“You can guide your life to a certain extent, and then, if you are lucky, serendipity takes over. It leads you down a path that you would not have considered an option. Once you’ve experienced that path, though, you become comfortable with it and know that it is the path you should have chosen all along,” writes Raymond Moody in his fascinating memoir, Paranormal: My Life in Pursuit of the Afterlife.
Moody is the man who coined the term near-death experience – or NDE – with his mega seller Life After Life, published in 1975, when he was still in medical school. It hit every bestseller list in the world and stayed there for more than three years. It was the first book to examine the possibility of life after death in a non-religious sense, and was the first book to examine the stages in a near-death experience. Moody points out that no two NDEs are identical, but that many share these traits:
Ineffability: People have a tough time expressing what happened to them.
Hearing the news: You hear the doctor pronounce that you are dead.
Feelings of Peace and quiet
The Noise: Loud buzzing or a loud ring.
The Dark Tunnel: You feel pulled rapidly into a dark space
Out of the Body: Just want it sounds like. You see yourself from a vantage point outside your body.
Meeting Others: You meet spiritual beings who are there to ease you through the transition or to tell you it isn’t your time to die.
The Being of Light: An encounter with a light that eventually assumes an “unearthly brilliance.” Some describe this being in religious terms, but regardless of what it’s called, this being of light helps you to “proceed along a path of truth and self realization.
The Review: The being of light often leads you to review your life, which is displayed in “panoramic intensity.”
The Border or Limit: This is a point people often reach in an NDE. If you move beyond it, you can’t return.
Coming Back: Exactly what it sounds like.
Most NDErs Moody spoke with also shared three other facets of this experience: They didn’t want to talk about the experience for fear of being labeled crazy. This may not be as true today as it was in the 70s, thanks in large part to researchers like Moody.
The effect of the experience on these individuals was “profound and noticeable.”
All reported that the experience left them with new views of death.
Even after such groundbreaking work, Moody claimed that his research didn’t prove life after death. It proved a commonality of experiences at the moment of death. But his continued explorations led him into a study of past lives, scrying as a means of communicating with spirits (John Dee Memorial Theater of the Mind) and most recently, into the area of shared near-death experiences.
Moody had heard about such experiences over the years but in 1994 experienced it himself at his mother’s deathbed. He was there with his wife, two sisters and their husbands, waiting for the moment of their mother’s death. “As we held hands the room seemed to change shape, and four of the six of us felt as though we were being lifted from the ground. I felt a strong pull like a riptide, only the pull was upward.”
Moody’s sister suddenly pointed at the foot of their mother’s bed and exclaimed their father was there, that he’d come back to get their mother. The light in the room became “soft and fuzzy, like looking into the water of a lighted swimming pool at night.” As Moody later wrote: “It was as if the fabric of the universe had torn and for just a moment we felt the energy of that place called heaven.”
These shared death experiences happen to people who are with a loved one who is dying. “These spiritual experiences can happen to more than one person and are remarkably like near-death experiences.”
Yet, Moody found four differences in shared NDEs that he considers extraordinary and new:
Mystical music. This music often emanates from the surroundings and is heard by others. It can last for a long period of time.
Geometric Changes in the Environment. The room or space shifts and changes shape. Moody admits he doesn’t know what it means, but it “seems as though people who are dying, and sometimes those around them, are led to a different dimension.”
A Shared Mystical Light. This part of a shared NDE is described in many different ways – as a translucent light, a light filled with love, a light that is like being swept up into a cloud.
Mist-ical Experience. Seeing emissions of mist from the dying.
Paranormal is a fascinating page turner that provides glimpses into the man himself – an undiagnosed illness that plunged him into a depression so severe he attempted suicide; his domineering father, his closeness to his mother; the cost of fame. Moody is now 68 years old and could have rested on his laurels decades ago. But the unrelenting curiosity that drives his explorations and his joy of discovery come through so powerfully in this book that I’m sure we’ll be reading more about shared NDEs.
Now listen to Moody talk about his own near-death experience.
I didn’t like the movie because I read the book first, and the movie script changed the storyline to such a degree that it was like another totally different story. Also, for my tastes, there was too much “Alice In Wonderland” type stuff in the movie: too much vivid and unnatural color; too many inexplicable special effects that didn’t make any kind of coherent sense. But that was just my personal take on it, because the book, for me, was fascinating and compelling. The movie, for me, went from a metaphysical exploration and experience of the afterlife into fantasy/sci-fic and missed delivering the message contained within the pages of the book. Again, just my personal take and opinion.
I think I’ve read all of the Moody books, and find him to be an extraordinary mind. Thanks for a heads up on this new one.
Great book, and I love Moody!.
I haven’t felt such a thing (luckily), but I would like to mention here another author who is much closer to the mainstream – Abraham Maslow. Some parts of the text remind me of peak experience. It’s something that, according to religious fundamentalism, “lower” humans such as myself aren’t supposed to experience, it should be just for saints. The first time I felt it (Religious fundamentalists would say: “No, you didn’t.”), when I wasn’t prepared for something like that, it was as close to feeling God’s presence as it get get. I suppose this kind of description of peak experience is even a bigger taboo for Christians.
Wow, ‘d forgotten about Maslow. He was well ahead of his time, for sure. Peak experiences DO sound a lot like what Moody lays out.
Oddly enough, I didn’t care for the movie WHAT DREAMS MAY COME, although I very much enjoyed the book. Much to say on this subject but will limit it to my great respect for Dr. Moody and his phenomenal works. Thank you for the post. Will get this book for sure.
I loved the book! I liked the movie, too, but thought it became too much about heaven and hell toward the end, which the book didn’t do. That was the screenwriter’s vision.
I didn’t like the movie,but I haven’t read the book.
The movie was good in parts,though.
It just didn’t add up to the movie it could have been,to me.
I think it bit off more than it could chew.
It would be like making a black and white film about colour.
No matter what you tried to convey in the black and white film you could never show the viewers what colour really was.
with you on that, cj – did not care for the movie “dreams” – but of course, more than admire and respect the work of dr. moody – i can remember the first time ever hearing of him many many moons ago!
A book I must read, it’s a fascinating subject. Not much to add to your excellent post other than to say that NDEs often appear to be on a par with the person’s individual beliefs.
Agreed! Did you see the movie, What Dreams May Come?
Oddly enough I have had several of the experiences listed above but have not had a NDE per se. What I have chalked my experiences upto are I (my old self died) and I my newself was given the wake up call that I needed to proceed on a new path.
When I died I was not in a very good place. I was confused and feeling very lost. I had a strange string of sychcronicites happen to me that left me baffled and really confused. I was searching for meaning to what had happened to me but was not having much luck in finding any answers. There really was noone to talk to who would understand what had happened to me. My old self at the time did not know about synchronicity, law of attraction, etc. I know now ” that” was the explanation for what had happened to me but anyhoo. It was that string of strangeness that caused my death but it also allowed me to come back to life. One day while I was wallowing in the mirk and misery, staring out the window, a little flash of light lit in front of my eyes. I thought I was having an optical illusion, I closed my eyes and I thought when I opened them it would be gone. Wrong! When I opened my eyes the flash grew bigger and then started twisting in front of my face. I watched it twist , twirl and glow brighter and brighter until it vanished. When it left I felt the warmest feeling of love that can’t even be described. I felt at peace and the heavy rock that was sitting on my chest was lifted. I felt alive for the first time in a long time. It was a cosmic kick in the ass that I needed to start really living. I know there is no death and I fear nothing.
Think I may read this book.
Wow, Becky. Talk about life-affirming. I think you would enjoy this book.
I love Moody’s work and recently bought three DVDs of his from his website,
https://www.lifeafterlife.com/dvdvideo.html
including this one;
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9ElMRtWkSk8&feature=player_embedded#!
To me his work is as important as the work Jung did.
Moody is a living treasure and one of the great pioneer’s of this world and beyond.
Bless you Raymond.
His book is terrific, Daz.