Episode 151: Dr. Raymond Moody & Paul Perry on ‘Proof of Life After Life’

Each episode, we'll discuss the reasons we now know that our loved ones have survived physical debt, and so will we. Welcome to Shades of the Afterlife. I had an extraordinary opportunity this past week. I got to interview the great doctor Raymond Moody and co author Paul Perry on a brand new book, and depending on when you're listening, it may already be out. The book is titled Proof of Life After Life, Seven Reasons to Believe there is an Afterlife.

The entire recording is well over an hour, so if you would like to watch the full video interview, just go to We Don't Die dot com and click on the radio show page. Today, I want to include some of the clips from that magnificent convertation and read to you a little bit about what's in the book. They were kind enough to send me a copy before it gets out to the public. This is one of those interviews that I actually learned some new things about life

after death, and I think you will too. So let me tell you about the guys you are going to hear from. First of all, doctor Raymond Moody and Paul Perry are both longtime friends, both New York Times bestselling authors with fifty years of investigating life after death. Doctor Raymond Moody is the leading authority on the near death experience,

a phrase he coined back in the late seventies. His groundbreaking work Life After Life completely changed the way we viewed death and dying and has sold more than thirteen million copies. Paul Perry is the co author of five New York Times Best line including The Light Beyond with Doctor Moody, Saved by the Light with Daniel Brinkley, and

Evidence of the Afterlife with doctor Jeffrey Long. He has co written a dozen books on near death experiences, four of them with doctor Moody, and directed two popular documentary films on the subject. You can visit doctor Moody's website at Life Afterlife dot com, and you can see all that Paul Perry has done at Paul Perryproductions dot com. So today we'll be talking about their book Proof of Life after Life, Seven Reasons to Believe there is an Afterlife.

I first asked these two gentlemen how they met each other.

he named the near death experience and defined it. And I said, I don't know what a near death experience is. And so nat our agent says, is an abrupt guy. And he says, I can't believe it. You're editing a major health magazine. You're not smart enough to know what a near death experience is. You need to go meet Raymond Moody and study this whole field. And so that's what I did. I went to Atlanta. Raymond was living in Carrollton at the time, Georgia, and we talked about

the book The Light Beyond. We hit it off right away, and one thing leads to another, and since now we've written this is our sixth book together. Proof of Life After Life is our sixth book. And one book always leads to a question, and the question that needs to be answered. And so that's what we do. We'll write a book and all of a sudden, they'll be with the light beyond. It was, see, there's nothing in this

book about children and near death experiences. And Raymond said, well, you know, there's not much research being done on it. But he directed me to Melvin Morris and Seattle and I went to see Melvin and we wrote. We wrote four books on children and Near death Experiences and other aspects of the near death experience, and three of those were New York Times bestsellers. And then it would go

on and on. We'd have question after question, book after book, and that's what we did from that point to now is answer these questions.

a bestseller for you, right. So what I'm getting at is This is not most people's fair, but it's how I got interested in this from Plato studied this, and the early Greek philosophers knew about these things. That's how I found about it. Long But you know, a philosopher is going to be the right person to present some of this information to the average person, I think, and so I tend to talk in abstractions and put the

information in that context. Whereas Paul could say, hey, just a minute here, professor, you know that doesn't make any sense to what And together we come up with the way I think to present information that is sometimes very you know, complex, hopefully in a way that people will't relate to it and benefit from it.

side of life. When they reach a certain age, say fifties, sixties, seventies, they begin to wake up to this question of life after death, which has been put aside or thought of as trivial or you know, it doesn't have or and then they just automatically wake up to it. By the way, that reason I found out about that at age eighteen was I read it at my hero Plato, my first

philosophy class in September of sixty two. Reading the first few pages of Plato's Republic, I decided then there to shift from astronomy, which is why I went there to study immediately to philosophy. Because this why is Plato's work still in print at any store twenty three hundred years People shouldn't ask themselves that well, number one, because it is amazing, terrific stuff, and this Republic is about, in

the end, a near death experience. It starts with this old guy who's been very successful in life, he says, and Socrates is then about twenty meets the old guy says, you know, Kevalos, what's it like from your point of view? Oh, Kevlo says, I've been very successful when my business made a lot of money. I've spent all time on my business, and now here I am. I saw all those stories I heard about about the afterlife when I was a kid, coming back in these people developed a sense of urgency.

Then in a later Plato dialogue I read that same semester he talked about the importance of this question of life after death. So that's how I got into this, and it's it came from Greek philosophy, where it was a big point of study. And yet of course all the other things too that people are concerned about. Because after I got my PhD in philosophy, I was a philosophy professor. I went into psychiatry, with my specific interest in it being why people kill people from a law

enforcement family, wrote in a cop card. When I was a kid, I mean my brother a shaf, my two uncles, Chieficale, two cousins. I mean my dad worked for the DEA as a surgeon for this drug stuff, and you see how it is, you know. So to me, this big question, which I studied from early on is why in the world would somebody kill somebody? So I studied that in psychiatry, and that worked in a unit for the criminally in saying it was full of these people that you read

about in the National Enquirer was my daily work. And so through all of this I have developed I think a great piece in one respect with respect to the question of life after death, and not through a logical process exactly, because there's great logical difficulties in trying to prove an after life, but thinking it through myself, I just give up, you know. To me it looks like, yeah, there's a life after death, as counterintuitive is it still seems to me, and having no template from it, but

always debating with myself about it. It's this thing about oxygen deprivation to the brain. I'm sorry, that's beloney, But people have the same experience identically who are not themselves ill or injured are going through our resuscitation, but rather who are there in the presence of somebody who is dying.

Shades of the Afterlife. I'm Sandra Champlain and we're listening to Paul Perry and the world famous doctor Raymond Moody talking about their brand new book, Proof of Life After Life, Seven Reasons to Believe there is an afterlife, and I'll give you a little sneak preview. Their reasons are all in the realm of this shared death experience. So let's listen to doctor Moody talk about the shared death experience.

with light. And most strikingly to me that in many cases I've studied over the years, the by then at the death of someone else that as the person's dying will themselves empathically co participate in the dying life review of the person there. And this to me is startling information and it makes me trying to come up with some reason that I could get myself recused from my life review, because you know, the idea of his self

is enough to scare to worry about. But you know, the idea of having a spectator there these people past the popcorn. But it happens. It happens not just to people as I would have thought, who are intimate and know the person well. But in one case, a medical doctors don't of sin is dying patients life review, who had never even laid his eyes on the patient force just called to the er.

real than this ordinary reality. And you know the incredible things that happen if you know the story probably of Anthony Chikori and PhD in physiology in the professor of orthopedic surgery at NYU, who had a profound death experience and was struck in that had by a bolt of lightning, had a cardiac rest and was it a family reunion, was able to look all in, saw his relatives who were there at the reunion at the resort center, even though he was apparently dead, and you know, Anthony said,

you know, this is more real. Anthony, who had never had any interest in music, started getting fascinated by the piano, started having dreams in which he was playing a piano or concert stage playing the same music, learned how to play the piano and transcribe this music, and is now, in addition to being a renowned orthopedic surgeon, as a famed concert pianist too. I mean, see, things like that don't make any sense if this world is as we

think by common sense that it is constituted. So see, And I could go on with a you know, a dozen other physicians that same story, but I give up. I can't figure out how I could reconcile the fact that I would put my help myself in these dogs hands, you know, in a life or death situation, with the fact that they all tell me that this thing is more real than any reality that I've experienced.

book is about. If you start to talk to people about what you're working on, they almost everybody will say, well, I've had an experience like that, and I didn't talk about it because I thought people would think I was wacky, or I just never thought it was an appropriate conversation. For whatever reason, they don't like to bring it up. Once you bring it up, that you start to open up the flower, as it were, and people start to deliver information that you previously didn't know was out there.

That's how it was with near death experiences, and this book is vastly different from near death experiences, which your experiences that take place with the people who are at the best essentially at the bedside of someone has died, who's dying, and they share their death experience.

comes out and looks kind of round from pressure. Is like a cow heart, and these hearts are very irritable. This woman, who was I think in her nineties, I'm pretty sure. He said, they kept going in and her heart would stop, and then the zapper, she's back. So

the woman just passes away. But this doctor told me that the friend told him that as her friend was dying, She says, she herself the friend went out of her body and was going up right with her friend toward this light, and she saw the people she recognized as the friends and relatives of her friend, and all of them had died. It's all. I mean. I could go on telling you a hundreds more, one hundred, as many

as you want. Stories like that. This near death experience is not something that is somehow generated by an oxygen that bird age deprived brain. But it's going to take something else than what we have for society to wake up with that, because this is too threatening people for many people of of us. Some people can accept that there's an afterlife, this idea scares a lot of other people, so we're still going to be stuck for a while. And this sort of framework is the reality versus the

oxygen deprivation. But you know one thing those folks never think of is even if you could prove that it was not oxygen deprivation to the brain, that still wouldn't prove that it's life.

shares the death experience of someone who's dying. So in the case of a precognitive experience, we have a couple of case studies here people who had loved ones in China and they were in England and they wake up in the middle of the night and they see this person who's in China standing at the foot of their bed and tells them I've died and I'll miss you, and then that's the end of the experience. It's later proven that this person did die at the same time

that they had appeared to this individual. And we have doctors who have seen their fathers. They've woken up and they've seen their fathers standing there and the father says, you know, you better talk to your mother, because I've spoken to her and she knows that I'm dead. You better talk to your mother. At the facts, that's precognitive, it's that kind of an experience. But there's other ones in here that aren't. They aren't all related to near

death experiences. And I think that's really the power of this book is that this book takes off from near death experiences, what's your subjective experiences? In other words, a person who hasn't as an NDE is the person who has it, and no one else has had it, no one else can really experience with the experience. But to share death experience is when someone shares the experience of a dying individual. And that's what makes this book very different.

So if you look at things like light, mist and music, we have once again a number of physicians who in a hospital have actually seen a light or a mist leave a person's body as they die. Or we have people who hear music when someone is dying. They'll be in the room and they'll hear music, and sometimes there might be several people in the room with this individual who hear music, and then several who don't. And that's one of the puzzles of shared death experiences.

an operating room or medical facility or whatever. So people say they can rise up, they see their body down below, they can see the doctors and nurses working on it, but their consciousness is separate. And then they say, in the circumstances, you can understand what the doctor or nurse or whoever are communicating, but you don't hear their voice. That you sort of pick up on what they're communicating

by mind. When they try to communicate in turn, that nobody can hear them kind of dawns on them that this might be connected with what we call death. And so with that realization, they say they go through this passageway into another world.

of the Afterlife. I'm Sam Champlain and you're listening to a conversation I had with doctor Raymond Boody and Paul Perry this week on their brand new book called Proof of Life After Life, Seven Reasons to Believe There isn't after Life. I feel so grateful that they picked me for their first interview, and they were kind enough to send me a copy of the book before it went out to the public, so there's a high chance that you're hearing this information before the rest of the world.

The forward of the book is by Eben Alexander, who wrote of course proof of heaven. I want to tell you what the seven reasons to believe are. Reason number one, out of body experiences, Reason number two, precognitive experiences, Reason number three, the transforming light, Reason number four, terminal lucidity, Reason number five, spontaneous meat, uses healings and skills, Reason number six, light missed and music, and reason number seven

the psychomntium. We all like hearing stories about what people experienced, and this book is filled with stories, but not just any stories, stories from doctors. Let's continue with Paul Perry talking about terminal lucidity.

I say anything before. She started singing a song, saying it so beautifully that the medicals staff was weeping and they were all pouring into her room to hear this phenomenon take place. And she seemed to have acquired information she seemed to have acquired knowledge. In her final moments, she sang, and then shortly thereafter she died. That's all Senator's terminal lucidity, where someone becomes very lucid at the point of being terminal.

and within a few hours he passed away. That's the story of terminal City. I think it's going to be one of the most common paranormal experiences.

of it had to do with the terminally helps. I was known for that, and people would call me in and so on. Anybody who is in that situation for any period of time, hospice workers or whatever, you're going to see this. And the trouble is when you describe it, it's like you can nobody can believe it. I know

the description, but all right, here is the description. It's like as a person died, they've even been demented on it is like that, no communication for a long time, and then as they die here you go hold onto your hat. They light out, I swear to you, and it's not the light coming from a light bulb, but from the sun is coming from inside of them. It's just this pure light.

and he was telling me this. He said, he had this patient he had been dealing with for a long time, and so the patient had died, and so they had covered the patient up with the sheet. So the doctor was standing around with the family who he had known all a long time, and suddenly they saw the twitch from under the sheet of front. You know what I mean, he said. So he starts talking to everybody coherrectly, and

then he just sat back. Then, Dad, my friend said, he said, unless those other people have been there with me, he said, I would have concluded that I had had an hallucination. It's just that uncanny when you say it.

he went to the store. As you can imagine, when he came back, she was dead. And I will remember that look on his face when he told me he said what it was like. He said, she already had one foot on the other side, and the mystified look on his face. It's not something that is easy to put aside as oxygen deprivation to the brain. I'll tell you that.

Many of the stories in this book, we have a large number of physician stories, and then some of them, like one that really amazes me is is people who see a mist coming out of someone who's dying. Because not only have we spoken to several doctors who has come out of people who are dying, but the description of what happens is the same. Is that they'll see a mist and the mist forms and seems to get sucked into a tube, are sucked into some hole and

disappeared through there through the ceiling. I mean, the description is the same, which is good news because it means that it's it's a legitimate phenomenon. If it repeats certain elements, it's a legitimate phenomenon.

And because knowledge, by contrast, is something solid and stable, so the knowledge of the clouds would by definition be and people were ridiculed. Up in the clouds we say, you know, and in the clouds we still say those things. That was something utterly unintelligible and beyond reason and knowledge. Then this guy named Luke Howard who was a pharmacist and he traveled in his business back and forth. It's just interested in this got to watching clouds through the

carriage or where we're drawing them. Then he realized, oh my god, there's different types of some of them are big empuffs. So he published this paper from a scientific society he belonged to, and it created a sensation because, as you can imagine, anybody who cared to read the paper and then wanted to walk outside could see was right right, Because you can all say it for ourselves, why don't you? And so I think, you know, something like that has got to happen, because this is so

what in the world are we dealing with? What they missed coming out of somebody's body when they die.

people about why they believed in the afterlife. In the beginning of twenty twenty, Tom producer of Coast to Coast AM, came to me with an idea to create Shades of the Afterlife. As he liked my work. It would be a podcast of me reporting on various reasons to believe in the afterlife. Shades is now going on three years old, and I'm proud of both my podcasts. I know I have a different set of listeners for each one, and

some people listen to both. Every so often. I have a guest so spectacular that I feel I need to share on both platforms today. I feel the same way. What you're listening to now is an edited version of a very long video conversation I had with doctor Moody and Paul Perry. If you wish to watch the entire thing, go to We Don't Die dot com click on the radio show page. Trust me, when I think something can really make a difference, I want to get it to as many people as I can, as fast as I can.

So let's continue listening to some words by doctor Raymond Moody.

the archetype of the skeptic. He was so skeptic, he said, as to the impressions which arise from their senses, he said, it's utterly beyond the rational possibility to determine whether those things arise from the objects or are from the creative power of our mind or from the author of our being. It's like the whole assumption that we live in a physical world and that is all a product of consciousness

and inferences about consciousness, and that's the reality. And humans by the mere light of reason, it seems difficult to prove the immortality of the soul. Now there's an understatement, and he went on to say, some new species of logic is required for that purpose, and some new faculties of the mind that they may enable us to comprehend that logic. Now, that is the brute reality. That's the real that's the fact, no matter what anybody wants to

say or you know it's that's the real fact. And so you see, it's traditionally been a thought that that's the end of it. You know that that's impossible to me,

I say, no, absolutely not. We can do it. There are new ways of thinking logic group, and if you apply these new principles of logic, you can open faculties or your mind you didn't know you had, and that when you put those things together, we can actually prepare our minds in advance so that when subsequently we happen to have it in your death experience, we can come back and tell everybody else about it in a whole

new way. I guarantee you what I'm saying is, if you're curious about the afterlife and all that, just meaning this book by proof of an effllent. I'm a logician, you know I've studied proof. There is all different kinds of proofs. What I want to say here is is there proof of an effllence? That's what most people want to know, and from what I have studied and what I've listened to lots of people about what they're mean when they're trying to say what kind of proof do

you want? What I can say is this. I can say that as a logician person who's taught logic and philosophy, I can say that it is a rational thing for you to anticipate that when you die some amazing thing is going to happen that won't sort of transfer you into a call different level a round in that. That's when I'm anticipating, not it's not a matter of believe

in or disbelieve as it is for me. So in that sense, yeah, there's a proof there's for those who are you know, not symbolic logicians or whatever, but just ordinary folks wanting to know is there a rational basis for this? Say absolutely, absolutely, Paul.

if not millions, of bits of information. You know, everything for everything you see visually, to everything you read, all your opinions, your own self talk and other people's talk, and that what happens when people reach the state of having an afterlife open up to them is that somehow all of this background information, the unnecessary information, has cleared out of their mind and they're able to focus on the real background information, which is what happens to us

on a supernatural way. To do that, many people have done deep meditations, they've done dark room meditations, things like that, and there's still a long way to go and figure out how to access this afterlife, if you will, But that's one theory of it that once you clean out the background information, you have an open gate if you will.

of consciousness. I had been studying for some time the phenomenon where if you have a vacant space in your vision will feel like a glittering space or a clear depth. They call it like you can take a silver bowl and highly polish it on the inside, fill it with olive oil, and then in a darkened room you gaze by candlelight or some low illumination, you gaze into that.

And many people under those circumstances I have these hypnogogic visions where they see this very lifelike, not like mental imagery, but very lifelike, three dimensional visions. And I had known

about that, and I experimented with my psychology students. But in nineteen eighty five six seven, I are found in an archaeological journal that an archaeologist I already knew about Ceterios Docors, he was very famous Greek classical archaeologist, had rediscovered this place the oracle of the dead, and it excavated it based on what they found there was in the apparition chamber. They found a large cauldron, bronze cauldron,

and it was surrounded by a balustrae. This was obviously a place you saw the visions, and there's torch marks on the wall showing it was illuminated. You stayed down there for twenty nine days talking about the person who died. So then you went into a cut stone maze and complete darkness, felt your way into this chamber and they are gazing into this you saw the apparitions setarios hadn't

figured that part out. I had figured that party out, and so I went to his place in ninety three or something ninety four and I told him about No. I think what it is is this because I recreated it by then, and he said, yeah, like then he realized. He showed me some books that people saying he had just never put two and two together, but I tried it out. You just set up a room where there's a mirror. Bad. It's a darkened room, but the mirror is placed higher than your line of visions, so you

don't see your reflection. The room is dark and you don't see reflections. There's a gentle light behind you. Illuminated this gently. But the primary thing is the preparation, Like you think about talk about with your friend, like the person who died, what was this person? Like? What are your best memories? What are your sticking points in the relationships. So then after this preparation, you go in there and you just gaze into the mirror, and people have extraordinary things.

I was not expecting what the result. I was my graduate students of psychology then time went. But my medical colleagues, a psychiatry colleague, and a clinical psychologist colleague, and a sociology colleague and an aneshesiologist were my subjects. And these were people who were informed about the mind. So I figured that anybody that did have a vision that said yeah, ray, when I saw my grandma or was it real or

wasn't That was what I was expecting. But imagine my surprise when my colleagues and graduate students came out of there not saying I saw them, but yeah, I talked to my grandma, and it was startling to me. It was a way. I mean, I had no idea of what I tapped into. And what people say is that some say the image appears in the mirror. Others say that, yeah, the image appears in the mirror, but then the image comes out into the room.

Thank you for listening to Shades of the Afterlife on the iHeartRadio and Coast to Coast am Paranormal podcast Network.