About the Author
Raymond Moody, Jr., M.D. is the leading authority on the near-death experience. He received his B.A., M.A. and Ph.D. from the University of Virginia. After teaching philosophy at East Carolina University, he got his M.D. from the Medical College of Georgia in 1976 and then served his residency at the University of Virginia Medical School. He is a bestselling author whose works include the award-winning Life After Life, The Light Beyond and Reunited.
About the Book
The first ever book to explore the phenomenon of ‘Shared Death Experiences’
In his classic work Life after Life, Dr Raymond Moody recorded case histories of people who were clinically dead and then revived. Introducing the concept of the NDE (Near Death Experience), he revolutionised the way we think about dying. Since the publication of that multi-million copy bestseller, hundreds of thousands of people have contacted Dr Moody with their own true stories, leading to a startling new discovery – the Shared Death Experience.
Glimpses of Eternity investigates for the very first time the extraordinary accounts of healthy people, friends and relatives who have had their own inexplicable experiences at the bedsides of the dying. Discover how entire families have seen strange visions or even accompanied their loved ones halfway to heaven. Others tell of witnessing life reviews, during which they learned things they never knew about those on the point of passing over …
Dr Moody challenges many current scientific theories about NDEs; for if Near Death Experiences are simply a product of the dying brain, how on earth can so many people in good health share them? Letting the compelling evidence speak for itself, Glimpses of Eternity offers hope and comfort for us all.
“Accident is the name of the greatest of all inventors.”
—MARK TWAIN
BY THE TIME I ARRIVED at medical school in 1972, I was already famous for the research I had done into what I called the near-death experience. Although I had not yet written about these experiences, I had spoken publicly so many times about my findings that I was well-known even as a first-year student.
I didn’t “invent death,” as some people have jokingly said to me. What I did do was examine the experiences of several people who had almost died, breaking down the process of dying into its identifiable elements. Collectively, I called the combination of all or several of those traits the “near-death experience.”
What I found amazed me, and later when I collected my findings into the book Life After Life, it amazed the world. I discovered that it was common for the dying to pass through a tunnel on their way to a light. In this light they would often meet other spiritual beings that were there to ease their transition into death. Many times these spiritual beings were deceased relatives. Sometimes they were beings that the subjects described as “God” or “Jesus.” It was not uncommon for the subjects to tell of conversations with Jesus, or to be told by God that it wasn’t their time to die.
Many of the subjects recounted leaving their bodies and watching from above as doctors and nurses took heroic measures to save their lives. A lot of the people I spoke with had life reviews, in which they “lived” their lives again, sometimes with commentary from a higher being.
Rarely did these people want to return to their physical bodies, but when they did they had a profound sense of higher purpose—a belief that there is some further duty to be done on earth before leaving for a spiritual realm.
These were experiences and accounts not yet found in medical books, and because of that, there were those who expected my research and the subsequent book to be real trouble for me. As a medical student researching something that could be construed as spiritual or even religious, I was opening myself to the prejudices that the world of science is thought to have about such matters. Even though the elements of the near-death experience had hidden in plain view since man first pondered death, their exploration was a form of heresy that would ostracize me from the scientific community.
That is what some of my close friends thought.
Personally, I was less concerned about acceptance by the medical school staff than my friends were. Like most people throughout history, including doctors, I had heard and read of “supernatural” events taking place at the moment of death. These were familiar to me through both my reading and my own life experience. As a student and teacher of philosophy, I had read many such accounts of the afterlife, including those recorded in the works of Plato. And then there are those accounts of our spiritual body in the Bible, particularly Saint Paul’s letter to the Corinthians, in which he writes: “There is a natural body, and there is a spiritual body … Behold, I show you a mystery: We shall not all sleep, but we shall all be changed.”
Great literature, too, deals with elements of near-death experiences. Scrooge’s uncomfortable life review in Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol is one such example, and Ernest Hemingway’s out-of-body experience during combat in For Whom the Bell Tolls is another.
Then, there are stories we hear from friends and family. For me there was my cousin Ronnie, who nearly died after surgery. He spoke of entering a heavenly realm, where he was told by a being of light that he would not return to his physical body if he crossed a particular boundary. Ronnie said he turned and ran as hard as he could, all the way back to his body. And then there was the story told by George Ritchie, a doctor in Charlottesville, Virginia, who had been declared dead at a military hospital in Texas only to have one of the most amazing near-death experiences ever—one that included an out-of-body journey that took him across the country and that was so vivid he was later able to follow the route after he recovered. It was truly Ritchie’s story that led me to collect similar experiences from students in my philosophy classes at East Carolina University, where I was teaching, and to search these for the common elements that together became known as the “near-death experience.”
When word got out that I was studying this phenomenon, people who had almost died contacted me in every way possible. Through my research they realized that their experience was not unique, but was one that had happened, in some form or other, to millions of people worldwide. My doorbell rang almost as often as my telephone with people who wanted to tell their stories and receive confirmation that they were not insane or delusional. They were as relieved to discover that others had had similar experiences as I was to gain another case study. When a person approached me in public and whispered, “I have a story you won’t believe …” my heart would begin to race with excitement. I still have the same reaction all these decades later. And yes, many of these case studies have come from doctors.
It came as no surprise to me that when I started medical school at the age of twenty-four, I was generously received by the teaching staff of the Medical College of Georgia. Within two weeks of starting classes, no fewer than eight professors invited me to their offices or their homes to discuss near-death experiences.
One of these was Dr. Claude Starr-Wright, a hematology professor who found himself in the unenviable position of having to resuscitate a friend whose heart had stopped. To Claude’s great surprise, the patient became quite angry after being brought back from the brink of death. When Claude inquired further, he discovered that his friend had had a near-death experience that took him to a place so heavenly he did not want to return.
Other physicians told me about their own startling experiences with death, all of which contained puzzling elements that they couldn’t put into words until they heard about my research and understood that what they had witnessed was a near-death experience.
I heard many stories during those first few months of medical school, all of which fit neatly into the description of a near-death experience as defined in my work. It seemed as though every week or so I would hear another story from a doctor, nurse or patient that involved a mysterious account of the afterlife. It was thrilling to have this steady stream of material that validated the findings of my research.
Then something happened to change all of that.
I was standing at the school’s magazine stand reading an article about Gorgeous George, a well-known wrestler from the 1950s, when an attractive woman approached me and held out her hand.
“Raymond, I’m Dr. Jamieson,” she said, shaking my hand.
She was a respected member of the faculty, so much so that I was somewhat embarrassed to be reading an article about a wrestler in a men’s magazine. I tried to conceal the magazine, but the fact of the matter was that Dr. Jamieson didn’t care. Her mother had died recently, she said, and something had happened during her death that she had not seen in my research nor heard of from anyone else.
With a pleasant insistence, she asked if I could accompany her to her office so she could tell me in private what had happened. When we were comfortably ensconced, she told me a story the likes of which I had never before heard.
“To begin with, let me tell you that I was not raised in a religious family,” she said. “That doesn’t mean my parents were against religion—they just didn’t have an opinion about it. As a result, I never thought about the afterlife because it was not a subject that came up in our household.
“Anyway, about two years ago, my mother had a cardiac arrest. It was unexpected and happened at home. I happened to be visiting her when it took place and had to work on her with CPR. Can you imagine what it’s like to give your mother mouth-to-mouth resuscitation? It is difficult enough on a stranger, but it was almost inconceivable to do it on my own mother.
“I continued to work on her for a long time, maybe thirty minutes or so, until I realized that any further effort was futile and that she was dead. At that point I stopped and caught my breath. I was exhausted and I can honestly say that it hadn’t yet sunk in that I was now an orphan.”
Suddenly, Dr. Jamieson felt herself lift out of her body. She realized that she was above her own body and the now-deceased body of her mother, looking down on the whole scene as though she were on a balcony.
“Being out-of-body took me aback,” she said. “As I was trying to get my bearings I suddenly became aware that my mother was now hovering with me in spirit form. She was right next to me!”
Dr. Jamieson calmly said good-bye to her mother, who was now smiling and quite happy, a stark contrast to her corpse down below. Then Dr. Jamieson saw something else that surprised her.
“I looked in the corner of the room and became aware of a breach in the universe that was pouring light like water coming from a broken pipe. Out of that light came people I had known for years, deceased friends of my mother. But there were other people there as well, people I didn’t recognize but I assume they were friends of my mother’s whom I didn’t know.”
As Dr. Jamieson watched, her mother drifted off into the light. The last Dr. Jamieson saw of her mother, she said, was her having a very tender reunion with all of her friends. “Then the tube closed down in an almost spiral fashion, like a camera lens, and the light was gone,” she said.
How long this all lasted Dr. Jamieson didn’t know. But when it ended she found herself back in her body, standing next to her deceased mother, totally puzzled about what had just happened.
“What do you make of that story?” she asked.
I could only shrug. At this point I had heard dozens of regular near-death experiences, and was hearing new ones each week. But there was little about Dr. Jamieson’s experience that I could comment on, since this was the first of this kind I had ever encountered.
“I said, what do you make of the story?” she asked again.
“It’s empathic,” I said, using the word that means the ability to share another’s feelings. “It is a shared death experience.”
“Have you heard many of these?” she asked, clearly excited at the notion that I had.
“No, Dr. Jamieson, I haven’t,” I said. “I am afraid that yours is the first I have ever heard.”
Dr. Jamieson and I sat in her office, making small talk about the nature of the experience she’d had with her mother. But in the end, we were completely puzzled, unable to figure out what had happened.
Shared death experience … The phrase stuck in my mind, but I didn’t hear another until the mid-1980s, when I began to hear stories from nurses and doctors about curious events that took place at deathbeds. Attitudes in medicine had loosened up by then. I began to realize that shared death experiences have been with us since the beginning of medicine; it’s just that doctors and nurses have been discouraged from speaking about events that could be considered more spiritual than scientific. As one doctor from the “olden days” told me, “It was almost treated as a violation of our oath as physicians to talk about anything that could be considered spiritual in nature. You just let it go—you didn’t talk about it.”
But that was then. By the 1980s, they were opening up, talking about all kinds of things, including near-death experiences and shared death experiences.
After I finished medical school, I began bringing up stories of empathic or shared death experiences at medical conferences all around the world. Sometimes I heard stories from people who were on the medical frontlines and were ready to talk, and gradually it became obvious to me that these experiences happened more frequently than I had thought. It also became obvious that they had common ground with near-death experiences, although I have to say there were many traits that I’d never heard of.
For instance, I began to hear people talking about the room changing shape and a mystical light that filled the room—both things I had never heard of with near-death experiences. But of all the recurring elements in these shared death experiences, among the most startling was the joint review of a loved one’s life.
A woman I’ll call Susan told me the sad but remarkable story of her adult son’s death from cancer. I think it’s remarkable because of the information she received. As the man died, she was “swept up in a cloud” with him and witnessed many scenes from his life. Some of the scenes were familiar to her, such as those from his childhood and teenage years. Others were completely alien to her, like those from what she called “his private years.” She wouldn’t elaborate on what those scenes may have held, other than to say, “I wasn’t embarrassed in the least by anything I saw.”
The information this woman gathered from her son’s life review was so specific that when it was over, she was able to recognize his friends and visit places that she had seen in the shared vision.
I was struck by this woman’s shared death experience because she received information that was previously unknown to her and which proved to be correct when checked out. She was not revisiting her own memories. But I still didn’t know what to make of such case studies, other than to acknowledge that, in each experience, a doorway seemed to open to a new aspect of the person who had died.
Here is another such story, told in its entirety by Dana, a woman whose shared life review with her husband was vivid and contained images and events that she had previously been unaware of. Here is her entire story in her own words:
“It was on my husband Johnny’s fifty-fifth birthday when the doctor told us that Johnny had lung cancer and had maybe about six months to live. I felt like somebody had hit me with a baseball bat. Honestly, I don’t even remember the doctor saying the words; it was like I just gradually figured out what he was saying.
“The next day I just walked into the bank and quit my job then and there. From that day until Johnny died, we weren’t separated from each other more than a few hours. I was beside him the whole time in the hospital and was holding onto him when he died. When he did, he went right through my body. It felt like an electric sensation, like when you get your finger in the electrical socket, only much more gentle.
“Anyway, when that happened our whole life sprang up around us and just kind of swallowed up the hospital room and everything in it in an instant. There was light all around: a bright, white light that I immediately knew—and Johnny knew—was Christ.
“Everything we ever did was there in that light. Plus I saw things about Johnny … I saw him doing things before we were married. You might think that some of it might be embarrassing or personal, and it was. But there was no need for privacy, as strange as that might seem. These were things that Johnny did before we were married. Still, I saw him with girls when he was very young. Later I searched for them in his high school yearbook and was able to find them, just based on what I saw during the life review during his death.
“In the middle of this life review, I saw myself there holding onto his dead body, which didn’t make me feel bad because he was also completely alive, right beside me, viewing our life together.
“By the way, the life review was like a ‘wraparound.’ I don’t know how else to describe it. It was a wraparound scene of everything Johnny and I experienced together or apart. There is no way I could even put it into words other than to say that all of this was in a flash, right there at the bedside where my husband died.
“Then, right in the middle of this review, the child that we lost to a miscarriage when I was still a teenager stepped forth and embraced us. She was not a figure of a person exactly as you would see a human being, but more the outline or sweet, loving presence of a little girl. The upshot of her being there was that any issues we ever had regarding her loss were made whole and resolved. I was reminded of the verse from the Bible about ‘the peace that passeth all understanding.’ That’s how I felt when she was there.
“One of the funny things about this wraparound view of our life was that we had gone to Atlanta in the seventh grade, to the state capitol, where there was a diorama. So at one point we were watching this wraparound and watching ourselves in another wraparound—a diorama—where we stood side by side as kids. I burst out laughing and Johnny laughed too, right there beside me.
“Another thing that was strange about this wraparound was that in certain parts of it there were panels or dividers that kept us from seeing all of it. I don’t have the words for this, but these screens or panels kept particular parts of both of our lives invisible. I don’t know what was behind them but I do know that these were thoughts from Christ, who said that someday we would be able to see behind those panels too.”
Other versions of shared death experiences that baffled me were those events that were shared by several people at the bedside. It is possible for a skeptic to easily write off a dying person’s death experience when it is shared with only one other person. But a death experience shared with a number of people at the bedside is more difficult to pass off as an individual fantasy.
Take, for example, the experience of the Anderson family, from a suburb of Atlanta, as they sat by their dying mother. This is told by one of the sisters, but all who were there corroborate the account:
“The day my mother died, my two brothers, my sister, my sister-in-law and I were all in the room. My mother hadn’t spoken a word in several hours, and she was breathing in an irregular pattern. None of us were really upset because mother had been on a long downhill course and we knew this was the end.
“Suddenly, a bright light appeared in the room. My first thought was that a reflection was shining through the window from a vehicle passing by outside. Even as I thought that, however, I knew it wasn’t true, because this was not any kind of light on this earth. I nudged my sister to see if she saw it too, and when I looked at her, her eyes were as big as saucers. At the same time I saw my brother literally gasp. Everyone saw it together and for a little while we were frightened.
“Then my mother just expired and we all kind of breathed a big sigh of relief. At that moment, we saw vivid bright lights that seemed to gather around and shape up into … I don’t know what to call it except an entranceway. The lights looked a bit like clouds, but that is only a comparison. We saw my mother lift up out of her body and go through that entranceway. Being by the entranceway, incidentally, was a feeling of complete joy. My brother called it a chorus of joyful feelings, and my sister heard beautiful music, although none of the rest of us did.
“I am originally from Virginia and my sister, brother and I agreed that the entranceway was shaped something like the Natural Bridge in the Shenandoah Valley. The lights were so vivid we had no choice but to tell our story to the hospice nurse.
“She listened and then told us that she knew of similar things happening and that it was not uncommon for the dying process to encompass people nearby.”
Another case that serves to illustrate the sharing of a death experience by more than one person comes from two women in their forties who were the first to tell me about jointly sharing the life review of a dying loved one. I’ll call them Pat and Nancy.
The sisters were at their mother’s bedside as she was dying of lung cancer. As her breathing became more labored, the room began to “light up,” said one of the sisters. Both of them told of how the room began to swirl, quickly at first before slowing to a stop. Then the two women found themselves standing with their mother, who looked decades younger.
Together, they were immersed in their mother’s life review, which was filled with many scenes they had lived and many they had not. They saw their mother’s first boyfriend and experienced her heartbreak at their breakup. They saw small things that had meant a lot to their mother, like the times she had helped poor children at their school without telling anyone. They also discovered the feelings their mother had for a widower who lived down the street, and how she had longed to strike up a conversation with him.
“What we saw was so real that we thought we had died too,” said one of the sisters. “For months it was beyond belief until we finally accepted it.”
Perhaps the most peculiar of all shared death experiences that I heard in the early days are the ones I called “predictive experiences,” in which the shared death experience reveals the death of someone else who is not expected to die anytime soon. These experiences truly puzzled me when I first heard them, and still do to this day.
Below is a predictive shared death experience that was told to me by Daniel, a hospice worker in Greenville, North Carolina:
“An elderly man with Alzheimer’s disease was the first patient of mine who fits the description you offered of an empathic near-death experience. Mr. Sykes, the man with Alzheimer’s, declined quite rapidly for his illness and age and died about a year after diagnosis. I got to know him and his wife quite well during our time together.
“About two months before his death he lapsed into what I would call an almost vegetative state. It was a typical last stage of Alzheimer’s disease. He didn’t know where he was nor did he recognize his wife or children. He could not talk coherently and gave no sign of understanding anything about his circumstances. The week before he died the nurse and I saw him twitch violently.
“The day he died was different in a very eerie way. He sat up in bed and spoke as clear as a bell, talking just like anyone would, but not addressing us. He was looking upward with bright eyes and carrying on a conversation with ‘Hugh.’ He spoke loud and clear to Hugh, sometimes laughing but usually just conversing as though the two were sitting in a coffee shop having a chat.”
The hospice workers assumed that Hugh was a deceased relative, but Mr. Sykes’s wife cleared up that misperception, telling them that he was her husband’s brother and lived in Massachusetts. She had just spoken to him a day or so earlier, she said, to tell him that her husband was on his deathbed.
“Mr. Sykes’s wife told us that Hugh was alive and in good health, but of course, as you can guess, we learned shortly afterward that Hugh had keeled over with a fatal heart attack right about the time that Mr. Sykes miraculously came back to life.”
When Mrs. Sykes found out that Hugh had died suddenly, her husband’s conversation with him took on another dimension for everyone at the bedside, said the hospice worker. They had initially believed that Mr. Sykes was in the throes of dementia. Now they saw him as being in communication with his newly deceased brother while he lay on his own deathbed.
By the late 1990s, I was hearing stories of shared death experiences from all over the world. Although I was able to collect many such stories, I did not have enough to draw any conclusions from them. Because of that, I had come to regard them as medical artifacts—unexpected findings that can be researched later and may lead to important conclusions.
The history of medicine is filled with artifacts that have later been explored and have changed the way patients are treated or viewed. For example, Barry J. Marshall and J. Robin Warren, physicians from Perth, Australia, noticed that patients who were on antibiotics for other reasons would also experience a healing of their stomach ulcers. They published a study showing that many stomach ulcers are caused by a bacterium and not stress, as most experts had believed.
Although these doctors were ridiculed when they presented their findings at a number of conferences of gastroenterologists, some of the doctors present conducted their own studies and found that the Australian doctors were right. Their findings—based on their own observations—changed the way many stomach ulcers are treated. This breakthrough—and their perseverance in the belief that it was important—won the two doctors the 2005 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for “the discovery of the bacterium Helicobacter pylori and its role in gastritis and peptic ulcers.”