by Colin Wilson
In a subsequent book, based on further research (Reflections on Life After Life), Moody observed some other interesting aspects of the near-death experience. There were many glimpses of a ‘heavenly’ realm, and the phrase ‘city of light’ occurred repeatedly. There was also an experience Moody calls ‘the vision of knowledge’, a flash of mystical insight into the nature of the universe:
for a second I knew all the secrets of all the ages, all the meaning of the universe, the stars, the moon — of everything … This all-powerful knowledge opened before me. It seemed that I was being told that I was going to remain sick for quite a while and that I would have several close calls. And I did have several close calls after that. They said some of it would be to erase this all-knowing knowledge that I had picked up … that I had been granted the universal secrets and that I would have to undergo time to forget that knowledge. But I do have the memory of once knowing everything …
Asked ‘In what form did this knowledge seem to be presented to you?’, Moody received the reply: ‘It was in all forms of communication, sights, sounds, thoughts. It was as if there was nothing that wasn’t known. All knowledge was there, not just of one field but everything.’ Moody asked: ‘One thing I wonder. I’ve spent a lot of my life seeking knowledge, learning. If this happens, isn’t that sort of thing rather pointless.’ The reply was:
No! You still want to seek knowledge even after you come back here. I’m still seeking knowledge … It’s silly to try to get the answers here. I sort of felt that it was part of our purpose … but that it wasn’t just for one person, but that it was to be used for all mankind. We’re always reaching out to help others with what we know.
Moody was struck by this notion of ‘forgetting’ this universal knowledge before returning to life, and cites Plato’s story of a soldier called Er — from The Republic — who was allowed to return from death. Er describes how the souls who were allowed to return to earth had to first drink of the waters of the River of Forgetfulness, and some of them ‘who were not saved by good sense’ drank far too much. Like many of Moody’s subjects, Er had no idea of how he returned to life; he simply woke up and found himself lying on his funeral pyre. It is plain that what interests Moody about all this is the question of that barrier of ‘forgetfulness’ that seems to interpose between ‘the other world’ and the present one — and, by implication, the question of why some people seem to have escaped total forgetfulness.
Another of Moody’s subjects described his ‘knowledge’ experience as being like a school. ‘… it was real. It was like a school, and there was no one there, and yet there were a lot of people there … you would feel, sense the presence of others being around’. Moody compared this with the comment of another subject who, in a near-death experience, felt that he had been into what he called ‘libraries’ and ‘institutions of higher learning’. His present subject agreed enthusiastically:
this is a place where the place is knowledge … It’s like you focus mentally on one place in that school and — zoom — knowledge flows by you from that place automatically. It’s just like you’d had about a dozen speed reading courses.
Another woman told him: ‘It was like I knew all things … I thought whatever I wanted to know could be known.’
All this is important because it seems to answer a fundamental objection to the whole notion of ‘survival’ — the apparent triviality of the preoccupations of the ‘communicators’. If we are going to wake up in the next world to the same kind of consciousness we have to put up with here, it scarcely seems worth the trouble of dying. Most of us are obscurely aware that there is something wrong with the quality of everyday consciousness; it is always getting us involved with questions and problems that we know to be unimportant, yet which stick in our heads like some irritating tune. When we experience a sudden surge of happiness or vitality, these problems are whipped away like a leaf in a gale. So if, as most spiritualists seem to agree, death is some kind of an evolution, then we have some kind of vague expectation that it will involve a higher level of vitality, a ‘bird’s eye view’ of what life is all about, a greater freedom. The whole atmosphere of seances seems to be irritatingly banal, ‘human all too human’. Even when the communicators claim to be great musicians or writers — as in the case of the psychic Rosemary Brown — what they have to offer seems downright sub-standard, the kind of thing that would have ended in their waste-paper baskets on earth.
Moody’s subjects who experienced ‘visions of knowledge’ seem to be making the point that life after death is not really a continuation of earth life on the same level. Moody emphasises how often they say things like ‘It’s impossible to explain’, or ‘the words I would use are different because there really are no words …’ This may also be regarded as an answer to Rudolf Steiner’s objection that ‘the Spiritualists are the greatest materialists of all.’ The observations of Kübler-Ross, Moody and others make us aware that when we study accounts of life after death, we should continually remind ourselves of the ‘language gap’, the problem of trying to translate new perceptions into words that were evolved with a narrower purpose in mind. Our concepts of reality are closely bound up with language, and most accounts of life after death seem to agree that language has become unnecessary.
The effect of Moody’s book was to virtually create a new academic industry: the study of near-death experiences (quickly abbreviated to NDEs.) Kenneth Ring, a professor of psychology at the University of Connecticut, attempted a far more systematic survey than Moody had aimed for. He noted that Moody made no claim to present scientific evidence about the experience of dying, much less of life after death; in 1977, the year Life After Life appeared, Ring set out to remedy this shortcoming by tracking down and interviewing scores of people who had come close to death, and studying the results statistically. In all important respects, Ring’s findings confirmed Moody’s. So did those of other researchers: Michael Sabom, Edith Fiore, Maurice Rawlings, Margot Grey. Edith Fiore (in You Have Been Here Before) summarised accounts of more than a thousand near-death experiences. To read some of these books often gives the bewildering impression of reading the same thing over and over again. But at least the sheer repetition drives home the fact that Moody’s cases were not a random sample, selected because they satisfied his own emotional preferences. Again and again there are the same descriptions of finding oneself in a state of ‘disembodiment’, of passing through some kind of tunnel with a light at the end, of a sense of communication with some benevolent being or beings, of some kind of ‘review’, of an experience of some border between life and death, and of a return to life. (Moody calls this ‘the core experience’.)
It has been repeatedly pointed out that all this ‘proves’ nothing. James Alcock expressed the basic objection in The Skeptical Enquirer:*
I have no argument with people’s theology or philosophy. What is bothersome, however, is the necessity these people feel to try to provide ‘objective’ evidence to support their beliefs, and their attempts to fool the layman with their claims of scientific rigour and exactitude. Survival research is based on belief in search of data rather than observation in search of explanation. It is an expression of individual and collective anxiety about death.
This is a perfectly fair objection, but it also seems to overlook the fact that science is based upon repeated observation. To ignore something that is repeated by thousands of observers would be a contradiction of the scientific attitude. Kübler-Ross, Moody, Ring and others are the first to admit that their observations of NDEs prove absolutely nothing about life after death. And since these researchers are not concerned with other evidence of ‘survival’ — the kind of evidence we have been surveying in this book — they make no attempt to argue a logical case for life after death. But in the concluding chapter of his own book, Ring has the courage to ‘remove my white lab coat and describe my own beliefs — for what they may be worth’. And after emphasising that near-death experiences prove nothing about survival,
he goes on:
I do believe — but not just on the basis of my own or others’ data regarding near-death experiences — that we continue to have a conscious existence after our physical death and that the core experience does represent its beginning, a glimpse of things to come.
He goes on:
My own understanding of these near-death experiences leads me to regard them as ‘teachings’. They are, it seems to me, revelatory experiences … These experiences clearly imply that there is something more, something beyond the physical world of the senses … Anyone who makes the effort to inform himself of the nature and consequences of genuine mystical or religious experiences will soon become convinced that the core experience is itself a member of this larger family.
Why do such experiences occur?… I have one speculative answer to offer, although I admit it may sound not only fanciful but downright playful. I have come to believe that the universe … has many ways of ‘getting its message across’. In a sense, it wants us to ‘wake-up’, to become aware of the cosmic dimensions of the drama of which we are all a part. Near-death experiences represent one of its devices for waking us up to this higher reality.
Ring’s point may be underlined by quoting a passage from a book on recent research into the ‘mystical experience’, Nona Coxhead’s The Relevance of Bliss. She cites the case of a psychotherapist, Wendy Rose-Neill, whose experience took place when she was tending her garden on an autumn day:
on this particular day I felt in a very contemplative frame of mind. I remember that I gradually became intensely aware of my surroundings — the sound of the birds singing, the rustling of leaves, the breeze on my skin and the scent of the grass and flowers.
I had a sudden impulse to lie face down on the grass and as I did so an energy seemed to flow through me as if I had become part of the earth underneath me. The boundary between my physical self and my surroundings seemed to dissolve and my feeling of separation vanished. In a strange way I felt I blended into a total unity with the earth, as if I were made of it and it of me. I was aware of the blades of grass between my fingers and touching my face, and I was overwhelmed by a force which seemed to penetrate every fibre of my being.
I felt as if I had suddenly come alive for the first time — as if I were awakened from a long deep sleep into a real world. I remember feeling that a veil had been lifted from my eyes and everything came into focus … I realised that I was surrounded by an incredible loving energy, and that everything, both living and non-living, is bound inextricably with a kind of consciousness which I cannot describe in words.
Although the experience could not have lasted for more than a few minutes, it seemed endless — as if I were in some kind of suspended eternal state of understanding …
Here phrase after phrase echoes what Ring has said of the near-death experience — the feeling of waking up for the first time, the sense of unity with the earth and the universe, the ‘loving energy’, the impression that time had been suspended.
We can see that what is being discussed is, to some extent, ‘right-brain experience’. Our left-brain obsession with the present and with survival keeps us trapped in the world of trivial immediacy. It is as though we were surrounded by a thin wall of soundproof glass. As we relax ‘into the right brain’, the glass walls slide silently back, and we suddenly experience contact with the real world. The everyday sense of urgency, of being in a hurry, suddenly disappears; the clock stops ticking frantically, and there is a floating sensation of timelessness.
There is another important point to note. In ordinary consciousness, we are aware of ourselves as spectators of the world around us, as if watching it on film. In these right-brain experiences, there is still a ‘spectator’, but we cease to identify with him. There is a feeling that the ‘spectator’ is not ‘you’. The ‘deeper you’ feels relaxed and totally alive. So there is an odd sense of being two people at once — or, as Ray Bryant said of his hypnotic regression experiences, of watching a television programme and taking part in it at the same time.
But the central recognition in these experiences is that they are somehow more ‘real’ than ordinary experience. We are, in fact, observing the world with something more like our ‘whole being’, instead of just a small part of it. So to try to dismiss mystical experience as somehow ‘one-sided’, as Bertrand Russell does in Mysticism and Logic, is scientifically inaccurate. Psychologically speaking, right-brain experience is more ‘complete’ than left-brain experience, for it also involves the left. What the poet sees in his ‘moments of vision’ is, in the most precise and scientific sense, ‘truer’ than what he sees when he is running for a bus or having a shave — just as seeing with both eyes is ‘truer’ than seeing with only one.
But this involves the corollary that the insight of the ‘core experience’ is also ‘truer’ — closer to reality — than the world of our ordinary perceptions. In criticising near-death studies, James Alcock implies that they are based on vague wishful thinking. The testimony of those who have experienced the NDE contradicts this; they insist that the experience is nothing like a dream: that it is more real than everyday experience. It is, of course, still possible to argue that NDEs are some kind of illusion or trick of the brain. But if they are taken in conjunction with the other evidence for ‘survival’, it seems more likely that they are genuine glimpses of a type of consciousness that is independent of the body.
Margot Grey, the founder of the International Association for Near-Death Studies in Great Britain, makes a clear connection between near-death experiences and mystical insight in a passage she contributes to The Relevance of Bliss. She describes how her own interest in near-death experiences began with a personal insight in 1976. In India, she was struck down by a fever that lasted three weeks, and she hovered on the brink of death.
At some point during the process of passing in and out of consciousness I became aware that if I somehow urged myself, I could rise up out of my body and remain in a state of levitation up against the ceiling in a corner of the room.
At the time this seemed entirely natural and felt very pleasant and extremely freeing. I remember looking at my body lying on the bed and feeling completely unperturbed by the fact that it seemed likely that I was going to die in a strange country … but thinking that it was totally unimportant where I left my body, which I felt had served me well and like a favourite worn out coat had at last outlived its usefulness and would now have to be discarded.
She describes a sense of floating in total darkness, and a sense of being ‘at one’ with infinite space:
Later on, I seemed to be travelling down an endless tunnel; I could see a pin-point of light at the end of the tunnel towards which I seemed to be moving … I remember knowing with absolute certainty that I would eventually be through the tunnel and would emerge into the light, which was like the light of a very bright star, but much more brilliant. A sense of exaltation was accompanied by a feeling of being very close to the ‘source’ of life and love, which seemed to be one.
The result of this experience was a ‘mental rebirth’. ‘My mental energies seemed extended and refined by a new consciousness and I determined to study the phenomena that I had experienced, in order to try to discover what other people experienced when apparently on the threshold of death.’ The work of Ring and Moody was available to her, and she began her own research into the near-death experience in England. And when Ring read the typescript of her book Return from Death, he felt much as Elizabeth Kübler-Ross felt on reading Moody’s Life After Life: that, without realising it, they had been writing the same book.* And they had arrived independently at the same conclusion: that the real importance of the near-death experience is its after-effect on those who have been through it. And in her conclusion to her book, Margot Grey writes:
A mystical vision of the nature of the universe ultimately seems to offer us the best basis for an understanding of NDEs. However, it is generally accepted by those who subscribe to this view that it w
ill take a while before people begin to feel comfortable with an order of reality other than the world of appearances. In the final analysis, science would seem to be converging with, or at least not conflicting with, what mystics have asserted for millennia when they have stated that access to spiritual reality only becomes possible when consciousness is freed from its dependence on the body. So long as one remains tied to the body and its sensory perceprions, spiritual reality can at best never be more than an intellectual construct. For it is only when one approaches the realm beyond death that one can experience it directly.
It would be a mistake to assume that what Margot Grey is saying is that we would all be better off dead. The last part of her book makes it clear that she feels the real importance of the NDE to be its effect on the lives of those who have been through it. Madame Blavatsky once said that although our earth-realism is the ‘solidest’ and most difficult of all the worlds, it also offers us the most opportunity. This again is a thread that runs throughout world mysticism: the notion that physical life on earth is not some kind of purgatory, to be patiently endured until we can escape to a higher realm, but some kind of unique opportunity. The main problem of human beings is that ‘confinement-in-the-present’ keeps us in a state allied to sleep or hypnosis, in which we accomplish nothing whatever because we have no idea of what we ought to be doing. The mystical experience and the ‘core experience’ both seem to bring a flash of insight into ‘what it is all about’. This is the insight that emerges clearly from all the writers on the near-death experience, and which Margot Grey states with more emphasis than most.