Dr. Raymond Moody | Near Death Experience, Nonsense Logic, & Storming The Afterlife

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00:51 Which means you'll unfortunately never hear my voice again. 1930s President Franklin Delano Roosevelt addressed the nation through a series of radio broadcast known as the fireside chats His aim was to reassure the common man that society would recover from its troubled times From 1930 and I deal with a different kind of fire For a new era of worldly frustration we offer a- I'm Greg Carlwood

01:27 These are the Hireside Chats. Strap in for another wild ride, Hireside Chatters! From sunny San Diego I'm Greg Carlwood and so much of our time in this world is sadly spent working jobs we care very little about so that we can maintain a home to watch stale sitcoms in through the evenings and we get stuck making safe stable and unfulfilling choices out of fear of falling through society's cracks But what's really at the heart of our mundane decision-making and commitment to time wasting entertainment? Why do we settle for being a cog in someone else's machine so easily? Well, I would venture to guess that many of us don't spend enough time thinking about life consciousness and meaning but instead have fallen into the mental traps of the mainstream narrative that our existence is a result of random process of evolution in a cold random chaotic universe thats less about finding happiness and fulfillment. And more about making sure we get the most breaths before were snuffed out of existence forever

02:24 We've been conditioned to waste our time here, incepted to settle for less, trained to think we have no control and tricked into the idea that we might as well just become the best car salesman in central Ohio cling to our job stacking boxes and Amazon warehouse or go on pretending to be satisfied with our position at The Call Center because what else is there? Well, I would say that curiosities like the near-death experience, deeper levels of meditation, psychedelics and even entity encounters are all baked in aspects of reality that although rare remind at least some us that life is a gift we gave ourselves to be enjoyed, seek adventure and know that we can play it any way we decide without fear of anything. And why not when death comes for us all eventually?

03:08 Well, today's guest Dr. Raymond Moody might agree with at least some of that because he has made a life as the leading authority on near-death experience and even coined the term! He is an MD with a PhD in philosophy as well as world renowned scholar, lecturer & author of bestsellers like Life After Life The Light Beyond Coming Back And Making Sense Of Nonsense The Logical Bridge Between Science & Spirituality As well his own autobiography Paranormal My Life In Pursuit Of The Afterlife I feel very fortunate to talk to him today in a time where the themes of risk, health, quality of life and dying are very potent and deserve to be examined appropriately with the clues we have. So let's get into it! The NDE term coining teacher, life engagement advocate and true magi of the mysteries of life Dr. Moody my man welcome to The Higher Side

03:59 Thank you so much for us this is just your really a fun guy thank you for the opportunity i try to write it's a real pleasure i'm a big fan of what you've done and be responsible for household term like near death experience is impressive in itself. you've been doing this research since nineteen sixty eight so you can thinking and talking about the stuff for over fifty years now, add in the interest of trying to change it up a little bit for u i guess to kick this off i would ask when it comes to the perceptions around life's meaning and the level of engagement that we have with it.

04:35 How have you seen these things morph through the decades? Because it feels like the collective thoughts and behaviors in this regard have changed pretty radically since the 60s, in particular. What do you think?" Well, yeah. One shift I've seen...I'm 76 now. I found out about near-death experiences in 1962 when I was 18 years old and then I was a first year philosophy student at the University of Virginia and I read about this in Plato's Republic which is really kind of it's about near death experiences really it kind of culminates on this near death experience that the end so

05:13 So I talked to my Professor Hammond, and I said what is all this? Because I was not religious. My dad was kind of sarcastic about religious things and my interest was astronomy. So anyway, I asked Professor Hammond about this and he said yeah the early Greek philosophers studied cases of people who had almost died and revived And he said that Plato was sort of positive about this. But meanwhile, Democritus who was the great philosopher had just figured out from reasoning alone that there had to be little tiny things that are too small to be seen that make up the material world which you called atoms and Democritus knew about these things too but he said that all this is is the residual biological activity in the body

06:09 Well, at that point I didn't have any sense that this was anything beyond a Greek phenomenon but I was interested in it anyway. Then three years later at UVA, I met Dr. George Ritchie who was a professor of psychiatry there at that time and George had had such an experience himself and I heard it from his own mouth I was just blown away by him more than anything else because to this day George is just the finest man i ever knew and why hurting, i knew that it was real to him if you know what i mean i didn't know what to make of.

06:51 And so i got interested in it then i heard a few more cases that are when i started being a philosophy professor and nineteen sixty nine, began to hear these from my students send from my fellow faculty members so up to now talk with thousands of people and. What I've seen, Russ and the way that this says the attitude has changed is that when I started talking about this in the early 70's. This was startling to people. It was a real novelty but in intervening years as you pointed out it just become part of the background of civilization everybody knows about them

07:33 And what I have seen in that point, you're a little young to know this but when I was in college critical thinking was still the thing. So I was a professor of logic for awhile and to me critical thinking is very important and what I've seen just in the past few decades more than anything else is a gradual whittling away of people's sense of critical thinking. And I think that really affects this because it's in a world where everybody just sort of, you know they can find support for whatever they want to believe or to think. I think that's a pretty terrible situation because

08:21 You know, you talked about curiosity. That's what defines my professional life. I first looked through a telescope when i was about seven or eight years old and i'm just still so curious about the world and i think that looking back at age 76, I see all these people who chased all kinds of things like fame and power and money or sex or whatever they chase that I've spent my life chasing knowledge. And, I gotta say at 76 that's a very satisfying kind of thing. I think that of all the things with psychiatry patients I've had and whatever seeing people chase all kinds of things what really seems to be satisfying more than anything else for people over course of a lifetime is knowledge

09:15 Not that we'll ever have much of it. I realized looking through a telescope at age eight, that I'm never gonna know much of anything and that's okay because the little bit you can understand is fun and getting around to the point in that long rambling monologue is that I think people who entertain some idea they just want to believe or they want it to be true That's basically a very dysphoric situation. I mean, look at them they're never happy

09:54 It's like if you put out there what you want to be the case and then you build up some kind of flimsy argument for it, always you're going to be uncomfortable because self-deception by definition we know on some level when we're fooling ourselves. Right? And so to me the way out of this is to really learn the principles or reasoning and critical thinking and then just subject things to the most rigorous logical process you can. And then once you go through that and you come out with some idea on the other side, at least you have some sort of confidence right? That it may be true and to me the reasoning process in itself is just fun. So I went through years...I had no idea whether there's life after death or not even beginning in medical school I realized that

10:53 The common explanation of this is oxygen deprivation to the brain i knew that wasn't the case because my first year in medical school. One of my wonderful professors took me aside one day, because by then I was kind of known for investigating this already. And she said, you know Dr. Moody? She said, I've been wanting to talk to you because of some mentation I had...she used that word when I was resuscitating my mother and so basically she told me that when she would try unsuccessfully to resuscitate her own mother

11:30 that as her mother died, she herself the physician got out of her body and looked down saw the dead body for mother in her own body standing beside then. As she's trying to get my bearings She said she looked around she saw that her mother there with her now now in spirit form She says you saw this tunnel and the light coming from it And she saw her mother recede into this tunnel being greeted by her relatives and friends who had passed away, and then she came back to our own body. Well subsequently I've heard many dozens of hundreds probably of those kind of experiences which is the same thing we know all this near-death experience in terms of its contents but it occurs not somebody who almost dies and recovers

12:23 but to somebody else who is not ill or injured, who's standing there by the person who's passing away. And so whatever this is it's not oxygen deprivation to the brain now there's a certain kind of person who's just afraid as you know I've known people who, I knew in graduate school who are still rehashing their own doctoral dissertations from that period. And you know there's a certain kind of person who wants knowledge to stop when they get their doctoral degrees right? and i'm not exactly criticizing them...I mean it's just sad thing for me

13:05 But my point is that to hold on to these old songs just because they make you comfortable in the long run. That's not very satisfying. Well said I agree with ya yeah, i just feel like i've realized a long time there's no logical way to infer with certainty that there's an afterlife But where I've come in it is not just, I give up. Like I have dear friends who are physicians, lots of them who have had their own near-death experiences or who have empathically co-participated in the near death experiences of their patients they were resuscitating

13:49 And at a certain point, I just give up. It's still very counterintuitive to me." Well let me step back to the empathic death experience that you were bringing up for the people in the audience who aren't super familiar with that it is that strange phenomenon where just by being with someone when they pass on that can trigger an NDE-like experience in a healthy person just due to proximity And to me, that is one of the most exciting new avenues of this sort of research. I am curious about your thoughts on why that might occur? Why would that be a mechanism within our reality that when you're experienced the death of a loved one in front of you, you go out of your body and have a similar experience what would be behind that for that to be in our reality

14:38 For us, I don't know. And you know what? I mean, I know it occurs and hear it from people all the time and it is kind of shocking in a way. The most shocking part of that is one of the common things on a near-death experience that everybody knows about are these life reviews right? People say that often in the company Being a complete life of complete love and compassion they review everything they've ever done and i saw hologram and they see everything they've ever done in a time what state.

15:16 not just from their own perspective when they did it, but from the perspective of the other people with whom they were interacting. And so if you see yourself in that panorama doing something mean to somebody then in the review actually you're embedded in their consciousness where you feel directly and empathically the hurt or if you see yourself doing a kind-hearted thing to somebody you feel the good feelings and so The most shocking thing about these empathic death experiences is that even that element of it sometimes occurs to the bystanders. Like, I've talked to a lot of people who say that yeah as Uncle Charlie or whoever died that I sort of saw his whole life

16:03 in this panorama. And I gotta say, that's very embarrassing to me because you know...I mean, I'm hoping to recuse myself from my own life review and, you know, you think about the idea there might be a spectator there is kind of embarrassing right? And yet the people I've heard this from say in effect that it's no, it's in the midst of the experience, it's very natural and as As I like to think of it as a psychiatrist, everybody has pretty much the same secrets. So in that context it becomes more understandable but...as to why this occurs which is your very good question? I don't know. I know that it does because I hear it from people all the time and even that though Russ really doesn't give us logical proof of an afterlife however

17:00 I do think that it is now possible to have something that, if not a rational proof of an afterlife, is at least a major breakthrough in the rational investigation of life after death. And what that comes from, I think is that we've got to meet the problem halfway. I mean David Hume – I'm sure you know him – he's the great skeptic of the 18th century who talked about causality and inductive logic and so on. In his essay on immortality

17:38 He said, by the mere light of reason it seems difficult to prove the immortality of the soul. Which is kind of an understatement if you think about it but then 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 And what he was getting at which I think is correct Is that the mind we have And the logic we have in 2021 are just not up to the problem of life after death. It's something that's beyond us."

18:18 Well said and actually this is something i was gonna ask you about because you have this other book called making sense of nonsense and it also makes me think about dream language in dreaming because modern science says dreaming is just a screensaver for the mind but many cultures put a lot of importance on the dream world and considerate. in the same or similar context as the spirit world and it's always this archetypal paradoxical type of symbolism and it has meaning and is often illogical at times I'm curious if you think that the dreamworld and dream interpretation might relate to the content of this new nonsense based logic.

19:01 Well absolutely because many dreams when you try to formulate a man language it turns out to be nonsense right. In the context of the dream, it seems like it makes sense. But once you wake up and you try to put it into words, it's nonsensical. Some dreams can be literal and prosaic, you know? And you can put them in words but many of them are just... You know when you're trying to formulate them in words You know, it just sounds like nonsense. Which is really whenever anybody I think goes from one dimension to another in their minds they're forced to talk nonsense, to talk about a transition into some other kind of reality like the Escher drawings

19:50 the people on the mill wheel, for example. You see the water going down the mill run and going over the wheel and then it goes down and then turns that angle and then goes down again and then goes down again and then turns another angle, goes down again, and it's right back up at the top of the mill wheel, right? And you can take those Escher drawings with a ruler and a protractor, you could describe that whole two-dimensional surface But when you try to describe what's in the picture, you get into talking nonsense. So I think that we've got to prepare ourselves for the fact that in order to comprehend the afterlife and any sort of rational way, that we've got to take charge and really change our own minds. And that means that we've got to be able to think about things that don't make sense in a logical way

20:46 And there's a very specific reason why we can't. By the way, I'm a great lover and admirer of Aristotle but one of his deficits or difficulties was that he was so literal-minded Whereas his master Plato had been trying to figure out not just how intelligible and meaningful in literal and figurative language works, but he was also trying to figure out how nonsensical language works. And he had gone quite away with it. He figured out that there's different kinds of nonsense or different types like if I say to you, "'Twas brillig and the slithy toves," that's nonsense

21:28 But now listen to this, holiness breeds the vestigial lipstick of spontaneity. That's nonsense too but it's a different type of nonsense right? Or listen to this third sentence that cabal you men just ate was the last one in this county that's nonsense too but yet a different time or if I say hat thoroughly thee if zoom how zest that's yet a different type of nonsense Or if I say, blah-wee-yum-bah-bah-wee-yum and nah-boy-yo-yo. You know that's...I've identified over 70 different patterns and types of nonsense and each one of those types has its own specific effects on the mind. So what Aristotle did when he codified the logic that you are now using right now in

22:19 and that exists in our society, that was too much for him. You know? Too high a hurdle that you could make sense of things that don't make sense. And so therefore since he had such an enormous effect on our thinking then we are here in 2021 where unable to think logically if we come up against something that's nonsensical Now what I'm saying with a great amount of confidence And I'm willing to be refuted on this. Propel closer to the truth right cuz i can see my mistake but if they cant find a hole in it. Then what im saying is there's a whole new way that we can sort of storm after life weekend reshape our own minds to be able to think about and when we do,

23:18 When enough people are able to think logically about nonsense, then eventually they'll all have a near-death experience. Well when we do if we know how to think about unintelligible things when later on we happen to have a near death experience then were gonna be able to come back and tell everybody else about it in a way that makes sense Yes i like what you're saying and some previous guests of mine have brought up the theory of charles ford that humanity moves through ages of dominance we had the dominant religion where everything was filtered through that lens then we moved into the dominant science which were in, and then he thought we'd move into a dominant of wider inclusion where we fold an all this stuff we dismissed as unscientific or paranormal in a way

24:09 saying that what makes sense, what we consider true actually changes and eras. And that sort of fits with what you've been getting at and I like it because mystics and monks and shamans they tend to speak in symbolism and paradoxes. There's that theme that the greatest truth can't be spoken directly it must be danced around and that's really intriguing maybe that's why you considered the bridge between science and spirituality Oh yeah, this is absolutely correct Russ. And you know if everybody listening right now will go back in your mind to 1915 okay and just imagine that you're a person in 1915 A very well educated and well informed person of 1915 Now listen to the following sentence

24:57 All four of Ethel's grandparents perished and were lost in a shipwreck long before her mother and father were born. Now, in 1915 that makes no sense. It's just nonsense. Now add all of our intervening knowledge like the role and heredity of DNA, the possibility of cloning and gene engineering... And we can imagine a scenario sending a probe down and getting the DNA from the bones and then by cloning and so on. So you see what would be totally unintelligible in 1915

25:35 Is and two thousand twenty one even though it hasn't yet happened that at least we can imagine that i could write or say like i watched a movie on my phone in nineteen hundred yeah exactly like you know watch the movie on my phone this morning. And like you were saying, what's unintelligible changes and I am confidently predicting that in the next decade or so even though technically the idea of an afterlife is unintelligible because it self contradictory right like to say that there is life after death means that there was life after the final irreversible.

26:16 cessation of life, which is self-contradictory. But what I'm saying is that in the next decade or so this is gonna be just like the telephone, right? That what was...in 1915 it's absurd to say you've watched a movie on your phone this morning but in 2021 it's a daily occurrence. Yes and let me ask you this because this is something that i think it's really interesting that yeah we will move into an era where what we're willing to accept culturally will change but this is really kind of. Western centric right because when you look at the egyptians or the greeks are many indigenous cultures they have very robust and detailed models of the afterlife and the process is that happen in the various layers of the soul awareness. And when i see that stuff my impression is that these things can be known and mapped out if a culture decides to explore consciousness and fall what do you think

27:16 Oh absolutely i think that we can storm the afterlife for one of a better term and what i mean by that is, even though our logic in the mind we have don't do it. We're in a position where we can actually transform our minds. I taught this course for many years, beginning in 1969 gradually developed it where I taught my students to think logically about things that don't make sense there were even exercises like exercises where they would have to write different types of nonsense and then reflect on how it made them feel and then

27:57 to shift to writing another type of nonsense and they can actually feel the wheels in their mind turning in a new direction. And I've just had, you know...I guess dozens and dozens of students that have had over the years who've looked back on that as sort of mental transformation point for them. So right now I'm conducting kind of collective study It's encouraging people to go through these exercises and learning how to think logically about unintelligible things with the expectation that eventually some of these people are gonna have near-death experiences. And it's already happened, by the way, that it's happened once and when they come back, they'll have a whole new way of telling the rest of us about it so it's kind of bridge across the world

28:48 Few years back i had this wonderful man is that elderly gentleman who's a renowned artist and scientist, can he take in one of my seminars on nonsense than a few years later he had a near death experience any said while i was over there. My mind went back to the nonsense seminar and he said i saw that what you were saying is true you can't comprehend how this world, is connected to that world unless you take the unintelligible access into account with the way he put it but to put them in two simple terms. You know greg russ oh its great is a greg

29:32 Dr. Seuss's books have sold over, hope you're sitting down, over 600 million copies and you're too young to remember doo-wop music, shah nah nah nah where the idea was to have nonsense as the main line or the harmony and then meaningful parts and it was a major form of music back in the 50s or scat singing with Ella Fitzgerald and Louis Armstrong, who are just...it's just nonsense syllables. But it really puts you into an amazing state like the glossolalia or speaking in unknown tongues of certain religious groups that's just repeating nonsense syllables until you go into this really phenomenal ecstatic state.

30:26 What is also chanting and there's no like the eager rose of the shaman these things i guess there is some relationship between getting into that mind state and possibly expanding our consciousness to bleed over into the spirit world. Oh, absolutely. And the structure of a shaman song which was the linguistic vehicle they used for transporting their minds over to the other world it consists of nonsense syllables and meaningless refrains like hickory dickory dock is that meaningless refrain and put together with elements of meaningful language so that the combination of them both together has a power that neither one has alone. And I used to show this to my students with a simple example, everybody knows the nursery rhyme hickory dickory dock. The mouse ran up the clock, the clock struck one and down it ran hickory dickory dock well we all know that everybody knows it

31:27 But if you take out the nonsense, what is it? It's the mouse ran up the clock. The clock struck one and down it ran that goes nowhere, you see. But if you combine it with the nonsense, it has a power which is so great that everybody literally knows that or as I've lectured around the world at English speaking world There's a playground rhyme that many people have wonderful associations to. One bright day in the middle of the night, two dead boys got up to fight back-to-back they faced each other drew their swords and shot each other. A blind man came to see the fray, a dumb man came to shout hooray

32:13 A deaf policeman heard the noise and came and killed those two dead boys. Now that is pure nonsense, yet you've got to admit it brings a very vivid story Alive in your mind yes and it sounds a lot like the kind of thing even some people who experience entity visitations there is this rhyme and this paradox to the way. When we make contact with what seems like some kind of intelligence on the other side they do talk like this and it's really, how curious cuz i would also say to bring up a somewhat near death experience adjacent phenomenon which is psychedelics

32:55 Any experience i had the transportation to the spirit world was accompanied by what can only really be described as a nursery rhyme, an unknown nursery rhyme being sung by kids i would say but it also overlaps with nde and a lot of other ways like out of body tunnel experience meeting with people of light a sense of rapidly. Rising into the heavens and key reluctance to return and Another thing you've mentioned is this feeling that it's more real than real life being a disembodied consciousness feels like a natural state of being and i absolutely would concur with that when it comes to my own limited experiences but what are your thoughts about the mechanisms that trigger.

33:42 These things i mean it seems to me that they are clues in our reality, that yes we're born here without a memory and we don't know the word eternal soul and maybe we are you know like you say you can conclude that. That these things would continue just be like what if u obliterated the body like with the consciousness still be out there but it feels like if we just trust them they are clues to tell us that hey have some fun with this life because theres more over their That's right. This world is relentless, you can sit back and reflect and you can see that it's an illusion once you think it through but then the phone rings or

34:25 the car comes zooming down the road. I mean, there's always a distraction so that it's very hard to maintain that state that life comes at us so relentlessly that even when you do realize its dreamlike nature then it intervenes and it does hurt right? The brick falls on your foot and you feel something that is unpleasant And yet older people get I had a wonderful experience when I was about 30 of being a psychiatrist in a geriatrics clinic. But this was the place where all the movers and shakers in this little town came, because if you're the mayor or the police chief well you can't go into the front door of the psychiatric clinic along with the rest of us peons. You've got to sneak in the back. And so I had this really great experience over a year

35:21 talking with all these very wonderful, older distinguished people who were smart and reflective. And I heard them constantly say during that time something like you know Raymond the older I get as a look back the more and more feel like my life has been kind of play or drama where they'd say like television show or movie or whatever And I even heard Joseph Campbell, the great mythologist make that same comment. And I've heard it from people all over the world that the older you get and more you see the kind of dramatic structure of this world. And so a great writer by the name of Elie Wiesel who had been to Auschwitz and he survived and then after the war, he became a very distinguished Nobel Prize winning writer

36:17 Allie Beasle said, God made man because he loves stories. And what he was getting at is that what is your life but your story? Right. And even your consciousness is kind of geared to when something new happens to you, what your consciousness does it weaves into a continuing narrative of your life story right And then as I gather, just from observing my own kids who've been kind of raised in a religion-free environment and we don't talk with our kids about life after death. We're talking about how to pay the phone bill and what's for dinner? They found out that I was interested in my near death experience work from looking me up on the internet right so

37:07 They were really raised not in this world that kind of thought patterns at all and yet both of them. Very early in life recalled you know where they were before they came to us and so you know i've kinda, again sort of just heaved a sigh and said, well apparently when you're finished up with one story the one you're on now then you go through some incomprehensible process and as I gather your back on another storyline. And so life is story

37:44 But when you're in the story or immersed in it, it's hard to get out of that framework. And even if you do for a little bit like I said then something comes up and you get hungry or a brick falls on your toe so its kind of set up to come at us relentlessly but it is hard to maintain this perspective that it's an illusion although as soon as you start Thinking about it in the app you realize yeah there's an illusion very persistent allusion but i love this theme of life as story and this relates to something else can ask about another somewhat rare quality that can accompany near death experience is the phenomenon of the flash forward where a person doesn't just see

38:31 a life review, they see parts of their future. They see the year they'll get married or the house that they'll settle in very strange and I wonder what happens if you fight those flash forwards let's say you recognize this house from your experience and you intentionally say nope I am not buying that house. I saw it in the flash forward, I'm not doing it." Or what if you tell your fiancee, hey we have to wait a year because I know I'm supposed to get married at 28, I want to get married at 29 because I'm just that rebellious? I'm curious how fixed are these flash forwards has that ever been looked at?" Yes, how fixed are they? Again I have thought a lot about that and i don't know. Is it more like one of the old kind of records you know the 45s or whatever The needle drops in the groove and then its just gonna play Or In the midst of is there some way we can shift it And answer is I just dont know

39:27 Maybe linear time is an illusion and these things have already happened or happening all at once in that just like the material world the time itself is also an illusion you can't change it because its, are they just occurred your only getting a glimpse of the end of the story but the stories the story. Yeah, that one I've reached pretty much. Time is or something suspicious about it and you know as an undergraduate philosophy student you learn all about this like how Kant said time is not really out there It's just part of the framework of our experience where like that makes experience possible

40:05 Or Aristotle made a great comment, he said you know think about time. He said it's just so weird! He said the past that doesn't exist and the future that doesn't exist either and the so-called present well you can't even catch that you know I mean it doesn't stay long enough to observe it And so there is something very peculiar about the notion of time which is exactly what people with near death experiences say they say as soon as you're over there that there's no such thing, time or space. As we appreciate it, you're just in an entirely different framework of reality in which the coordinate points at least according to I've heard this from a lot of people with near-death experiences but my friend Dr. Eben Alexander who was so wonderful man neurosurgeon formerly at Harvard for 15 years

41:01 professor there, but Eben had a near-death experience and we were talking about this and he said yeah over there on that other world the coordinates are love number one. And also information or knowledge so imagine the state of reality or consciousness in which you orient yourself not by time or space But by love and knowledge, I mean that's a mind bending thought in itself to me. And you know my wife she is very brilliant number one. Cheryl has an IQ of 150 plus but fortunately for me she is also completely unintellectual right? So if she went to art school and just very very brilliant

41:51 Yet, she's not really a candidate. She'll happily talk like a philosophical point. She'll be interested But just by her own, I'd been telling her for years this thing about yeah time's unreal. And just a few years ago she looked at me and she said you're right time is unreal it's just something that people grow into I think the realization that things that you take as common sense when your younger the older you get the more you see its just a sham really It's a way to enjoy a story, is what it is. These assumptions. Yeah I think about this a lot and I try to equate it too maybe there is a stage... Maybe puberty is a good analogy that obviously this is the process that occurs at a certain age of life all on its own without us doing anything and maybe there is another stage that's less recognized in the older ages where it triggers some kind of peace

42:54 and some kind of calmness it's not as radical as an n d e but it allows some of those after effects that are common for people who experience them to pour in like this piece appreciation of love a knowing of some kind the sort of stuff maybe we need to identify, new mechanism in the. Trajectory of human life that happens after fifty or sixty that contains these qualities It does, and you might enjoy the guy who was sort of regarded as the expert on that was Eric Erickson who was a psychiatrist to sort of mapped out these different phases we go through. And like for example in their 50's just out of nowhere if they've never had any interest whatsoever in gardening but in their fifties people just naturally develop an interest in gardening

43:46 And it's almost like these things are built into us. And then I think that when you die, it's even more radical that you go through a whole different transformation of orientation where this world that you and I are in now...you see it in the rearview mirror And then you see that really reality is far more inclusive than this life we're leading. That there's a much more inclusive reality, which we can glimpse sometimes like in a mystical experience or spiritual experience but then we quickly got kind of sucked back into this and immersed in it

44:34 Because the nature of this life we're in is immersion, right? You get Descartes said for example he said I am not lodged in my body as a captain and his ship. And what Descartes was getting at well if the ship goes over the rocks The captain may feel nothing but if you plow your foot against a sharp rock then you're gonna feel something right so We're enmeshed in this thing and our feelings are kind of tied to what happens to it. But that even within that context, we can get out of it and say well no I'm bigger. I am a more inclusive being than just my body

45:20 Yes absolutely and i guess that is the big question if we were to take near death experience at their word in that these experiences are as real and accurate as they're described what does that say do you about the meaning and purpose of life itself why do you think where here i don't think it's random no i think this is kind of like a. Educational entertainment opportunity yes really good, But when you're in it, I had this wonderful woman who was a very wonderful performer and

45:57 I met her in the 70s and she was telling me about this one role that she was famous for. And, I don't even know what it was because I'm not in that particular area of performance so I just knew her as a wonderful person who contacted me about her near-death experience but she was internationally renowned for her art and she was telling me, she said Raymond She said, this night that I walked off the stage after this role I'd been playing for many years. And she said and then about several years later, I had a near-death experience And she said, the closest way I can describe my near-death experience to you is she said it was like that night that I walked off the stage after playing that same role for so many years. And I've heard the same kinds of things from other actors and actresses who have had near death experiences who use that very kind of analogy that this thing we're in is kind of a role and it's not all of us

47:01 But that we get so immersed in it because life comes at you relentlessly like i was saying and how reflective do you want to be i mean in the sense that i spent my life kind of been a philosophical banker and thats fun for me. You know, I can't distinguish between my work and my fun. To me just the most fun thing to do for the average day...apart from my family of course that's the reality there but in terms of the work life there is no difference between work and fun it's like what i like to do is sit around and think about these things

47:49 And also there's a realization that comes with that. Therefore, I don't participate as much in this life and I've often wondered whether When i get over there look back and say hey you know spent so much time in my life reflecting on what this world will be like the afterlife for all that. You know i didn't really get engrossed but you know there's a certain argument to be made i guess that, To get engrossed in this and watch it, and what I learned from people with near-death experiences is that it's all okay. You know at the end you know but death is not the horror that we might imagine it to be but you know sometimes people think of death as like going to sleep right or like diminishing consciousness

48:45 What i hear from people with near death experiences it's more like waking up than it is going to sleep and far from diminishing your consciousness your consciousness zips over to a higher level actually in which this world war and just becomes kind of damn unreal. Yes i agree with you and when it comes to the near death experience the most recent book of yours i read was the light beyond and you identify nine traits of the experience you say a sense of being dead, peace in painlessness and out-of-body experience tunneling experience meeting with people of light meeting with the more supreme being of white.

49:31 A life review, a sense of rising rapidly into the heavens and reluctance to return. Now these are all things that people definitely associate with NDEs but what's curious to me is not all these happen to everybody every time why do you think there is that variance? Do you think it has to do with maybe the medicines a person is under when it comes to hospital based experience could relate to memory what do you think Well, I'm not sure but one thing I am pretty confident it has to do with is how close the person got to death. Like in all the thousands of experiences people have talked with

50:13 There's about 15 common elements, like you're saying that the ineffability of it, the inability to put it into words. The feeling of being out of the body and going through a tunnel and seeing one's life in review and meeting deceased relatives and so on. And not everybody has the whole picture. And it seems to be related on a certain level to how close you got to death. Like people with only a momentary cardiac arrest will be more likely to tell you, for example I got out of my body and then I came back quickly Or if the cardiac arrest goes on longer, people may say I went through the tunnel and began to see my life in review. Whereas these ones where people would talk about seeing everything in the common list those are in my experience almost always

51:06 the people who have these cardiac arrests that are so long they don't make any sense. Like I've talked to people, you know, who were believed dead for two hours or just for things that don't really make any medical sense and yet they happened and it's not invariable because sometimes people even with a very brief cardiac arrest will have a very elaborate experience but in general General cases it does seem to relate how close they got today yeah. Very interesting and it's funny that some people are afraid, look at these things or intimidated by them cuz I find them to be fear reducing anxiety reducing and if we just think about our age a little bit we are in a time where fear and anxiety i can't remember when they were any higher

51:58 And if you start to think about what is life about what does happen when we die what clues can we get i think it's great armor against anyone who might wanna make you fearful in this life because. It's just the story yeah like i said as long as you can hold on to that framework and yet, no this life being immersive it presents itself relentlessly to you. And so, it's hard to maintain that perspective once you're in the midst of some annoyance or another right? It's like I can sort of realize yeah this is just a story but then some personal annoyance intrudes and all my emotions are engaged and so on. So you know it pulls you back into it which is the structure of it right

52:50 Like you can figure out that's an illusion by going through a process but then the illusion and trade and you know you can't help but focus on it. Yes thats why you gotta trip mushrooms again every couple of years right? I kid, I kid. But its about time to tie all these things together How has this life long study affected your thoughts about your own death how you want to die how you would prefer your body to be processed if that matters at all but the conditions in which she would like to go out based on what you know. Well you know it's seventy six,

53:33 I'm ready to die. At the same time, I've got two kids who are still 22 and 20. Ideally, I'd like to stay with them for a while to get them started and I hope for a painless peaceful pleasant death. Pain...I mean, I'm not afraid of death but pain is a different story so...and also another thing that troubles me being and had a lot of work in geriatrics is that I don't want to go the route of the nursing home. And so on, I just want to be out painlessly peacefully and pleasantly. So you know when I was 18? I read Plato's Thedo and in there Plato says philosophy is a rehearsal for dying

54:26 And at age 18, I really...that just struck me and I thought it was so obviously true. Now at age 76 and I look back in oh my God you know that's an amazing thing that an eighteen-year old would respond to that so strongly as i did but nonetheless that something I've had all my life is that if you just keep death constantly in your mind Then it sort of sorts itself out and so I'm ready to go. And also just a hope, you know to avoid any pain through the process and

55:05 Also, I really sort of turn it over to God. It's like I'm not in a position to be able to tell so I just sort of turned that over to God and then like I said ideally I would like to stay around with my kids awhile to get them on the road but...I am just not afraid of death but I am scared things in life Wise and cheers to that it sounds like at seventy six you had a full life in your still racking up accolades and accomplishments like making it on the higher side chat so always more to do right. But i do feel very lucky to have gotten talk to the man who coined near death experience i find these things fascinating and empowering, a renewed sense of one this appreciation for life and love are

55:57 simple messages, but they are deep. Yeah! To me they say that we should take the reins of life and live with purpose and I appreciate your contribution to drawing more attention to these experiences and messages whatever they mean Same here this just been delightful to spend this time with you and thanks also to the people who are listening in just really. What a great opportunity i have this time what day so thank you so much, do kind and as for the promotional stuff remind people about your books your courses and i think even a new documentary coming out this year right

56:35 That's right, the website is lifeafterlife.com and it has all the material on it and the book that I'm proudest of in my life is Making Sense Of Nonsense When I was a kid My favorite writers were Lewis Carroll And Dr Seuss They just loved nonsense When I was 7 or 8 I had this realization looking through the telescope one night It doesn't make any sense cuz you know how big is this thing were and while your mind goes out the wall, but you think i'll just a minute doesn't there have to be something on the other side of a wall. But then you thing that only other possibility if it goes on and on and on infinitely but that doesn't make any sense either

57:23 And I remember about seven or eight just deciding, well the world is nonsense. But that was okay to me because i was a great fan of Dr Seuss and Lewis Carroll and so my book that im really proudest of is making sense of nonsense, and it's a way to reformat your mind. Not just to think about cosmic things but doctors and lawyers and people in advertising all kinds of people say they find practical results from it for their own profession so that's the book that I just most enjoy writing. It took me 40 years to write that book but that's the one I like the most

58:09 Yeah, who knew a life of studying the near-death experience would lead you to making sense of nonsense and trying to form a new type of logic. But I love it! I appreciate your time. You are the man. Well thank you so much and this has just been so delightful and thanks to the people for listening in Yes totally couldn't do it without them And you enjoy your day good sir You too Alright guys, how about that? Probably a little unexpected but I was just thinking about where we are with this virus thing and the levels of fear and anxiety that i see out there. And felt like maybe the best medicine would be to not talk about COVID at all but just talk about death and consciousness and the glimpses behind the veil that we do get from people who have NDEs Sort of uh... what's-the-worst-that-could-happen scenario

59:06 And for my money, a guy like Dr. Moody makes the worst that could happen seem far less severe or My Name Isn't Russ Carlwood. Funny that he heard my name as Russ I wasn't gonna correct him until it came up but the man is 76 years young It's really no big deal But as I was saying, I know we did some shows looking at pretty radical opinions on COVID and a lot of that material still stands. I wholeheartedly agree that we have much more control over our health than any of the vested interests are saying. Sure when pressed they might admit to it but it's never part of the 24-hour news cycle. The message is more go on keep eating junk food but just wear that mask

59:50 And whatever, you know. But if your circle is anything like mine then you do know people who have had a sick week with no smell or taste of course that's not big deal but friends who have lost grandparents colleagues who've lost family Or people we might know who never left an ICU and folks dealing with that kind of loss they don't want to hear about PCR tests so the dangers of ventilators are any other coulda woulda shoulda stuff So i've been thinking about the isolation that i've seen because of fear and uncertainty and how long it's gone on a full year when are you gonna come out hiding you know, but also the loss that i have seen in my circles lately. When you deal with a loss what's left but to deeply contemplate what the death process even is because its not an end and it is unavoidable

1:00:45 So maybe society doesn't want to talk about it. Maybe the system is best served by everyone being so scared to die that they'll live inside forever, but if you hear out people like Dr. Moody and do some exploration of your own, you can reach a place where consciousness survives. It makes loss easier and encourages fearlessness—not full-blown recklessness but fearlessness which I think we need Maybe it's just that for me my thirty six birthday is next month many of my friends are also in their mid thirties and i'm realizing that cove it or not again not trying to say this is a huge covid commentary. But if you've been lucky enough to escape any real tragedy or loss up into this point your probably the minority and then certain sense your probably do,

1:01:36 It's in the range of human experience and there is nothing you can do about it except explore the clues and breadcrumbs as to what that process really is. So I set out to do a near-death experience show, and of course I was familiar with Dr. Moody but didn't realize he coined the term until I dug more into his work and that made all the more perfect i know this episode clocks and a little bit on the shorter side because we spent probably forty minutes trying to get skype to work his son was helping us out it was a big thing, i can't take up a person's whole day.

1:02:12 We split the difference and covered everything that i had in mind to cover. I am a little less interested in the making sense of nonsense stuff personally but i totally understand why the work has taken him there, and why it would be intriguing area to wait into there is something to the nonsensical structure of dream language spirit contact that sort of stuff you can even say paradoxical But that aside, I read some great accounts in his book that i don't even think we got to talk about. People who had been blind since their youth having a near-death experience and describing medical instruments that didn't exist the last time they had sight recognizing the color of doctor's clothing 100% seen without their physical body or eyes Of course the empathic death experience! That is so crazy

1:03:07 I hope i can die at home surrounded by friends and family. I don't want to be anywhere near the hospital, and if that shaves off a few months at the end of life then that's fine! If i'm stuck in a hospital bed or a nursing home i'm not living anyway but you think about something like the empathic death experience and it's clear to me that we're meant to live this life as if it's the most important thing that we got going on...and it is but there are so many clues that it's not all there is Our society does pretty much all it can to strip away or ignore these clues, but they are baked into reality for a reason. Of course Dr. Moody likes to stay as scientific as he can so when he says that the near-death experience is not absolute proof that any part of us would survive if the physical body was completely destroyed...or like cremated let's say

1:04:01 Sure, logically I understand what he's saying but i'm also like well come on. Part of the excitement of the whole thing is that you're never going to pin it down 100 percent but any explorers who focus on verifying out-of-body experiences for themselves they can and they do all the time In my case, just because I went out of body and talked jive with a few entities a couple of times on salvia doesn't scientifically prove existence goes on without the body or that the drug experience is the same as death. But i learned what i needed to learn it's something that you can just feel and its experience thats just for you when you have that experience and come out sure you don't really feel the need to prove it or explain it anyone else

1:04:51 i guess this is all just to say that as much as love is part of the human experience so it's pain and loss, i hope spending some time with a person who dedicated their whole career to learning about this transition. It's helpful it's important to have a framework for the stuff and i was happy to fortify my own little bit through the process of preparing for the show and putting out the episode itself It's not pyramid portals and Martian overlords, but how can a person not be interested in this big mystery of life? And I know i said this but to me life is very well designed. We come in with no memory of a before No sense of realms beyond because without the illusion of complete realness we wouldn't play the game the same way Fear and uncertainty can be good motivators sometime risk has to feel risky right

1:05:48 If we knew the game was largely illusionary, there would be no consequences. There would be no meaning. Blair Witch was only cool for the first couple weeks because people thought it was real! Then it was just another movie... But I think The Illusion is dialed in just right Because for those brave enough to push on it they do get results They DO see through it And you realize that you can do anything you want to do in this life and its alright It's kind of like that Terrence McKenna quote, that I always used to apply to the situation of leaving my stable but depressing job and taking a leap into THC. But it applies to life broadly as well. He said, Nature loves courage you make the commitment and nature will respond to that commitment by removing impossible obstacles dream the impossible dream in the world will not grind you under it will lift you up this is the trick

1:06:44 This is what all these teachers and philosophers who really counted, who really touched the alchemical gold. This is what they understood! This is the shamanic dance in the waterfall this is how magic is done by hurling yourself into the abyss and discovering it's a feather bed I mean wow I just love that And it's also why I like the Gnostic perspective. But i'm not bitter about the illusion of life, I don't think of it as a prison It's a game that only works if we think its real but if you look for them there are just enough clues to make you confident that it probably isn't and at the end of the day we have nothing to fear and in our most vulnerable moments The universe does have enough empathy to remind us of that A message I think is crucial In 2020 & 2021

1:07:34 It's a beautiful thing. So live, goddammit! Live!! And I'll see you next time. Life After Life is Dr. Moody's website Let him know you like the show Give his books to your loved ones Check out his courses Sign up for THC Plus if you want more ad-free THC it's the best way to make sure nothing comes between us and shows that this podcast has value to you And or of course leave me a voicemail about your own thoughts and experiences and theories at thehighersidechats.com slash voicemail, and I'll play them on the next joint session bonus show for plus people But anyway...I've done my part Your move astral travelers near-death experiencers and piercers with a veil! Your fucking move The truth has been hidden from me Did it myself

1:08:29 Got lizard people on top of the world And I wish it was somebody else Believe it or not, the truth is out there For people who have the eyes to see My favorite show makes me Who could it be? The High Side Chats THC Just watch the TV and obey Take some more pills when you're blue

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1:10:08 Believe it or not. Believe it or no, not. Believe it or not the truth is out there for people who have the eyes to see. Favorite show makes me more aware of who could it be? The Higher Side Chats Believe it or not, the truth is out there for people who have the eyes to see. My favorite show makes me more aware Who could it be? The Higher Side Chats THC