By John Fitzgerald
What happens when our race is run…when the final whistle blows on the pitch of life?
It’s a question that sets us thinking, but it can also ignite lively and passionate exchanges, and lead to rows, fallings-out, or all-out war “holy” or otherwise.
A remarkable book I came across recently seeks to answer this question that has taxed many a great intellect over the millennia. It’s by Raymond Moody MD and titled Proof of Life after Life, with the subtitle: 7 Reasons to believe there is an afterlife.
Mr. Moody sprang to global prominence in 1975 with his first book Life after Life, in which he dealt with a phenomena he termed the Near Death Experience (NDE).
It became a best-seller worldwide, with its compilation of accounts from people who’d been revived after being clinically “dead” and who then told of leaving their physical bodies, moving at speed through a tunnel, and, in many cases, meeting departed loved ones at a kind of border between this world and one beyond.
According to the accounts, when you approach the “light at the end of the tunnel” a divine being, or a deceased friend or loved one, advises you that your time hasn’t yet come: and you must return to complete your life mission.
The book spawned thousands of other books on the subject, and hundreds of research projects internationally to establish exactly what happens during an NDE. One school of thought was that the experience pointed to an afterlife, with another insisting there must be a “rational” non-transcendent explanation, such as the effect of medication, hallucination, oxygen deprivation etc.
Raymond Moody didn’t commit himself either way, satisfied to let people make up their own minds, having considered the evidence.
But now, five decades later, and after a lot more research on his part, he offers a compelling argument that NDEs and other paranormal activity do indeed indicate that we survive the death of the physical body…that consciousness does NOT die with the brain but lives on in another world or dimension.
He draws particular attention to what are known as “shared death experiences”, in which people standing close to a dying loved one have an experience similar to that of the person who is dying or who has been revived. This can’t be written off as delusion, he stresses, given that a number of people share the same transcendent experience.
He goes on to discuss the transformative impact of NDEs (people’s lives change largely for the better), which is not replicated by any of the experiences induced by drugs, or atypical brain activity.
Moody makes a compelling argument for the belief, long held by millions of people for centuries and promoted by most of the world’s religions, that death is just a transition from one form of existence to another.
The book is well worth a read even if you are a hardened skeptic or died-in-the-wool atheist. It challenges the view, which gained primacy with the rise of materialism, that we are just meaningless collections of moving parts in a universe that itself has no meaning.
The NDE isn’t the only indicator of an afterlife. One could mention OOBEs (Out of body experiences) and Electronic Voice Phenomena (EVP), where discarnate voices mysteriously appear on tape. Electronic devices exist that are used to detect spiritual presences or energies. And then we have cases of mediums who were tested under the most stringent, meticulously supervised conditions (as in the Scole Experiment of the early 1990s) as they communicated with those thought of as dead but who, the experiments revealed, could relay messages to us across the Great Divide.
Of course, regardless of how compelling a case anyone makes on this most vital question that concerns all of us, the controversy is sure to rage on, with entrenched positions adopted equally by those of a religious or materialist persuasion.
But it’s surely no harm to have a look at the evidence because, let face it, in the end we all have to make the big journey.
And (fingers crossed) the “Other Side” will prove to be a kinder and happier place than this “Vale of Tears”.
