This is a documentary transcription of “Scientific Evidence of the Afterlife,” with Dr. Raymond Moody from Youtube.com. Understanding more about the afterlife can help us heal from grief of loss of another individual and grief surrounding our own mortality.

“I’m Raymond Moody. And these are my thoughts on near-death experiences. Near-death experiences are a common pattern of conscious experience that occurs to people who are on the verge of death.

For example, in a cardiac arrest from which they are resuscitated. And basically they consist of elements that are common all over the world. Not every person has all of the elements. But among the things that people say are that they hear the doctors say something like, oh my god, he’s dead– or we’ve lost her.

Which is very surprising to them, because they say that I have never felt so alive as when I heard that doctor say I was dead. Because from their point of view, they feel that they distance themselves from their physical body.

And they watch the scene of the resuscitation typically from a point of view above it. As this progresses, they eventually wake up to the fact that, oh, this must be something to do with death. And at that point, they enter into states of consciousness that no matter how articulate they may be, they say there are no words for it.

That it’s ineffable, or indescribable. They go through a passageway into a beautiful light. They feel comfort, peace, and joy. They meet relatives and friends of theirs who have died. And they go through panoramic memory, in which everything they’ve ever done is displayed around them in a sort of holographic, three-dimensional panorama.

And they come back from these experiences with a total new take on life, thinking that the most important thing we can do while we’re here is to learn how to love, and saying that they have no more fear of death, because they feel that death is just a transition into some other reality.

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Not everybody who comes close to physical death has a near-death experience in the interim. And it’s very difficult to get an estimate of what percentage of people do. Because somewhere between 20% and maybe 50% to 60% of people who come close to death have a near-death experience.

But not everybody reports it. And also, we have no idea why some do and some don’t. For example, some ideas that you might have naturally, like it’s the religious basis, right? However, religious people do, and religious people don’t have near-death experiences.

Or people who say that they had absolutely no exposure to religion prior to a cardiac arrest may have an experience. So it doesn’t seem to have anything to do with the age of the patient. And it doesn’t have anything to do with the illness or injury that brought somebody to near death.

So we really don’t know why some do and some don’t. One of the more puzzling features of near-death experiences is that it happens fairly regularly that while they are out of their body in the hospital, the patients will tell us that they go to some other part of the hospital or maybe even some place outside of the hospital entirely and are able accurately to report what happened.

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For example, I had this wonderful friend, Vi Horton, who had a cardiac arrest during surgery for a gallbladder and had a cardiac arrest that lasted 20 minutes, according to her doctor. Now, when Vi was out of her body, she was going out in the hall in the hospital.

And in an area of the hospital, she saw her brother-in-law, who was standing there alone. And as she was watching him, a friend of the brother-in-law came up and said, what are you doing here? And her brother-in-law said, well, I was going to Athens today to see Uncle Henry.

But it looks like Vi is going to kick the bucket. So I’m staying around to be a pallbearer at her funeral. Several days later, when her brother-in-law came to the hospital to visit her after she was revived, Vi said to him, well, the next time I die, I want you to go on to Athens to see Uncle Henry because I will be fine.

And I interviewed that brother-in-law at depth about that. And he said that totally changed his life. Now, this is a fairly common thing that patients will tell us these things, seeing things about the resuscitation scene that they shouldn’t have been able to see.

The difficulty is how in the world do you establish that? There have been these schemes of let’s put things up on the shelf above in a resuscitation room, so that if the patient happened to be out of their body, and they could report this, then we would know.

But you see, I am both a medical doctor and a philosophy professor. And some of the things that I hear coming out of medical doctors’ mouths about thinking through things like this are extraordinary to me, because there are enormous difficulties in that kind of approach.

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I have even heard some people say that we could prove life after death if we could get a few of these verifications from a distance. But the trouble is that that in no means would show that there is a life after death, because it wouldn’t prove that after the body was finally irreversibly dead that this could occur.

And also because near-death experiences of a transcendent nature occur in some dimension of reality that is totally displaced from this physical realm that we’re in. So you couldn’t prove the existence of a transcendent life after death by proving that somebody saw something while they were out of their body here.

But I’m not trying to say these aren’t impressive. I mean, I do feel that they occur. The next step is, well, how do we know? And that is a very difficult thing to establish. So what I would say in answer to the what is it that leaves your body at the point of death? It is the “I” that is the subject of your story.

Because as soon as you’re out of your body, you’re out of this story. And I had a famous actress, Broadway actress, that I knew who had had this experience. And she had had a role on Broadway that she played for a long period of time.

And she became identified with the role. And she said the last night she walked off the stage and she was leaving that role behind, she said then flash forward to her near-death experience. And she said that was as close as she could get to a description of it.

It’s like that getting out of your body is just getting out of this role that you’re in and headed towards some other role. But in some cases you get pulled back into the same role. And people say that it is very difficult to describe what is that transformation of identity that takes place when you go from this realm of existence, which is time and space, to a state of existence that is not based on temporal or spatial features.

But rather, the closest people can get to it is they say it’s like information and love, that everything is either information or love. And that whereas in this world, in order to get a piece of information I might have to go to a computer or a book, that in that dimension, apparently just to formulate the thought that you want to know something zaps it into your purview.

Consciousness is about as far down on the word scale as you can get in terms of getting a definition of it, right? Consciousness is narrative-directed. That is, in your life, when some new event takes place in your life that you’re conscious of, what you do is you weave it into your longer life story.

When you get out of your body into this other realm, you still at that point still have some contact with this culture that you’re in and the narrative that you’re in. But what I want to know is, what about when you get into a timeless, faceless existence? Because a narrative necessarily involves the notion of time and space.

If there’s no time and space, how could you continue anything like the kind of conscious existence we have now? And I just really have to say, I’m baffled, and I don’t know. But what I am really impressed by is people that I’ve talked with who’ve had these experiences, they say they still exist.

They’re still themselves. And yet, there’s no time and no space. And I don’t know how to put that together yet. Near-death experiences affect people very profoundly. And they have certain kinds of predictable effects.

The most dramatic one is that whatever they are chasing in life– and I have spent my life chasing knowledge. Some people spend their life chasing power or money or fame or any of these other things. But it’s striking to me that whatever they have been chasing in life, when people come back from this experience, they say that what this is all about is learning to love.

And they say that is what comes forward in your life review. Now, I also immediately want to say that they say also that it doesn’t make that any easier. My friend George Ritchie, the first living person I ever knew who had had this experience, said, Raymond, this experience makes your humanity, even more of a burden in a way.

And to translate George’s words into my vernacular, because I’ve heard this from a lot of people, what he was saying is, let’s face, it’s very difficult to get through the average day without wanting to choke at least one other person, right? And that reality stays the same.

So they come back realizing the importance of the quest to learn to love and yet still find themselves in a human situation. So that’s one after effect. The other after effect is people say that it eliminates the fear of death.

Not that they would want to die in a painful or unpleasant way, but from their experience, they interpret death as a transition into some other and more desirable realm of existence. So they have no more fear of death.

Now, another after effect, which is much rarer, but there are lots of cases of it, because there are lots of people with near-death experiences, but it is inspiration to artistic creativity. For example, in upstate New York at NYU is Dr.

Anthony Cicoria, who is PhD in physiology, and an M.D., and an esteemed professor of orthopedic surgery. And in 1996, Anthony, at a family reunion was struck in the neck by a bolt of lightning in a telephone booth and had a cardiac arrest, and got out of his body, went around and was able to accurately report to the people in the family reunion what they were doing while he was out of his body.

But after he came back from this, developed an interest in the piano, which he had never had before, and kept having a recurrent dream in which he was playing the same piece of music on a concert stage.

And then a friend of his just one day came by and said, I’m going out of town for a year, and I need somebody to take care of my piano. Would you do it? He said, well, OK. So he started taking piano lessons.

And now, in addition to being an esteemed professor of orthopedic surgery, Anthony is an acclaimed concert pianist. I’ve interviewed quite a number of people over the years who, after their near-death experience, had some new talent that they didn’t know about.

And the most common one is people say it makes them more perceptive about other people. I remember this woman named Frances Stokes who was a receptionist for one of my dad’s medical friends, who told me about her near-death experience when she was 11.

And she said after that she has this, not like a psychic thing, but this ability. She said, for example, when she steps on an elevator with somebody, that she can sort of feel their being and maybe feel some of their pain or something or what’s going on with them.

And I hear that a lot. I think that creativity is a part of us that has to do with some other realm of existence. That is definitely how it feels to me. So I think creativity, I can easily imagine why that would be something that would be stirred up by a near-death experience.

There is one inference you can make from near-death experiences with complete certainty that is astonishing. And it has to do with this life review. Because people say at a certain point that the physical environment kind of disappears, and everything that they’ve ever done is surrounding them in a sort of holographic panorama.

And that there is no time, that they’re in a standstill. No time, and everything they’ve ever done is there around them. And when they witness it, they don’t review it through the eyes they had when they did the action.

Rather, they are embedded empathically in the consciousness of the person with whom you interacted. So in this review, if you’ve done something hurtful to somebody, then you are that person and you feel directly and empathically the sadness you brought about in that person’s life.

Or if you did something kindhearted to someone, then you feel the good feelings. Now, knowing that, we can make an inference from that that is really quite startling. And that is that at least for some of us, life is a two-phase process, right? First, we go through it forward as the actor, or protagonist.

Then time stands still. There’s a 180-degree turnaround. And you witness the same actions from the point of view of the other characters. Now to me, this is extraordinary in itself, that we can know for sure that at least for some of us, life is a two-phase process.

Now, beyond that, what happens is that somebody who comes back from that, therefore, are they in a third phase of life? Well, the Ancient Greek Philosopher Heraclitus said they were, because he talked about these people who had been apparently dead and returned.

And what he said about them was that these people are appointed to watch over the living and the dead. And that is often the feeling that I get from these people with near-death experiences, that they’re kind of one foot in this world and one foot in someplace else.

And so how did they get back from this? Well, the story varies. Some people say they have no idea. At one moment, they were in this light and then this state of heightened consciousness. The next moment, they were back in their bodies with no sense of transition.

Then another group of people say that somebody there told them you have to go back– it could be a dead relative; it could be this being of complete compassion that they’re with– that you have to go back.

And they say, I don’t want to go back. But they’re forced to go back. Because they said, you’re not finished yet. Very frustrating for them is the fact that they never are told why it is that they have to go back.

They are not told what they have to finish. In the passage of time, they often say, I can see now why I was sent back. But I didn’t have access to it at that time. A third group are people who are given a choice.

They say that they were told, you can either go on with the experience you’re having, or you can go back to the life you’ve been leading. And not too surprising– all the ones I’ve talked with who, you know, chose to come back– but the reason they give is phenomenal.

And that is in almost every case, it is that they come back on behalf of somebody else. They say that, for myself, I wanted to stay. But I chose to go back. And most commonly, it’s because they have young children left to raise or some other loved one that they feel that they need to take care of.

It’s a really interesting thing when people see their relatives who have died. I mean, this creates all sorts of paradoxes. One is, for example, they say that they don’t see them at any particular age.

They say that it’s that you recognize that that is the person who was Aunt Matilda or whoever. But it’s not like you see a physical presence. And nonetheless, it has a kind of geometry, like a form, and that you recognize from the feelings and the memories who this is, despite the fact that there’s no physicality to it.

Let’s say that, as many think, after a near-death experience, there is reincarnation. So what sense does it make that Aunt Matilda may be reincarnated somewhere in Nebraska, but that she is appearing to me in my near-death experience as Aunt Matilda? What is going on? Well, these contradictions do sort of vanish, however, if you think about the fact that this is a timeless framework of existence.

The reason why there appears to be a contradiction between saying that my aunt appeared to me in a near-death experience and is nonetheless reincarnated at that time– that is only contradictory if you’re assuming that there is such a thing as time.

And one of the neat things about being in my age, which is 74 now, is you realize there is no such thing as time. I mean, I had figured that one out as a philosophy undergraduate. But here, it really becomes an item of immediate personal experience at a certain age.

So time is just part of the framework of this thing that we’re in. It does not really have an independent existence apart from the physical dimension. And people in near-death experiences say that the state of consciousness they are in doesn’t have a time component.

People regularly tell you that they chose to come back, that they were given a choice to come back or not. And they chose to come back. And so that raises some interesting anomalies for the medical profession.

Like you spend all of this time in your education, and you spent all this hour trying to revive the person, and then the person comes back and says, oh, I chose to come back. Well how do you fit these two things together? And a matter of fact, I would go on to say that they don’t have a clear solution, as long as we stay within the framework of Aristotelian logic, that we’ve got to learn how to think logically about things that are beyond the literal and don’t make any literal sense.

To me, the most interesting single aspect of the near-death experience is the life review, that somebody could go through experience and see everything they’d every done and review it from the point of view of the other people involved, and that no time passed, and that it totally changed their lives.

That, to me, is just phenomenal. Negative experiences occur. And they are much smaller in number. The Gallup poll that was done on this in 1979, is I remember the 3, but I can’t remember if there was a point in front of it.

But it’s either 0.3% or 3% of the experiences they gathered were negative. And that coincides very nicely with my experience with this. Now, there are all kinds of questions that come up with this. Number one is, is this an under-reporting problem? I mean, personally I would be very reluctant to say, you know, Doc, when I died, I went to hell.

So maybe not as many people report that. And then another difficulty with it is that, whereas the positive near-death experiences seem more homogeneous, the negative ones are spread out all over the place.

There doesn’t seem to be an internal coherence to them. And there are three major categories of negative ones. One, in which it starts just like any other near-death experience– all the same things– except rather than feeling it to be a good thing, that people experience it dysphorically.

But then as it proceeds, then it changes into a positive near-death experience. Another type in which there are hellish visions and flames. And those seem to be the rarest of all. I talked to an elderly man who had been riding on the back of a wagon when he was a kid.

And he fell and had some sort of horrible head injury. And he had visions. He said it was like there were these puffs of flame jumping up all around him. But it was just very vague, you know, and not anything very specific.

The ones that I’ve heard are just very patchy like that. It’s not like anything. Kind of like what I would call a delirium, where the images may be very vivid. But they don’t really fit together very well.

I’ve talked to lots of people with near-death experiences because of suicide attempts. And the common factor is that they say that they would never attempt it again. And when I asked them why, they say it’s not because they felt that they would end up in any sort of hell or anything.

But rather, that just as with any other thing you’ve done in your life, that you would have to witness the after effects of your action on your loved ones who were left behind. And also people saying– and in fact, a couple of people have used the same analogy– that it was kind of like walking out in the middle of the movie.

That if it had completed, that the sadness would have been that they would never have known how that particular life would have played out. People who go through a near-death experience definitely don’t come back with the idea of the Old Testament God and the raging and the fury and so on.

People describe a being of complete compassion and love. Some years ago, I went to China and then to India a year or so later. And in both cases, I was expecting to hear something different. But what I was astonished by was that I heard the same thing in India, for example, with the Hinduism, as I hear in the United States from people who are Jewish or Christian or whatever.

So I think that the religion aspect of it really doesn’t factor into it. Except that people will say– they say, since there are no words, then I’m forced to use the words from my tradition. But it’s not like that it’s the words don’t really have that sense they do in their religion.

And people say that after this they have no more interest in denominations or that there is more of a personal relationship with God, rather than an ideological religion that comes to the fore with this.

Culture may play a role in the articulation of the experience. But it usually comes with the admission that it’s not adequate, that it’s just the only ones available to them. So where you’re from doesn’t matter.

It’s like being a human being is pretty much the same all over. And not to degrade cultural things, which are wonderful, but we are still just these basic beings. I definitely think that near-death experiences do transcend culture.

All over the world, there’s this collective story of leaving one’s body and going on a sort of trip. Like it’s basically a travel narrative, if you think about it, like a journey to another world. But there’s a very strange paradox involved in that.

And that is that we all know the meaning of a travel story. We all love travel stories. But doesn’t the travel story depend for its meaning on space and time? So there’s a very real disconnect there. That’s kind of the situation we are in with near-death experiences, because the story is very moving.

I got out of my body. I went through a tunnel into a light. I came back to my body and returned to life. That’s a travel narrative. But the whole presupposition is that it’s not spatial or temporal. The question that obviously arises is what relationship do these near-death experiences have to the experiences people have under DMT or various kinds of psychedelic agents and so on? One very interesting thing about those compounds is that they exist in relationships to human beings.

And so it would make a certain amount of sense that we would seek things in the environment that would reproduce this amazing experience that we have. I am completely confident in saying, yeah, the physical world is an illusion.

And it makes me sound psychotic, and that’s all right. Because if they haul me away to a mental hospital, that’s an illusion too, and maybe a very interesting one, right? I mean, we’re not putting the world down by saying that it’s illusory.

To me, it just gradually dawned on me– and after talking with thousands and thousands of people– that this is a reality. For years, I just didn’t know. I mean, I accepted perfectly that the people were telling me the truth, that they were being sincere.

And I also knew that it had nothing to do with oxygen deprivation to the brain, because one of my own medical school professors told me about having this experience when she was resuscitating her mother.

So this is an illusory narrative-driven thing we’re in. And where I have come in my thinking about it is that apparently we finish this one story, and then we go through some incomprehensible process, and then, I gather, we’re back on another storyline.

Well, I’ve never had an interest in convincing anybody else that there’s an afterlife. But in terms of what I think, I’m in. I mean, to my utter surprise, there is a life after death. And what I would advise people on the basis of that is slow down a little bit and enjoy life, because this is a really unique and interesting experience.

You’re going to get out of it alive. And you’re going to have some really interesting things to review in your life. So don’t be afraid of death. It’s not anything to be scared of. But stay here as long as your sentence is.

Because when you get out of here, it will make sense.

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