Duncan Trussell Family Hour - Dr. Raymond Moody

Episode Date: March 29, 2017

What happens when you die? This is one of the most important or least important questions of all time and today we get an answer from Dr. Raymond Moody the author of "Life After Life" and an expert on the Near Death Experience.

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Go to Casper.com forward slash family hour, use offer code family hour, you'll get $50 towards a brand new mattress. Oh God, you've done it again, you've tuned into the Delta Trestle Family Hour Podcast. And this is a very special episode because today we're going to be talking about what happens when you die. Many people think many different things, but most people don't want to think about it at all. They want to pretend that they go on forever. They don't want to imagine themselves being incinerated in a cremator.

What is a cremator? Today I traveled from my bedroom into my office to do a Skype phone conversation with one of the top most researchers in the near-death experience. In fact, he coined the term. We're going to have a conversation with Dr. Raymond Booney today. But first, the news. The hand-bellied lemur of Afghanistan has gone extinct. We'll also be looking into the Delhi strike happening in East Side Manhattan by the Meatpacking

District. But most importantly, you're going to die and that thing you call your body, you're just going to turn into dust and everyone you know is going to die too. Coming up. And now a clip from Ram Dass' Experiments in Truth, available on Audible or at RamDass.org. It's not the physical death that's so scary. It's the psychological death. It's the ceasing to be who you think you are.

The thread was held and I have been now with many people and just holding them as they die. And being right with them, looking in their eyes as the spirit just leaves, as they just leave and the last breath occurs and the eyes glaze over and the being just leaves. And there's just a release, an opening. Because by the time they got to that moment, they were no longer clinging to that which dies. Don't be silly, where could I go?

There's no more clinging to that which dies. For who we are was, is, and will be. And these are just processes of transformation that we're going through. Just like it's very hard for a prepubescent to understand the time will come when his baseball cards aren't that relevant. So the time will come when even our mortal coil isn't that relevant. Friends, if you have ever been curious about what happens when you die, then this episode is for you.

We're going to jump right into it, but first, some quick business. Friends, I don't need to tell you that you do the most important things in life on a mattress. You eat nachos on a mattress. You watch TV on a mattress. You freak out on a mattress. You make love on a mattress. You sleep on a mattress and more than likely, you're going to die on a mattress.

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And if you want to come see me live, I got some dates coming up which are located at DuncanTrussell.com. I am going to be in San Francisco. I'm actually coming up there for the map psychedelic conference. So if you're going to that, maybe I will see you there. But I'm going to be doing some stand up on April 26th at the independent and I'm also going to be doing stand up at the Feral Audio Theater, the Harmon Theater. I don't know they're calling this thing, but I'm going to be doing stand up in LA.

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All these tickets as well as all the nights that I'm just doing like 15 minute sets around town in New York are at DuncanTrussell.com. I'd love it if you would come out to see a show. Today's guest is the author of one of the most famous books on near death experiences out there. It's called Life After Life. He's a philosopher. He's a psychologist, a physician. And what's really interesting, if you have been listening to each episode,

you know that I just had a long conversation with Jason Louvre about John Dee and gazing into mirrors to communicate with spirits. And as it turns out, Dr. Moody has in Alabama, something called the Theater of the Dr. John Dee Theater of the Mind, which is a psycho mantium, a place where you can gaze into mirrors and connect with spirits. He is an incredibly fascinating person. And if you want to see him live, you can.

He's going to be at the Bell House in Brooklyn. I've been doing my live podcasts with Alex Gray, and they're going to be talking about near death experiences and the afterlife. That's April 13th at the Bell House in Brooklyn. I'm going to be in the audience. I hope you'll come out and see the show. All right, guys, let's do it. Everybody, please welcome to the DuncanTrussell Family Hour Podcast,

the author of Life After Life, Dr. Raymond Moody. It's the DuncanTrussell Family Hour Podcast. Thank you so much for joining us today. Thank you so much. Thank you so much for joining us today. Welcome to the DuncanTrussell Family Hour Podcast. Welcome to the DuncanTrussell Family Hour Podcast. Welcome to the DuncanTrussell Family Hour Podcast.

Thank you so much for joining us today. Well, thank you very much for having me on your program. You are the preeminent researcher of the near-death experience. You have come into contact with thousands of people who report, I guess what you could call a pattern after they are clinically dead. And I was wondering if we could just start off with you describing what that pattern is. Well, basically, there are about 15 common elements that recur in near-death experiences. And one experience may have two or three or four of these things,

or seven or eight or 10 or 11 or some, especially in cases where the cardiac arrest was very lengthy, they even have the entire picture of 15 elements. But as to the more common elements, what people tell us is that they will say that at this point where their heart stops beating, they very often report hearing their doctor or somebody else's presence say, oh my God, he's dead or we've lost her or words to that effect, which is very surprising to them because one thing I've heard from people all over the world repeatedly

is the same sort of idea people say that when they hear their doctor say that they're dead, as one man told me, he said, I've never felt so alive as when I heard that doctor say I was dead. Because actually people say that at this point where their heart stops beating, it's not like, as you might imagine, that you enter into a dreamlike state, but rather people say that everything is hyperreal and that compared to the state of consciousness when they enter at this point where they seem to die, that ordinary waking experience seems very dreamlike in comparison. People say they enter into an extraordinarily vivid hyperreal state

and they tell us that they seem to slip out of their bodies, they very often rise up above and typically from a point of view right below the ceiling, they can see on the table down below their body, which incidentally they might not necessarily recognize. You think that we know what we look like because of photographs and mirrors and so on, but people say actually this is very startling because your body doesn't look exactly like what you imagine it does. And in this hyperreal state as they look down from above, they say they can see the doctor or nurse or other people present

and they can understand what the doctor or nurse are communicating to one another. Typically not in the sense of an auditory voice, but it's more as though they can understand heart to heart or mind to mind what the doctor or nurse are saying. But when they try to communicate in turn, when they try to ask the doctor, how can it be that I'm out of my body up here looking at you down there, no one seems to be able to hear them or to see them. If they try to touch the doctor or nurse to get their attention, they find that they go right through instead of making physical contact.

Are they scared? Are they scared? That sounds terrifying. No, actually people say to the contrary that they feel complete peace. And at a certain point as they think of this, they say they become at some point aware that this must be what we call death. And at that point they tell us they enter into a state of consciousness that no matter how articulate they may be, or however many languages they speak, that they say they simply cannot describe it,

that it really lies beyond our ability to put it into words. But nonetheless they try and very typically, what they tell us is that they enter through a tunnel of sort, a narrow passageway, I've heard it called a hallway, or a tube, or an illuminated passageway. And they come out on the other side into this incredibly brilliant and warm and loving light. And they see this light sort of permeates everything. And in that light very often they tell us that relatives or friends of theirs

who've already died seem to be there almost in the role of a greeting committee. And that they see their departed relatives and loved ones there, not exactly in physical form, but they say it is a sort of form, it's a shape, but it's not a physical matter. But they become aware of who these people are because they have the feelings and the memories and so on in the sense of a personal presence. As this develops, they say that there's kind of a switch goes off

and they find that they are surrounded by a sort of holographic review of every single thing they've ever done in their lives. And they say this experience takes place in timelessness. That no time passes is a timeless state. And yet when they relate it to us or try to narrate it to us, they have to describe it as a sequence because language is sequential. But they say in the experiencing of it, it's not a sequence. Everything is there at once.

And they say that you can see every single action you've ever done and that when you do, however, you don't review the action you did through the eyes you had when you were doing it. Rather, you assume the position of the individual with whom you've interacted. So if you see yourself doing a mean-spirited thing to somebody else, then you feel the sadness you brought about in that person's life. Or if you see yourself doing a kind-hearted action, then you feel the good feelings you brought about.

Now, at some point everybody says, obviously, that I've talked to anyway, has to come back. Some people tell us they have no idea how they got back. At one moment they were there in this light. The next moment they found themselves back in the hospital in the operating room with no sense of transition. Other people tell us that they were told they had to go back, perhaps by one of their departed relatives or a sort of presence of light.

Then a third group were given a choice. They say that they can either choose to go back to the life they had been leading or to continue in the light. And interestingly, almost everybody says that personally, they would rather have stayed in the light, but they choose to go back. And it's most commonly because they have young children left to raise, which is certainly something I can understand very well, having an 18-year-old and a 16-year-old.

They are pretty much the only reason I'm staying around here. I understand that because being 72, I'm ready to go at any time except it'd be great to be able to stay with my kids for a while. And when they come back from this, they tell us that their lives have been transformed. They have no more fear of death because from their point of view, what they experienced was a life hereafter. And they tell us that whatever they had been chasing or pursuing before, whether power or money or fame or knowledge is in my case,

that what they feel that the important thing we can do in life is to learn how to love. And that is a very typical kind of scenario for in your death experience. What do you think that light is that everyone reports? Well, I accept what people tell me that it really is, it's not something we can describe in words, that it lies beyond our ability to comprehend it and the state of existence that we're in now. But what people tell me is the closest word you can have for it is love. It's just like this palpable love that is so far beyond anything we've ever experienced while we're alive.

And it's also information. Now, I should point out here that people say that this experience does not take place in space, as you and I experience space, and it's not a temporal experience. It's neither temporal nor spatial because everything is happening at once. It's not a matter of sequence or time duration. And that if, for example, you want to see something which is at a distance, you just think about it and zap, all of a sudden there it is manifest in front of you. So it's an informational state as well where people say that knowledge is sort of instantly accessible to you.

So this field of loving data, I mean, is that God? Do people just think of that as that must be the creative force or the Godhead? Yeah, a lot of people say God. And with that word, Godhead, it shows you are interested in mysticism. And yes, in a way, this is what William James would count for sure as a mystical experience in the sense that it imparts knowledge and also that it's ineffable or indescribable. And also as William James said that a mystical experience is passively received, and he said, for example, you can induce a mystical state by chanting or isolating yourself for all these other things.

But once it starts that you receive it passively, you're just sort of a spectator or swept up in it. And also that it's transient by definition. I mean, this doesn't last very long by definition. People come back here. So yes, they do use the word God or Christ sometimes or an angel. I've heard people say like a divine being, like an angelic being. The thing that this obviously anyone who's living today wants to hear this because one of the great terrors of existence is the end of existence.

And what's really fascinating to me is how little it's studied. You've spent a lifetime studying this. There are researchers who are looking into this, but you would think it's one of the most important questions. Or I don't know, maybe the least because we're just supposed to deal with this thing here. But what I wanted to address as quickly as possible because I don't know what the point is of spending too much time on it. We do have these studies from the University of Michigan, the EEG activity in rat brains after they died. Most recently, the University of Ontario detected Delta spikes in a brain 10 minutes after death. And there seems to be some correlation between cardiac arrest and this kind of like intense brain activity,

which seems to indicate some kind of sentience or consciousness after clinical death. What do you think about that? I know you've been asked this question a million times. I've seen people ask you this in interviews, but I have to ask it. Isn't it just a hallucination? Well, I would say absolutely it's not. And in terms of the neurophysiological things you're talking about, you know, we live in an age of scientism, right?

That is people who are perhaps very accomplished at science, but who sort of take that as their religion and to use that word or their ideological system. And I am a medical doctor and psychiatrist, so I can talk that way. But I also understand before I went to medical school, I got a PhD in philosophy, which we can't require people who do the neurosciences or psychiatry or neurology to become a philosopher before they do all this stuff because that would just take too much time. But that's what I did and what I will tell you from that point of view. This is still a philosophical question.

Now, it's very pleasant for a certain sort of mind to try to reduce consciousness to electrochemical reactions that the brain matter. And of course, they have to do that. It's this kind of psychological thing that they need to hold on to because incredibly to me, so many people are just terrified to say three simple words that come very easily off of my tongue, which is I don't know. But I think the theory you're talking about there is what's called epiphenomenalism, which is a philosophical point of view, which is that there is no independent reality to consciousness,

but rather what is called consciousness is the secondary sort of unreal byproduct of the primary reality of the brain substance and so on. Now, what is difficult with that is that identically this same phenomenon, which we call the near-death experience, also occurs very frequently and people who are not ill are injured. Your brains are not compromised, but what's happening to them is that they happen to be at a location, say, beside somebody else who is dying in a bed, for example. And the shared-death experiences, which are identical in content

and probably even more common than near-death experiences, occur to people who are not ill or injured. And so obviously some other factor or factor than a chemical discharge in the brain occasioned by the stress of death is involved. Another thing about that word hallucination, my dad was a medical doctor. I grew up around medical doctors. A lot of my friends are medical doctors. I am a medical doctor. And I will just tell you this.

To import that term hallucination, which is a clinical term that I have to use and practice and so on, to try to solve the epistemological problem of whether these experiences are real or not is simply reasoning in a circle. It just means these people haven't thought this out very much. Because when I see a patient, for example, seeing patients in the ER, I go in and I see their eyes tracking motions when I don't see anything in the room or you seem to see them listening to something as though there's... That's hallucination.

But the reason I introduced that term is nothing to do with solving an epistemological problem. It's to go through a diagnostic process where I determine what's wrong with this person and what I can do for them. To import that clinical term into try to solve the epistemological term of whether these experiences are real or not is just ludicrous. And it's a way of getting away from reality, in my opinion. And there's a real problem here. I mean, if millions and millions of people who come close to death

and who articulate and who are doing very well, very functional people, tell us they have these experiences and that they are convinced it's real, it doesn't follow from that that it is real, but it also follows... But it does follow from that that we're just not in a position to be able to solve that question with introducing the clinical term of hallucination. It's a lot more difficult than that. I agree with that. And I think what a really important consideration is the experience of being near someone when they're dying.

And all the things that happened during that, which are so difficult to explain, I've seen it with... I used to work at a... I volunteered at a hospice a little bit. Yeah, yeah, good, good, good. You see the... I remember this wonderful woman who was dying of Alzheimer's disease and I was there with her a few hours before she passed. And I remember, maybe you know something about this, but it was the strangest thing to watch because you could watch her kind of surrendering

to what was happening and every time she surrendered to it, and let me guess that she lit up with a light. Yes, yes, that's it exactly. That is just so astonishing. Wow, that's it. Your guess is as good as mine, Duncan. I don't know. The whole room lit up.

I've seen it so many times and it's like they become hyper-conscious, right? It's like sometimes even people in a diminished state or maybe they've been obtunded or delirious for weeks, when that happens, they are perfectly coherent. They look around and they address everybody in the room by name and they say they're good vines. Yeah, it's really quite fascinating. That experience you're referring to has a name. It's called FETI, F-E-Y. And if you look in the dictionary, that term sort of dropped out in the early part of the 20th century

when people started dying in hospitals, or I'm sorry, say 30s, when people started dying in hospitals, but when people were dying at home, everybody knew about this. It's FAY as defined as an extraordinary enhanced state of consciousness that pretends imminent death. Wow. And people seem to drop all of their neuroses and their consciousness is just extraordinarily clear. That is wild. That's one of the, I cite that anecdotal evidence from time to time only because it was one of the strangest things I've ever seen. The flowers in the room.

Oh my God, and it gets stranger after you do it. I mean, I just was there with lots and lots of people when they died and this is just something that leaves you scratching your heads. I mean, it's just really extraordinary. They seem more alive than ordinarily alive. Right. Right. And this, so your field of research, it's interesting to me because it points to this sort of other dimension, or some sort of intentionally concealed aspect to the human experience that because it's repeating,

not only in near death experience, you must know that what you described is also very similar to people who've had smoked DMT, report the tunnel and the breaking through and being visited by beings of love. And you know, with the diamethyltryptamine, the question emerges too, where you think to yourself, well, there's no way my brain created that. Like whatever that was was not, I saw something, I didn't project something. So, but this is interesting to me because it implies some kind of law that is not based on the, an organism's physical existence, some kind of transcendent law. And I was wondering if you had any theories on, or if you could describe what that law is,

or what, from this research, what principles you have learned that seem to function in this, in this state, which by the way, it sounds, even though it's not religious, it sounds religious in nature. Yeah, well, I kind of think that the, the causation is probably the other way around, rather than people's religious beliefs causing these experiences that, that these experiences are what are, are the basis of a lot of religions is the way I look at it, that these experiences are part of the input, which cause religious systems to be formed. And so what you, you said there about some other dimension. Yeah, absolutely. That is the crux of the problem here.

And that is, how do we prove some other state of existence? And, you know, and in my opinion, and as I mentioned, I went through, I was a philosophy professor for three years before I went to medical school and have continued to study philosophy. And in the real world, in my opinion, there are two figures in Western history who've come closest to the, getting it nailing down as it were, the afterlife problem. And one was Plato in his Republic and his dialogue, the Phaedo. And incidentally, in terms of that, the Phaedo is the ultimately the basis of the Christian philosophy of the afterlife or theology of the afterlife. That's a long story, which I won't tell now, but that's the fact.

And the Phaedo is the first document where Plato attempted to apply the rational process to the solution of the afterlife question. And then the second person who I think stated the difficulties most beautifully was David Hume, who's kind of the archetype of the skeptic. These so-called people who call themselves, I'm a skeptic. It irritates me not to do anything with the near-death experience, but because I love teaching Greek philosophy. And when I get up to the skeptics, which was the movement formulated by Phaedo about 20 years after Aristotle died, those are the real deal on this. And the people who call themselves skeptics generally, they don't even know who Phaedo is and they get the concept wrong.

But in terms of the archetype of a skeptic in the modern world, David Hume is the standard. And David Hume lived from 1711 to 1776. He was, for example, he was a friend of Ben Franklin's. And in his essay on immortality, he beautifully states the real problem. And he said, and if you follow this along in your mind, say the words, you'll see that he was right. He said, by the mirror light of reason, it seems difficult to prove the immortality of the soul. By what arguments or analogies could we prove any state of existence which no one ever saw and which no way resembles any that ever was seen? Some new species of logic is requisite for that purpose.

And some new faculties of the mind that they may enable us to comprehend that logic. Now, presumably, Hume was speaking ironically. And what he meant by that was that since Aristotle's logic, let's face it, has done pretty well for us for 2300 years. I mean, it's not an easy thing to come up with some new species of logic. And we think, falsely, but we do think that we know our minds pretty well. And the idea that there could be some new faculties of the mind that would enable us to comprehend this new logic seems preposterous. Now, here at the age of 72, and see the grim reaper coming at my age, I can just go on and cheerfully announce not really to make a pronouncement or a state in ideology, but what I want to claim is that I have solved Hume's problem because see my area in philosophy was logic and philosophy of language and ancient Greek philosophy.

And so I have developed a new set of logical principles about how we can think logically about things that from the worldly point of view don't make any sense. And so over the, since I've been teaching this since about 1969 in my philosophy classes, and even a set of exercises which people can use to actually reformat their mind to think logically about things that don't make sense. This is not published in the US yet, by the way, so I'm not trying to sell a book here. I just published about a month ago in France, but thus far no luck in the US. But I'm prepared to go to the wall on this one and say, yeah, yeah, we can, not that we can prove life after death, but that at least we can open our minds to achieve entirely new ways to think about this in a genuinely rational problem. By the way, I am not in a genuinely rational fashion. Incidentally, I'm not a parapsychologist. In my opinion, parapsychology is a pseudo science and that in 2017 anyway, the question of life after death is not yet a scientific problem because it can't be confirmed by a certain kind of test.

But what we can do, which is a different approach, is to reformat our minds so that we can think about this major question of existence in an entirely new way that then opens entirely new pathways where we can investigate this question. What is the reformatting? Well, if you could give me a pass on this one, I just basically, what we, here's the thumbnail sketch. Plato was trying to work out the rules and principles by which meaningless, unintelligible language, namely nonsense works. But Aristotle was a very compulsive guy and anything that smacked of irrationality to him was anathema. So when he talked about nonsense, his favorite terms for that was random talk. But I could prove to you very quickly, just in a few minutes, that far from being random talk, nonsense or meaningless unintelligible language is actually less random than ordinary meaningful language. And it operates by its own rationally discernible principles.

Does it mean like baby talk or like, what do you know? Well, no, actually, no. What would an example of that be? Baby talk is not nonsense, but simplified sense. Right. Okay, sure. But nonsense is, for example, everybody would think of Edward Lear or Lewis Carroll or Dr. Seuss. And in my work on this, it's been going on, gosh, I guess, 50 years now, amazingly.

But what I found is that there are over 70 different types of meaningless, unintelligible language, namely nonsense. Here are just three of them. Okay. Listen to these. Twas Brilligan, the Sly the Tove, did Garen Gimble and the Wave. Okay. That's one type of nonsense, obviously. But listen to this.

Holiness breeds the vestigial lipstick of spontaneity. That's a different type. It's still nonsense, but it's a different type. That's the kind of nonsense I hear, and I'm like, I know exactly what you mean. Gotcha. And listen to this one. That cannibal you man just ate was the last one in this county. But basically, what I'm getting at is that nonsense itself is a separate domain of language.

That's hilarious. What's the last one from? It's own rationally discernible principles now. And this is a complicated topic. I know, but the fact is that when you, you can take people through a series of exercises, I do it in a sort of seminar. Sometimes I've done it like as an entire semester length course at universities, which I've taught multiple times.

So you can actually reformat people's minds with exercises so that they are able to think logically about things that don't make sense. Now, I have been doing this for many decades with the anticipation that eventually somebody who has learned this new logic is going to have a near-death experience. And for reasons I won't go into, I mean, it makes sense, but it's just, this is getting into complicated stuff here, but basically to get to the point, when somebody goes into a near-death experience, and it's just by chance, years later perhaps, already knowing the rationally discernible principles, which enable them to think about this logically,

that when they come back, I conjectured, they would be able to talk about this experience in an entirely new way. And that by comparing the old accounts, which we already have, which make it a travel narrative, I got out of my body and went through a tunnel into a line, so a travel narrative. Now, the people who go into it with this new logic will be able to have new ways of expressing it. And I was sort of patiently waiting on October 15th, 2015, got a call from an old friend who is a distinguished artist and scientist who had been to my nonsense seminar about maybe

six or seven years before. So he called me because he had been through this gosh-awful, terrible, horrible infection, just, oh my God, it's amazing that he lived and was in the hospital for 60 days. But he was telling me about his experience in a very sort of weak tone of voice. He had been through a terrible ordeal. But all of a sudden, like his voice got clear and very expressive, and he said, and you know, Raymond, when I was over there, he said, I got to thinking about the nonsense the sentence seminar was in.

And this is what he said. He said, what he realized when he was on the other side was, he said, I realized that in order to think about how this realm we're in now is connected with that other realm, he said, you've got to take the intelligibility access into account. And again, I think you can see that this is something that's really difficult to put in a synopsis. But it's my life's work. And it's on the, you know, this is in progress.

Another student of mine or now a colleague of mine about five years ago started out on this herself, herself, and she now has published just an amazing new book with some of the initial findings that we've made on this. Well, I think it's, you know, this is on the way. I think this is, I think that two things come to mind. Number one, near death researchers or whatever happens after death researchers, these kinds of explorers, it's, I guess, a form of astronaut almost. Like you're trying to train these

Absolutely. Astral cartographers or something to go into this place and come up, come back with maps. But the, what, what occurs to me is if let's just imagine that in the same way we have telescopes that somehow this research comes together, we utilize technology, we figure out a way to actually get something over there that can record it. And we come up with some substantial proof that indeed upon the death, there is another place that we go to. Do you think that this would be disastrous for human society?

Don't you think that should be Really interesting. That's a great point because I hear so many people say it the other way around. They say, oh, if we could only rationally prove the afterlife and everything would be fine and would be all, would be hugging each other in the streets all the time. I was a forensic psychiatrist and I worked in a maximum security unit for the criminally insane for quite a while. And I have perhaps from that experience a little bit of a warped view of humanity.

But nonetheless, with all those prejudices aside, I do think it's overstating the case to say that this would make everything okay on the earth. I think people would still be just as mean as they are now. But what I do think it would do is to reformat the mind in such a way that we may be able to think not just about the afterlife question. Incidentally, I don't conduct these seminars specifically with the directed to the afterlife question. The point of my seminars is more to just to enhance critical thinking and to, you know,

stimulate creative thinking. And so it's the purpose is not to send people over to the other side. It's rather to help us while we're here. And the side effect, one of the many side effects would be that this would give us a new way of investigating not just near-death experiences, but also the enigmatic communications that people give as they're dying. I'm sure you have observed as I have observed that it's a very common and that all physicians have probably observed.

It's a very common thing that on the brink of death in the last few days or hours or minutes of life, people will start talking nonsensically, right? Yes. And now we can look at these enigmatic communications in an entirely new way. Not to make them into sense because you can't make nonsense into sense. Nonsense is the thing in itself. But that nonsense sometimes does reflect realities in a way. Since we have a universal structure, a universal structural formula that we know that underlies

all different kinds of nonsense, then we can, I think, have a better map of the mind of the dying person in such a way as that I am convinced that assuming that as people are dying, they do enter into a transcendent state. And if that is true, then we have an entirely new way of showing where that point is, where people go in from this state of consciousness that you and I are in right now into some transcendent state of consciousness. This transcendent state of consciousness, it's so beautiful. And my experience with it has solely been through DMT.

I don't know if it's the same thing. But when I smoked DMT, I remember going into a loving presence, an incredible clarity. But in that state, my thought was, why did you make me be human? Why do you get to be here and I have to do this human thing? Because that place is so peaceful and tranquil and perfect and creative and instantly creative. So this is where, to me, it starts getting scrambled up in my head because I think to myself, if there's some system out there that involves people like you and I and every human being getting blasted out of a vagina into time, suffering immensely for decade after

decade, and then popping back to this beautiful surprise party where your relatives are like, you did it. The question is, why did I do it? Or who made me do it? Why aren't we coming here in the first place if this other side is so filled with love and perfection? You know, that's a great question. And it's one I've faced rather acutely in the last few years.

Because just to set this out plainly, I just never was religious. My dad was a surgeon and a professional military officer who was in the Pacific Theater in World War II. So you probably get the picture from that. And so we weren't religious. My dad had a brief flirtation with the Presbyterian church that lasted about three weeks when I was 12 years old and mystified by, what is this? So I never was religious.

And still, to me, the notion of an afterlife is highly counterintuitive. The reason I got interested in these near-death experiences is that they are very relevant to the understanding of early Greek philosophy. A lot of these early Greek philosophers were fascinated by these stories of people who died and almost died and came back. And having learned that in 1962, in 1965, three years later, I met at the University of Virginia Dr. George Ritchie, who at that time was a professor of psychiatry there, who had had such an experience.

So George was the first living person I heard this from, and subsequently I've heard it from thousands of people. And I didn't get interested in this because any sort of religious thing. To me, it was something I learned about in Greek philosophy. And so I have always trusted that the people who tell me these things were sincere. You can see that on their faces, especially if you talk to thousands of them. But to me, I just didn't know the answer. And I also knew that there's no way of proving it either way with science or with any other

form of rational thought. But what has happened to me over the decades of being very curious about this is it just becomes more and more puzzling. And there is a new book out on this called The Science of Near-Death Experiences. I think that's a little bit of a misnomer, but the book is excellent. The Science of Near-Death Experiences, edited by John Hagen, MD, and it's through the University of Missouri Press, and it just came out. And a lot of the stories in there are physicians who've had their own near-death experiences.

And so the things I've heard from physicians are just, they got to the point of just what is going on. Let me give you a fairly recent example. About two years ago, I was in Italy, and after my lecture, this really nice surgeon came up. And you could tell from his eyes that he was haunted. I don't mean in a negative way, but you could tell that he was working on something that had really gotten to him. He just couldn't comprehend. So he led me over to the corner, and this is what he told me. He said that some months before, he had been operating on elective operative procedure.

I forgot what it was, but not anything significant. And this man was fairly young, and he was in overall an excellent state of health. So there was no thought that anything bad would happen during the surgery. But in the event, the man underwent a cardiac arrest, and the surgeon was unable to revive him. So he told me he was just beside himself, which you can imagine he was thinking, Oh my God, how did this happen? And what am I going to say to the family?

And whereupon he said the operating room doors flew open, and this woman came in who at first he assumed was psychotic. And you know how when you're under stress, you have a hard time understanding what somebody else is saying anyway? Yes. So he said he had to focus in on this woman's face to figure out what she was saying. And he said finally he picked up that she was saying, My husband is not dead. And she said I was out in the waiting room, and my husband came to me and he said,

that you think he's dead, and that I should come in here and tell you that he's not dead. Oh my God. And the surgeon, the surgeon told me that he was so blown away, just he doesn't even remember resuming the resuscitation. But he said, and he did, and after a while the guy's heart started beating again. Whoa. Yeah, and he said he was there in the ER when this guy regained consciousness. And this is a surgeon, this isn't someone, this isn't some,

this is a real, this is a person who's every day operating on people. He's not lying about this. Yes. Wow. Really, look at that book. Like I just said, the science, the near death experience, just came out with the University of Missouri Press. You're going to see a lot of physicians in there who are just blown away by this.

That is. But I hear this kind of thing from doctors all the time. But he said, when this guy regained consciousness in the recovery room, he said the first thing the patient said to him was, doctor, I was up above my body up there and I could see that you thought I was dead. And he said, I kept trying to tell you, I'm not dead, I'm not dead, but you wouldn't hear me. So I went out into the operating room and I tried to tell my wife out into the waiting room.

And I tried to tell my wife to come in here and tell you that I'm not dead. Wow. Now, to get back to the point I was making with this, you were talking about one in the name of God, are we here for? Yes. Yeah. And in the process of thinking through this, I woke up one morning and a writer I really greatly enjoyed back in the 60s

that maybe you're too young to have read, but his name was Ellie Wiesel. And he had been through Auschwitz and he was a wonderful scholar and a very wise and kind man. And I used to love reading Ellie Wiesel stuff. Well, when I was thinking through all this, I woke up in the morning and I remember a line that Ellie Wiesel said that seemed so improbable to me when I read it. But now it makes sense. Ellie Wiesel said, God made man because he loves stories. And you think about it, what is your life but your story, right?

Wow. Now, I think that, and I think Plato really had a lot of insight into this. And to make a long story short, what I think we're here on is a kind of adventure. It's in narrative format. We learn things from it. So we're here for education purposes and entertainment purposes, not to use that term flippantly, but life is a pretty fascinating experience in itself. And I think that what it is ultimately is a kind of learning experience.

Do you follow any of the new philosophies from Nick Bostrom's simulation theory, the idea that this is some kind of simulator that we're in? Oh, I know a little bit about that, but it's the idea that I've come up with on my own. It's pretty much that idea that was Plato said in the cave metaphor, if you've ever read that, the state of existence we're in is very dream-like and that there is another realm kind of superimposed over the top of it. Yeah, so I've always kind of think that. But then it's kind of sinister. Excuse me.

It's kind of sinister because, and I don't mean sinister. What I mean is, okay, I love the idea. Well, God loves stories, and that's beautiful. Until you're like, you know what, God, how about you don't get me to write the story about being in Auschwitz? How about you get me to write the story about being some wealthy prince with a harem and who becomes Buddha or something? Why do I get to tell this story? The thing that seems interesting is that, yeah, maybe this really is a story-generating simulation for some kind of other intelligence that's harvesting our life stories out of some desire for maybe it or his or her or its own realization.

Or our own. Or our own. But we still are confronting suffering. Yes, we are. The problem of evil. Yes. Now, let me ask you this though. Let's assume that tomorrow you went to the doctor and they diagnosed you with some terrible illness.

Yes. Not a fatal illness, but some terrible infection that required for you to be isolated on a desert island all by yourself for, let's say, 10 years. Okay. And they could take you out there in a cargo plane with all the food and water and medicine you're going to need for 10 years. And in addition, there was room in the cargo plane for, let's say, a DVD player and 2,000 DVDs. Okay. Now, let me ask you, would you choose all comedies? No.

Would you choose some tragedies too? Sure. Yes. When you were watching the tragedy on that desert island, would you be crying? Yeah. Probably. Yeah. There you go.

You know, again, religion is not a big deal to me, but you know, I think that David Hume said, he said the only concept of the afterlife that he felt that a philosopher about which he met a rational person. Who with curiosity could entertain would be the idea of reincarnation, that you get to come back multiple times, that you get to experience. And it's terrible as it sounds. I mean, if I asked, like in my masking, like I got my 2,000 DVDs, would I choose one of them to be in Auschwitz? Yes, I would. Wow. Would I choose to be a guard? No, I would not.

Well, what about that? He's choosing to be the guard, you know? I don't know. I don't know. This is tough stuff. I don't know. These are, you know, and perhaps the problem is like addressing these questions with the minds locked into the time space continuum. You know, I don't know.

And you know, we could probably talk about this for 100,000 years. We have a few minutes left. And I just wanted to ask you, because I think this is, people know about your research into the near-death experience. But I think fewer people are aware that you use scrying. Mirror scrying is a technique to gain information. I was just wondering if you could tell me a little bit about what that is. I saw a mention that you actually have in some way been influenced by John Dee. And I just wanted to hear a little bit about what that is.

Yes. Well, I'm quickly going to expose myself here as a very boring person. I doubt that. Because essentially all of my interest go back to ancient Greek philosophy and logic. And that's where it started. And when I was 18 years old and reading about the Greeks, anybody who does that will quickly realize that a big formative factor in the origin of Western thought were these institutions known as oracles of the dead, where alleged, according to Plutarch and Herodotus and Aristophanes, many other great Greek writers,

that you could go to these places and have some sort of experience, which you interpreted to be an actual visitation with a deceased loved one. Now, in my psychiatry career, I learned about this process you're calling that many people, when you gaze into an optical clear depth, you see these visions. Like a crystal ball or a mirror. Yeah. Yeah. Or a city and mirror like the Aztecs used, a clear pond as my Cherokee ancestors used,

and so on and so on. And it's worldwide. And in about 1988, I read an article in a classical journal about how one of these oracles of the dead had been discovered, the most famous one that's mentioned by Homer and Herodotus and a lot of these people. But during the excavation, I read the excavation report and based on what they found there, I put two and two together and figured out how they did it. And to make a long story short, I set this up and it works. Now, for further details, I wrote a book on this called Reunions,

but more recently in the Journal of Transpersonal Psychology in 2012, Arthur Hastings at the Institute of Transpersonal Psychology describes his replication of my work. And there are other articles that also have replicated it. But yes, you can do this. You mean you can communicate with people who've passed on through this? Well, what I would say is that you can have an experience which seems to you to be a visitation from a departed loved one. Now, and I can say also that the people who go through this and incidentally, my initial subjects were my medical colleagues, my sociology professor, my graduate students of psychology.

This is not a new age thing. We were going into this out of curiosity. But the fact is that you can induce these experiences from within a full waking state of consciousness where you actually do seem to be seeing and conversing with somebody who's died. Now, the question that you're going on from there to ask is, is this real? Yeah. Well, what I would say is that the people who go through this almost universally say, yeah, this was real, but we're still in that big question.

See, is that the impression of people is that it's real? Does that mean it's real or not? I give up. Well, I mean, before even whether it's real or not, I want to know, what did you say going through this? Is it an extended process? Yes, it is. It takes me a day.

I do it one-on-one. Now, I am no good at group therapy, but I'm just sociophobic to tell you the truth. But I think somebody who was a group therapist, I believe, could take multiple people through this at once. And it's happened a couple of times, actually. I've taught lots and lots of people how to do this over the years, and there are actually people who are practicing this now. And in one of the standard textbooks of grief therapy,

it's now recommended as a method to help with grief. It was very well known in the Middle Ages. You mentioned John Dee came a little bit later, but even in the Middle Ages, this was kind of a medical procedure that doctors would use to help people with grief. Doctors would have people gaze into a speculum. Wow. Yeah, some kind of speculum. Oh, my God.

I wish I'd asked this question at the beginning because I want to know how to do this. It keeps coming up. You hear it so many times. I've heard it so much lately, this concept, and I think people... Hey, listen, if you want a really good sort of scholarly take on it, my book was published in 1993, I think, Reunions. But in 2001, there was a book published at the Princeton University Press, which is called Greek and Roman Necromancy.

Cool. It's the title. And the author is Daniel Ogden, who is, I guess, a classics professor somewhere in Britain. Yeah, this is... I mean, it's one of the most astonishing things that this got lost. I mean, this was very well known. You've probably... I can tell from your...

You mentioned John Dee and so on. You probably are also aware right of the Greek magical papyri that were discovered in the Egyptian desert. They're in the Greek language, so this was after the Alexandrian conquest. And you can get, for example, you can get it through the University of Chicago Press. And the volume we're looking for is volume number one. But there are these extant manuscripts that have survived from antiquity that give you full instructions on how to do this. Do you still do grief counseling?

I do grief counseling all the time. That's what my remnant of a... Yeah, that's what I still do in my... The therapeutic aspect of my work, although I think I really do more... Philosophical counseling is what I do is... Because, I mean, obviously I learned a lot about grief as a psychiatrist, but all in all, I think I learned a lot more about grief from my philosophical background than I did from my medical background.

And do you do these sessions one-on-one, or can people do it over the internet? Do you Skype with people to do this? I gotta laugh about the Skype, because to tell you the truth, my last computer had a crank on the side, and my wife was yelling at me the other day about my total inability even to operate a cell phone. The reason you and I can do this right now is that she set this up before... I mean, I'm just totally inept with respect to machinery. Well, I'm so grateful to her for this, and you two...

I'm left after this conversation spellbound with a million more questions for you. Hey, great! Well, let's do it again. I'd love to, and I hear you're coming to New York. Is that correct? Yes, yes, yes. You have the info there. I have the info, so you're going to be doing, I guess, with Alex Gray. You're doing an event at the Bell House, so I will definitely be there. All right, great. I can't wait to meet you. I can't wait to meet you.

You're a curious person like I am, and I gather that your favorite thing to say is the same as my favorite thing to say is, I don't know, but I sure am interested. Yeah, well, I mean, and also I'll have another drink, unfortunately. Well, I don't drink, but I'm not immune to all substances. I don't know what the current law is in New York, but I don't know. Well, you know, I think people are pretty lax about it right now, Marijuana, if you're doing an event with the right person, but you're doing this with... Hey, by the way, at the site of the Oracle of the Dead in Thespertea in northwest Greece,

just before you went into the apparition chamber, the archaeologists found sexual little burned-out nens of hashish. Wow. And incidentally, that doesn't mean that the hashish did not cause the experience, right? Because you can do this perfectly adequately without any helpers, okay? Yes. But I'm assuming that it probably enhanced or amplified the experience, but it's nothing to do with causation.

Well, I mean, yeah, I agree. The whole causation thing. I mean, of course they had hashish. Why wouldn't they? It just makes sense. And, you know, I think it's fascinating that these black obsidian scrying mirrors are now in everyone's home because it's their phones. And when your computer's off, that's what it is.

Exactly. So it's wild that they're everywhere. Wow. So I'm going to... This is amazing. Are you going to... At the bell house, do you know what the focus of your talk is going to be? Well, I'm just going to talk about your death experiences and things generally.

But, you know, I just... I'd love to just see what the audience wants to hear about, too. So I'll have a lecture and then we'll have plenty of time for discussions and so on. Beautiful. Well, I look forward to it. Thank you so much for giving me an hour of your time. I really appreciate it. Please thank Cheryl for me.

I would happily give you two or three more. Cheryl says she's got... She wants one of those hooks, you know, to get me off, pull me off the stage. But also if you could give the specifics on what the... where the meeting is. Oh, yeah. No problem. I'll have all those links will be in the comments section of this episode. Also, I'll mention it in the beginning of the episode, too.

Thank you so much, Dr. Moody. I really do appreciate this. This was really interesting. Likewise, man. It's great to hear from somebody that doesn't have much of an opinion, which I'm in that same category. I just... you know, this is just baffling to me and just totally different from what I would have imagined.

I want it to be true. And I think it is. I mean, I've... But I think there's a reason we don't... I don't know if I want it to be true or not. You know, they say everybody wants there to be an afterlife. That's a stretch to me. I want to think about that one some more.

But I've got to the point where I've got to say it seems to me to be true. I mean, I mean, it's just totally counterintuitive and a big surprise. But I'm beginning to gather that to my utter astonishment. There is. Thank you so much for being on the show. I'll see you in a month, I guess, or whenever you're at the bellhouse. I will announce those dates at the beginning of the show. Links will be at DrTrustle.com.

Thank you so much. And your name is... Duncan Trussell. Yeah, Trussell. Okay, good. Couldn't hear the last part, so it's Trussell. Trussell, Trussell. So, Trussell, great.

And it's Raymond here, Duncan. Got it. Oh, I'm sorry I was calling you doctor. It just feels so official at the end of the show to call you a doctor. Raymond, I really appreciate it. And I look forward to seeing you soon. Me too, man. This has just been delightful.

Hare Krishna. I'll see you around. Hare Krishna. Thank you for listening, everybody. That was Dr. Raymond Moody. If you're in New York, don't forget, he's going to be at the bellhouse on April 13th with Alex Gray. I'll have links, all the links you need to find Dr. Moody in the comments section of this episode at DuncanTrustle.com. Much thanks to Casper for sponsoring this episode.

You can go to Casper.com forward slash family hour. Use offer code family hour to get $50 towards a brand new mattress. And don't forget to use our Amazon link. And if you like the podcast, why not give us a nice rating on iTunes? But most importantly, maybe think about the crazy idea that your heart doesn't have to stop beating for you to act like you've died. You can walk around for the rest of your life pretending that you went into the light, experienced this incredible state, came back and realized that your number one mission is to spread love on this planet as insane, embarrassing, cheesy, and ultimately possibly useless as that ideal may be. It's a fun pastime, the best hobby out there. And the more you do it, the more synchronicities happen to you and the stranger things get in the best way possible.

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