Religion, Spirituality and the Near-Death Experience

Mark Fox

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2003
• ISBN:
  9781134442782
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Teologia e religione
• Subtopic: Religione

This dramatic and sustained response to decades of research into near-death experiences (NDEs) is the first book to credibly bridge the gap between the competing factions of science and spirituality. Neither a religious argument touting NDEs as hard evidence for God, nor a scientific rebuke to religious interpretations, it balances investigation of these much-reported yet baffling phenomena, and brings fresh urgency to the study of our hopes for a life beyond.

1
A BRIEF HISTORY OF NDEs

Discovering the NDE

What happens as we die? And what, if anything, might follow our deaths? Commencing in the last quarter of the twentieth century and continuing into the twenty-first, new research based on the testimonies of persons who had ‘died’ before being resuscitated convinced many that these questions could finally be answered. For these people often made remarkable claims that they had journeyed to other worlds, meeting deceased friends and relatives and glimpsing heavenly fields and streams, before receiving a gentle but forgiving judgement by a loving, divine, ‘being of light’. Their stories were deeply moving, apparently consistent, and seemed to baffle doctors and scientists. Indeed, many of these remarkable claims were themselves investigated and published by those self-same doctors and scientists. Could it really be true? Had twentieth-century medical science finally unlocked the mystery of death? And had it revealed that the human soul was, after all, capable of surviving the demise of the body?

These experiences were quickly given a name: ‘near-death experiences’ or ‘NDEs’. Yet it is now widely agreed that this remarkable new era of research into the possibility of the soul’s surviving death might not have happened at all had it not been for the pioneering work of one philosophically educated American physician: Dr Raymond Moody Junior. His first book, Life After Life, appeared in 1975 and has in the ensuing years sold approximately fourteen million copies. In the meantime, its author has become widely and publicly credited as the founding father of what has now come to be known as ‘near-death studies’. He has, for example, been variously described as the ‘pioneer of the whole NDE movement’ (Blackmore 1993: 6), as ‘the grandfather of the twentieth-century study of near-death experiences’ (Bailey and Yates 1996: 25) and as the one who ‘lifted the dark veil of something heretofore as unspeakable as the [near-] death experience’ (Ebon 1977: 25). Indeed, regarding his place in the field of near-death research, one commentator has gone so far as to assert that what can be said of Moody is ‘what was once said of the formidable Immanuel Kant: you can think with him, or you can think against him, but you cannot think without him’ (Zaleski 1987: 103). Since the first appearance of Life After Life, persons from a wide range of Western and non-Western religions and cultures have come forward either to claim experiences similar to those popularized in his book or to offer studies of their own which appear to confirm many of his original findings. Two years after the appearance of Life After Life, an international body, the International Association for Near-Death Studies (IANDS), was founded to promote interest in and research into NDEs. Currently, in addition to publishing the Journal of Near-Death Studies, IANDS organizes conferences, local support groups for near-death experiencers (NDErs) and a number of other activities worldwide. Further academic research into the NDE has arisen within a wide variety of areas: primarily neuroscience, but also other areas of psychology as well as from within disciplines such as sociology and religious studies. Again: none of this existed before 1975. It seems clear in the light of all of this that any attempt to chart the contours of a short history of the NDE, as this chapter will seek to do, must begin with an examination of Moody’s own work. Who was he? And to what extent is it accurate to view him as the one who first discovered ‘actual case histories that reveal there is life after death’, as his original publishers were to claim?

By his own account, Raymond Moody first developed an interest in such experiences in the late 1960s and early 1970s.¹ By the time of his first book’s publication, he had assembled a case collection of approximately 150 such accounts from acquaintances and students that would provide the data upon which the book’s most sensational findings were to be based. Indeed, Life After Life is dedicated, cryptically, ‘To George Ritchie M.D. and, through him, to the One whom he suggested’: a reference to an NDEr whose wartime NDE profoundly impressed Moody at this time and would later find extended publication in its own right. Prior to the beginning of his fascination with return-from-death claims, however, Moody had received his undergraduate degree in philosophy from the University of Virginia, subsequently obtaining an MA and a PhD at the same university. In 1969, he became Assistant Professor of Philosophy at the university, where amongst other subjects he was to teach Plato’s Phaedo, including its discussions of the nature of the soul and its immortality. According to Moody, it was at this point that a number of students began to approach him with claims to have undergone experiences that had convinced them that the soul is indeed immortal; most of these had occurred when they had been pronounced clinically dead, usually as a result of accidents. His interest piqued, Moody began to collect such cases and continued to do so when he entered the Medical College of Georgia in 1972, where he received his MD before taking up a residency in Psychiatry at the University of Virginia Medical Centre. By 1972, Moody had collected, by his own estimate, only ‘about a dozen cases’, but he began to lecture publicly on them in 1973 and finished Life After Life in 1974, by which time his case collection had grown to approximately 150 cases. These cases were to provide the majority of the testimonies that were to constitute the most sensational chapter of his landmark study, published the following year.

Life After Life

Constituting the bulk of Life After Life, in terms of both length and centrality to the work’s overall thesis, was its second chapter ‘The Experience of Dying’. Here, Moody presented much of the case collection upon which the book rests in the form of extracts from that collection, arranged and presented under a number of headings. He derived these, in turn, from an examination of what he perceived to be a number of common features that remained consistent across a large number of reports from his case collection. At the time of the writing of Life After Life, these headings numbered fifteen:

1. Ineffability
2. Hearing the news
3. Feelings of peace and quiet
4. The noise
5. The dark tunnel
6. Out of the body
7. Meeting others
8. The being of light
9. The review
10. The border or limit
11. Coming back
12. Telling others
13. Effects on lives
14. New views of death
15. Corroboration.

Crucially, Moody’s central claim in Life After Life was that his respondents had reported to him an experience which possessed the consistency of shared, ‘real’, experience, rather than the randomness and confusion of ‘mere’ dreams. He attempted to support this by presenting a sizeable number of testimony-extracts within his book’s longest section and an examination of some of these goes some way towards accounting for the popularity of his work, suffusing it, as they do, with a vivid, narrative appeal. Of his out-of-body experience following an accident, for example, one respondent’s testimony reproduced by Moody described how he

was sort of floating about five feet above the street, about five yards away from the car, I’d say, and I heard the echo of the crash dying away. I saw people come running up and crowding around the car, and I saw my friend get out of the car, obviously in shock. I could see my own body in the wreckage among all those people, and could see them trying to get it out. My legs were all twisted and there was blood all over the place.

(Moody 1975: 37)

A respondent’s journey through ‘The dark tunnel’ in which he heard what Moody described as ‘The noise’ was similarly dramatic:

One afternoon I became very sick, and they rushed me to the nearest hospital. When I arrived they decided they were going to have to put me to sleep, but why I don’t know, because I was too young. Back in those days they used ether. They gave it to me by putting a cloth over my nose, and when they did, I was told afterwards, my heart stopped beating. I didn’t know at that time that that was exactly what happened to me, but anyway when this happened I had an experience. Well, the first thing that happened–now I am going to describe it just the way I felt–was that I had this ringing noise brrrrrnnnnng-brrrrrnnnnng-brrrrrnnnnng, very rhythmic. Then I was moving through this–you’re going to think this is weird–through this long dark place. It seemed like a sewer or something. I just can’t describe it to you. I was moving, beating all the time with this noise, this ringing noise.

(Moody 1975: 31)

Dramatic also was the feature that was to dominate much later discussion: that of ‘The being of light’ which appeared to contain a gentle, loving, presence:

I became very weak, and I fell down. I began to feel a sort of drifting, a movement of my real being in and out of my body, and to hear beautiful music. I floated on down the hall and out the door onto the screened-in porch. There, it almost seemed that clouds, a pink mist really, began to gather around me, and then I floated right straight on through the screen, just as though it weren’t there, and up into this pure crystal clear light, an illuminating white light. It was so beautiful and so bright, so radiant, but it didn’t hurt my eyes. It’s not any kind of light you can describe on earth. I didn’t actually see a person in this light, and yet it has a special identity, it definitely does. It is a light of perfect understanding and perfect love.

(Moody 1975: 62–3)

Indeed, the vividness and the consistency of the experience he presented was further reinforced by being taken up and delivered by Moody as a ‘“model”, a composite of the common elements found in very many stories’ presented at the opening of the seminal second chapter. It is reproduced here, in full:

A man is dying and, as he reaches the point of greatest physical distress, he hears himself pronounced dead by his doctor. He begins to hear an uncomfortable noise, a loud ringing or buzzing, and at the same time feels himself moving very rapidly through a long, dark tunnel. After this, he suddenly finds himself outside of his own physical body, but still in the immediate physical environment, and he sees his own body from a distance, as though he is a spectator. He watches the resuscitation attempt from this unusual vantage point and is in a state of emotional upheaval.

After a while he collects himself and becomes more accustomed to his odd condition. He notices that he still has a ‘body’, but one of a very different nature and with very different powers from the physical body he has left behind. Soon other things begin to happen. Others come to meet and to help him. He glimpses the spirits of relatives and friends who have already died, and a loving, warm spirit of a kind he has never encountered before–a being of light–appears before him. This being asks him a question, nonverbally, to make him evaluate his life and helps him along by showing him a panoramic, instantaneous playback of the major events of his life. At some point he finds himself approaching some sort of barrier or border, apparently representing the limit between earthly life and the next life. Yet, he finds that he must go back to the earth, that the time for his death has not yet come. At this point he resists, for by now he is taken up with his experiences in the afterlife and does not want to return. He is overwhelmed by intense feelings of joy, love, and peace. Despite his attitude, though, he somehow reunites with his physical body and lives.

Later he tries to tell others, but he has trouble doing so. In the first place, he can find no human words adequate to describe these unearthly episodes. He also finds that others scoff, so he stops telling other people. Still, the experience affects his life profoundly, especially his views about death and its relationship to life.

(Moody 1975: 21–3)

Here, what is clearly evident is that Moody had taken his fifteen allegedly recurring elements and linked them together with a plot in order to provide a narrative model of a ‘typical’ NDE as opposed to a simple list of common elements. Indeed, it is difficult to underestimate the importance of this model, for it became, essentially, the definition of ‘near-death experience’ that became accepted by many and hence guaranteed both the popularity and priority of Moody’s original work. As we shall see, even where future studies were to deviate from his own, it was often clear that they began either as attempts to replicate the model from different collections of case studies or as attempts to refute it. Indeed, as we shall also see, it became for at least some researchers the typical experience which neuroscience was to be called upon to replicate and to explain, for the strong and vivid suggestion it gave of a shared, structured, consistency to NDErs’ reports raised the intriguing possibility that the experience was neither dream, nor hallucination, nor delusion, but something far more real. As Moody himself was to remark in Life After Life:

It is my opinion that anyone looking into near-death experiences in an organized way is likely also to uncover such strange apparent corroboration. At least, I believe he will find enough to make him wonder whether near-death experiences, far from being dreams, might not belong in a very different category indeed.

(Moody 1975: 176–7)

Despite the appearance of a number of future studies which claimed to confirm many of Moody’s initial conclusions, it is worth considering at the outset a few of the questionable aspects of his handling of the material which was to underlie his model. In the first chapter of Life After Life, for example, he admitted that of his 150 accounts, ‘no two… are precisely identical’ (Moody 1975: 23). He also declared that ‘I have found no one person who reports every single component of the composite experience’ (Moody 1975: 23). In addition, it was again clear from his comments upon the model that no single account matched it exactly, and that only just over half of its features (eight) were reported by ‘very many’ of his respondents, with ‘few’ reporting up to twelve. Again, Moody conceded that no one element of the composite experience was reported to him by every member of his study group, that elements which only occurred in single accounts were not included in the abstract, and, further, that the order in which elements were experienced by his group of NDErs in fact contained at least some variation. Thus, on the one hand he was forced to conclude:

The order in which a dying person goes through the various stages … may vary from that given in my ‘theoretical model’. To give one example, various persons have reported seeing the ‘being of light’ before, or at the same time, they left their physical bodies, and not as in the ‘model’, some time afterward.

(Moody 1975: 24)

He added to this, however, that ‘the order in which the stages occur in the model is a very typical order, and wide variations are unusual’ (Moody 1975: 24).

Future chapters of this study will seek to explore in considerably more detail the extent to which NDErs’ experiences really do share a significant number of common elements. However, even this brief acknowledgement of the potential weaknesses of Moody’s handling of his material en route to his model might lead at least some to wonder whether it reflects an underlying consistency within reports or imposes a false consistency on what are in fact a very diverse collection of accounts. It is also instructive to consider how a single element such as ‘The dark tunnel’ was arrived at in the list of common features. In his narrative model, as we have seen, Moody noted this aspect of a typical NDEr’s experience as one in which he ‘feels himself moving very rapidly through a long dark tunnel’. An examination of the presented extracts from the case collection as revealed in Life After Life, however, reveals that the darkness is not invariably described as tunnel-shaped. To be sure, the designation ‘tunnel’ is sometimes used, for example by an NDEr who stated that ‘I felt like I was riding on a roller coaster train at an amusement park, going through this tunnel at a tremendous speed’ (Moody 1975: 32).

Elsewhere, however, Moody’s respondents revealed a variety of ways of describing this apparently consistent feature of their experiences. One talked of ‘just floating and tumbling through space’; another claimed that ‘I had the feeling that I was moving through a deep, very dark valley’; another talked of entering ‘head first into a narrow and very, very dark passageway’; whilst another explained that he was:

in an utterly black, dark void. It is very difficult to explain, but I felt as if I were moving in a vacuum, just through blackness. Yet, I was quite conscious. It was like being in a cylinder which had no air in it. It was a feeling of limbo, of being half-way here, and half-way somewhere else.

(Moody 1975: 32)

Another of Moody’s respondents felt the need to resort to incorrect use of Biblical metaphor in order to do justice to her experience, writing:

Suddenly, I was in a very dark, very deep valley. It was as though there was a pathway, almost a road, through the valley, and I was going down the path … Later, after I was well, the thought came to me, ‘Well, now I know what the Bible means by “the valley of the shadow of death”, because I’ve been there’.

(Moody 1975: 33–4)

Given the diversity of descriptors being used in order to express the experience, it is difficult to see why ‘tunnel’ should be so favoured, or even how an identical experience is being variously described. As Moody again was to admit:

Many different words are used to describe this space. I have heard [it] described as a cave, a well, a trough, an enclosure, a tunnel, a funnel, a vacuum, a void, a sewer, a valley, and a cylinder. Although people use different terminology here, it is clear that they are all trying to express some one idea.

(Moody 1975: 30–1; emphasis mine)

This cluster of questions concerning the adequacy of Moody’s methodology–and the doubts which it raises concerning the repeated claim made in his book for the presence of significant consistency within near-death reports–is in one important sense puzzling. For if such flaws existed in his treatment of his original data, how did it come to be that his book was so well received, and how was it that it became so very popular and influential? Given such weaknesses, what might explain the strength of popularity of Life After Life, amongst early near-death researchers and laypersons alike?

This is a complex cluster of questions. To begin with, it is clear that Moody’s work was not aimed at an academic audience, and this may itself give clues as to its br...