A new era of research into the possibilities of surviving death through the soul will probably never have arisen without its pioneer: Dr. Raymond Moody. His extensive research with people who claimed to have had a Near Death Experience made it possible to tackle a topic that had never before been explored in this way. He compiled a list of fifteen recurring elements, which has since been adopted and used by many.
Moody
After teaching philosophy for some time, Moody studied medicine, with the aim of becoming a psychiatrist and teaching philosophy of medicine at a medical school. During that period he gave lectures to various groups of doctors and nurses about what he thought happened after death. By 1972, Moody had collected about twelve testimonies, but he began lecturing publicly in 1973 and had completed his book Life after this Life (original title: Life after Life) in 1974 and had studied about one hundred and fifty cases.
Because scientific research into survival after physical death was so new at the time, Dr. Moody did not realize that other doctors were also working on it. Only when the proofs of his book Lev and after this Life were available did he come into contact with psychiatrist Elisabeth Kübler-Ross. Her research not only paralleled his, but duplicated it. The two had never met before February 1976 (Moody, p.140). At that time, Kübler-Ross said she had interviewed hundreds (now thousands) of patients who said they had had an NDE. She has probably done the most to bring public and professional attention to the phenomenon than any other figure, although she routinely refused to publish reports of her findings.
Moody’s first book Life After This Life was published in 1975 and sold approximately 14 million copies over the years. At that time, the author was widely and publicly identified as the father of Near Death Studies. With the publication of the book, Moody says he challenged the medical community to investigate the miraculous phenomenon of the near-death experience (Morse p.7). According to Moody, the circumstances and types of people who have such an experience are very different, yet he believes there is a striking similarity between the accounts of the experiences themselves. In fact, the similarity between different reports is so great that fifteen separate elements can easily be distinguished that appear again and again in the enormous number of stories I collected. Based on these points of similarity, I have constructed a brief, theoretically ideal or complete experience, containing all the common elements in the characteristic order in which they occur (Moody, p. 25).
Moody took his fifteen assumed recurring elements and attempted to link them to a plot to provide a narrative model of a typical NDE, rather than a simple list of corresponding elements. This model has since been accepted by many and also guaranteed the popularity and priority of Moody’s original work. I also think this is because Moody did not target the academic audience and that is why his book (also because it covered such a new and exciting topic) has become so popular.
The cases he studied fall into three clearly distinguishable categories:
- The experiences of people who were brought back to life after being deemed clinically dead or declared dead by their doctor.
- The experiences of people who, as a result of an accident, serious injury or illness, came very close to physical death.
- The experiences of persons who, while dying, reported these experiences on their deathbed. Those present later reported on the content of this death experience (Moody p. 22).
The elements
The elements around which Moody’s book revolves are the following (Moody, p. 28-88):
Ineffability
Our general understanding of language depends on a large number of common experiences from which almost all of us can draw. What those who have been in close contact with death have gone through is not part of our common experience, so it is to be expected that they might have difficulty putting their experiences into words. The people involved describe their experiences as inexpressible, that is, inexpressible. Sometimes the experiences are so incredibly beautiful that our words often dwarf them.
Hearing news
Many people said they heard a doctor or other person present pronounce them dead.
Feelings of peace and tranquility
Many people describe extremely pleasant feelings during the early stages of their experience. A man who had suffered serious head injuries showed no signs of life. He says: When I suffered the injury I felt a brief pain, but soon all the pain disappeared. I felt like I was floating in a dark space. It was a bitterly cold day, but as I was in that darkness all I felt was warmth, and the greatest pleasure I had ever experienced. I remember thinking I must be dead . (Moody, p. 30)
The sound
In many cases people are told about various unusual sound observations at or just before the onset of death. Sometimes they are particularly unpleasant: An awful buzzing sound coming from inside my head. It made me feel extremely uneasy and I will never forget that sound. (Moody, p. 31) In other cases the sound effects seem to take a more pleasant, musical form: () like tinkling bells, very far away, like a sound carried by the wind. Or: a kind of music, regal, beautiful music. (Moody, p. 31)
The dark tunnel
Often simultaneously with perceiving the sound, some people get the feeling that they are being pulled very quickly through a dark space. Many different approaches are used for that space, such as cave, pit, pipe, enclosure, tunnel, air shaft, vacuum, void, sewer, valley and cylinder. (Moody, p. 31)
Outside the body
For many people it is an impossible task to imagine an existence outside their familiar physical body. That is why a dying person is often so overwhelmingly surprised after his rapid journey through the dark tunnel. For at this stage he may find himself watching his own body from a position outside it, as if he were a spectator, an outsider, or a spectator of the scene. The emotional reactions to this strange situation vary widely. Most people report that at first they desperately wanted to return to their own bodies, without the slightest idea of how to do so. Others remember reacting with fear and panic. Some report a more positive response to the situation.
Meeting others
Several people report that at some point in their death experience, sometimes initially, sometimes only after other events had occurred, they saw spirit beings in their environment, beings who were apparently present to ease their transition to death, or, to telling them that it was not yet their time to die and that they must return to their physical bodies. Some believe that the beings encountered were their guardian spirits.
The essence of light
The element that impressed everyone the most is the encounter with a particularly bright light. Despite the unusual revelation of the light, none of Moody’s informants doubt that it is a being, a being of light. Moreover, it is a being with a clearly defined personality. The love and warmth that this being radiates cannot be put into words and the dying person is completely surrounded and filled by it; he feels completely at ease and acknowledged in the presence of this being. He also feels an irresistible magnetic attraction to this light. He is inescapably drawn towards it.
The retrospective
Some people claim that, although they cannot explain it well, everything they have ever done comes back in retrospect, from the smallest trivialities to the most important events. Others stated that they were mainly shown the highlights of their lives. Some people see this review as an educational effort by the being of light. As the images flash before them, the creature seems to emphasize the importance of two things in life: learning to love other people and acquiring knowledge.
The border or barrier
Described as a gray mist, a door, a fence along a meadow or simply a line, this could be the border one approaches and upon crossing it one would actually die, according to the stories.
The return
The most common feelings reported in the first moments after death are a desperate longing to return to the body and an intense feeling of remorse for passing. But once the dying person reaches a certain depth in his experience, he does not want to return: he may even resist returning to the body. This is especially the case with those who have gone so deep that they have encountered the essence of light. As one man emphatically stated: I never wanted to be away from that creature again. (Moody, p. 65)
Telling others
According to him, the people Moody interviewed had well-functioning, well-balanced personalities. Nevertheless, they did not relate their experiences as they would relate a dream, but rather as a true event that they had actually experienced. Despite their own certainty about the authenticity and importance of what happened, they realize that our contemporary society is hardly the kind of environment in which accounts of this kind would be received with sympathy and understanding. Many have noted that they immediately realized that others would think they were crazy if they told them what had happened to them. Therefore, they have decided to remain silent about it, or to reveal their experiences only to their closest relatives.
Influence on the rest of life
No one felt it necessary to convert others or try to convince others of the authenticity of his experience. Their experience appears to have had a subtle, calming influence on their lives. Many said that it has given their lives more meaning, that they have become more aware and more closely involved in essential philosophical issues.
New views on death
Almost everyone has expressed in some form or another the thought that they no longer fear death. Of course, certain ways of dying are not desired by anyone, nor do any of these people consciously seek death. It’s just that the actual condition of being dead no longer deters them.
Confirmation
Are there any accounts that can be verified by witnesses present, or later, corroborating events? According to Moody, the somewhat surprising answer to this question is: yes. Several doctors told him how astounded they were that patients without any medical knowledge could give such an accurate and detailed description of the procedures used in their revival attempts, despite the fact that they took place during the patient’s clinical death. Another example is that of a dying girl who left her body and went into another room of the hospital, where she found her older sister sobbing and saying to her, Oh, Kathy, please don’t die, please Kathy. To that sister’s astonishment, Kathy was later able to tell exactly where she had been during that time and what she had said.
However, Moody admits that he has not yet found a person who has experienced all the elements and that the order of the elements in the stories also differs. However, Moody’s work was not aimed at an academic audience, he admits in his book that something happens during the NDE that science cannot (yet) explain.
Within two years of the publication of the book Life After This Life, the International Association for Near Death Studies (IANDS) was founded with the aim of further researching the NDE phenomenon and bringing it to doctors who were interested in it. Many of its members, including Kenneth Ring, Bruce Greyson and Michael Sabom, went on to conduct their own studies of NDEs, equating themselves with Moody in collecting and classifying NDE data and doing so better than him at the level of scientific and quantitative analysis. It also supports (and still does) seminars, workshops and conferences aimed at bringing NDE research to the attention of professionals. In 1981, the first professional conference on NDEs took place at the University of Connecticut; eighteen scholars and researchers participated and provided new guidelines for the study. The Dutch department of the IANDS is the Merkawah Foundation and its aim is to guide people with an NDE, to raise awareness of the NDE phenomenon and its consequences and to contribute to scientific research into the cause and consequences of an NDE. (Flyer from the Merkawah Foundation)