it was all already a major research topic all over the world that that was surprising to me sure another part of this book that I love when besides the near-death experiences is is the past life regressions and the oh man I mean you got so much so many good things in this book uh that I just recently read paranormal uh about what is the art of scrying yeah I think that's what it is yeah how did you explain what scrying is or explain yeah experiment and then how did you come about with that well Trey I mean you know all my friends always know me well I'll say I'm such an or right which I really am because as incredible as all this stuff may seem it really just goes back to one root interest to me and that is the Amazing Story of ancient Greek philosophy I mean if you took the events that took place from 600 BCE um just at the dawn of philosophy to the 280 years later with the death of Aristotle and you wrote it up as a article and you tried to get it published in the National Enquirer they would reject it because nobody would believe it I mean it's just too Sensational and that is that a big part of the um whole Western way of thinking came from speculation and theories about these near-death experiences on the what one hand and another element of it was that the Greek the Greeks had these institutions called Oracles of the Dead where the story is not like mediumship but you would go to these places and they had techniques during which you would seem to see and Converse with the spirits of departed relatives and I remember the day I read that it was re in I was reading in um it well first of all it sent several of the Greek dramas like aristophanese the comic playwright makes fun of the oracles if it did just like you know there'd be people today the same thing sure but then like Herodotus the historian was writing about him and yeah I remember reading this thing about his Herodotus saying yeah that this this King Perry Anderson a delegation to the Oracle of the Dead to call up his deceased wife Melissa and I remember thinking I was a big he a big fan of Herodotus already by that point but I thought you know he must have had a bad day there because in my 18 year old omniscience I knew full well that there couldn't be a place where you could go to call up the Dead but it's true or not it was a major input into the history of how people got thinking about things a lot of these early philosophers were specifically identified by the public as participants in these things at the Oracle of the dead so that's where it was until about 1986 I guess I was reading an article in a classical germ and it was about how that they had rediscovered the most famous of the Oracles of the dead but was directly below Albania and the Greek province of vespratia direct and um that they had gone there and just dug where Herodotus and odyssey I mean uh the Homer and a lot of sources said it was but nobody had ever looked because it couldn't be right so they they dug up this place and based on what the archeology report said I've immediately realized number one what they were doing and number two realize that incredibly it would work and that was what they found was this enormous bronze cauldron down under the ground in this chamber and there were carbon marks on the walls to show that they used illuminated by Torchlight and the people who were seeing the dead were apparently encircling this cauldron and looking down into the cauldron and so the archaeologists said well this is fraud you know they had those people down there 29 days and so by then they could figure out what the person they came to see was like and they would hide in the cauldron and act out the road I thought just a minute here these people were the founders of rationality that they would be fooled by something like that for over a thousand years didn't seem probable to me but more con more importantly I knew that there is a there is a in from Psychiatry that there is a process when you can get people to gaze into what's called an optical clear depth a mirror with with a in a darkened room or um in the Middle East still today they take a silver bowl they'll highly polish it on the inside fill it up with olive oil then dark darken the room and have by candlelight if you look into that you see these eidetic images not like mental images which are kind of vague but they're actually projected into the visual space they're 3D colored they take on a life of their own so putting that together I just said well this is what it is and set it up and it just it worked and um so a lot of people now have practiced this as a um grief therapy technique it was in the medieval period it was a standard Greek standard Greek therapy grief therapy thing that doctors knew about they would set up a mirror and they could get their grieving patient to gaze into the mirror and go through a process and then you'd see these these apparitions but I mean you set up an experiment at one of your universities where you had uh you actually went to like Alabama and bought a house and you set up this this this room where you painted The Walls Black and you had a mirror up you had a seat you had a candle and that's right you had like I don't know how many um uh people that you had experiment but it was like well I've got it experience like that's I mean that's 25 right I mean well it was about uh the you I finally got it up to the about 50 percent of the people on the first attempt will have an experience however if you first of all ascertain that they can see miravish just without having an agenda and showing them this and then if they see something then then you can add the preparation process which is basically you ask the person to choose some one person they want to see again who had died and then you take them through a process kind of like grief therapy right like going what was this person like and you just open-ended questions to get people to talk and reminisce and take them through a process in an hour or two then you put them into this room and you tell them just to gaze away into the mirror and under those circumstances about 50 to 60 percent of people on the very first attempt will have and experience which they interpret to be a visitation from the dead I that came as a real surprise to me I understood that a certain percentage of people would see Visions right but but especially since my cop my colleagues and my graduate students of psychology were my subjects people who already knew about the mind and I thought well if they see anything they'll say something like oh yeah I saw this image it looked like my grandma but was it real or was it a figment I don't know that was what I confidently expected imagine my surprise when the very first person there is this very seasoned um alcohol and and drug rehab counselor which as you may know that's a very very earthy group of folks she was 44 years old A very wise and well put together person came out of there saying not that you know I've you know saying that she saw her her father and talked to him and all and so uh that was a real surprise to me but that's how it panned out that people don't take this to be a dreamlike experience they they interpret it to be a real encounter an actual event like you had one like you had an experience with this like I did grandmother came and like I didn't know that you came out of the the room and you sat down and all of a sudden you look up and there she is like I would have crapped my pants like I don't know like I don't know well you know you wouldn't because it's the that's what you would think I mean which I would have thought but by then I guided through many so many people through it my attitude was well if this happened to me I would understand it's just a figment right but but um no I mean I I mean I just to this day I'm speechless about it in a way trade because I mean I I just I have to tell you that I mean I from my the experience I saw and communicated with my deceased grandmother I felt her presence I mean it's just really startling I um one thing that my wife I think has a really tough time with me about this is that I mean foreign cantankerous at all but to me logic is a very precious thing it's not to be Alden in all but I figure if you're going to reason about something then the most funnest to reason about it rigorously I've never understood the kind of person who when they use reasoning what they they settle on what they already think or they want to be and then they put together some sort of no matter how flimsy Bridge of reasoning to get there that can't be any fun because if you're deceiving Yourself by definition you understand you are what whereas if you really go by the real rules of reason and practice assiduously and try as hard as you can to to refute something rather than to confirm it see is the what makes it fun and if it survives that process you can get have a certain amount of confidence that you're on the right track right always with the understanding that you might be mistaken but um you know one of the biggest tragedies in this whole field of inquiry um Trey is that you know the people who characterize themselves as Skeptics about this kind of thing and I hate to sound harsh but hey I've got a certain license I'm 76. those people don't know what they're talking about because I'll tell you why the skeptical movements happen to have here this is one of the ancient manuals of skepticism that this is by skep sex this empiricus but the skeptical movement came about after Aristotle codified logic right and if you think about what logic is it's a system for generating conclusions right from premises so Aristotle made this an enormous contribution to thought about 20 30 years later Pirro p-y-r-r-h-o who who understood logic very well but he got to think in just a minute here what if we knowing logic is what we do we really apply it assiduously we Bear Down on every question we really reasoning it out but instead of drawing a conclusion we withhold the conclusion what would happen and that's what a skeptic is okay now the reason they do this is not sheer orneryness but rather because they found that if they did this as a spiritual practice like constantly refraining from drawing a conclusion that two things would happen number one their minds would expand and number two if you think about it geometrically and everybody else is running in this direction to get to the conclusion but your Technique is to withhold the conclusion then you see side Pathways of inquiry that everybody else missed because they're focusing in this direction right so that's what a skeptic is now run in your mind what the so-called Skeptics tell us oh I'm a skeptic about these near-death experiences I think it's just the chemistry of the brain well if you unpack what they just said it is oh I'm a person who doesn't draw conclusions and my conclusion is such and such a self-contribution yeah so it's it's like sadly the the whole movement to trying to investigate these things they don't even know what skepticism is the organized Skeptics actually are members of a humanist movement I won't get into what that is but it's um uh you know it's not anything to do with skepticism and so what we really need is good skeptical thinking so because I am that's my natural tendency I just really fought this tooth and now I mean I just first of all it's still very counterintuitive to me that the idea that there's an afterlife and I just all these years I knew that these people were sincere that was plain and I knew that they were telling me what they really experienced and I knew it wasn't oxygen deprivation to the brain but what it was I just didn't know I mean you just because you can prove it's not oxygen deprivation to the brain it doesn't follow that it is life after death but where I've come in all honesty is that a few years ago I just gave up I mean I I haven't drawn a logical conclusion but where I got was I just I ran out of uh what else to say I mean I just you know I know so many medical doctors for example whose medical judgment I completely would trust if heaven forbid I had to see a doctor but on the other hand they unanimously all from their near-death experiences tell me yeah you know I it was real I had this experience as I was real that's impressive to me and then also the fact that it's so common is I mean I got a lot of cases of medical doctors who empathically co-lived the dying experiences of their patients and so I realized something just impossible was going on and I just and I it's it's still really I almost speechless now I stutter when I say it but well it's like you you have this belief of this that you have this belief you have this that data that supports this theory that there is life after death however like your famous quote in your book I've gotten you to the purple and Gates however I haven't gotten you past them like I don't know because you haven't spoken to an actual dead person you've spoken yeah because I've come back so it's like you can't really you can't really support Life After Life After Death because the data doesn't show that it just shows people coming back from that point and telling their stories you want to go from belief to known that's where I'm at yeah right I wanna I don't want to believe it I don't want to believe their stories I want to know that they're it's true it's accurate my question for you is you being 76 do you fear death no I don't fear death but life scares me a lot and uh and I don't want any pain in the process right I mean I've I've had a kidney stone a gallstone I'm hope I'm finished with that but the pain I don't like that idea and I got a a 20 year old and a 22 year old at home I I mean you know I'm I they're dependent on me to I would like I mean ideally I'd like to stay around for a while for them but I also don't want to get into the downhill spiral like the fall and then the visit to the old folks home I'm sorry man I just wanna get out of here painlessly peacefully and pleasantly and with all with my obligations taking care of as much as I can sure what are you working on now I know you've got a new book coming out um which I'm pretty excited about is it out now yeah I have two books that I've uh published in the last year um and we talked about we talked about changing the paradigm yeah what is it making sense of nonsense is one of them that's right that's right making sense to nonsense basically what this is is that I have figured out a way to think uh logically about things that don't make sense as paradoxical as that may seem it really works and um so basically this is my life's work it was part of my doctoral dissertation in 1969 so I've spent my life on this and then this work and where it teaches the mind how to think about things that don't make sense well as I've already seen it's happened at least once that I know about when people are accommodate their minds to this new way of thinking then the clock starts eventually some of them are going to have near-death experiences right and what I conjecture I sort of lay this out in the book is why but it it works out you can see it once you think through it that somebody who was in that situation who knew how to think about things that don't make sense going into the near-death experience would come back with the ineffability problem essentially greatly alleviated that is instead of saying well I had this experience but I don't know how to talk to you about it they would say hey I got this new and it does work that it's just about several years ago a very imminent um artist and scientists who had been to one of my workshops several years later had a near-death experience and he's telling me that oh when he was all over on the other side he said Raymond my mind went back to the seminar I had and he said I saw that what you're saying is true that you can't comprehend how that world is connected to this world unless you take the unintelligibility access into account which is I guess the way a physicist would say it but um basically I've worked out this sort of program it consists of Text Plus exercises that you go through it and it actually reformats your mind to think not just about life after death but uh attorneys have told me that it improves their critical thinking skill a lot of people and advertising say that I just swear about this book they say it really helped me in my work medical doctors have said oh my God I say so much about my patients I mean it's kind of a it's um it's you know it's Dr Seuss's books have sold over 600 million copies now what that means together with all the you're a little young to remember about Doo-wop music like which is combination of nonsense that's the main line together with meaningful Parts like get a job or or nursery rhymes or playground rhymes like one Bright Day in the middle of the night two dead boys got up to fight back to back they faced each other Drew their swords and shot each other a blind man came to see The Fray a dumb man came to shout hurray a deaf policeman heard the noise and came and killed those two dead boys that's the playground rhyme that many many people have fond memories are or or if you like jazz um Ella Fitzgerald and Louis Armstrong scat singing which is um nonsense syllables just more spot improvised that that really do you know they lift your mind to elsewhere so there's a lot of um penetration of nonsense into into song and poetry and um uh also into religion like with the in the Christian tradition the glossolalia which is nonsense syllables put together without order in a way that really does bring about an ecstatic state or in the Zen Buddhism the co-ans what is the sound of one hand clapping so nonsense has always had a very you know spiritual uses as well but because people don't like the word nonsense then they sort of shut that out and because of that bifurcation that on the one hand we love nonsense but on the other hand we don't like the word that really closes out uh rational thought about a whole range of things one of them being question of life after death but if you correct that deficit then it opens up entirely new ways to investigate the question of life after death love it I love every bit of that so your newest book is God is God Is Bigger Than The Bible that's right um and people can find that yeah from Amazon after life or Amazon life afterlife.com is your website and they can go to Amazon and they can buy God Is Bigger Than The Bible what is that about well you know I'm really happy with this book because it's um basically I not being from a religious background my encounter with God is turned out I mean it's just um what I find Trey is that I've seen a lot of people who are looking for God but they're kind of turned off by religion and they don't know anything about the Bible so they get intimidated and so what this book is all about is what I've learned about God from the thousands of people I've talked with who had near-death experiences who have experienced the presence of God during their experiences and my own personal encounters and sort of putting this together in a whole new way of thinking about God not in terms of abstractions like does God exist but rather in terms of relationship like really I mean if somebody asked me Raymond do you believe that God exists I say paradoxically known absolutely not because number one any belief that I Raymond Moody can formulate about God being a limited person is bound to be skewed in One Direction or another right and also if you hear think of that sentence do you believe that God exists the emphasis of the of the sentences on the word exist well as a professor of logic I consider it take about an hour but I could show you what it means to say that something exists right it's a frame Setter more than anything else it like tells you how to think about other things well doesn't it put a boundary on doesn't it put God in a box when you do that exactly see I think that all these people are does God exist they're wondering whether God exists I say that God is greater than existence existence is a human concept we use for very specific reasons and God doesn't fit into that box what I say is I have a relationship with God and if you have engage in a relationship with God and you pray and all things happen so that's that's what this book is about Raymond I wish I could like just freeze time right now and we can just talk about this stuff all night long because like this is seriously like one of the best things but one of the best conversations ever um thank you so people need to go to lifeafterlife.com they can go to Amazon buyer books um last question kind of you know I'm really interested in this um especially your answer what do you want your legacy to be that I was a good father yeah it's um you know Trey the interesting thing is when you're a kid you hear about this the most the happiest life is a life of serving others right you hear that when you're a kid isn't ideal as life goes on it becomes an aspiration when you get to my age it's just a fact of experience you know and that is you just learn empirically that as long as you're focusing on yourself and your ego you're always miserable and it's that liberating thing where you can wait out and just be focused on helping other people that's when life gets interesting and uh in terms of my intellectual Legacy though I mean I'm I'm happy about my work on near-death experiences but I think in the long run what I'm going to be remembered as intellectually is the guy who figured out a whole new code of logic how you can think about things that are unintelligible and how it opens up whole new areas of inquiry not just in life after death but a whole lot of other practical applications of it too and plus it is fun yeah we got to have you back on man um yeah yeah this is fine Raymond Moody Dr Raymond Moody thank you so much for joining the show this seriously is uh an amazing an amazing conversation thank you so much this was just so much fun man and I'm just really thank you thank you thank you for this and also thank you so much for all the people listening in too I just really appreciate you to spend this time with us [Music] thank you [Music]

Channel: Your Superior Self

Views: 19,880

Keywords: #god, #consciousness, #science, #podcast, #angels, #obe, #nde

Id: SZfBOU4xHrc

Length: 58min 21sec (3501 seconds)

Published: Fri Apr 14 2023