Dr. Raymond Moody invented the term Near Death Experience and he joins us, along with his co-author Paul Perry, to talk about their latest project, Proof of Life after Life.
You can find the book on Amazon, Proof of Life after Life: 7 Reasons to Believe There Is an Afterlife: https://amzn.to/48vOSlb
Thanks Dr. Moody and Paul!
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TRANSCRIPT
Jim:
He invented the term near death experience. He is a legend in the field. Dr. Raymond Moody joins us with his co-author, Paul Perry on the Paranormal Podcast. Up next,
Speaker 2:
This is the Paranormal Podcast with Jim Harold.
Jim:
Welcome to the Paranormal Podcast. I am Jim Harold and so glad to be with you once again, and I hope that you had a fantastic Christmas if you celebrate Christmas, and I hope you have a happy and safe, be very safe out there, New Year. And next up, we are going to have two great guests with us, and we’re going to talk about the afterlife because here at the Spooky Studio, we always bring you the content even during the holiday season. Enjoy.
If you’ve listened to my shows anytime at all, you know that my favorite subject is the afterlife because we talk a lot about a lot of different things here. We talk about UFOs, we talk about ghosts, we talk about cryptid creatures. Now we might not all see a UFO or a Bigfoot or a ghost for that matter, but I do have news for everybody listening to me, even though hopefully it’ll be many decades down the road, we will have to walk this path, shuffle off this mortal coil and face what is next.
And today we have two fantastic guests who are at the forefront of answering those questions. I’m talking about the legendary Raymond A Moody, Dr. Moody who invented the term near-death experience. He is the bestselling author of many books which have sold tens of millions of copies. His seminal work Life After Life has completely changed the way we view death and dying, and has sold over 13 million copies worldwide. And again, he is the leading authority on the near death experience that he coined that term back in the late seventies. And with him is his co-author today, Paul Perry. He’s the co-author of Multiple New York Times bestsellers, including Saved by the Light, which was made into a popular movie, and Evidence of the Afterlife. And he has co-authored several books with Dr. Moody. Paul is also a documentary filmmaker whose work has appeared on worldwide television. They have a new book out, it’s called Proof of Life After Life:: Seven Reasons to Believe There is an Afterlife, Dr. Raymond Moody and Paul Perry, thank you so much for joining us today.
Dr. Raymond Moody:
Thank you very much. Good to be here. Thank you. This is really nice. I just appreciate it so much.
Jim:
Well, it’s great to talk to you both in Dr. Moody, a legend such as yourself. We’re just very honored to be able to speak with you once again. Now, a lot of people would say, well, there’ve been multiple books on this subject. What is new? So in this book, Proof of Life After Life, and you can both speak to this, what is new, these seven reasons to believe that there is an afterlife?
Paul Perry:
Well, here’s what’s new. One of the most fascinating things that can happen to a person in their lifetime is having a near death experience. What happens during a near death experience is generally people leave their body, they can see what’s going on around them. They go up a tunnel, they see dead relatives. They are introduced to a being of light. And when the experience is over, they are transformed by it. But that’s a near death experience, and that is a subjective experience, which means that only the person who’s had it can really accurately describe it. And as a result, many people don’t believe that near death experiences actually happen. They believe they’re just the phantasm of the mind. But this book doesn’t deal with only near death experiences; this book deals with shared death experiences. And a shared death experience is when a dying person shares their death experience with at least one other person. And what that creates is an objective experience, one that has proof behind it because more than one person has actually witnessed that death experience. And this book focuses proof, Proof of Life After Life, focuses on shared death experiences and how they provide, how provide actual proof of the body of the body’s consciousness leaving the body. That’s the primary difference between the near death experience and the shared death experience. And that’s what we deal with.
Jim:
How common Dr. Moody is this shared death experience? I’ve certainly heard about this before. I think I’ve seen you speak on television programs about it before. I think it’s one of the most fascinating things. I actually have a story I’ll share from my wife, but go ahead, Dr. Moody, if you would, and please talk to us about how prevalent the shared death experiences are?
Dr. Raymond Moody:
I’m very interested in that myself, Jim, and no study has been done on that yet to get the incidents; we know about near-death experiences that they’re very common. But my guess is I think probably shared death experiences are more common than ordinary near-death experiences and because who can recount this experience of somebody else dying. And my intuition is that there are probably more shared death experiences than near death experiences. But shared death experiences are the same things in near death experiences except they occurred not to somebody who’s say undergoing a cardiac arrest and resuscitated, but rather they occurred to people there at the bedside of somebody who’s passing away. And that as grandma or whoever in the bed is dying, the bystanders may say that as grandma died, I left my body and I went up her way toward this light with her.
Or they say that they see apparitions of the dying persons, deceased relatives and friends coming into the room as though to escort them away. People say that the room fills with light but not light that comes from the sun or from a light bulb. But this really kind of extraordinary, very clear light that lights up people as they’re dying. And most astonishingly to me, Jim, I’ve had quite a number of people over the years who’ve told me that as somebody was dying, that the bystander themselves had empathically co-lived the dying life review of the person who’s passing away. This is a very common feature of near death experiences. People say that they see their entire life reviewed in a kind of panorama, which takes place instantly, and which they witness not just they witness every event of their life, not just from the point of view they had when they did the action, but actually from also from the perspective of the people with whom they’ve interacted.
And that’s such a personal thing. It’s a rather shocking thing to realize that it occurs to people there at the bedside as well. For a long time, the only ones of these I’d heard of were from people who were very intimately connected with the person. The first two I heard were from middle-aged women who had lost their adolescent sons. They were unrelated people. But then I had a really wonderful one from a woman in Carrollton, Georgia who had had this life with her husband. They had been, really grew up as playmates, as kids. And so she told me that as he was dying, she reviewed his life with him, this panorama. This for years, I thought this had to be somebody intimate. But then a few years back, Cheryl and I got a message from a doctor who was called to the ER to resuscitate a patient he had never met before.
And he said as this guy was passing away, he said, the life of the man popped up around him. So something really odd is going on here, I think. And the reason why we don’t know about this is that I think what tends to occur is that when this happens to somebody, their natural predisposition seems to be that this is so uncanny that only they would’ve ever experienced it. They think it’s something just pertaining to them so people don’t talk about it. But I think now that this is getting out more in the public, that there will be a similar phenomenon with near death experiences occurred back in the seventies. And I think the same thing will now people will be waking up to these shared death experiences, which are one reason they’re so interesting here that the way we process this in the West, these near death experiences, goes back to Plato and Democrates.
It came a little bit before him, who was the person who realized that things are made of tiny little bits too small to see, which he called atoms. But Plato studied these near death experiences, and he took them as indicators of an afterlife. But Democrates who also studied, I mean, his little essay on it said, there’s no such thing as a moment of death. And he said, what happens is that these people, even though the body appears dead, that there’s still some residual biological activity that’s invisible because it’s on the atomic level. And it’s interesting, see, that’s the same argument form we have today. It’s like some people say, yeah, this is the afterlife. Other people say, no, this is oxygen deprivation to the brain, but why the shared death experiences throw a monkey wrench into the works because the people who are standing by or obviously not ill or injured.
So there’s no question that this experience, which is the same experience being generated by the oxygen deprivation to the brain, and yet it’s the same experience. So this is another reason why I think that people are not so, have not been so willing to talk about this because, you know, as you know Jim for many people including me and you, all this is inspiring stuff. For many people, this is very threatening material. And if they have some kind of rigid framework, even if whichever side they take, at least there’s some framework for talking about because there’s this sharp division between the physiological and the spiritual interpretations. But the trouble with this is that this brings it out into what do we make of this? I mean, it’s obviously not oxygen deprivation to the brain, what is it?
Jim:
Now, I’ll just share my wife’s story and you can tell me if this falls into this category. It might’ve been more of a, I don’t know if a premonition would be the right word, but I’ll just share the story. So this is back in 2001, right before 911, and my mother-in-law was very sick. I was married at the time to my wife, still am. And anyway, she was at an at-Home Hospice. But it was one of those things where you felt like, oh, we’ve got several weeks. There was no indication that we were talking about anything imminent. So, maybe two – and this is before I ever paranormal podcasted so it had nothing to do with the shows. I was interested, been interested all my life in this kind of stuff, but it was not my job – so anyway, we had fallen asleep, and I should say earlier that day, she was over at her mom’s with her mom and dad.
They lived about 10 minutes away, and she wanted to stay the evening and be with her and help her and things. She’s like, no, go home. You’ve got a small child, you’ve got a husband, get home, be with them. She was almost pushing her out the door kind of, verbally, in a nice way. And anyway, she got home, went to sleep. 2, 2: 30 in the morning, she wakes up and she sees a vision of Mother Mary and her family’s Catholic and her mom was very devoted to Mother Mary. It was just very smiling, very happy, comforting, and warm. She saw it, I don’t know, 30, 60 seconds just standing there looking over my shoulder when I sleep, particularly back then, dead to the world. She saw it. She said, it’s like nothing else she’s ever seen. So anyway, she falls back asleep, not 10, 15 minutes later she gets a call. My father-in-law, and he simply says, she’s gone and my wife is still waking up. And she’s like, who’s gone? What are you talking about? Your mother, she just passed about 10 or 15 minutes ago. What about that story? Does that fall into this category?
Dr. Raymond Moody:
It does. Actually, Jim, we have a chapter dedicated to this. We call it precognitive experiences. And it’s when a person unexpectedly sees the death of another person or who has foreknowledge of a paranormal kind. It doesn’t have to be necessarily someone’s death, but they have foreknowledge of something that’s happening. And that’s actually frequently occurs. But I don’t know if there’s any percentages on that, how many people experience something like that. But we uncovered a number of stories, including one. I was talking to a very well-known Hollywood producer, a female who I can’t name, but she told me she was on the east coast visiting her boyfriend, and early in the morning she began to feel uneasy and found it impossible to get back to sleep. And this feeling intensified in her. And for no particular reason, she said she started to think about her father. And then she began to toss and turn, woke up her boyfriend, and he said he was too, having difficulty sleeping.
And they began to talk. And as they did, she suddenly saw her father hovering over the bed as she put it like a ghost. They both saw the father, and she said that it wasn’t strange, it wasn’t creepy, but she could tell that he had shown up to tell her that he had died. And she immediately called home. She was in Boston, and she called home to Los Angeles and found out that yes, her father had just passed away unexpectedly of a heart attack. The odd thing in this one is that she had a link with her father. So there’s that empathic link, but her boyfriend had no link at all, had never met her family at all, but he was seeing the same thing she was seeing. So that shows in one case, you don’t always have to have that empathic link with the person you’re having a precognitive experience about.
Jim:
Yeah, it’s really fascinating. It’s really fascinating. And I remember Dr. Moody seeing you on a television program years ago talking about, and you probably know so many stories that maybe this one won’t come immediately to mind. I just remember was something very odd with I think it may have been twin sisters or sisters clear across the country, and I don’t think it was a death, but it was some kind of injury or something. And just kind of like that golden thread that connects us to those we love.
Dr. Raymond Moody:
I don’t remember that specific one, but that’s just a very common pattern where people say that at the point where somebody else is distressed or that they know is or ill, that they sort of pick up on.
Paul Perry:
I mean, well, Raymond, that could be the soldier of Fort Dix.
Dr. Raymond Moody:
Yeah, that’s right. That’s right. That was a soldier at Fort Dix, a Sergeant, and he had been admitted to the hospital for something, I forgot what, but he had a cardiac arrest. He was very ill. Unbeknownst to him, his sister who had severe diabetes had been ill for a long time, was about almost at the same time, admitted to that same hospital, but unbeknownst to him, but she died. But during his near death experience, he was able to see and converse with his sister. And when he came back, he knew that she had died because he found out when he met her in this situation.
And these things are really startling to think about. And yet, I mean, I gather that they’re common enough that anyone who just is curious enough to actually want to ask around their own friends and relatives are going to be able to find cases. It’s just not that unusual. And statistically, what makes it unusual is that it’s not discussed, that people take it inwardly and don’t talk about it. But as soon as this gets out, then I think it’ll quickly become apparent to people that this is, if not more common than near death experiences, at least very, very common.
Jim:
We’re talking with Dr. Raymond Moody and Paul Perry, and we’ll be back right after this on the Paranormal Podcast.
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Merry Christmas and happy Holidays from the Spooky Studio. Now back to the Paranormal Podcast.
Jim:
Now, there are different categories, as I understand it. I mean you talked about them to some extent, but are there, there’s seven different kinds, 10 different kinds in terms of categories of these shared death experiences.
Paul Perry:
We have whittled down to seven. There’s probably 700 in real life, but we picked out the most interesting ones, the ones we could link stories with and also research. We have a lot of research in this. One of the more interesting ones, and I think this is a very common experience, and now that it’s been named and defined, people will start to realize that they’ve experienced this as well, and they’ll start to report them. And that is something called terminal lucidity.
Jim:
Yes.
Paul Perry:
And terminal lucidity is defined as a flash of life that takes place shortly before one’s death. Now, this can be quite dramatic because it takes place in people who are essentially dead or people who are in, and they haven’t been coherent for many days. A prime example of this comes from the 1930s. And this, by the way, terminal lucidity has only been named since I think 2016, and it was defined during that period as well. But throughout history, there have been many instances of terminal lucidity.
Dr. Raymond Moody:
It used to be called, by the way, all of our great grandparents knew about it, they called it fay because people died at home. And so people saw this, but then when people started getting, dying in hospitals, then the public awareness went out, and then it became all these knowledge of medical people.
Paul Perry:
But a really prime example of terminal lucidity is something that happened to a woman named Katharina Ehmer who lived her life in metal institutions in Germany in the 1930s. She had had meningitis as a child and she had never spoken her entire life, at least spoken anything coherent. She had been at an institution since childhood, and according to doctor’s definitions was not even generally aware of her surroundings. But on the day that she died, she started to sing a song. And all the doctors at this institution freaked out because yeah, they didn’t, never expected this from her. And she began to sing a song that ended with Where does the soul find its home? Its peace?. And she continued to sing this, and people came from all over. The institution came to see her. They kind of knew her from their exposure to her all these years. And apparently it was a deeply emotional experience. And then it was also an experience that made people think she had revived, that she had somehow overcome the effects of meningitis. And that’s a trait of terminal lucidity as well. But in fact, within a few hours she passed away. And that’s the standard root of terminal lucidity. People who appear to be terminal suddenly have this burst of energy and they start to talk to their family about, they start to talk to their family in a very lucid way.
Jim:
That’s, go ahead. Go ahead.
Paul Perry:
Yeah, it’s fascinating. And then the family says, wow, grandma’s okay, and we can take her home tomorrow, and they come pick her up and she’s passed away.
Jim:
And particularly with cases of Alzheimer’s, that’s very striking because my thought process was always that if something happens in Alzheimer’s, your brain changes and it’s irreversible, but somehow these people are able to, and I’ve heard the word rally before, rally and start to speak in a more normal, lucid way. I mean, how in the world does something like that work, do you think?
Paul Perry:
Well, I don’t know. I mean, there are speculations about it, of course, and the one you just brought up with Alzheimer’s makes you think that the brain is totally dead or defunct, which it is. And there’s other cases. There was one written about in Time Magazine by a surgeon who said that he had a patient whose “skull was full of tumors,” that he was no longer functional and showed no brainwaves existing on EEG, yet in fact, he began to speak. He talked to his family while they gathered by his bedside and spoke very lovingly about their relationship. But he spoke in a way that he was perfectly lucid, like he was all okay. And then he passed away later, passed later. Once again, that’s the typical path of terminal lucidity. It’s a teaser.
Dr. Raymond Moody:
Sometimes it involves singing, too, or poetry.
Paul Perry:
Absolutely.
Dr. Raymond Moody:
This is part of the western intellectual tradition. Plato wrote about that and his dialogue Theaetetus, that sometimes even if their families say they’ve never had any interest in poetry or song, that just before they die, the few days or few hours or minutes, people will start singing or reciting poetry or sometimes making up poetry on the spot. And I’m a social phobic person, so I’m mostly a recluse. And just in my limited social network, two people had sang themselves out as they were dying. People I know were there with them, said that as they were dying, they started singing.
Jim:
Amazing, amazing.
Dr. Raymond Moody:
And if I know two people who are just in a limited network, then this has got to be common. Plato knew what was common.
Paul Perry:
One of the things that’s great about working with Raymond is he’s a medical doctor, but he’s also a doctor of philosophy. And he’s able to pull up memory information about how these experiences, every experience we’ve ever written about near death experiences, past life regressions, and now shared death experiences. It not only existed during the Greek period, but they were examined by the great Greek philosophers. And you realize a couple of things. One is that you realize how brilliant the Greeks were, but you also realize that all these experiences are very old. They may not have the names we attached to them now, but they existed and they were well analyzed by the Greek philosophers. So it gives you a real base to work with.
Jim:
You also talk about the transforming light. That’s another reason to believe there is an afterlife. Can you talk to us about what the transforming light is?
Paul Perry:
Yeah. Do you want to go there, Raymond?
Dr. Raymond Moody:
Well, it occurred to me very quickly when I was starting this back in the sixties that when people pass away, they enter into a different world, which seems to be predicated on love rather than whatever it is that’s predicated on here. And all of these people that I had talked, was talking with, said that whatever they had been chasing before, like knowledge is in my case or power or faith or money or whatever they’re chasing, they say they realize through their near death experience. and this life review, that what this is all about is love. And I’ve heard a lot of people say, I could call this light or I could say love, and it doesn’t matter which way you say it. And that becomes the new focus of their lives and the transformations. Now, the way I have figured out what these people get so transformed about by their near death experiences was either from their testify for what they said, and also when I got to know their families and friends could tell me about much of this near death experience that changed the person.
But there was only one case, Jim, where I knew somebody both before and afterward, and I was able to see this transformation. And I get speechless to try to describe it. I mean, any way I can describe it seems, I mean I’m just frustrated. But basically in 1980, I think it was, when I was doing an internal medicine rotation and I was working with a hematologist, and one of the patients that we were seeing was this wonderful young woman from Colorado, and she had that Colorado spirit, if you know what I mean, the young people out there that way they are. And she was like that just wonderful young woman. And she was pregnant, but she had developed a platelet problem and her platelet count plunged. So then you got a clotting problem, right? So we were worried that when she delivered the baby that she would bleed out.
And so that’s why we were treating her. But then just because I was a resident, then I moved to on from that rotation, and my attending was the person who took care of it, but I didn’t know anything about this. Just when I left the ward, she was still pregnant. About three years later, I was sitting in the hospital cafeteria. I was on call for psychiatry that night. And it was the middle of the night I was sitting in the cafeteria and this presence, I mean, I just have the words for it, this young woman, very thin she was. And when I met her before she had very blonde hair. Her hair was still blonde, but just a woman, it’s hard to describe to describe. But the sweetness and kindness was just overflowing from, I did not recognize her. And she looked about 30 years older, but not in a bad way.
I’m talking about in terms of maturity. And she sat down beside and she said, Dr Moody, she said, you don’t remember me, but she said, about three years ago, I was in the hospital, I had a platelet problem. And she said, after you left, I delivered the baby. And I almost bled out during delivery. And she said, I had a near death experience. And she said, I told the nurses about it. And they said, well, that Dr. Moody was here, a few books. He studies this. So that was the connection. But what I’m talking about here is this utter transformation of this lovely young woman as she was, into a person who was just filled with light. I know it sounds crazy, but I mean I saw that transformation so dramatically in that one person that I’d heard about from a lot of people who had near death experiences told me about this transition. But that’s the first time or maybe the only time that I’ve ever really seen the before and after pictures as it were.
Jim:
Now since you brought up, go ahead Paul. And then I have a question about NDEs. Go ahead.
Paul Perry:
Yeah. I was involved several years ago in something called the transformation study, which was done in Seattle at several locations, several hospitals. And what we did was we looked at 400 plus people who had had near death experiences and compared them to people who had not had near death experiences and other aspects in their life as well. But it was 400 people who had had near death experiences and 400 who had not had them. Have we found that over the years, well, we found that people who have near death experiences are transformed in a number of ways. One is that they have a decrease in death anxiety. They’re really no longer afraid to die. They have a higher zest for living, which we defined as them being type A without the anger.
They have increase in learning, an increase in appreciation of learning. And many of them feel that during their near death experience, they had had a substantial amount of information kind of downloaded into them by the NDE, but for the most part, they couldn’t remember most of it. And so they became very hungry for education. And the really mystical side of this, if that wasn’t enough, is that they have an increase in psychic abilities. So on the average, near-death experiences have about four times as many verifiable psychic experiences as those who did not have a near-death experience. And so that’s a huge transformation, and we consider that a shared death experience because it’s something that came from a near death experience, but is obviously shared by people by virtue of the fact they can see that a person has been transformed like Raymond could see with the young lady. So that’s why we consider that a shared death experience.
Jim:
Very interesting to me, is this: the NDE. Why I believe in the NDE, and it’s not the only reason, but this is a major reason. You have all the naysayers out there who say, oh, well, it’s the throes of dying brain. It’s similar to the experience that astronauts have in the quote, vomit comet, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. But what I say to that, and you’re the foremost chronicler of it, Dr. Moody, these people who have these experiences and then they can report back things they couldn’t possibly know, whether it’s the activity of medical personnel, very specific things that they’d have no way of knowing. We had a guest on, and I’m blanking on his name, I always forget his name after, but he told about an experience where a man came back from an NDE and was describing the surgical procedure that was going on, and he said that one of the doctors was flapping his arms like a chicken, and it seemed like the most ludicrous thing. But it turned out that this surgeon had a habit after he had scrubbed up, rather than, to keep his hands sterile, he would point with his elbows to different instruments as he wanted them. So it would give him the appearance of flapping his arms like a chicken. The point being, I can’t think of a rational explanation for people having the ability to explain these things if they aren’t in some kind of transformational state where they have kind of almost all-knowing awareness. So to me, that alone is a big proof point for the NDE.
Dr. Raymond Moody:
It certainly just is. You can’t put it together is, and the only way you can put it together is by saying that they knew things they couldn’t possibly have known, which is, if you think about it, that’s a self contradiction. So what is going on here? See, it’s something we can’t even talk about according to the logic that we inherited from Aristotle because that’s based on non-contradiction. But what we have to say about people in that situation you describe is that they seem to know things they couldn’t possibly know and then we’re up against a wall.
Well, what follows from that? We don’t know. But it’s mystifying. And I guess the thing that has been more remarkable to me than that is just the utter depth you see in many of these people when they come back. The best person I ever knew in my life was Dr. George Reggie, who was a professor of psychiatry at University of Virginia when I was there as an undergraduate. And George had had this experience when he was in the army in World War II, and I knew George for, well since 1965 till he died. And I mean, I’m speechless again, but George was first of all very modest and unassuming, and yet he could do things that just didn’t make any sense. And when you lived in the community where he was, you heard these things from people all the time. Like the best known internist, internal medicine doctor in Charlottesville at that time who was a friend of ours, was also a friend of George’s.
And the internist told me one time, he said that one time, both he and George knew these two people, a man and a woman who did not know each other and they’d never met. And they were just two acquaintances of both George and the internal medicine doctor who had no knowledge of each other. And so he said, the internist told me, he said, and one night George was talking to me and he said, those two people belong to each other. They’re going to meet and fall in love and get married. And it happened. Just within the year it happened, and I could give you a dozen other things like that that George did that make no sense.
Jim:
Well, I do want to ask you about this one thing on NDE. And there’s so much more we could cover in this book, and that’s why people need to pick it up. But people worry about the negative NDE. And as I understand it, if I’m correct, it is a proportion, it is a smaller proportion. It’s not the majority of experiences. I think if I understand correctly, most experiences are on the whole positive. But what about negative near death experiences? I know there may be people who are afraid to die because of their, or what’s going to happen. I mean, I think most people have a fear of dying. I think if the truth is known, I know I do, I’ll admit it, but I think some people are very sensitive to that because of their religious upbringing and think they’re going to go to hell and stuff like that. So what would you say about negative near-death experiences?
Dr. Raymond Moody:
What I would say over the years, just, I don’t know how many, but not many, a small proportion, but what strikes me about them more than anything else is that they are highly veried. Whereas the near death experiences have a sort of homogeneity to them or very similar, the hellish ones or the unpleasant ones are spread out all over the place and a lot of differences. And I, it’s also that, just to tell you the truth, my root level opinion or feeling about the ones I’ve talked to is that the way they describe this experience was very much the way a patient describes a delirium. And so the ones I taught, I’m not making a general statement about all the people who’ve had near death experiences, I just don’t know. But in the ones that I saw it, when a patient who wakes up from a delirium describes it has a very surrealistic kind of air to it. And that was the impression I got that the bulk of the ones that I talked with who had hellish experiences, it was more like a delirium. Whereas the near death experiences a highly organized and coherent experience.
Paul Perry:
But there is a huge variety of hellish experiences. I mean, some are like Raymond described, but some kind of fit into that organized pattern of a near death experience. Like for instance, there’s one, we have a lot of doctors that we’ve quoted in this book. A lot of doctors have spoken to us, which has been rare in the past, but they’re now starting to get used to the notion that there are near death experiences and there are shared death experiences. So this one came from a doctor named Rajiv Parti, who was an anesthesiologist at Bakersfield Heart Hospital. He had a near death experience, and part of it was extremely unpleasant because he stood at the precipice of a hellish environment with his father who he did not get along with. His father had been very mean to him by his description when he was a young man.
And yet in this hellish environment, they worked out their differences and then went on to have a pleasant and organized near death experience. So I think sometimes a lot of people are passing through. You have a life review with the near death experience. A lot of people are passing through extremely negative aspects of their life. And what the near death experience does is it actually helps them. It’s like rapid therapy. It helps them work through that and make a different moral observation of it and they had originally. So there’s a lot of ways to look at the hellish experience.
Jim:
Well, we’ve only scratched the surface today. We could talk so much more with Dr. Raymond Moody and Paul Perry about life after life and specifically this new book, Proof of Life After Life, Seven Reasons to Believe There is an Afterlife, but I know they’re both busy men and we really appreciate the opportunity. Where can find this book and Dr. Moody more about your work and Paul as well?
Paul Perry:
Well, this book is called Proof of Life After Life. Raymond wrote a book in the seventies called Life After Life, but this is an extenuation of that book. This is like Life after Life part two. Okay, so it’s called Proof of Life After Life, Seven Reasons to Believe in The Afterlife. Big yellow book. And that’s available at Amazon, Barnes and Noble. And it should be available at any bookstore in your neighborhood.
Jim:
Well, I’ve just got to say it’s a privilege to speak with both of you on, again, is there a more important topic? I can’t think of it. Dr. Raymond Moody, go ahead.
Dr. Raymond Moody:
Think you’re right, Jim. This is the question on which all other questions are asked.
Jim:
That’s right. That’s right. Words of wisdom from the great Dr. Raymond, a Moody, Dr. Moody, Paul Perry, thank you for joining us today on the program.
Paul Perry:
Thank you very much, and everyone who’s listening, thank you.
Dr. Raymond Moody:
Yes, thanks so much, folks.
Jim:
Really enjoyed spending some time with Dr. Moody and Paul. What an insightful conversation and my little bit of insight is I hope you have a happy new year. I used to hate the New Year, loathed it because I think I love the holidays so much that I really got depressed, but now I really look forward to it because I do see it as a time to wipe the slate clean, new beginnings, new goals, new excitement, and hopefully we’ll have some new and exciting things here around the Spooky Studio for 2024. We thank you so much for tuning in for the last year. I hope you’ll stick with us next year and we’ll be back next week with a brand new show. We thank you so much. Have a great week everybody. And as always, stay safe, especially on New Year’s. And stay spooky. Bye-Bye.
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