Alex Ferrari 0:00
Tell me what your life was like before you died.

Raymond Moody 0:08
I was born and raised in the south. My dad was a hardened surgeon, military medic from World War Two Pacific Theater. I gather that he was just kind of turned off by religion. So I grew up free of that anybody took the notion of an afterlife seriously until I was 18 years old in Plato my first year at the University of Virginia, and immediately decided to major in philosophy at the end of Plato's Republic. There's this story about a man who was believed dead and resuscitated, and Plato obviously took it seriously. Man told of this amazing experience. Three years later, I met Dr George Richie, who was a professor of psychiatry at University of Virginia, and I heard his story of the same thing, close call with death. Subsequently to that, through a PhD in philosophy and an MD and a residency in psychiatry. Career as a forensic psychiatrist, I had the wonderful privilege, as it is, Alex, of interviewing literally 1000s of people from all over the world who went to the brink of death and came back at these amazing stories I know in my life, many, many wonderful people, including my best friend of life, Milton Friedman, that not the economist, but presidential speech writer who didn't want there to be. I mean, it's wish fulfillment. It's just It doesn't matter whether people wish or don't wish this. It is or it isn't, regardless of I think that human life is a story, and even your consciousness is narrative directed when some new event happens to you in life, what do you do? You your mind automatically weaves it into their life story. So what I think, is this thing we're in is the hyper future version of what you guys do out there in Hollywood. In my opinion, I think this is the movies and the whole setup of life. You may say, Well, that's a simple logical fallacy, because what you're doing is you're taking one aspect of the human life, namely the theater, and projecting it out as a model for a home, and I understand that fallacy, which Aristotle identified. However, what I think is it happened the other way around. I think the reason why we reason we have the theater, is that just as I learned when in my Geriatric Psychiatry career, I got to talk to some eminent, celebrity, knowledgeable, refined, reflective people who just would go back and say, you know, Raymond, the older I get, the more the impression about an uncanny impression develops when I look back at my life. It has been a story or a movie or a novel or a play, whatever term they used. You know, we all know the story pisistratus, there in Athens and the chorus that have been going on for long, long time. So what I'm getting at is, I think this thing that we're in is kind of like theater, the way I gather, is just like, that's what people naturally come to as they grow older. This has been a kind of script or a story, and then as I gathered, you know, from my own way I put this together. I gather that you we die, then we go through some incomprehensible process, and then we're back on another story, as both of my kids have assured me, I don't, you know, I mean in terms I learned this from my two kids, because, you know, they never went to church. My wife and I don't talk about life after death. We talk about the phone bill was for dinner the movie, you know, so, but they both just independently recalled where they were before they came to us. We adopted both of them at birth. So I watched this on phone. And, you know, it's like I asked people for this for about 10 years, I've been observing this, I asked, let's suppose that you were diagnosed with a terrible infection that required that you be isolated all by yourself on a desert island for 10 years. And they could, they would send you over there in a cargo plane with plenty of room for all the food and water and medicine they're going to need for 10 years. But in addition, there's some extra room so they can send a DVD player, and let's say 10,000 DVDs. Ask people under that circumstance is, would you choose all comedies? And only three people have only said that they would, and they had a little goofy look in their eyes. But what I'm getting at is then I say, Well, would you take along some tragedies too, and they will sure, sure. And I said, Well, when you were all by yourself on that desert island watching that tragedy, would you be crying? And they say, Well, sure, because that's the experience of tragedy.

Raymond Moody 5:00
And I think this is the setup we're in now. It's like, I kind of the way I've put it together. You know, Plato, I was like, following on with what you're saying. In his old age, his last book was the laws, and in it, he said, We are God's toy. He began it by saying, if you think about it, for there's not much to a human life is not very important, and we are God's toy, and he said, and you're the best way of dealing with this life is just sort of play out. I see people all the time standing in line for a roller coaster, for example, with my daughter, who was not me, standing in line with her. People standing in line for two hours to get on a roller coaster, knowing full well that when they're upside down at 90 miles an hour, where they won't want to be there. And I think life is kind of that. What you know, I've been through some Gosh, awful, terrible things you mentioned. I've just been a terrible illness lately, and just a month I was feeling terrible. So the thing is that when we're in it, we might be kicking and screaming and protesting, even though, in a larger sense, we might have set it up. It's like I've come to do you see as a physician, is that every illness is a state of is an altered state of consciousness. Think about it. Every one of even having a cold, your consciousness goes to the back of your throat. See it from there. Every illness has its own peculiar alterations and consciousness. So illnesses can be a learning experience too. So while we're in here, it's just like the movie, too. I mean, I'm not much on horror movies. I'll go there with my daughter and my aunts over my eyes, but you know it's you choose to go see a horror movie. For one thing, they told me, Well, first of all, there is a family resemblance, and that if you look at 1000s of cases, you see about 15 or 20 common elements. But not everybody has the whole picture, and one person may have one or two or three of these things, or seven or eight. Some people have the whole picture, and it does seem to correlate very nicely with how long the person was in a state of cardiac arrest. That longer the cardiac arrest goes on, the more complex this experience becomes. But what people say is that at a certain point they may hear the doctor or nurse or somebody else say, Oh my God, he's dead. We've lost him, or worse, to that effect. But from their point of view, I hear people all the time say in one terms or another, I've never been so alive as when I heard that doctor say I was dead. Because people say it's kind of like waking up. They say, you withdraw from your body. You leave your body. You can see the resuscitation team scene going on down below. You don't hear voices, usually, but you can hear you can understand what the doctors and nurses or communicate or thinking really is what they say. At a certain point, you realize, oh, I'm dying or something, they proceed through a passageway of some sort, like a hallway or a tunnel, or come out on the other side into this incredibly brilliant and warm and loving light. They say, just taken up into comfort and peace. They say they see in spirit form, relatives or friends of theirs who have already passed away, who seemed to be there to meet them, and they undergo holographic panoramic memory, where they say that time stands still there in a timeless state and in a sort of hologram displayed all around them, they see every action they've ever done, and they re witness it, not just from the perspective they had they Were doing when they were doing the action, but they are also empathically embedded in the consciousness of the person with whom they're interacting. So you if you do something mean to somebody, then you feel that person's pain and hurt. And everybody goes out of this saying that obvious. Many people say that this is in a company with a being of sheer light to like, say, complete compassion and love, who can see this and is sort of helping them think about and they say, there are no words, but that it's the thought comes that, what have you done with your life, or How have you learned to love? Because they say whatever you had been chasing, like the creative buzz, like a friend of mine, their experiences and me too, you know, if or the people who are looking for money or power or fame or knowledge is where, you know, I'm chasing knowledge. But whatever anybody is chasing. They say that what comes clear in this panorama is that the important thing is to learn to love because they say that's just and then some people say, I have no idea how I got back I was in this light. Was just back in my body. Other people say they were given a choice that you can either perceive. With this, or you can go back to the life you've been leading. And yet, other people say you got to go back. There's things left to finish, but they're not told what it is. And then there are things beyond that. Some people say that they see into a realm, an entire realm of existence that seems to be predicated on the search for knowledge. And then beyond that, the realm of sheer life. The ones I sketched out, they're the most common ones that people say when they come back. They say, I'm just not afraid of death, not that they would want pain in the process, but rather that they say that to learn from their experience, that what we call death is a transition into another reality. You know, I had this friend of mine. I loved her dearly. I knew her 20 something years till she died. Her doctor told me, he said she was dead right for 40 minutes. And I mean, the way she came back, it was just, it's too much to believe. But what people say is that they're like, Here's George Richie's description. Was very graphic. He said that if you try to imagine Cal Tech and MIT and Harvard and Yale and Princeton and the Sorbonne and all of them squeezed into one place, he said you can't even begin to imagine this. But he said there are people in there who are pursuing knowledge. And George said that there was one aspect of this realm that he said you could compare it to a library. And he said he noticed that in one section of that library was dedicated, he said to the holy books of the universe, well, I wish he could be, you know, it's, and I've heard these same things. It's the another thing that people with these extremely in depth, that you see that this thing we're in is is kind of an illusion. It's like a projection, kind of which I've kind of figured out by myself. They say it becomes very clear. And, you know, it's like he thought we had an absolutely kind of duty insofar as we can think about it and see the illusionary quality that certainly is how life feels in breakfast when you're in the midst of it. It's immersive. I've gotten the point where I would have these little insights that, oh yeah, this is an illusionary experience, and then the police knock on the front door some terrible noise, so then you're immersed immediately in it again. But I've got to the point where I can keep the streams going, like I can, pretty much all the time, kind of cognize or realize that it's theatrical or illusory thing, and at the same time, be burped by it and pleased by it and frightened by it, and all the things, I think that a big part of it is to experience story your life story, and the love and the relationship and the interconnections that come. And then I also think, although I was not as sure of this one, but I do think that you can take the learning you make here, you can take that across what I understand from a lot of people. It's like a lot of people say that during these life reviews, that this being that they're with, sort of focuses in on some specific things where they've been learning, and even though there's no words, they say the thought comes that's very good, very interesting, that even after you come here, that will go on for eternity, as a lot of people say, you get the impression that the process of knowledge is eternal. And I do think that we are in a situation of world history right now where the spiritual dimension of life will sort of be rationally comprehensible.