Speaker 1: Now here's a highlight from Coast to Coast AM on iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2: And welcome back to Coast to Coast. We're back with
Speaker 2: Raymond Moody and Paul Perry. Their book is called Proof
Speaker 2: of Life After Life. Raymond and Paul, let's go into
Speaker 2: these seven reasons to believe there is an afterlife? And Raymond,
Speaker 2: how did you and Paul come up with seven?
Speaker 3: Not eight? Not ten?
Speaker 4: Well? Okay, over the years. As I mentioned, we've worked
Speaker 4: together for about thirty three years now, and we would
Speaker 4: collect shared death experiences that we heard and after a while,
Speaker 4: you get a bunch together and you want to categorize them,
Speaker 4: and we ended up categorizing them into these seven reasons
Speaker 4: to believe in the afterlife. And it's because these reasons
Speaker 4: fit best with each of the shared death experiences we
Speaker 4: decided to put into those. I also want to point
Speaker 4: out that what really triggered this book. I mean, we've
Speaker 4: been collecting and shared death experiences for years, but what
Speaker 4: really triggered it was that both Raymond and I had
Speaker 4: a shared death experience.
Speaker 3: Well, that's fascinating. What was yours about?
Speaker 5: Paul?
Speaker 1: What happened?
Speaker 3: I was.
Speaker 4: Several years ago, I was working on a book with
Speaker 4: the head of neuropharmacology University of Washington, Vernon Neppie, and
Speaker 4: it was a book on deja vu, and we worked
Speaker 4: on it for a long period of time. We did
Speaker 4: a proposal on it. We couldn't sell the book, so
Speaker 4: we kind of stopped working on books. And I had
Speaker 4: nothing to do with Vernon for like five years. I
Speaker 4: hadn't talked to him or written to it at all,
Speaker 4: and the same with him anyway. At this point, my
Speaker 4: mother had Alzheimer's and she was dying from Alzheimer's. And
Speaker 4: one day I got a call from Vernon Neppie and
Speaker 4: Vernon said, said, you know, I was sitting here. It
Speaker 4: was on a Sunday, he said, I was sitting here
Speaker 4: reading the paper and I heard a female voice say,
Speaker 4: call Paul Perry, and I ignored it. And about an
Speaker 4: hour later, I was into the sports section and I
Speaker 4: heard a female voice again say call Paul Perry. So
Speaker 4: that's what I'm doing. I'm calling you and I don't
Speaker 4: know why. And I said, well, my mother's dying from Alzheimer's.
Speaker 4: And he was really the perfect person to talk about
Speaker 4: that because he was a neuropharmacologist so we spent quite
Speaker 4: a bit of time talking about different tears that he
Speaker 4: had attempted. He had attempted on people who had Alzheimer's.
Speaker 4: And in the course of had that conversation, this was
Speaker 4: before iPhones, there was that buzzing, you know, on the line,
Speaker 4: telling me that someone was trying to give me a call.
Speaker 4: So I said, Verne, I'll call you back later. I
Speaker 4: answered that phone and it was the care facility telling
Speaker 4: that my mother had died. And that fit very well
Speaker 4: into the category of a shared death experience, because somehow
Speaker 4: my mother, I think, had contacted Vernon and when it
Speaker 4: felt that Vernon was the perfect person to talk about
Speaker 4: what was going on with her, and that's how this
Speaker 4: conversation ensued.
Speaker 3: And Merriman, how about your shared death experience?
Speaker 5: Well, similarly, I had been studying these things for a
Speaker 5: long period of time, and just as Paul and I
Speaker 5: were getting ready to write a book on it, incredibly
Speaker 5: my mother suddenly she was found to have non Hodgkins
Speaker 5: slim foma and we all were there and as she
Speaker 5: was passing away, George, I mean, you know, people that
Speaker 5: go through this, there are no words. Really, the closest
Speaker 5: I can get to it is to say that first
Speaker 5: thing I noticed was the the room was no longer
Speaker 5: three dimensional. It was kind of I felt like we
Speaker 5: were in a kind of double funnel. And light of this,
Speaker 5: a very unusual character filled the room, and it was
Speaker 5: full of energy. It wasn't it wasn't like vertigo was
Speaker 5: things spinning around, but there was energy there that seemed
Speaker 5: to be revving up. And my mother had been for
Speaker 5: several days of pundit. We weren't getting anything from us.
Speaker 5: But just as she was passing away, she rallied and
Speaker 5: I heard her voice twice say I love you, But George.
Speaker 5: The voice I didn't hear it through my ears, I know,
Speaker 5: but it was very insistent, and twice I heard her,
Speaker 5: but it wasn't coming from her voice, but I heard her. Meanwhile,
Speaker 5: my sister felt the presence of my father, who had
Speaker 5: died eighteen months ago, eighteen months before. My wife experienced something.
Speaker 5: My brother in law felt things. And you know, as
Speaker 5: you know, I'm driven in my life by curiosity, and
Speaker 5: sure what that happened. We were kind of ready to
Speaker 5: do that book, but when it happened to me, it
Speaker 5: put me off on another I was trying to process
Speaker 5: my own experience rather than to learn about others. But
Speaker 5: after a while that settled down and we got busy
Speaker 5: on it, and we went ahead and finished the book.
Speaker 3: That's fantastic. Now your first reason, of course, for proof
Speaker 3: of reasons to believe there's an afterlife out of body experiences.
Speaker 3: That alone should convince people it's real, right.
Speaker 4: Well, there's an addition to that, and that is that
Speaker 4: people have near death experiences. About fifty percent of them
Speaker 4: have out of body experiences, but a certain number of
Speaker 4: them have a shared death experience, and that would be
Speaker 4: an example of that would be that if a person
Speaker 4: is lying on operating table from a cardiac arrest, yet
Speaker 4: later on when they're brought back, they can recount conversations
Speaker 4: in the hospital waiting room. For instance, They're able to
Speaker 4: convey accurate information about what the doctors were doing and
Speaker 4: what they were saying, and the instruments they were using.
Speaker 4: That's a shared death experience because it shows that somehow
Speaker 4: consciousness has separated from the body, and for all intents
Speaker 4: and purposes, a person who has a cardiac arrest is dead.
Speaker 4: So this shows once again that consciousness survives bodily death.
Speaker 3: Precognitive events, of course, is important as reason too, right.
Speaker 5: So yeah, yeah, and you know I I saw in
Speaker 5: my practice, of course, you know, dude, to my interest,
Speaker 5: I was the one always appointed to talk to the
Speaker 5: terminally ill patients, right. It was a big part of
Speaker 5: my medical practice for a long time. And I quickly
Speaker 5: realized under that circumstance that it's and I know, any
Speaker 5: doctor who has had a lot to do with the mental,
Speaker 5: with the you know, the terminally ill, will tell you
Speaker 5: the same thing that they seem to know in some
Speaker 5: extraordinary way when they're gonna die. I saw this so
Speaker 5: many times, and and the same thing about medical practice
Speaker 5: in a way, so it's unreally, it's relentless, right, so
Speaker 5: you don't have time to process all these amazing things
Speaker 5: you're seeing. But it does occur. People know in some
Speaker 5: way that I can't figure out when they're gonna die.
Speaker 5: When I was back in nineteen seventy, George, my wife
Speaker 5: was pregnant and this was my first child, and we
Speaker 5: both woke up in the middle of the night with
Speaker 5: the same drink that we were losing the baby. And
Speaker 5: she was seeing it from her perspective and I was
Speaker 5: seeing it from my in my perspective when we got
Speaker 5: to the er, I saw the obstetrician with his back
Speaker 5: to me, and I remember to this day it's like
Speaker 5: the khaki pants and the plaid shirt and the tawny
Speaker 5: colored long hair. Well, the trouble was the I had
Speaker 5: only seen there was a It was a group of
Speaker 5: three obstetricians. I had only met one. But this night,
Speaker 5: that the night we had the dream. Then the next night,
Speaker 5: twenty four hours later, it happened just as we dreamed it.
Speaker 5: And when we went to the er, I saw that
Speaker 5: doctor that I had never seen before, and he was
Speaker 5: exactly like I'd seen in the dreaming. And the reason
Speaker 5: I'm telling this is not to be autobiographical, but you
Speaker 5: know a lot of folks listening in will say, yeah,
Speaker 5: me too. This is in a way that I can't understand.
Speaker 5: The time since is mixed up during the dying process,
Speaker 5: and I just you know, I saw this all the time.
Speaker 3: Transforming the light. What is that?
Speaker 4: Well, it's an observation that people can make about someone
Speaker 4: who's had in your death experience, And the observation is
Speaker 4: is that they've they've they are able to share with
Speaker 4: all of us around them that they're personnel. The has
Speaker 4: changed greatly. We called it the Scrooge effect because it's
Speaker 4: very much like what happened with Ebenezer Scrooge and the
Speaker 4: Christmas Carol when he saw the ghost of Marley, his
Speaker 4: business partner. All around him has changed and everything it
Speaker 4: transformed him completely, Scooge and these there you go, and
Speaker 4: these transformative effects and near death experiences can be documented.
Speaker 4: So there's several studies that have documented them, and what
Speaker 4: they say is that through near death experiences. Number one,
Speaker 4: there's a great decrease in death anxiety with people who
Speaker 4: have had a near death experience. But people who have
Speaker 4: near death experiences also have a tendency to have a
Speaker 4: higher zest for living, and that's defined as the subject
Speaker 4: is type A without the anger. They're very aggressively living life.
Speaker 4: And another thing that is very supernatural is that the
Speaker 4: people who have had near death experiences have at least
Speaker 4: four times the number of verifiable psychic experiences as people
Speaker 4: around them. So verifiable psychic experience would be that you
Speaker 4: have a dream the night before you're going to take
Speaker 4: a plane flight somewhere that the plane is crashed. Yeah,
Speaker 4: you get up in the morning, you tell your spouse
Speaker 4: that the plane you had this dream and in fact
Speaker 4: then there is a plane crash and you're not on it.
Speaker 4: That's how dramatic they can be.
Speaker 2: How many people don't react to their inner feelings like
Speaker 2: that and would have gone on the plane.
Speaker 4: You mean, well, there is that angle too, is that
Speaker 4: there's a greater there's a greater increase in increase of
Speaker 4: intuition among people have near death experiences. And that's that's
Speaker 4: shared because it's highly visible.
Speaker 5: Yeah, George, and all my career, I have only known
Speaker 5: one person both before and after their near death experience.
Speaker 5: And this only in nineteen eighty. I was on a
Speaker 5: hematology service in my medical training. I was a resident
Speaker 5: and we had this patient and who was a lovely
Speaker 5: young woman, and she was pregnant and she was having
Speaker 5: platelet difficulties. So the object of the hematologist treatment was
Speaker 5: to try to get the platelet count back up before
Speaker 5: she delivered. Well, anyway, I got to know this fine
Speaker 5: young woman, and I want to emphasize that, just a
Speaker 5: delightful person. Okay, Now, then I left that unit. That
Speaker 5: was my service in that unit was over before she
Speaker 5: had her baby. Now flashed forward three years. I was
Speaker 5: sitting in the cafeteria at the hospital. In the middle
Speaker 5: of the night, I was on call for psychiatry and George,
Speaker 5: I mean, you know, I don't have the words. This
Speaker 5: apparition quoated in. I mean, this young woman and she
Speaker 5: was very then she seemed full of light for one
Speaker 5: of the better term, very light on her feet. And
Speaker 5: she sat down and she said, doctor Moody, you don't
Speaker 5: remember me, but she said, three years ago I was
Speaker 5: and it was this very young woman. And she told
Speaker 5: me that after I had left, she did deliver the
Speaker 5: baby and she almost bled out during the delivery and
Speaker 5: had a cardiac arrest in a near death experience. And
Speaker 5: she said that when she tried to tell the nurse,
Speaker 5: they said, oh, that doctor Moody, he was here a
Speaker 5: few weeks ago. He studies this. So there in the
Speaker 5: middle of the night, this woman floated in. She had
Speaker 5: she had done her nursing studies, she has been a nurse.
Speaker 5: But the transformation I saw in that person, I mean,
Speaker 5: I just can't describe it. It was like a transfiguration
Speaker 5: is not a is not an exaggeration. It was one
Speaker 5: of the most startling things I have experienced during my residency.
Speaker 5: To see the physical transformation even in this young woman.
Speaker 5: I mean it was and not only she was, as
Speaker 5: I said, very nice person, but the depth after her
Speaker 5: her experience was what impressed me. I mean, I just
Speaker 5: really don't have the words to describe it, but I
Speaker 5: know that these transformations of people, as I'm sure you've
Speaker 5: noticed too, when of the people you've talked through in
Speaker 5: the really profound.
Speaker 2: Scientists have still yet to be able to explain the
Speaker 2: Big Bang theory, how the universe started and all that,
Speaker 2: Yet you two seem to have a pretty good handle
Speaker 2: on the afterlife.
Speaker 3: Why is that?
Speaker 5: What I say is, you know, I know enough from
Speaker 5: having taught to thousands of people that you can't really
Speaker 5: imagine it right. And everybody says, no matter how articulate,
Speaker 5: no matter how many languages they speak, no matter how
Speaker 5: many degrees they have, they said, I just can't describe
Speaker 5: it to you. There are no words. So there is
Speaker 5: that limitation. However, I had numerous cases over the years
Speaker 5: where people have told me that they had previously read
Speaker 5: accounts of near death experiences, then subsequently had their own
Speaker 5: near death experience, and while they were having their near
Speaker 5: death experience, were able to recognize what it was from
Speaker 5: what they had read.
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